14 - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope by Anthony Trollope

Delve into the captivating life and mind of Anthony Trollope, an iconic figure in literature, through his own words. His autobiography is a rollercoaster of emotions, from side-splitting humor to poignant honesty. Discover the fascinating insights he provides on his unique approach to writing, viewing it more as a labor than a form of art. Trollopes die-hard fans will be thrilled by his candid evaluation of his own work and his recognition of his novels flaws and accomplishments. This autobiography extends beyond just his literary life, providing an intimate look at his years juggling his passion for writing with a full-time job at the post office.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter thirteen of the Autobiography of Anthony Trollop. This LibriVox
recording is in the public domain. Autobiography of Anthony Trollop
On English novelists of the present day. In this chapter,
I will venture to name a few successful novelists of
my own time with whose works I am acquainted, and

(00:22):
will endeavor to point whence their success has come, and
why they have failed. When there has been failure. I
do not hesitate to name Thackera the first. His knowledge
of human nature was supreme, and his characters stand out
as human beings with a force and a truth which
has not, I think been within the reach of any
other English novelist in any period. I know no character

(00:45):
in fiction unless it be Don Quixote, with whom the
reader becomes so intimately acquainted as with Colonel Newcombe. How
great a thing it is to be a gentleman at
all parts. How we admire the man of whom so
much may be said with truth? Is there any one
of whom we feel more sure in this respect than
of Colonel Newcomb. It is not because Colonel Newcomb is

(01:08):
a perfect gentleman that we think Thackeray's work to have
been so excellent, but because he has had the power
to describe him as such, and to force us to
love him a weak and silly old man. On account
of this graceive character, it is evident from all Thackeray's
best work that he lived with the characters he was creating.
He had always a story to tell until quite late

(01:30):
in life. And he shows us that this was so
not by the interest which he had in his own plots,
for I doubt whether his plots did occupy much of
his mind, but by convincing us that his characters were
alive to himself. With Becky Sharp, with Lady Castlewood and
her daughter, and with Esmond, with Warrington, Pendennis and the Major,

(01:51):
with Colonel Newcomb, and with Mary Lyndon, he must have
lived in perpetual intercourse. Therefore he has made these personages
real to us. Among all our novelists, his style is
the purest, as to my ear, it is also the
most harmonious. Sometimes it is disfigured by a slight touch
of affectation, by little conceits which smell of the oil,

(02:14):
But the language is always lucid. The reader without labor
knows what he means, and knows all that he means,
as well as I can remember, he deals with no episodes.
I think that any critic examining his work minutely would
find that every scene, and every part of every scene,
adds something to the clearness with which the story is told.

(02:35):
Among all his stories, there is not one which does
not leave on the mind a feeling of distress that
women should ever be immodest, or men dishonest, and of
joy that women should be so devoted in men so honest.
How we hate the idle selfishness of Pendennis, the worldliness
of Beatrix, the craft of Becky Sharp, How we love

(02:55):
the honesty of Colonel Newcomb, the nobility of Esmond, and
the devoted effects of Missus Pendennis. The hatred of evil
and love of good can hardly have come upon so
many readers without doing much good. Late in Thackeray's life
he never was an old man. But towards the end
of his career he failed in his power of charming

(03:16):
because he allowed his mind to become idle in the
plots which he conceived and in the language which he used.
I do not know that there is any perceptible change.
But in the Virginians and in Philip the reader is
introduced to no character with which he makes a close
and undying acquaintance. And this, I have no doubt is
so because Thackeray himself had no such intimacy. His mind

(03:40):
had come to be weary of that fictitious life which
is always demanding the labor of new creation, and he
troubled himself with his two Virginians and his Philip only
when he was seated at his desk. At the present moment,
George Eliot is the first of English novelists, and I
am disposed to place her second of those of my time.

(04:00):
She is best known to the literary world as a
writer of prose fiction, and not Improbably whatever of permanent
fame she may acquire will come from her novels. But
the nature of her intellect is very far removed, indeed,
from that which is common to the tellers of stories.
Her imagination is no doubt strong, but it acts in analyzing,

(04:21):
rather than in creating. Everything that comes before her is
pulled to pieces, so that the inside of it shall
be seen, and be seen, if possible, by her readers
as clearly as by herself. This searching analysis is carried
so far that in studying her latter writings, one feels
oneself to be in company with some philosopher rather than

(04:42):
with a novelist. I doubt whether any young person can
read with pleasure either Felix Holt, Middle March or Daniel Deronda.
I know that they are very difficult to many that
are not young. Her personifications of character have been singularly
terse and graphic, and from them has come her great
hold on the public, though by no means the greatest

(05:04):
effect which she has produced. The lessons which she teaches remain,
though it is not for the sake of the lessons
that her pages are read. Seth Bede, Adam Bede, Maggie
and Tom Tulliver, Old, Silas Marner, and much above all
Tito and Romola are characters which, when once known, can
never be forgotten. I cannot say quite so much for

(05:27):
any of those in her later works, because in them
the philosopher so greatly overtops the portrait painter that in
the dissection of the mind, the outward sign seems to
have been forgotten. In her as yet, there is no
symptom whatever of that weariness of mind, which, when felt
by the reader, induces him to declare that the author
has written himself out. It is not from decadence that

(05:50):
we do not have another Missus Poyser, but because the
author soars to things which seem to her to be
higher than Missus Poyser. It is, I think the defect
of George Eliot that she struggles too hard to do
work that shall be excellent. She lacks ease. Latterly, the
signs of this have been conspicuous in her style, which

(06:10):
has always been and is singularly correct, but which has
become occasionally obscure from her too great desire to be pungent.
It is impossible not to feel the struggle, and that
feeling begets a flavor of affectation. In Daniel Deronda, of
which at this moment only a portion has been published.
There are sentences which I have found myself compelled to

(06:31):
read three times before I have been able to take
home to myself all that the writer has intended. Perhaps
I may be permitted here to say that this gifted
woman was among my dearest and most intimate friends. As
I am speaking here of novelists, I will not attempt
to speak of George Eliot's merit as a poet. There
can be no doubt that the most popular novelist of

(06:53):
my time, probably the most popular English novelist of any time,
has been Charles Dickens. He has now been nearly six
years and the sale of his books goes on as
it did during his life. The certainty with which his
novels are found in every house, the familiarity of his
name in all English speaking countries, the popularity of such

(07:14):
characters as Missus Gamp, Micawber and Pecksniff, and many others
whose names have entered into the English language and become
well known words. The grief of the country at his death,
and the honors paid to him at his funeral all
testify to his popularity. Since the last book he wrote himself.
I doubt whether any book has been so popular as

(07:35):
his biography by John Forster. There is nowithstanding such testimony
as this. Such evidence of popular appreciation should go for
very much, almost for everything in criticism on the work
of a novelist. The primary object of a novelist is
to please, and this man's novels have been found more
pleasant than those of any other writer. It might of

(07:58):
course be objected to this that though the books have pleased,
they have been injurious, that their tendency has been immoral,
in their teaching vicious. But it is almost needless to
say that no such charge has ever been made against Dickens.
His teaching has ever been good, from all which there
arises to the critic a question whether, with such evidence

(08:18):
against him, as to the excellence of this writer, he
should not subordinate his own opinion to the collected opinion
of the world of readers. To me, it almost seems
that I must be wrong to place Dickens after Thackeray
and George Eliot, knowing as I do, that so great
a majority put him above those authors, my own peculiar
idiosyncrasy in the matter forbids me to do so. I

(08:41):
do acknowledge that Missus, gamp, Micawber, Pecksniff, and others have
become household words in every house as though they were
human beings. But to my judgment, they are not human beings,
nor are any of the characters human which Dickens has portrayed.
It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this
man's bay power that he has invested his puppets with

(09:02):
a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature.
There is a drollery about them, in my estimation, very
much below the humor of Thackeray, but which has reached
the intellect of all. While Thackeray's humor has escaped the
intellect of many. Nor is the pathos of Dickens's human
It is stagy and melodramatic, but it is so expressed

(09:27):
that it touches every heart a little. There's no real
life in Smike. His misery, his idiocy, his devotion for Nicholas,
his love for Kate are all overdone and incompatible with
each other. But still the reader sheds a tear. Every
reader can find a tear for Smike. Dickens's novels are

(09:47):
like Busico's plays. He has known how to draw his
lines broadly, so that all should see the color. He too,
in his best days, always lived with his characters, and he, too,
as he graduate ceased to have the power of doing so,
ceased to charm. Though they are not human beings. We
all remember Missus, gamp and Pickwick, the Boffins and Veneerings

(10:10):
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

(10:33):
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 novelists should ever dare

(10:57):
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

(11:17):
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
marvelously ignorant, and which Thackeray had never studied. He had
read extensively, and was always apt to give his readers

(11:39):
the benefit of what he knew. The result has been
that very much more than amusement may be obtained from
Bulwer's novels. There's 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

(11:59):
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 flavor of an effort to produce effect. The

(12:22):
effects are produced, but it would have been better if
the flavor 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,

(12:44):
and therefore neither do we know them. Even Pelham and
Eugene Aram are not human beings to us, as are
Pickwick and Colonel Nucomb and Missus 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 Elliott,

(13:05):
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 Leeber and

(13:27):
his rattling, jolly, joyous, swearing irishman. 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

(13:49):
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 wunted, 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 monopolized. The talk was never a bore.

(14:12):
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
latter 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

(14:33):
Man Servant 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 matter 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

(14:56):
Bronte was surely a marvelous 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 the 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

(15:17):
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 fiber 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

(15:38):
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 Loricer are forgotten. Because the
men and women depicted are human in their aspirations, human
in their sympathies, and human in their actions. In Valette too,

(16:01):
and in surely 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

(16:25):
every way unprepossessing. There is no writer of the present
day who has so much puzzled me by his eccentricities, impractabilities,
and capabilities as Charles read. 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

(16:46):
can see what is grandly noble and admire it with
all his heart. He can see too what is foully
vicious and hated with equal ardor 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

(17:09):
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 Belief of
Honesty in Literary Transactions, a wonderful work which has I
believe been read by very few. I never saw a
copy except that in my own library, or heard of

(17:30):
anyone who knew the book. Nevertheless, it is a volume
that must have taken very great labor 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

(17:53):
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 the 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 purpose and also
without infringing any international copyright act. The French author not

(18:14):
unnaturally praises him for the transaction, telling him that he
is umfree gentleman. The plot was used by read 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 pseudonym uncle, and defended himself by
stating the fact of his own purchase. In all this,

(18:37):
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 did not himself create.
When an author puts his name to a book, he
claims to have written all that there is therein, unless

(18:58):
he makes direct signification to the contrary. Some years subsequently
there arose another similar question, in which mister Reid'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

(19:19):
the day fell foul of him for this bare faced 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

(19:39):
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,

(20:01):
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 ahead. Surely no novelist
ever before had combined in story telling. He has occasionally

(20:24):
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 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

(20:44):
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 which
lost upon me individually. When I sit down to write
a novel, I do not at all know, and I

(21:06):
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 dovetailing which does not dovetail with absolute accuracy.

(21:28):
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 milestone. One is constrained by mysteries

(21:53):
and hemmed in by difficulties, knowing, however, that the mysteries
will be made clear and the difficulties overcome 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,

(22:14):
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

(22:37):
true to human nature. In her writings, she is always
endeavoring 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,

(23:00):
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.

(23:21):
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 savored as are those by
Miss Thackeray, and are therefore less true to nature. In

(23:42):
Miss Broughton's determination not to be mawkish and missish, she
has made her ladies do and say things wish 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 over come her
fault in this direction. There is one other name without

(24:05):
which the list of best known English novelists of my
time would certainly be incomplete, and that is the name
of the present Prime Minister of England. Mister Disraeli has
written so many novels, and has been so popular as
a novelist that, whether for good or ill, I feel
myself compelled to speak of him. He began his career
as an author early in life, publishing Vivian Gray when

(24:27):
he was twenty three years old. He was very young
for such work, though hardly young enough to justify the
excuse that he makes in his own preface that it
is a book written by a boy. Dickens was I
think younger when he wrote his sketches by Boz and
as young when he was writing the Pickwick Papers. It
was hardly longer ago than the other day when mister

(24:47):
Disraeli brought out Lothair, and between the two there were
eight or ten others. To me, they have all had
the same flavor of paint and unreality. In whatever he
has written, he has affected something which has been intended
to strike his readers as uncommon and therefore grand. Because
he has been bright and a man of genius, he

(25:08):
has carried his object. As regards the young, he has
struck them with astonishment and aroused in their imagination ideas
of a world more glorious, more rich, more witty, more
enterprising than their own. But the glory has been the
glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been a wealth
of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers,

(25:28):
and the enterprise has been the enterprise of moundbacks. An
audacious conjuror has generally been his hero, some youth who,
by wonderful cleverness, can obtain success by every intrigue that
comes to his hand. Through it all, there's a feeling
of stage properties, a smell of hair oil, an aspect
of blue, a remembrance of tailors, and that pricking of

(25:49):
the conscience which must be the general accompaniment of paste diamonds.
I can understand that mister Disraeli should, by his novels,
have instigated many a young man and many a young
woman on their way in life. But I cannot understand
that he should have instigated anyone to good. Vivian Gray
has had probably as many followers as Jack Sheppard, and

(26:11):
has led his followers in the same direction. Lo there,
which is as yet mister Disraeli's last work, and I
think undoubtedly his worst has been defended on a plea
somewhat similar to that by which he has defended Vivian Gray.
As that was written when he was too young, so
was the other when he was too old, too old

(26:31):
for a work of that nature, though not too old
to be Prime minister. If his mind were so occupied
with greater things as to allow him to write such
a work, yet his judgment should have sufficed to induce
him to destroy it. When written here that flavor of
hair oil, that flavor of false jewels, that remembrance of
Tailor's comes out stronger than in all the others. Though

(26:54):
there is falser even than Vivian Gray, and Lady korusand
and the daughter of the duchess, more inane and unwomanlike
than Venetia or Henrietta Temple. It is the very bathos
of storytelling. I have often lamented, and have as often
excused myself, that lack of public judgment which enables readers
to put up with bad work because it comes from

(27:15):
good or from lofty hands. I never felt a feeling
so strongly, or was so little able to excuse it,
as when a portion of the reading public received low
Air with satisfaction end of Chapter thirteen. Recorded with a
cold by Jessica Louise, Minneapolis, Minnesota,