Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

ceased to charm. Though they are not human beings, we all remember

Mrs. Gamp and Pickwick. The Boffins and Veneerings do not, I think,

dwell in the minds of so many.

Of Dickens's style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky,

ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules--almost

as completely as that created by Carlyle. To readers who have taught

themselves to regard language, it must therefore be unpleasant. But

the critic is driven to feel the weakness of his criticism, when

he acknowledges to himself--as he is compelled in all honesty to

do--that with the language, such as it is, the writer has satisfied

the great mass of the readers of his country. Both these great

writers have satisfied the readers of their own pages; but both

have done infinite harm by creating a school of imitators. No young

novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens. If such

a one wants a model for his language, let him take Thackeray.

Bulwer, or Lord Lytton,--but I think that he is still better known

by his earlier name,--was a man of very great parts. Better educated

than either of those I have named before him, he was always able to

use his erudition, and he thus produced novels from which very much

not only may be but must be learned by his readers. He thoroughly

understood the political status of his own country, a subject

on which, I think, Dickens was marvellously ignorant, and which

Thackeray had never studied. He had read extensively, and was always

apt to give his readers the benefit of what he knew. The result

has been that very much more than amusement may be obtained from

Bulwer's novels. There is also a brightness about them--the result

rather of thought than of imagination, of study and of care, than

of mere intellect--which has made many of them excellent in their

way. It is perhaps improper to class all his novels together, as

he wrote in varied manners, making in his earlier works, such as

Pelham and Ernest Maltravers, pictures of a fictitious life, and

afterwards pictures of life as he believed it to be, as in My Novel

and The Caxtons. But from all of them there comes the same flavour

of an effort to produce effect. The effects are produced, but it

would have been better if the flavour had not been there.

I cannot say of Bulwer as I have of the other novelists whom I have

named that he lived with his characters. He lived with his work,

with the doctrines which at the time he wished to preach, thinking

always of the effects which he wished to produce; but I do not

think he ever knew his own personages,--and therefore neither do

we know them. Even Pelham and Eugene Aram are not human beings to

us, as are Pickwick, and Colonel Newcombe, and Mrs. Poyser.

In his plots Bulwer has generally been simple, facile, and successful.

The reader never feels with him, as he does with Wilkie Collins,

that it is all plot, or, as with George Eliot, that there is no plot.

The story comes naturally without calling for too much attention,

and is thus proof of the completeness of the man's intellect. His

language is clear, good, intelligible English, but it is defaced

by mannerism. In all that he did, affectation was his fault.

How shall I speak of my dear old friend Charles Lever, and

his rattling, jolly, joyous, swearing Irishmen. Surely never did

a sense of vitality come so constantly from a man's pen, nor from

man's voice, as from his! I knew him well for many years, and

whether in sickness or in health, I have never come across him

without finding him to be running over with wit and fun. Of all the

men I have encountered, he was the surest fund of drollery. I have

known many witty men, many who could say good things, many who

would sometimes be ready to say them when wanted, though they would

sometimes fail;--but he never failed. Rouse him in the middle of

the night, and wit would come from him before he was half awake.

And yet he never monopolised the talk, was never a bore. He would

take no more than his own share of the words spoken, and would yet

seem to brighten all that was said during the night. His earlier

novels--the later I have not read--are just like his conversation.

The fun never flags, and to me, when I read them, they were never

tedious. As to character he can hardly be said to have produced

it. Corney Delaney, the old manservant, may perhaps be named as an

exception.

Lever's novels will not live long,--even if they may be said to

be alive now,--because it is so. What was his manner of working I

do not know, but I should think it must have been very quick, and

that he never troubled himself on the subject, except when he was

seated with a pen in his hand.

Charlotte Bronte was surely a marvellous woman. If it could be

right to judge the work of a novelist from one small portion of

one novel, and to say of an author that he is to be accounted as

strong as he shows himself to be in his strongest morsel of work,

I should be inclined to put Miss Bronte very high indeed. I know

no interest more thrilling than that which she has been able to

throw into the characters of Rochester and the governess, in the

second volume of Jane Eyre. She lived with those characters, and

felt every fibre of the heart, the longings of the one and the

sufferings of the other. And therefore, though the end of the book

is weak, and the beginning not very good, I venture to predict that

Jane Eyre will be read among English novels when many whose names

are now better known shall have been forgotten. Jane Eyre, and

Esmond, and Adam Bede will be in the hands of our grandchildren,

when Pickwick, and Pelham, and Harry Lorrequer are forgotten;

because the men and women depicted are human in their aspirations,

human in their sympathies, and human in their actions.

In Vilette, too, and in Shirley, there is to be found human life as

natural and as real, though in circumstances not so full of interest

as those told in Jane Eyre. The character of Paul in the former of

the two is a wonderful study. She must herself have been in love

with some Paul when she wrote the book, and have been determined to

prove to herself that she was capable of loving one whose exterior

circumstances were mean and in every way unprepossessing.

There is no writer of the present day who has so much puzzled

me by his eccentricities, impracticabilities, and capabilities as

Charles Reade. I look upon him as endowed almost with genius, but

as one who has not been gifted by nature with ordinary powers of

reasoning. He can see what is grandly noble and admire it with

all his heart. He can see, too, what is foully vicious and hate

it with equal ardour. But in the common affairs of life he cannot

see what is right or wrong; and as he is altogether unwilling to be

guided by the opinion of others, he is constantly making mistakes

in his literary career, and subjecting himself to reproach which he

hardly deserves. He means to be honest. He means to be especially

honest,--more honest than other people. He has written a book

called The Eighth Commandment on behalf of honesty in literary

transactions,--a wonderful work, which has I believe been read by

a very few. I never saw a copy except that in my own library, or

heard of any one who knew the book. Nevertheless it is a volume

that must have taken very great labour, and have been written,--as

indeed he declares that it was written,--without the hope of

pecuniary reward. He makes an appeal to the British Parliament and

British people on behalf of literary honesty, declaring that should

he fail--"I shall have to go on blushing for the people I was born

among." And yet of all the writers of my day he has seemed to me

to understand literary honesty the least. On one occasion, as he

tells us in this book, he bought for a certain sum from a French

author the right of using a plot taken from a play,--which he

probably might have used without such purchase, and also without

infringing any international copyright act. The French author not

unnaturally praises him for the transaction, telling him that he

is "un vrai gentleman." The plot was used by Reade in a novel; and

a critic discovering the adaptation, made known his discovery to

the public. Whereupon the novelist became angry, called his critic

a pseudonymuncle, and defended himself by stating the fact of his

own purchase. In all this he seems to me to ignore what we all mean

when we talk of literary plagiarism and literary honesty. The sin

of which the author is accused is not that of taking another man's

property, but of passing off as his own creation that which he

does not himself create. When an author puts his name to a book he

claims to have written all that there is therein, unless he makes

direct signification to the contrary. Some years subsequently there

arose another similar question, in which Mr. Reade's opinion was

declared even more plainly, and certainly very much more publicly.

In a tale which he wrote he inserted a dialogue which he took from

Swift, and took without any acknowledgment. As might have been

expected, one of the critics of the day fell foul of him for this

barefaced plagiarism. The author, however, defended himself, with

much abuse of the critic, by asserting, that whereas Swift had

found the jewel he had supplied the setting;--an argument in which

there was some little wit, and would have been much excellent truth,

had he given the words as belonging to Swift and not to himself.

The novels of a man possessed of so singular a mind must themselves

be very strange,--and they are strange. It has generally been his

object to write down some abuse with which he has been particularly

struck,--the harshness, for instance, with which paupers or lunatics

are treated, or the wickedness of certain classes,--and he always,

I think, leaves upon his readers an idea of great earnestness

of purpose. But he has always left at the same time on my mind so

strong a conviction that he has not really understood his subject,

that I have ever found myself taking the part of those whom he has

accused. So good a heart, and so wrong a head, surely no novelist

ever before had combined! In storytelling he has occasionally been

almost great. Among his novels I would especially recommend The

Cloister and the Hearth. I do not know that in this work, or in any,