Note (return) — Chapter VII · THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL

In a certain sense, however, the last of the three, though he may give less impression of genius than the other two (or even the other four whom we have specially noticed), is the most interesting of all: and qualms may sometimes arise as to whether genius is justly denied to him. Anthony Trollope, after a youth, not exactly orageuse, but apparently characterised by the rather squalid yet mild dissipation which he has described in The Three Clerks (1858) and The Small House at Allington (1864), attained a considerable position in the Post Office which he held during great part of his career as a novelist. For some time that career did not look as if it were going to be a successful one, though his early (chiefly Irish) efforts are better than is sometimes thought. But he made his mark first with The Warden (1855), and then, much more directly and triumphantly, with its sequel Barchester Towers (1857). When the first of these was published Dickens had been a successful novelist for nearly twenty years and Thackeray had "come to his own" for nearly ten. The Warden might have been described at the time (I do not know whether it was, but English reviewing was only beginning to be clever again) as a partial attempt at the matter of Dickens in a partial following of the manner of Thackeray. An "abuse"—the distribution in supposed unjust proportion of the funds of an endowed hospital for aged men—is its main avowed subject. But Trollope indulged in no tirades and no fantastic-grotesque caricature—in fact he actually drew a humorous sketch of a novel à la Dickens on the matter. His real object was evidently to sketch faithfully, but again not without humour, the cathedral society of "Barchester" as it actually spoke, dressed, thought, and lived: and he did it. The first book had a little too much talk about the nominal subject, and not enough actual action and conversation. Barchester Towers remedied this, and presented its readers with one of the liveliest books in English fiction. There had been nothing like it (for Thackeray had been more discursive and less given to small talk) since Miss Austen herself, though the spirits of the two were extremely different. Perhaps Trollope never did a better book than this, for variety and vigour of character drawing. The masterful wife of Bishop Proudie, the ne'er-do-weel canon's family (the Stanhopes), and others stand out against an interest, not intense but sufficient, of story, a great variety of incident, and above all abundant and lifelike conversation. For many years, and in an extraordinary number of examples, he fell little below, and perhaps once or twice went above, this standard. It was rather a fancy of his (one again, perhaps, suggested by Thackeray) to run his books into series or cycles—the chief being that actually opened as above, and continuing through others to the brilliant Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), which in some respect surpasses Barchester Towers itself, with a second series, not quite disconnected, dealing with Lady Glencora Palliser as centre, and yet others. His total production was enormous: it became in fact impossibly so, and the work of his last lustrum and a little more (say 1877-1882), though never exactly bad or painful to read, was obvious hack-work. But between The Warden and The American Senator, twenty-two years later, he had written nearer thirty than twenty novels, of which at least half were much above the average and some quite capital.26 Moreover, it is a noteworthy thing, and contrary to some critical explanations, that, as his works drop out of copyright and are reprinted in cheap editions, they appear to be recovering very considerable popularity. This fact would seem to show that the manners, speech, etc., represented in them have a certain standard quality which does not—like the manner, speech, etc., of novels such as those of Hook and Surtees—lose appeal to fresh generations; and that the artist who dealt with them must have had not a little faculty of fixing them in the presentation. In fact it is probably not too much to say that of the average novel of the third quarter of the century—in a more than average but not of an extraordinary, transcendental, or quintessential condition—Anthony Trollope is about as good a representative as can be found. His talent is individual enough, but not too individual: system and writer may each have the credit due to them allotted without difficulty.