Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

his own actions? In what country have grander efforts been made by

private munificence to relieve the sufferings of humanity? Where

can the English traveller find any more anxious to assist him than

the normal American, when once the American shall have found the

Englishman to be neither sullen nor fastidious? Who, lastly, is

so much an object of heart-felt admiration of the American man and

the American woman as the well-mannered and well-educated Englishwoman

or Englishman? These are the ideas which I say spring uppermost

in the minds of the unprejudiced English traveller as he makes

acquaintance with these near relatives. Then he becomes cognisant

of their official doings, of their politics, of their municipal

scandals, of their great ring-robberies, of their lobbyings and

briberies, and the infinite baseness of their public life. There

at the top of everything he finds the very men who are the least

fit to occupy high places. American public dishonesty is so glaring

that the very friends he has made in the country are not slow

to acknowledge it,--speaking of public life as a thing apart from

their own existence, as a state of dirt in which it would be an

insult to suppose that they are concerned! In the midst of it all

the stranger, who sees so much that he hates and so much that he

loves, hardly knows how to express himself.

"It is not enough that you are personally clean," he says, with

what energy and courage he can command,--"not enough though the

clean outnumber the foul as greatly as those gifted with eyesight

outnumber the blind, if you that can see allow the blind to lead

you. It is not by the private lives of the millions that the outside

world will judge you, but by the public career of those units whose

venality is allowed to debase the name of your country. There never

was plainer proof given than is given here, that it is the duty of

every honest citizen to look after the honour of his State."

Personally, I have to own that I have met Americans,--men, but more

frequently women,--who have in all respects come up to my ideas of

what men and women should be: energetic, having opinions of their

own, quick in speech, with some dash of sarcasm at their command,

always intelligent, sweet to look at (I speak of the women), fond

of pleasure, and each with a personality of his or her own which

makes no effort necessary on my own part in remembering the difference

between Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Green, or between Mr. Smith and Mr.

Johnson. They have faults. They are self-conscious, and are too

prone to prove by ill-concealed struggles that they are as good as

you,--whereas you perhaps have been long acknowledging to yourself

that they are much better. And there is sometimes a pretence at

personal dignity among those who think themselves to have risen

high in the world which is deliciously ludicrous. I remember two

old gentlemen,--the owners of names which stand deservedly high

in public estimation,--whose deportment at a public funeral turned

the occasion into one for irresistible comedy. They are suspicious

at first, and fearful of themselves. They lack that simplicity of

manners which with us has become a habit from our childhood. But

they are never fools, and I think that they are seldom ill-natured.

There is a woman, of whom not to speak in a work purporting to be

a memoir of my own life would be to omit all allusion to one of

the chief pleasures which has graced my later years. In the last

fifteen years she has been, out of my family, my most chosen friend.

She is a ray of light to me, from which I can always strike a spark

by thinking of her. I do not know that I should please her or do

any good by naming her. But not to allude to her in these pages

would amount almost to a falsehood. I could not write truly of

myself without saying that such a friend had been vouchsafed to me.

I trust she may live to read the words I have now written, and to

wipe away a tear as she thinks of my feeling while I write them.

I was absent on this occasion something over three months, and

on my return I went back with energy to my work at the St. Paul's

Magazine. The first novel in it from my own pen was called Phineas

Finn, in which I commenced a series of semi-political tales. As I

was debarred from expressing my opinions in the House of Commons,

I took this method of declaring myself. And as I could not take my

seat on those benches where I might possibly have been shone upon

by the Speaker's eye, I had humbly to crave his permission for a

seat in the gallery, so that I might thus become conversant with

the ways and doings of the House in which some of my scenes were

to be placed. The Speaker was very gracious, and gave me a running

order for, I think, a couple of months. It was enough, at any rate,

to enable me often to be very tired,--and, as I have been assured

by members, to talk of the proceedings almost as well as though

Fortune had enabled me to fall asleep within the House itself.

In writing Phineas Finn, and also some other novels which followed

it, I was conscious that I could not make a tale pleasing chiefly,

or perhaps in any part, by politics. If I write politics for my

own sake, I must put in love and intrigue, social incidents, with

perhaps a dash of sport, for the benefit of my readers. In this

way I think I made my political hero interesting. It was certainly

a blunder to take him from Ireland--into which I was led by the

circumstance that I created the scheme of the book during a visit

to Ireland. There was nothing to be gained by the peculiarity, and

there was an added difficulty in obtaining sympathy and affection

for a politician belonging to a nationality whose politics are not

respected in England. But in spite of this Phineas succeeded. It

was not a brilliant success,--because men and women not conversant

with political matters could not care much for a hero who spent

so much of his time either in the House of Commons or in a public

office. But the men who would have lived with Phineas Finn read the

book, and the women who would have lived with Lady Laura Standish

read it also. As this was what I had intended, I was contented. It

is all fairly good except the ending,--as to which till I got to

it I made no provision. As I fully intended to bring my hero again

into the world, I was wrong to marry him to a simple pretty Irish

girl, who could only be felt as an encumbrance on such return. When

he did return I had no alternative but to kill the simple pretty

Irish girl, which was an unpleasant and awkward necessity.

In writing Phineas Finn I had constantly before me the necessity

of progression in character,--of marking the changes in men and

women which would naturally be produced by the lapse of years. In

most novels the writer can have no such duty, as the period occupied

is not long enough to allow of the change of which I speak. In

Ivanhoe, all the incidents of which are included in less than a

month, the characters should be, as they are, consistent throughout.

Novelists who have undertaken to write the life of a hero or heroine

have generally considered their work completed at the interesting

period of marriage, and have contented themselves with the advance

in taste and manners which are common to all boys and girls as

they become men and women. Fielding, no doubt, did more than this

in Tom Jones, which is one of the greatest novels in the English

language, for there he has shown how a noble and sanguine nature

may fall away under temptation and be again strengthened and made

to stand upright. But I do not think that novelists have often

set before themselves the state of progressive change,--nor should

I have done it, had I not found myself so frequently allured back

to my old friends. So much of my inner life was passed in their

company, that I was continually asking myself how this woman would

act when this or that event had passed over her head, or how that

man would carry himself when his youth had become manhood, or

his manhood declined to old age. It was in regard to the old Duke

of Omnium, of his nephew and heir, and of his heir's wife, Lady

Glencora, that I was anxious to carry out this idea; but others added

themselves to my mind as I went on, and I got round me a circle of

persons as to whom I knew not only their present characters, but

how those characters were to be affected by years and circumstances.

The happy motherly life of Violet Effingham, which was due to the

girl's honest but long-restrained love; the tragic misery of Lady

Laura, which was equally due to the sale she made of herself in her

wretched marriage; and the long suffering but final success of the

hero, of which he had deserved the first by his vanity, and the

last by his constant honesty, had been foreshadowed to me from

the first. As to the incidents of the story, the circumstances by

which these personages were to be affected, I knew nothing. They

were created for the most part as they were described. I never

could arrange a set of events before me. But the evil and the good

of my puppets, and how the evil would always lead to evil, and the

good produce good,--that was clear to me as the stars on a summer

night.

Lady Laura Standish is the best character in Phineas Finn and its

sequel Phineas Redux,--of which I will speak here together. They

are, in fact, but one novel though they were brought out at a

considerable interval of time and in different form. The first was

commenced in the St. Paul's Magazine in 1867, and the other was

brought out in the Graphic in 1873. In this there was much bad

arrangement, as I had no right to expect that novel readers would

remember the characters of a story after an interval of six years,

or that any little interest which might have been taken in the

career of my hero could then have been renewed. I do not know that

such interest was renewed. But I found that the sequel enjoyed the

same popularity as the former part, and among the same class of

readers. Phineas, and Lady Laura, and Lady Chiltern--as Violet

had become--and the old duke,--whom I killed gracefully, and the

new duke, and the young duchess, either kept their old friends or

made new friends for themselves. Phineas Finn, I certainly think,

was successful from first to last. I am aware, however, that there