Of publishers, however, I must speak collectively, as my sins
were, I think, chiefly due to the encouragement which I received
from them individually. What I wrote for the Cornhill Magazine, I
always wrote at the instigation of Mr. Smith. My other works were
published by Messrs. Chapman & Hall, in compliance with contracts
made by me with them, and always made with their good-will. Could
I have been two separate persons at one and the same time, of whom
one might have been devoted to Cornhill and the other to the interests
of the firm in Piccadilly, it might have been very well;--but as
I preserved my identity in both places, I myself became aware that
my name was too frequent on titlepages.
Critics, if they ever trouble themselves with these pages, will, of
course, say that in what I have now said I have ignored altogether
the one great evil of rapid production,--namely, that of inferior
work. And of course if the work was inferior because of the too
great rapidity of production, the critics would be right. Giving
to the subject the best of my critical abilities, and judging of
my own work as nearly as possible as I would that of another, I
believe that the work which has been done quickest has been done
the best. I have composed better stories--that is, have created
better plots--than those of The Small House at Allington and Can
You Forgive Her? and I have portrayed two or three better characters
than are to be found in the pages of either of them; but taking
these books all through, I do not think that I have ever done better
work. Nor would these have been improved by any effort in the art
of story telling, had each of these been the isolated labour of a
couple of years. How short is the time devoted to the manipulation
of a plot can be known only to those who have written plays and
novels; I may say also, how very little time the brain is able
to devote to such wearing work. There are usually some hours of
agonising doubt, almost of despair,--so at least it has been with
me,--or perhaps some days. And then, with nothing settled in my
brain as to the final development of events, with no capability
of settling anything, but with a most distinct conception of some
character or characters, I have rushed at the work as a rider rushes
at a fence which he does not see. Sometimes I have encountered
what, in hunting language, we call a cropper. I had such a fall in
two novels of mine, of which I have already spoken--The Bertrams
and Castle Richmond. I shall have to speak of other such troubles.
But these failures have not arisen from over-hurried work. When my
work has been quicker done,--and it has sometimes been done very
quickly--the rapidity has been achieved by hot pressure, not in
the conception, but in the telling of the story. Instead of writing
eight pages a day, I have written sixteen; instead of working five
days a week, I have worked seven. I have trebled my usual average,
and have done so in circumstances which have enabled me to give
up all my thoughts for the time to the book I have been writing.
This has generally been done at some quiet spot among the
mountains,--where there has been no society, no hunting, no whist,
no ordinary household duties. And I am sure that the work so done
has had in it the best truth and the highest spirit that I have
been able to produce. At such times I have been able to imbue myself
thoroughly with the characters I have had in hand. I have wandered
alone among the rocks and woods, crying at their grief, laughing at
their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. I have been
impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only excitement
to sit with the pen in my hand, and drive my team before me at as
quick a pace as I could make them travel.
The critics will again say that all this may be very well as to
the rough work of the author's own brain, but it will be very far
from well in reference to the style in which that work has been
given to the public. After all, the vehicle which a writer uses for
conveying his thoughts to the public should not be less important
to him than the thoughts themselves. An author can hardly hope to
be popular unless he can use popular language. That is quite true;
but then comes the question of achieving a popular--in other words,
I may say, a good and lucid style. How may an author best acquire
a mode of writing which shall be agreeable and easily intelligible
to the reader? He must be correct, because without correctness he
can be neither agreeable nor intelligible. Readers will expect him
to obey those rules which they, consciously or unconsciously, have
been taught to regard as binding on language; and unless he does
obey them, he will disgust. Without much labour, no writer will
achieve such a style. He has very much to learn; and, when he has
learned that much, he has to acquire the habit of using what he has
learned with ease. But all this must be learned and acquired,--not
while he is writing that which shall please, but long before. His
language must come from him as music comes from the rapid touch of
the great performer's fingers; as words come from the mouth of the
indignant orator; as letters fly from the fingers of the trained
compositor; as the syllables tinkled out by little bells form
themselves to the ear of the telegraphist. A man who thinks much of
his words as he writes them will generally leave behind him work
that smells of oil. I speak here, of course, of prose; for in poetry
we know what care is necessary, and we form our taste accordingly.
Rapid writing will no doubt give rise to inaccuracy,--chiefly because
the ear, quick and true as may be its operation, will occasionally
break down under pressure, and, before a sentence be closed, will
forget the nature of the composition with which it was commenced.
A singular nominative will be disgraced by a plural verb, because
other pluralities have intervened and have tempted the ear into
plural tendencies. Tautologies will occur, because the ear, in
demanding fresh emphasis, has forgotten that the desired force has
been already expressed. I need not multiply these causes of error,
which must have been stumbling-blocks indeed when men wrote in the
long sentences of Gibbon, but which Macaulay, with his multiplicity
of divisions, has done so much to enable us to avoid. A rapid writer
will hardly avoid these errors altogether. Speaking of myself, I
am ready to declare that, with much training, I have been unable to
avoid them. But the writer for the press is rarely called upon--a
writer of books should never be called upon--to send his manuscript
hot from his hand to the printer. It has been my practice to read
everything four times at least--thrice in manuscript and once in
print. Very much of my work I have read twice in print. In spite
of this I know that inaccuracies have crept through,--not single
spies, but in battalions. From this I gather that the supervision
has been insuffic
ient, not that the work itself has been done too
fast. I am quite sure that those passages which have been written
with the greatest stress of labour, and consequently with the
greatest haste, have been the most effective and by no means the
most inaccurate.
The Small House at Allington redeemed my reputation with the spirited
proprietor of the Cornhill, which must, I should think, have been
damaged by Brown, Jones, and Robinson. In it appeared Lily Dale,
one of the characters which readers of my novels have liked the
best. In the love with which she has been greeted I have hardly
joined with much enthusiasm, feeling that she is somewhat of a
French prig. She became first engaged to a snob, who jilted her;
and then, though in truth she loved another man who was hardly
good enough, she could not extricate herself sufficiently from the
collapse of her first great misfortune to be able to make up her
mind to be the wife of one whom, though she loved him, she did not
altogether reverence. Prig as she was, she made her way into the
hearts of many readers, both young and old; so that, from that time
to this, I have been continually honoured with letters, the purport
of which has always been to beg me to marry Lily Dale to Johnny
Eames. Had I done so, however, Lily would never have so endeared
herself to these people as to induce them to write letters to the
author concerning her fate. It was because she could not get over
her troubles that they loved her. Outside Lily Dale and the chief
interest of the novel, The Small House at Allington is, I think,
good. The De Courcy family are alive, as is also Sir Raffle Buffle,
who is a hero of the Civil Service. Sir Raffle was intended to
represent a type, not a man; but the man for the picture was soon
chosen, and I was often assured that the portrait was very like.
I have never seen the gentleman with whom I am supposed to have
taken the liberty. There is also an old squire down at Allington,
whose life as a country gentleman with rather straitened means is,
I think, well described.
Of Can you Forgive Her? I cannot speak with too great affection,
though I do not know that of itself it did very much to increase
my reputation. As regards the story, it was formed chiefly on that
of the play which my friend Mr. Bartley had rejected long since,
the circumstances of which the reader may perhaps remember. The
play had been called The Noble Jilt; but I was afraid of the name
for a novel, lest the critics might throw a doubt on the nobility.
There was more of tentative humility in that which I at last adopted.
The character of the girl is carried through with considerable
strength, but is not attractive. The humorous characters, which are
also taken from the play,--a buxom widow who with her eyes open
chooses the most scampish of two selfish suitors because he is
the better looking,--are well done. Mrs. Greenow, between Captain
Bellfield and Mr. Cheeseacre, is very good fun--as far as the fun
of novels is. But that which endears the book to me is the first
presentation which I made in it of Plantagenet Palliser, with his
wife, Lady Glencora.
By no amount of description or asseveration could I succeed in
making any reader understand how much these characters with their
belongings have been to me in my latter life; or how frequently
I have used them for the expression of my political or social
convictions. They have been as real to me as free trade was to Mr.
Cobden, or the dominion of a party to Mr. Disraeli; and as I have
not been able to speak from the benches of the House of Commons,
or to thunder from platforms, or to be efficacious as a lecturer,
they have served me as safety-valves by which to deliver my soul.
Mr. Plantagenet Palliser had appeared in The Small House at Allington,
but his birth had not been accompanied by many hopes. In the last
pages of that novel he is made to seek a remedy for a foolish
false step in life by marrying the grand heiress of the day;--but
the personage of the great heiress does not appear till she comes
on the scene as a married woman in Can You Forgive Her? He is
the nephew and heir to a duke--the Duke of Omnium--who was first
introduced in Doctor Thorne, and afterwards in Framley Parsonage,
and who is one of the belongings of whom I have spoken. In these
personages and their friends, political and social, I have endeavoured
to depict the faults and frailties and vices,--as also the virtues,
the graces, and the strength of our highest classes; and if I have
not made the strength and virtues predominant over the faults and
vices, I have not painted the picture as I intended. Plantagenet
Palliser I think to be a very noble gentleman,--such a one as justifies
to the nation the seeming anomaly of an hereditary peerage and of
primogeniture. His wife is in all respects very inferior to him;
but she, too, has, or has been intended to have, beneath the thin
stratum of her follies a basis of good principle, which enabled her
to live down the conviction of the original wrong which was done
to her, and taught her to endeavour to do her duty in the position
to which she was called. She had received a great wrong,--having
been made, when little more than a child, to marry a man for whom
she cared nothing;--when, however, though she was little more than
a child, her love had been given elsewhere. She had very heavy
As to the heaviest of these troubles, I will say a word in vindication
of myself and of the way I handled it in my work. In the pages of
Can You Forgive Her? the girl's first love is introduced,--beautiful,
well-born, and utterly worthless. To save a girl from wasting
herself, and an heiress from wasting her property on such a scamp,
was certainly the duty of the girl's friends. But it must ever
be wrong to force a girl into a marriage with a man she does not
love,--and certainly the more so when there is another whom she does
love. In my endeavour to teach this lesson I subjected the young
wife to the terrible danger of overtures from the man to whom her
heart had been given. I was walking no doubt on ticklish ground,
leaving for a while a doubt on the question whether the lover
might or might not succeed. Then there came to me a letter from a
distinguished dignitary of our Church, a man whom all men honoured,
treating me with severity for what I was doing. It had been one
of the innocent joys of his life, said the clergyman, to have my
novels read to him by his daughters. But now I was writing a book
which caused him to bid them close it! Must I also turn away to
vicious sensation such as this? Did I think that a wife contemplating
adultery was a character fit for my pages? I asked him in return,
whether from his pulpit, or at any rate from his communion-table,
he did not denounce adultery to his audience; and if so, why should
it not be open to me to preach the same doctrine to mine. I made
known nothing which t
he purest girl could not but have learned,
and ought not to have learned, elsewhere, and I certainly lent no
attraction to the sin which I indicated. His rejoinder was full
of grace, and enabled him to avoid the annoyance of argumentation
without abandoning his cause. He said that the subject was so much
too long for letters; that he hoped I would go and stay a week with
him in the country,--so that we might have it out. That opportunity,
however, has never yet arrived.
Lady Glencora overcomes that trouble, and is brought, partly by her
own sense of right and wrong, and partly by the genuine nobility
of her husband's conduct, to attach herself to him after a certain
fashion. The romance of her life is gone, but there remains a
rich reality of which she is fully able to taste the flavour. She
loves her rank and becomes ambitious, first of social, and then of
political ascendancy. He is thoroughly true to her, after his thorough
nature, and she, after her less perfect nature, is imperfectly true
to him.
In conducting these characters from one story to another I realised
the necessity, not only of consistency,--which, had it been maintained
by a hard exactitude, would have been untrue to nature,--but also
of those changes which time always produces. There, are, perhaps,
but few of us who, after the lapse of ten years, will be found to
have changed our chief characteristics. The selfish man will still
be selfish, and the false man false. But our manner of showing or
of hiding these characteristics will be changed,--as also our power
of adding to or diminishing their intensity. It was my study that
these people, as they grew in years, should encounter the changes
which come upon us all; and I think that I have succeeded. The
Duchess of Omnium, when she is playing the part of Prime Minister's
wife, is the same woman as that Lady Glencora who almost longs to
go off with Burgo Fitzgerald, but yet knows that she will never do
so; and the Prime Minister Duke, with his wounded pride and sore
spirit, is he who, for his wife's sake, left power and place when
they were first offered to him;--but they have undergone the changes
which a life so stirring as theirs would naturally produce. To do
all this thoroughly was in my heart from first to last; but I do
not know that the game has been worth the candle.