Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

that smells of oil. I speak here, of course, of prose; for in poetry

we know what care is necessary, and we form our taste accordingly.

Rapid writing will no doubt give rise to inaccuracy,--chiefly because

the ear, quick and true as may be its operation, will occasionally

break down under pressure, and, before a sentence be closed, will

forget the nature of the composition with which it was commenced.

A singular nominative will be disgraced by a plural verb, because

other pluralities have intervened and have tempted the ear into

plural tendencies. Tautologies will occur, because the ear, in

demanding fresh emphasis, has forgotten that the desired force has

been already expressed. I need not multiply these causes of error,

which must have been stumbling-blocks indeed when men wrote in the

long sentences of Gibbon, but which Macaulay, with his multiplicity

of divisions, has done so much to enable us to avoid. A rapid writer

will hardly avoid these errors altogether. Speaking of myself, I

am ready to declare that, with much training, I have been unable to

avoid them. But the writer for the press is rarely called upon--a

writer of books should never be called upon--to send his manuscript

hot from his hand to the printer. It has been my practice to read

everything four times at least--thrice in manuscript and once in

print. Very much of my work I have read twice in print. In spite

of this I know that inaccuracies have crept through,--not single

spies, but in battalions. From this I gather that the supervision

has been insufficient, not that the work itself has been done too

fast. I am quite sure that those passages which have been written

with the greatest stress of labour, and consequently with the

greatest haste, have been the most effective and by no means the

most inaccurate.

The Small House at Allington redeemed my reputation with the spirited

proprietor of the Cornhill, which must, I should think, have been

damaged by Brown, Jones, and Robinson. In it appeared Lily Dale,

one of the characters which readers of my novels have liked the

best. In the love with which she has been greeted I have hardly

joined with much enthusiasm, feeling that she is somewhat of a

French prig. She became first engaged to a snob, who jilted her;

and then, though in truth she loved another man who was hardly

good enough, she could not extricate herself sufficiently from the

collapse of her first great misfortune to be able to make up her

mind to be the wife of one whom, though she loved him, she did not

altogether reverence. Prig as she was, she made her way into the

hearts of many readers, both young and old; so that, from that time

to this, I have been continually honoured with letters, the purport

of which has always been to beg me to marry Lily Dale to Johnny

Eames. Had I done so, however, Lily would never have so endeared

herself to these people as to induce them to write letters to the

author concerning her fate. It was because she could not get over

her troubles that they loved her. Outside Lily Dale and the chief

interest of the novel, The Small House at Allington is, I think,

good. The De Courcy family are alive, as is also Sir Raffle Buffle,

who is a hero of the Civil Service. Sir Raffle was intended to

represent a type, not a man; but the man for the picture was soon

chosen, and I was often assured that the portrait was very like.

I have never seen the gentleman with whom I am supposed to have

taken the liberty. There is also an old squire down at Allington,

whose life as a country gentleman with rather straitened means is,

I think, well described.

Of Can you Forgive Her? I cannot speak with too great affection,

though I do not know that of itself it did very much to increase

my reputation. As regards the story, it was formed chiefly on that

of the play which my friend Mr. Bartley had rejected long since,

the circumstances of which the reader may perhaps remember. The

play had been called The Noble Jilt; but I was afraid of the name

for a novel, lest the critics might throw a doubt on the nobility.

There was more of tentative humility in that which I at last adopted.

The character of the girl is carried through with considerable

strength, but is not attractive. The humorous characters, which are

also taken from the play,--a buxom widow who with her eyes open

chooses the most scampish of two selfish suitors because he is

the better looking,--are well done. Mrs. Greenow, between Captain

Bellfield and Mr. Cheeseacre, is very good fun--as far as the fun

of novels is. But that which endears the book to me is the first

presentation which I made in it of Plantagenet Palliser, with his

wife, Lady Glencora.

By no amount of description or asseveration could I succeed in

making any reader understand how much these characters with their

belongings have been to me in my latter life; or how frequently

I have used them for the expression of my political or social

convictions. They have been as real to me as free trade was to Mr.

Cobden, or the dominion of a party to Mr. Disraeli; and as I have

not been able to speak from the benches of the House of Commons,

or to thunder from platforms, or to be efficacious as a lecturer,

they have served me as safety-valves by which to deliver my soul.

Mr. Plantagenet Palliser had appeared in The Small House at Allington,

but his birth had not been accompanied by many hopes. In the last

pages of that novel he is made to seek a remedy for a foolish

false step in life by marrying the grand heiress of the day;--but

the personage of the great heiress does not appear till she comes

on the scene as a married woman in Can You Forgive Her? He is

the nephew and heir to a duke--the Duke of Omnium--who was first

introduced in Doctor Thorne, and afterwards in Framley Parsonage,

and who is one of the belongings of whom I have spoken. In these

personages and their friends, political and social, I have endeavoured

to depict the faults and frailties and vices,--as also the virtues,

the graces, and the strength of our highest classes; and if I have

not made the strength and virtues predominant over the faults and

vices, I have not painted the picture as I intended. Plantagenet

Palliser I think to be a very noble gentleman,--such a one as justifies

to the nation the seeming anomaly of an hereditary peerage and of

primogeniture. His wife is in all respects very inferior to him;

but she, too, has, or has been intended to have, beneath the thin

stratum of her follies a basis of good principle, which enabled her

to live down the conviction of the original wrong which was done

to her, and taught her to endeavour to do her duty in the position

to which she was called. She had received a great wrong,--having

been made, when little more than a child, to marry a man for whom

she cared nothing;--when, however, though she was little more than

a child, her love had been given elsewhere. She had very heavy

troubles, but they did not overcome her.

As to the heaviest of these troubles, I will say a word in vindication

of myself and of the way I handled it in my work. In the pages of

Can You Forgive Her? the girl's first love is introduced,--beautiful,

well-born, and utterly worthless. To save a girl from wasting

herself, and an heiress from wasting her property on such a scamp,

was certainly the duty of the girl's friends. But it must ever

be wrong to force a girl into a marriage with a man she does not

love,--and certainly the more so when there is another whom she does

love. In my endeavour to teach this lesson I subjected the young

wife to the terrible danger of overtures from the man to whom her

heart had been given. I was walking no doubt on ticklish ground,

leaving for a while a doubt on the question whether the lover

might or might not succeed. Then there came to me a letter from a

distinguished dignitary of our Church, a man whom all men honoured,

treating me with severity for what I was doing. It had been one

of the innocent joys of his life, said the clergyman, to have my

novels read to him by his daughters. But now I was writing a book

which caused him to bid them close it! Must I also turn away to

vicious sensation such as this? Did I think that a wife contemplating

adultery was a character fit for my pages? I asked him in return,

whether from his pulpit, or at any rate from his communion-table,

he did not denounce adultery to his audience; and if so, why should

it not be open to me to preach the same doctrine to mine. I made

known nothing which the purest girl could not but have learned,

and ought not to have learned, elsewhere, and I certainly lent no

attraction to the sin which I indicated. His rejoinder was full

of grace, and enabled him to avoid the annoyance of argumentation

without abandoning his cause. He said that the subject was so much

too long for letters; that he hoped I would go and stay a week with

him in the country,--so that we might have it out. That opportunity,

however, has never yet arrived.

Lady Glencora overcomes that trouble, and is brought, partly by her

own sense of right and wrong, and partly by the genuine nobility

of her husband's conduct, to attach herself to him after a certain

fashion. The romance of her life is gone, but there remains a

rich reality of which she is fully able to taste the flavour. She

loves her rank and becomes ambitious, first of social, and then of

political ascendancy. He is thoroughly true to her, after his thorough

nature, and she, after her less perfect nature, is imperfectly true

to him.

In conducting these characters from one story to another I realised

the necessity, not only of consistency,--which, had it been maintained

by a hard exactitude, would have been untrue to nature,--but also

of those changes which time always produces. There, are, perhaps,

but few of us who, after the lapse of ten years, will be found to

have changed our chief characteristics. The selfish man will still

be selfish, and the false man false. But our manner of showing or

of hiding these characteristics will be changed,--as also our power

of adding to or diminishing their intensity. It was my study that

these people, as they grew in years, should encounter the changes

which come upon us all; and I think that I have succeeded. The

Duchess of Omnium, when she is playing the part of Prime Minister's

wife, is the same woman as that Lady Glencora who almost longs to

go off with Burgo Fitzgerald, but yet knows that she will never do

so; and the Prime Minister Duke, with his wounded pride and sore

spirit, is he who, for his wife's sake, left power and place when

they were first offered to him;--but they have undergone the changes

which a life so stirring as theirs would naturally produce. To do

all this thoroughly was in my heart from first to last; but I do

not know that the game has been worth the candle.

To carry out my scheme I have had to spread my picture over so wide

a canvas that I cannot expect that any lover of such art should

trouble himself to look at it as a whole. Who will read Can You