Michael Sadleir

“ One thinks immediately of William Harrison Ainsworth, from the foppish eminence of his early twenties to the last sad years in a Tonbridge villa, when he laboured at the regular production of three-volume fiction—one novel a year at seventy-five pounds the time—alone amid the memories of vanished splendour. But the man who as a youth wins reputation in letters and passes, of deliberate purpose, maturity and age in other, non-literary, pursuits is a scarcer type, of which Melville is an unusual example. ”

“ Palaces more delicate, more romantic, more brilliant and more terrible than those of Trollope have been erected and have stood to win the admiration of posterity; but their splendour and their beauty are due more to the solid material that upholds their walls and roofs than to the skill and fancy of their decoration. Other palaces, because they lacked such invisible but vital solidity, have drawn for an hour the fickle favour of the crowd and then toppled into dust. It is easy, in fiction, to create a nine days' wonder, but hard indeed to win the esteem of ninety years. ”

“ He does not reveal to us human nature as does Trollope; nor, like Disraeli, pique our interest with satiric brilliance on topics of follies of the day; he has none of Marryat's gay familiarity with the winds that blow and the sun that shines on the crossroads of life's pilgrimage; he has no fund of rough but genial humanity like Reade; he is not tender like Mrs. Gaskell, nor mystic visionary like Herman Melville; even Whyte Melville, with his stilted rhetoric and clumsy naïveté, has at times an attractive freshness that Collins lacks. ”

“ Readability has, in these latter days, become a term of condescension. But that is the fault of a superior age, and for the ten who use the word contemptuously there are ten thousand who, did they care to do so, would give it an older and a more honourable meaning. To them, as always to the large public of novel-readers, fiction, when it is not costume-romance, mystery-story, or topical propaganda, is a revelation of their own lives. ”

“ Grey, the honourable man, gets in the end the wife he wants; but Trollope does not hesitate to show fairly the preference of a high-spirited girl for an adventurous rascal, and there will be many who, when the book is finished, will regret—a little ashamedly—that virtue has ultimately triumphed. In the life story of Lady Glencora Can You Forgive Her? is important, for it pictures her newly married and literally on the verge of running away from her shy, proud, inarticulate husband, with a beautiful young reprobate, whose previous intimacy with her the reader may imagine at his discretion. ”

“ But we prodigals, returned from our rioting and sick with the husks of a démodé violence, stoop to any self-abasement, to any denial of our own past judgment, so we be allowed entry to the quiet courts and ordered opulence of the age we once affected to despise. Literary enthusiasm expresses itself in various ways. For my part to love an author is to collect him, for I can read no borrowed books, and only with difficulty such as are not first editions. ”

“ Men there are to whom all collecting is folly; others to whom every passion is vile. To the logical asceticism of their private Utopias they are welcome, provided the lover be left to enjoy his mistress, the lepidopterist his butterflies, the bibliophile his books. Even the more subtle critic, who admits the lure of collecting but maintains that the craze of the first edition is senseless hysteria, shall not tempt me to dispute. This is a book about first editions, and will be read only by the initiate. If we be hystericals, we have at least our weakness in common. ”

“ For long enough yet will persist turbulent discomfort and the clamour of quacks hawking the millennium; but at last will be peace, and it is surely a longing for that peace that has turned men's minds partly to high romance, but more generally to the manners and genius of a century ago. Those of an older generation than my own have, perhaps, never betrayed their gentle Victorian heritage. One may envy and applaud their wisdom. ”

“ As a novelist of indignation Collins is pathetic rather than blameworthy. He had the usual fanaticisms of the invalid intellectual—hatred of athleticism, of sport, of legal injustice, of religious intrigue, of social insincerity; and his propaganda novels give expression to his passionate dislikes with a petulant but rather impressive sincerity. Fortunately for the modern reader of books which by their very nature are now out of date, Collins did not fail, even in his tilting at windmills, to regulate his movements with practised skill. ”

“ Both deal in the passions of the nobly born; but while the woman has at least the courage of bad taste, the man, fettered by good form, achieves no taste at all. Whyte-Melville's novels, like Hamlet, are full of quotations. He is the father of novelette; the wellspring of cliché. His lovely ladies are not women nor his gallants men: they are the dummies of suburban melodrama, exquisitely gowned, faultlessly tailored, mouthing the phrases of drawing-room passionates, but, even as dummies, failing to achieve that semblance of gilded sin that is their only purpose. ”

“ One important full-length novel remains, good in itself and at the same time remarkable as the only one of the author's tales in which he arms himself formally as a social crusader.
The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870) is a novel written in defence of the “fallen woman.” It is quaint to read Trollope's solemn and tactful preface, in which he almost apologizes to his public for venturing on such indelicate ground. Fortunately the book is so feeble as propaganda that, but for the preface, one would be unaware that it was written with any special purpose. ”

“ By the time he came to the writing of The Prime Minister, Trollope had become deeply interested in presenting in the person of the Duke his ideal conception of an English aristocrat. No praise can be too high for the skill with which he implies, but does not describe, the divergent qualities of ambition possessed by the Duke and by his wife. Throughout the book she is for ever striving to make him in the eye of the world the greatest gentleman of the greatest kingdom of all time. ”

“ To the modern reader, the unmistakable first appearance of the real Collins in these excellent tales comes with a pleasurable shock after the mild bohemianism of the preceding novel, Hide and Seek. After Dark consists of six narratives of varying length and subject, ingeniously woven together into the pattern of a single story. At their best they are as good as anything the author ever wrote; even at their worst they are free from the perfunctory carelessness that mars so much of his later work. ”

“ Much of the action takes place in a painter's studio, and Collins has full scope for showing his fondness for art, an enthusiasm suitable enough in the son and biographer of a distinguished painter, but somewhat uncommon among novelists of his age. Throughout his work he makes play with knowledge of contemporary painting, displaying decided and on the whole admirable taste, often well in advance of his time.
Poor Miss Finch (1872) is more a story of contemporary social life than either a novel of mystery or one of propaganda. ”

“ Superficially he has fared better than they, for, if little read except by boys, he is at least acknowledged as a classic, and there are few adult novel readers who could not from their own childhood gather sufficient memories to characterize in summary some of his best known books.
Nevertheless, it is arguable that the forgotten author is happier than he who is accepted but unread. A revival of interest in the books of a man not already docketed and filed in the appreciation of his age may develop a new perspective. ”

“ Instead of an Englishman reaching an imaginary and fantastic land, where he finds conditions that correspond partly to the prejudices, partly to the ideals, of the author, the hero of Disraeli's satire is a being from a mythical world, who comes over the sea to an island that is, in all but name, England as Disraeli saw it. As an example of pertinacious and aggressive parody The Voyage of Captain Popanilla is witty and readable enough, but it fatigues, as do all pastiches of the kind, by its somewhat literal pursuit of contemporary activity. ”

“ TOGETHER WITH OBSERVATIONS RELATIVE TO VICTORIAN BOOKMAKING, RECOMMENDATIONS TO COLLECTORS, AND AN APPEAL TO THE EXPERIENCE OF OTHER STUDENTS FOR ASSISTANCE AND CORRECTION (i) I am aware that bibliographers proper designate by means of upright strokes the alignment of wording on the title-pages of books subject to their analysis. This mannerism I have eschewed, and for two reasons. In the first place, a bibliography so displayed baffles the inexpert reader by a suggestion of mathematical obscurity. ”

“ In so far as a work of art requires outside knowledge for its proper appreciation, to that extent it falls short from what in art is highest and most perfect.
The appearance of Lothair in 1870 caused something of a scandal in serious political circles. The Briton is accustomed to take his statesmen seriously, but his novelists with frivolity and in the leisure hour. Wherefore he regarded it as unseemly that the name of an ex-Prime Minister and of a man whose political career was by no means run should figure on the title-pages of a three-volume novel. ”

“ More hardly shall this befall such a one as Marryat, who is “placed” already as a writer of sea stories for boys and as an instructor in adventure for young people.
Who shall deny that he is all of this? His fame as a novelist of naval escapade, of risk and makeshift among pirates and barbarians, is fame deserved. The difficulty for one concerned to reappraise his work lies in the fact that there is more to him than is here implied. He is the only writer in the tradition of Fielding and Smollett who can claim consideration on the same plane as these famous authors. ”

“ As a very young man—unknown, ambitious, at once receptive and intensely sensitive—he used as material for fiction not only the incidents of his own life, but, even more, the thoughts and aspirations that filled his teeming brain. Vivian Grey (1826-7) , Contarini Fleming 108 (1833) , and Alroy (1833) are mainly interesting as autobiography, and to the use of personal experience as material for novel-writing he returned in extreme old age when, looking back from the splendid eminence of his power, he described in the pages of Endymion the long road that he had travelled from obscurity to fame. ”

“ And so matters progressed, while gradually novels ousted poetry from my shelves, and, again gradually, from the reading of modern novels I came once more to Trollope and the writers of his age.
It is not until one undertakes seriously the collecting of the less-known Victorian novelists that one realizes how prime the sport that their assembling offers, how 7destitute of guide-posts is the maze of their work. In the capacity of quarry few authors or groups of authors can rival those with whom this volume deals. The essence of collecting is the chase. ”

“ David Hannay, in his excellent little Life of Marryat, remarks acutely on the peculiar meanness of the hero's character—a meanness that makes an even more repellant appearance in the last but one of the sea stories—Percival Keene. Seeing that Marryat was writing of himself and that the events in the life of Frank Mildmay must have been easily recognizable by naval contemporaries, it is remarkable that he should present his central figure so unsympathetically, unless he failed to realize the young man's shortcomings. ”

“ Quality has outstayed vogue, and the latter comes smirking back to the smiles of a lover yesterday despised. Indeed, Trollope is in a fair way to become once again the fashion. For a while he will be honoured by the enthusiasm of the intellectuals. ”

“ His only daughter gives her love to an unknown and penniless commoner. His younger son, after ragging through his university career, resorts disastrously to cards and racing. Finally, his heir—Lord Silverbridge—stands for Parliament in the opposite interest to that of his father, and, worse still, turns from the girl the Duke has chosen as his bride, in order to throw his title and prospects at the feet of the beautiful daughter of an American savant. The Duke struggles against his own humanity; slowly and unhappily, as is his way, he adjusts himself to the changing times ”

“ One may go farther and confess that the author, seeking frankly to profit by the contemporary popularity of the novel of fashionable life, wrote a tale of society into which he crammed all that he knew of character and incident likely to appeal to the mood of the moment. ”