Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

was given for the reading of novels were very few, and from many

they were altogether banished. The high poetic genius and correct

morality of Walter Scott had not altogether succeeded in making men

and women understand that lessons which were good in poetry could

not be bad in prose. I remember that in those days an embargo was

laid upon novel-reading as a pursuit, which was to the novelist

a much heavier tax than that want of full appreciation of which I

now complain.

There is, we all know, no such embargo now. May we not say that

people of an age to read have got too much power into their own

hands to endure any very complete embargo? Novels are read right

and left, above stairs and below, in town houses and in country

parsonages, by young countesses and by farmers' daughters, by old

lawyers and by young students. It has not only come to pass that

a special provision of them has to be made for the godly, but that

the provision so made must now include books which a few years since

the godly would have thought to be profane. It was this necessity

which, a few years since, induced the editor of Good Words to apply

to me for a novel,--which, indeed, when supplied was rejected, but

which now, probably, owing to further change in the same direction,

would have been accepted.

If such be the case--if the extension of novel-reading be so wide

as I have described it--then very much good or harm must be done

by novels. The amusement of the time can hardly be the only result

of any book that is read, and certainly not so with a novel, which

appeals especially to the imagination, and solicits the sympathy of

the young. A vast proportion of the teaching of the day,--greater

probably than many of us have acknowledged to ourselves,--comes

from these books, which are in the hands of all readers. It is from

them that girls learn what is expected from them, and what they

are to expect when lovers come; and also from them that young men

unconsciously learn what are, or should be, or may be, the charms

of love,--though I fancy that few young men will think so little

of their natural instincts and powers as to believe that I am right

in saying so. Many other lessons also are taught. In these times,

when the desire to be honest is pressed so hard, is so violently

assaulted by the ambition to be great; in which riches are the

easiest road to greatness; when the temptations to which men are

subjected dull their eyes to the perfected iniquities of others;

when it is so hard for a man to decide vigorously that the pitch,

which so many are handling, will defile him if it be touched;--men's

conduct will be actuated much by that which is from day to day

depicted to them as leading to glorious or inglorious results. The

woman who is described as having obtained all that the world holds

to be precious, by lavishing her charms and her caresses unworthily

and heartlessly, will induce other women to do the same with

theirs,--as will she who is made interesting by exhibitions of

bold passion teach others to be spuriously passionate. The young

man who in a novel becomes a hero, perhaps a Member of Parliament,

and almost a Prime Minister, by trickery, falsehood, and flash

cleverness, will have many followers, whose attempts to rise in

the world ought to lie heavily on the conscience of the novelists

who create fictitious Cagliostros. There are Jack Sheppards other

than those who break into houses and out of prisons,--Macheaths,

who deserve the gallows more than Gay's hero.

Thinking of all this, as a novelist surely must do,--as I certainly

have done through my whole career,--it becomes to him a matter of

deep conscience how he shall handle those characters by whose words

and doings he hopes to interest his readers. It will very frequently

be the case that he will be tempted to sacrifice something for

effect, to say a word or two here, or to draw a picture there,

for which he feels that he has the power, and which when spoken or

drawn would be alluring. The regions of absolute vice are foul and

odious. The savour of them, till custom has hardened the palate and

the nose, is disgusting. In these he will hardly tread. But there

are outskirts on these regions, on which sweet-smelling flowers

seem to grow; and grass to be green. It is in these border-lands

that the danger lies. The novelist may not be dull. If he commit

that fault he can do neither harm nor good. He must please, and the

flowers and the grass in these neutral territories sometimes seem

to give him so easy an opportunity of pleasing!

The writer of stories must please, or he will be nothing. And

he must teach whether he wish to teach or no. How shall he teach

lessons of virtue and at the same time make himself a delight to

his readers? That sermons are not in themselves often thought to

be agreeable we all know. Nor are disquisitions on moral philosophy

supposed to be pleasant reading for our idle hours. But the novelist,

if he have a conscience, must preach his sermons with the same

purpose as the clergyman, and must have his own system of ethics.

If he can do this efficiently, if he can make virtue alluring and

vice ugly, while he charms his readers instead of wearying them,

then I think Mr. Carlyle need not call him distressed, nor talk

of that long ear of fiction, nor question whether he be or not the

most foolish of existing mortals.

I think that many have done so; so many that we English novelists

may boast as a class that has been the general result of our own

work. Looking back to the past generation, I may say with certainty

that such was the operation of the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss

Austen, and Walter Scott. Coming down to my own times, I find such

to have been the teaching of Thackeray, of Dickens, and of George

Eliot. Speaking, as I shall speak to any who may read these words,

with that absence of self-personality which the dead may claim, I

will boast that such has been the result of my own writing. Can any

one by search through the works of the six great English novelists

I have named, find a scene, a passage, or a word that would teach

a girl to be immodest, or a man to be dishonest? When men in their

pages have been described as dishonest and women as immodest, have

they not ever been punished? It is not for the novelist to say,

baldly and simply: "Because you lied here, or were heartless there,

because you Lydia Bennet forgot the lessons of your honest home,

or you Earl Leicester were false through your ambition, or you

Beatrix loved too well the glitter of the world, therefore you shall

be scourged with scourges either in this world or in the next;" but

it is for him to show, as he carries on his tale, that his Lydia,

or his Leicester, or his Beatrix, will be dishonoured in the estimation

of all readers by his or her vices. Let a woman be drawn clever,

beautiful, attractive,--so as to make men love her, and women

almost envy her,--and let her be made also heartless, unfeminine,

and ambitious of evil grandeur, as was Beatrix, what a danger is

there not in such a character! To the novelist who shall handle it,

what peril of doing harm! But if at last it have been so handled

that every girl who reads of Beatrix shall say: "Oh! not like

that;--let me not be like that!" and that every youth shall say:

"Let me not have such a one as that to press my bosom, anything