Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

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,

that he has left a character that will remain; but he has written

some of his scenes so brightly that to read them would always be

a pleasure.

Of Wilkie Collins it is impossible for a true critic not to speak

with admiration, because he has excelled all his contemporaries in

a certain most difficult branch of his art; but as it is a branch

which I have not myself at all cultivated, it is not unnatural

that his work should be very much lost upon me individually. When

I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very

much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so to construct

his that he not only, before writing, plans everything on, down to

the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots

it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary

dove-tailing which does not dove-tail with absolute accuracy. The

construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never

lose the taste of the construction. The author seems always to be

warning me to remember that something happened at exactly half-past

two o'clock on Tuesday morning; or that a woman disappeared from

the road just fifteen yards beyond the fourth mile-stone. One is

constrained by mysteries and hemmed in by difficulties, knowing,

however, that the mysteries will be made clear, and the difficulties

overcome at the end of the third volume. Such work gives me no

pleasure. I am, however, quite prepared to acknowledge that the

want of pleasure comes from fault of my intellect.

There are two ladies of whom I would fain say a word, though I feel

that I am making my list too long, in order that I may declare how

much I have admired their work. They are Annie Thackeray and Rhoda

Broughton. I have known them both, and have loved the former almost

as though she belonged to me. No two writers were ever more

dissimilar,--except in this that they are both feminine. Miss

Thackeray's characters are sweet, charming, and quite true to human

nature. In her writings she is always endeavouring to prove that

good produces good, and evil evil. There is not a line of which

she need be ashamed,--not a sentiment of which she should not be

proud. But she writes like a lazy writer who dislikes her work,

and who allows her own want of energy to show itself in her pages.

Miss Broughton, on the other hand, is full of energy,--though

she too, I think, can become tired over her work. She, however,

does take the trouble to make her personages stand upright on the

ground. And she has the gift of making them speak as men and women

do speak. "You beast!" said Nancy, sitting on the wall, to the man

who was to be her husband,--thinking that she was speaking to her

brother. Now Nancy, whether right or wrong, was just the girl who

would, as circumstances then were, have called her brother a beast.

There is nothing wooden about any of Miss Broughton's novels; and

in these days so many novels are wooden! But they are not sweet-savoured

as are those by Miss Thackeray, and are, therefore, less true to

nature. In Miss Broughton's determination not to be mawkish and

missish, she has made her ladies do and say things which ladies

would not do and say. They throw themselves at men's heads, and

when they are not accepted only think how they may throw themselves

again. Miss Broughton is still so young that I hope she may live

to overcome her fault in this direction.

There is one other name, without which the list of the best known

English novelists of my own time would certainly be incomplete,