 Chapter 17 of the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. The American Postal Treaty. The Question of Copyright with America. Four more novels. In the spring of 1868, before the affair of Beverly, which as being the first direct result of my resignation of office, has been brought in a little out of its turn, I was requested to go over to the United States and make a postal treaty at Washington. This, as I had left the service, I regarded as a compliment, and of course I went. It was my third visit to America, and I have made two since. As far as the post office work was concerned, it was very far from being agreeable. I found myself located at Washington, a place I do not love, and was harassed by delays, annoyed by incompetence, and opposed by what I felt to be personal and not national views. I had to deal with two men, with one who was a working officer of the American Post Office, than whom I have never met a more zealous or as far as I could judge a more honest public servant. He had his views, and I had mine, each of us having at heart the welfare of the service in regard to his own country, each of us also having certain orders which we were bound to obey. But the other gentleman, who was in rank the superior, whose executive position was dependent on his official status, as is the case with our own ministers, did not recommend himself to me equally. He would make appointments with me and then not keep them, which at last offended me so grievously that I declared at the Washington Post Office that if this treatment were continued, I would write home to say that any further action on my part was impossible. I think I should have done so had it not occurred to me that I might in this way serve his purpose rather than my own, or the purposes of those who had sent me. The treaty, however, was at last made, the purport of which was that everything possible should be done, at a heavy expenditure on the part of England, to expedite the mails from England to America, and that nothing should be done by America to expedite the mails from thence to us. The expedition, I believe, to be now equal both ways, but it could not be maintained as it is without the payment of a heavy subsidy from Great Britain, whereas no subsidy is paid by the States. Footnote. This was a state of things which may probably have appeared to American politicians to be exactly that which they should try to obtain. The whole arrangement has again been altered since the time of which I have spoken. I had also a commission from the Foreign Office for which I had asked to make an effort on behalf of an international copyright between the United States and Great Britain, the want of which is the one great impediment to pecuniary success which still stands in the way of successful English authors. I cannot say that I have never had a shilling of American money on behalf of reprints of my work, but I have been conscious of no such payment. Having found many years ago, in 1861, when I made a struggle on the subject, being then in the States, the details of which are sufficiently amusing. Footnote. In answer to a question from myself, a certain American publisher, he who usually reprinted my works, promised me that, if any other American publisher republished my work on America before he had done so, he would not bring out a competing edition, though there would be no law to hinder him. I then entered into an agreement with another American publisher, stipulating to supply him with early sheets, and he, stipulating to supply me a certain royalty on his sales with accounts half-yearly. I sent the sheets with energetic punctuality, and the work was brought out with equal energy and precision by my old American publishers. The gentleman who made the promise had not broken his word. No other American edition had come out before his. I never got any account, and, of course, never received a dollar. That I could not myself succeed in dealing with American booksellers, I have sold all foreign rights to the English publishers, and though I do not know that I have raised my price against them on that score, I may in this way have had some indirect advantage from the American market. But I do know that what the publishers have received here is very trifling. I doubt whether Monsieur Chapman and Hall, my present publishers, get for early sheets sent to the States as much as five percent on the price they pay me for my manuscript. But the American readers are more numerous than the English, and taking them all through are probably more wealthy. If I can get one thousand for a book here, exclusive of their market, I ought to be able to get as much there. If a man supply six hundred customers with shoes in place of three hundred, there is no question as to such result. Why not then if I can supply sixty thousand readers instead of thirty thousand? I fancied that I knew that the opposition to an international copyright was by no means an American feeling, but was confined to the bosoms of a few interested Americans. All that I did and heard in reference to the subject on this further visit, and having a certain authority from the British Secretary of State with me, I could hear and do something. Altogether confirmed me in this view. I have no doubt that if I could poll American readers, or American senators, or even American representatives, if the polling could be unbiased, or American booksellers, footnote. I might also say American publishers if I might count them by the number of heads and not by the amount of work done by the firms, that an ascent to an international copyright would be the result. The state of things as it is is crushing to American authors, as the publishers will not pay them a liberal scale, knowing that they can supply their customers with modern English literature without paying for it. The English amount of production so much exceeds the American that the rate at which the former can be published rules the market. It is equally injurious to American booksellers, except to two or three of the greatest houses. No small man can now acquire the exclusive right of printing and selling an English book. If such a one attempted, the work is printed instantly by one of the Leviathans, who alone are the gainers. The argument, of course, is that the American readers are the gainers, that as they can get for nothing the use of certain property, they would be cutting their own throats where they would pass a law debarring themselves from the power of such appropriation. In this argument, all idea of honesty is thrown to the winds. It is not that they do not approve of a system of copyright, as many great men have disapproved, for their own law of copyright is as stringent as ours. A bold assertion is made that they like to appropriate the goods of other people, and that is in this case they can do so with impunity, they will continue to do so. But the argument, as far as I have been able to judge, comes not from the people but from the book-selling Leviathans, and from those politicians whom the Leviathans are able to attach to their interests. The ordinary American purchaser is not much affected by slight variations in price. He is, at any rate, too high-hearted to be affected by the prospect of such variation. It is the man who wants to make money, not he who fears that he may be called upon to spend it, who controls such matters as this in the United States. It is the large speculator who becomes powerful in the lobbies of the house, and understands how wise it may be to incur a great expenditure, either in the creation of a great business or in protecting that which he has created from competition. Nothing was done in 1868, and nothing has been done since, up to 1876. A royal commission on the law of copyright is now about to sit in this country, of which I have consented to be a member. And the question must then be handled, though nothing done by a royal commission here can affect American legislators. But I do believe that if the measure be consistently and judiciously urged, the enemies to it in the States will gradually be overcome. Some years since we had some quasi-private meetings under the presidency of Lord Stanhope in Mr. John Murray's dining room on the subject of international copyright. At one of these I discussed this matter of American international copyright with Charles Dickens, who strongly declared his conviction that nothing would induce an American to give up the power he possesses of pirating British literature. But he was a man who, seeing clearly what was before him, would not realize the possibility of shifting views. Because in this matter the American decision had been, according to his thinking, dishonest, therefore no other than dishonest decision was to be expected from Americans. Against that idea I protested and now protest. American dishonesty is rampant, but it is rampant only among a few. It is the great misfortune of the community that those few have been able to dominate so large a portion of the population among which all men can vote, but so few can understand for what they are voting. Since this was written the Commission on the Law of Copyright has sat and made its report, with the great body of it I agree, and could serve no reader by eluding here at length to matters which are discussed there. But in regard to this question of international copyright with the United States, I think that we were incorrect in the expression of an opinion that fair justice, or justice approaching to fairness, is now done by American publishers to English authors by payments made by them for early sheets. I have just found that twenty was paid to my publisher in England for the use of the early sheets of a novel for which I received sixteen hundred in England. When asked why he accepted so little, he assured me that the firm with whom he dealt would not give more. Why not go to another firm, I asked? No other firm would give a dollar, because no other firm would care to run counter to that great firm which had assumed to itself the right of publishing my books. I soon after received a copy of my own novel in the American form and found that it was published for seven and a half D. That a great sale was expected can be argued from the fact that without a great sale the paper and printing necessary for the republication of a three volume novel could not be supplied. Many thousand copies must have been sold, but from these the author received not one shilling. I need hardly point out that the sum of twenty would not do more than compensate the publisher for his trouble in making the bargain. The publisher here no doubt might have refused to supply the early sheets, but he had no means of exacting a higher price than that offered. I mention the circumstance here because it has been boasted on behalf of the American publishers that though there is no international copyright they deal so liberally with English authors as to make it unnecessary that the English authors should be so protected. With the fact of the twenty just brought to my knowledge and with the copy of my book published at seven and a half D now and by hands I feel that an international copyright is very necessary for my protection. They among Englishmen who best love and most admire the United States have felt themselves tempted to use the strongest language in denouncing the sins of Americans. Who can but love their personal generosity, their active and far-seeking philanthropy, their love of education, their hatred of ignorance, general convictions of the minds of all of them that a man should be enabled to walk upright, fearing no one and conscious that he is responsible for his own actions. In what country have grander efforts been made by private munificence to relieve the sufferings of humanity? Where can the English traveler find any more anxious to assist him than the normal American, when once the American shall have found the Englishman to be neither sullen nor fastidious? Who, lastly, is so much an object of heartfelt admiration of the American man and the American woman as the well-mannered and well-educated English woman or Englishman. These are the ideas which I say spring uppermost in the minds of the unprejudiced English traveler as he makes acquaintance with these near relatives. Then he becomes cognizant of their official doings, of their politics, of their municipal scandals, of their great ring robberies, of their lobbing and briberies, and the infinite baseness of their public life. There are, at the top of everything he finds, the very men who are the least fit to occupy high places. The American public dishonesty is so glaring that the very friends he has made in the country are not slow to acknowledge it, speaking of public life as a thing apart from their own existence, as a state of dirt in which it would be an insult to suppose that they are concerned. In the midst of it all, the stranger, who sees so much that he hates and so much that he loves, hardly knows how to express himself. It is not enough that you are personally clean, he says, with what energy and courage he can command. Not enough, though, the clean outnumber the foul as greatly as those gifted with eyesight outnumber the blind, if you that can see allow the blind to lead you. It is not by the private lives of the millions that the outside world will judge you, but by the public career of those units whose venality is allowed to debase the name of your country. There never was plainer proof given than is given here, that it is the duty of every honest citizen to look after the honor of his state. Personally, I have to own that I have met Americans, men, but more frequently women, who have in all respects come up to my ideas of what men and women should be. Energetic, having opinions of their own, quickened speech with some dash of sarcasm at their command, always intelligent, sweet to look at, I speak of the women, fond of pleasure, and each with a personality of his or her own which makes no effort necessary on my own part in remembering the difference between Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Green, or between Mr. Smith and Mr. Johnson. They have faults, they are self-conscious and are too prone to prove by ill-concealed struggles that they are as good as you, whereas you perhaps have been long acknowledging to yourself that they are much better. And there's sometimes a pretense at personal dignity among those who think themselves to have risen high in the world which is deliciously ludicrous. I remember two old gentlemen, the owners of names which stand deservedly high in public estimation, whose deportment and a public funeral turned the occasion into one for irresistible comedy. They are suspicious at first and fearful of themselves. They lack that simplicity of manners which with us has become a habit from our childhood. But they are never fools, and I think that they are seldom ill-natured. There is a woman of whom not to speak in a work purporting to be a memoir of my own life would be to omit all illusion to one of the chief pleasures which has graced my later years. In the last fifteen years she has been, out of my family, my most chosen friend. She is a ray of light to me from which I can always strike a spark by thinking of her. I do not know that I should please her or do any good by naming her, but not to allude to her in these pages would amount almost to a falsehood. I could not write truly of myself without saying that such a friend had been vouchsafed to me. I trust she may live to read the words I have now written and to wipe away a tear as she thinks of my feeling while I write them. I was absent on this occasion something over three months, and on my return I went back with energy to my work at the St. Paul's magazine. The first novel in it for my own pen was called Phineas Finn, in which I commenced a series of semi-political tales. As I was debarred from expressing my opinions in the House of Commons, I took this method of declaring myself. And as I could not take my seat on those benches where I might possibly have been shown upon by the speaker's eye, I had humbly to crave his permission for a seat in the gallery, so that I might thus become conversant with the ways and doings of the House in which some of my scenes were to be placed. The speaker was very gracious and gave me a running order for, I think, a couple months. It was enough at any rate to enable me often to be very tired, and as I have been assured by members, to talk of the proceedings almost as well as though fortune had enabled me to fall asleep within the House itself. In writing Phineas Finn and also some other novels which followed it, I was conscious that I could not make a tale pleasing chiefly or perhaps in any part by politics. If I write politics for my own sake I must put in love and intrigue, social incidents with perhaps a dash of sport, for the benefit of my readers. In this way I think I made my political hero interesting. It was certainly a blunder to take him from Ireland, into which I was led by the circumstance that I created the scheme of the book during a visit to Ireland. There was nothing to be gained by the peculiarity, and there was an added difficulty in obtaining sympathy and affection for a politician belonging to a nationality whose politics are not respected in England. But in spite of this Phineas succeeded. It was not a brilliant success, because men and women not conversant with political matters could not care much for a hero who spent so much of his time, either in the House of Commons or in a public office. But the men who would have lived with Phineas Finn read the book, and the women who would have lived with Lady Laura Standish read it also. As this was what I had intended I was contented. It is all fairly good except the ending, as to which till I got to it I made no provision. As I fully intended to bring my hero again into the world I was wrong to marry him to a simple pretty Irish girl, who could only be felt as an encumbrance on such return. When he did return I had no alternative but to kill the simple pretty Irish girl, which was an unpleasant and awkward necessity. In writing Phineas Finn I had constantly before me the necessity of progression in character, of marking the changes in men and women which would naturally be produced by the lapse of years. In most novels the writer can have no such duty, as the period occupied is not long enough to allow of the change of which I speak. In Ivanhoe, all the incidents of which are included in less than a month, the characters should be, as they are, consistent throughout. Novelists who have undertaken to write the life of a hero or heroine have generally considered their work completed at the interesting period of marriage, and have contented themselves with the advance in taste and manners which are common to all boys and girls as they become men and women. Fielding no doubt did more than this in Tom Jones, which is one of the greatest novels in the English language, for here he has shown how a noble and sanguine nature may fall away under temptation and be again strengthened and made to stand upright. But I do not think that novelists have often set before themselves the state of progressive change, nor should I have done it had I not found myself so frequently allured back to my old friends. So much of my inner life was passed in their company that I was continually asking myself how this woman would act when this or that event had passed over her head, or how that would carry himself when his youth had become manhood, or his manhood declined to old age. It was in regard to the old Duke of Omnium, of his nephew and heir, and of his heirs wife, Lady Glancora, that I was anxious to carry out this idea, but others added themselves to my mind as I went on, and I got round me a circle of persons as to whom I knew not only their present characters, but how those characters would to be affected by years and circumstances. The happy motherly life of Violet Effingham, which was due to the girl's honest but long restrained love. The tragic misery of Lady Laura, which was equally due to the sale she made of herself in her wretched marriage, and the long-suffering but final success of the hero of which he had deserved the first by his vanity and the last by his constant honesty, had been foreshadowed to me from the first. As to the incidents of the story, the circumstances by which these personages were to be affected, I knew nothing. They were created for the most part as they were described. I never could arrange a set of events before me, but the evil and the good of my puppets, and how the evil would always lead to evil, and the good produce good, that was clear to me as the stars on a summer night. Lady Laura Standish is the best character in Phineas Finn and its sequel Phineas Redux, of which I will speak here together. They are, in fact, but one novel, though they were brought out at a considerable interval of time and in different form. The first was commenced in the St. Paul's magazine in 1867, and the other was brought out in the graphic in 1873. In this there was much bad arrangement as I had no right to expect that novel readers would remember the characters of a story after an interval of six years, or that any little interest which might have been taken in the career of my hero could then have been renewed. I do not know that such interest was renewed, but I found that the sequel enjoyed the same popularity as the former part, and among the same class of readers. Phineas and Lady Laura and Lady Chiltern, as Violet had become, and the old Duke, whom I killed gracefully, and the new Duke and the young Duchess, either kept their old friends or made new friends for themselves. Phineas Finn, I certainly think, was successful from first to last. I am aware, however, that there was nothing in it to touch the heart like the abasement of Lady Mason when confessing her guilt to a rowed lover, or any approach in delicacy of delineation to the character of Mr. Crawley. Phineas Finn, the first part of the story, was completed in May, 1867. In June and July I wrote Linda Tressel for Blackwood's magazine, of which I've already spoken. In September and October I wrote a short novel called The Golden Lion of Grand Pair, which was intended also for Blackwood, with a view of being published anonymously, but Mr. Blackwood did not find the arrangement to be profitable, and the story remained on my hands, unread and unthought of for a few years. It appeared subsequently in good words. It was written on the model of Nina Balotka and Linda Tressel, but is very inferior to either of them. In November of the same year, 1867, I began a very long novel which I called He Knew He Was Right, and which was brought out by Mr. Virtue, the proprietor of the St. Paul's magazine, in six penny numbers every week. I do not know that in any literary effort I ever fell more completely short of my own intention than in this story. It was my purpose to create sympathy for the unfortunate man, who, while endeavouring to do his duty to all around him, should be led constantly astray by his unwillingness to submit his own judgment to the opinion of others. The man is made to be unfortunate enough, and the evil which he does as a parent, so far I did not fail, but the sympathy has not been created yet. I look upon the story as being nearly altogether bad. It is in part redeemed by certain scenes in the house and vicinity of an old maid in Exeter. But a novel which in its main parts is bad cannot in truth be redeemed by the vitality of subordinate characters. This work was finished while I was at Washington in the spring of 1868, and on the day after I finished it I commenced The Vicar of Bullhampton, a novel which I wrote for Mr. Bradbury and Evans. This I completed in November 1868, and at once began Sir Harry Hotspur of Humboldt Wait, a story which I was still writing at the close of the year. I look upon these two years, 1867 and 1868, of which I have given a somewhat confused account in this in the two preceding chapters, as the busiest of my life. I had indeed left the post office, but though I had left it I had been employed by it during a considerable portion of the time. I had established The St. Paul's Magazine in reference to which I had read an enormous amount of manuscript, and for which independently of my novels I had written articles almost monthly. I had stood for Beverly and had made many speeches. I had also written five novels, and had hunted three times a week during each of the winters, and how happy I was with it all. I had suffered at Beverly, but I had suffered as a part of the work which I was desirous of doing, and I had gained my experience. I had suffered at Washington with that wretched American postmaster, and with the mosquitoes not having been able to escape from that capital till July, but all that had added to the activity of my life. I had often groaned over those manuscripts, but I had read them, considering it perhaps foolishly, to be a part of my duty as editor. And though in the quick production of my novels I had always ringing in my ears that terrible condemnation and scorn produced by the great man in Paternaster Row, I was nevertheless proud of having done so much. I always had a pen in my hand. Whether crossing the seas or fighting with American officials or tramping about the streets of Beverly, I could do a little and generally more than a little. I had long since convinced myself that in such work as mine the great secret consisted in acknowledging myself to be bound to rules of labor similar to those which an artisan or a mechanic is forced to obey. A shoemaker, when he has finished one pair of shoes, does not sit down and contemplate his work in idle satisfaction. There is my pair of shoes finished at last. What a pair of shoes it is. The shoemaker who so indulged himself would be without wages half his time. It is the same with a professional writer of books. An author may of course want time to study a new subject. He will at any rate assure himself that there is some such good reason why he should pause. He does pause, and will be idle for a month or two while he tells himself how beautiful is that last pair of shoes which he has finished. Having thought much of all this and having made up my mind that I could be really happy only when I was at work, I had now quite accustomed myself to begin a second pair as soon as the first was out of my hands. End of Chapter 17. Recording by Jessica Louise, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Chapter 18 of the autobiography of Anthony Trollop. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. In 1869 I was called on to decide in counsel with my two boys and their mother what should be their destination in life. In June of that year the elder, who was then twenty-three, was called to the bar, and as he had gone through the regular courses of lecturing, tuition, and study, it might be a bit of a shame to be called to the bar. But just as he was called there seemed to be an opening for him in another direction, and this joined to the terrible uncertainty of the bar, the terror of which was not in his case lessened by any peculiar forensics. He remained there three years and a half, but he did not like it, nor do I think he made a very good publisher. At any rate he left the business with perhaps more pecuniary success than might have been expected from the short period. My second son, Frederick, had very early in life gone to Australia, having resolved on a colonial career when he found that boys who did not grow so fast as he did got above him at school. This departure was a great pang to his mother and me, but it was permitted on the understanding that he was to come back when he was twenty-one, and then decide whether he would remain in England or return to the colonies. In the winter of 1868 he did come to England, and had a seasons hunting in the old country, but there was no doubt that he would return to the colonies. In the winter of 1868 he did come to England, and had a seasons hunting in the old country, but there was no doubt in his own mind as to his settling in Australia. His purpose was fixed, and in the spring of 1869 he'd made his second journey out. As I have since that date made two journeys to see him, of one of which at any rate I shall have to speak as I wrote a long book on the Australian colonies, I will have an opportunity of saying a word or two further on of him in his doings. The Vigor of Bullhenton was written in 1868 for publication in Once a Week, a periodical then belonging to Monsieur's Bradbury and Evans. It was not to come out till 1869, and I, as was my want, had made my terms long previously to the proposed date. I had made my terms and written my story, and sent it to the publisher long before it was wanted, and so far my mind was at rest. The date fixed was the 1st of July, which date had been named in accordance with the exigencies of the editor of the periodical. An author who writes for these publications is bound to suit himself to these exigencies, and can generally do so without personal loss or inconvenience, if he will only take time by the forelock. With all the pages that I have written for magazines I have never been a day late, nor have I ever caused inconvenience by sending less or more matter than I had stipulated to supply. But I have sometimes found myself compelled to suffer by the irregularity of others. I have endeavored to console myself by reflecting that such must ever be the fate of virtue. The industrious must feed the idle. The honest and simple will always be the prey of the cunning and fraudulent. The punctual, who keep none waiting for them, are doomed to wait perpetually for the unpunctual. But these earthly sufferers know that they are making their way heavenwards, and their oppressors their way elsewards. If the former reflection does not suffice for consolation, the deficiency is made up by the second. I was terribly aggrieved on the matter of the publication of my new vicar, and had to think very much of the ultimate rewards of punctuality and its opposite. About the end of March, 1869, I got a dolorous letter from the editor. All the once a week people were in a terrible trouble. They had bought the right of translating one of Victor Hugo's modern novels, L'homme curie. They had bad fixed date, relying on positive pledges from the French publishers, and now the great French author had postponed his work from week to week and from month to month, and it had so come to pass that the Frenchman's grinning hero would have to appear exactly at the same time as my clergyman. Was it not quite apparent to me, the editor asked, that once a week could not hold the two? Would I allow my clergyman to make his appearance in the Gentleman's Magazine instead? My disgust at this proposition was, I think, chiefly due to Victor Hugo's latter novels, which I regard as pretentious and untrue to nature. To this perhaps was added some feeling of indignation that I should be asked to give way to a Frenchman. The Frenchman had broken his engagement. He had failed to have his work finished by the stipulated time. From week to week and from month to month he had put off the fulfillment of his duty, and because of these latches on his part, on the part of this sententious French radical, I was to be thrown over. Virtue sometimes finds it difficult to console herself even with the double comfort. I would not come out in the Gentleman's Magazine, and as the grinning man could not be got out of the way, my novel was published in separate numbers. The same thing has occurred to me more than once since. You are no doubt regular, a publisher has said to me, but Mr. Blank is irregular. He has thrown me out and I cannot be ready for you till three months after the time named. In these emergencies I have given perhaps half of what was wanted, and have refused to give the other half. I have endeavored to fight my own battle fairly, and at the same time not to make myself unnecessarily obstinate. But the circumstances have impressed on my mind the great need there is that men engaged in literature should feel themselves to be bound to the industry as men know that they are bound in other callings. There does exist, I fear, a feeling that authors, because they are authors, are relieved from the necessity of paying attention to everyday rules. A writer, if he be making 800 a year, does not think himself bound to live modestly on 600 and put by the remainder for his wife and children. He does not understand that he should sit down at his desk at a certain hour. He imagines that publishers and booksellers should keep all their engagements with him to the letter, but that he, as a brain worker and conscious of the subtle nature of the brain, should be able to exempt himself from bondage when it suits him. He has his own theory about inspiration which will not always come, especially will not come if wine cups overnight have been too deep. All this has ever been odious to me as being unmanly. A man may be frail in health and therefore unable to do as he has contracted in whatever great of life. He who has been blessed with physical strength to work day by day, year by year, as has been my case, should pardon deficiencies caused by sickness or infirmity. I may in this respect have been a little hard on others, and if so, I here record my repentance. But I think that no allowance should be given to claims for exemption from punctuality made, if not absolutely, on the score still with the conviction of intellectual superiority. The vicar of Bulhampton was written chiefly with the object of exciting not only pity but sympathy for fallen women and of raising a feeling of forgiveness for such in the minds of other women. I could not venture to make this female the heroine of my story, to have made her a heroine at all would have been directly opposed to my purpose. It was necessary therefore that she should be a second-rate personage in the tale, but it was with reference to her life that the tale was written, and the hero and the heroine with their belongings are all subordinate. To this novel I affixed a preface in doing which I was acting in defiance of my old established principle. I do not know that anyone read it, but as I wish to have it read I will insert it here again. I have introduced in the vicar of Bulhampton the character of a girl whom I will call for want of a truer word that shall not in its truth be offensive, a cast away. I have endeavored to endow her with qualities that may create sympathy, and I have brought her back at last from degradation, at least to decency. I have not married her to a wealthy lover, and I have endeavored to explain that though there was possible to her a way out of perdition, still things could not be with her as they would have been had she not fallen. There arises, of course, the question whether a novelist, who professes to write for the amusement of the young of both sexes, should allow himself to bring upon his stage a character such as that of Carrie Brattle. It is not long since, it is well within the memory of the author, that the very existence of such a condition of life as was hers was supposed to be unknown to our sisters and daughters, and was in truth unknown to many of them. Whether that ignorance was good may be questioned, but that it exists no longer is beyond question. Then arises the further question, how far the conditions of such unfortunates should be made a matter of concern to the sweet young hearts of those whose delicacy and cleanliness of thought is a matter of pride to so many of us. Cannot women who are good pity the sufferings of the vicious and do something perhaps to mitigate and shorten them without contamination from the vice. It will be admitted probably by most men who have thought upon the subject that no fault among us is punished so heavily as that fault, often so light in itself but so terrible in its consequences to the less faulty of the two offenders by which a woman falls. All of her own sex is against her and all those of the other sex in whose veins runs the blood which she is thought to have contaminated and who of nature would befriend her were her trouble any other than it is. She is what she is and she remains in her abject pitiless, unutterable misery because this sentence of the world has placed her beyond the helping hand of love and friendship. It may be said no doubt that the severity of this judgment acts as a protection to female virtue, deterring as all known punishments do deter from vice. But this punishment, which is horrible beyond the conception of those who have not regarded it closely, is not known beforehand. Instead of the punishment there is seen a false glitter of Godly life, a glitter which is damnably false and which alas has been more often portrayed in glowing colors for the injury of young girls than have those horrors which ought to deter with the dark shadowings which belong to them. To write in fiction of one so fallen as the noblest of her sex, as one to be rewarded because of her weakness, as one whose life is happy, bright and glorious is certainly to allure to vice and misery. But it may perhaps be possible that if the matter be handled with truth to life, some girl who would have been thoughtless may be made thoughtful, or some parent's heart may be softened. Those were my ideas when I conceived the story, and with that feeling I described the characters of Carrie Brattle and of her family. I have not introduced her lover on the scene, nor have I presented her to the reader in the temporary enjoyment of any of those fallacious luxuries, the longing for which is sometimes more seductive to evil than love itself. She's introduced as a poor, abased creature who hardly knows how false were her dreams, with very little of the Magdalene about her, because though there may be Magdalene's they are not often found, but with an intense horror of the sufferings of her position. Such being her condition, will they who naturally are her friends protect her? The vicar who has taken her by the hand endeavors to excite them to charity, but father and brother and sister are alike hard-hearted. It had been my purpose at first that the hand of every Brattle should be against her, but my own heart was too soft to enable me to make the mother cruel, or the unmarried sister who had been the early companion of the forlorn one. As regards all the Brattles, the story is, I think, well told. The characters are true, and the scenes at the mill are in keeping with human nature. For the rest of the book I have little to say. It is not very bad, and it certainly is not very good. As I have myself forgotten what the heroine does and says, except that she tumbles into a ditch, I cannot expect that anyone else should remember her. But I have forgotten nothing that was done or said by any of the Brattles. The question brought in argument is one of fearful importance. As to the view to be taken first, there can I think be no doubt. In regard to a sin common to the two sexes, almost all the punishment and all the disgrace is heaped upon the one who in nine cases out of ten has been the least sinful. And the punishment inflicted is of such a nature that it hardly allows room for repentance. How is the woman to return to decency to whom no decent door is opened? Then comes the answer. It is to the severity of the punishment alone that we can trust to keep women from falling. Such is the argument used in favor of the existing practice, and such the excuse given for their severity by women who will relax nothing of their harshness. But in truth the severity of the punishment is not known beforehand. It is not in the least understood by women in general except by those who suffer it. The gaudy dirt, the squalid plenty, the contumely of familiarity, the absence of all good words and all good things, the banishment from honest labor, the being compassed round with lies, the flaunting glare of fictitious revelry, the weary pavement, the horrid slavery to some horrid tyrant, and then the quick depreciation of that one wear of beauty, the substituted paint, garments bright without but foul within like painted sepulchres, hunger, thirst and strong drink, life without hope, without the certainty even of a morrow's breakfast, utterly friendless, disease, starvation, an equivering fear of that coming hell which still can hardly be worse than all that is suffered here. This is the life to which we doom our erring daughters, when because of their error we close our door upon them. But for our erring sons we find pardon easily enough. Of course there are houses of refuge from which it has been thought expedient to banish everything pleasant as though the only repentance to which we can afford to give a place must necessarily be one of sackcloth and ashes. It is hardly thus that we can hope to recall those to decency who, if they are to be recalled at all, must be induced to obey the summons before they have reached the last stage of that misery which I have attempted to describe. To me the mistake which we too often make seems to be this, that the girl who has gone astray is put out of sight, out of mind, if possible, at any rate out of speech, as though she had never existed, and that this ferocity comes not only from a hatred of the sin, but in part also from a dread of the taint which the sin brings with it. Very low, as is the degradation to which a girl is brought when she falls through love or vanity, or perhaps from a longing for luxurious ease, still much lower is that to which she must descend perforce when, through the hardness of the world around her, she converts that sin into a trade. Mothers and sisters, when the misfortune comes upon them of a fallen female from among their number, should remember this, and not fear contamination so strongly as did Carrie Brattle's married sister and sister-in-law. In 1870 I brought out three books, or rather of the latter of the three I must say that it was brought out by others, for I had nothing to do with it except to write it. These were Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, and Editor's Tales, and a little volume on Julius Caesar. Sir Harry Hotspur was written on the same plan as Nina Bellatka and Linda Tressel, and had for its object the telling of some pathetic incident in life rather than the portraiture of a number of human beings. Nina and Linda Tressel and the Golden Lion had been placed in foreign countries, and this was an English story. In other respects it is of the same nature, and was not, I think, by any means a failure. There is much of pathos in the love of the girl, and of paternal dignity and affection in the father. It was published first in Macmillan's magazine by the intelligent proprietor of which I have since been told that it did not make either his fortune or that of his magazine. I'm sorry that it should not have been so, but I fear that the same thing may be said of a good many of my novels. When it had passed through the magazine, the subsequent use of it was sold to other publishers by Mr. Macmillan, and then I learned that it was to be brought out by them as a novel in two volumes. Now it had been sold by me as a novel in one volume, and hence there arose a correspondence. I found it very hard to make the purchasers understand that I had reasonable ground for objection to the process. What was it to me? How could it injure me if they stretched my pages by means of lead and margin into double the number I had intended? I have heard the same argument on other occasions. When I have pointed out that in this way the public would have to suffer, seeing that they would have to pay moody for the use of two volumes in reading that which ought to have been given to them in one, I have been assured that the public are pleased with literary short measure, that it is the object of novel readers to get through novels as fast as they can, and that the shorter each volume is, the better. Even this, however, did not overcome me, and I stood to my guns. Sir Harry was published in one volume, containing something over the normal three hundred pages, with an average of two hundred twenty words to a page, which I had settled with my conscience to be the proper length of novel volume. I may hear mention that on one occasion, and one occasion only, a publisher got the better of me in matter of volumes. He had a two volume novel of mine running through a certain magazine, and had it printed complete in three volumes before I knew where I was, before I had seen a sheet of the letterpress. I stormed for a while, but I had not the heart to make and break up the type. The editor's tales was a volume republished from the St. Paul's magazine, and professed to give an editor's experience of his dealings with contributors. I do not think that there is a single incident in the book which could bring back to anyone concerned the memory of a past event. And yet there is not an incident in it, the outline of which was not presented to my mind by the remembrance of some fact. How an ingenious gentleman got into conversation with me, I not knowing that he knew me to be an editor, and pressed his little article on my notice. How I was addressed by a lady with a becoming pseudonym, and with much equally becoming audacity. How I was appealed to by the dearest of little women, whom here I have called Mary Gresley. How in my own early days there was a struggle over an abortive periodical which was intended to be the best thing ever done. How terrible was the tragedy of a poor drunkard who with infinite learning at his command made one sad final effort to reclaim himself and perished while he was making it. And lastly how a poor weak editor was driven nearly to madness by threatened litigation from a rejected contributor. Of these stories the spotted dog with the struggles of the drunkard scholar is the best. I know now however that when the things are good they came out too quick one upon another to gain much attention, and so also luckily when they were bad. The Caesar was a thing of itself. My friend John Blackwood had set on foot a series of small volumes called Ancient Classics for English Readers, and had placed the editing of them and the compiling of many of them in the hams of William Lucas Collins, a clergyman who from my connection with the series became a most intimate friend. The Iliad and the Odyssey had already come out when I was at Edinburgh with John Blackwood, and on my expressing my very strong admiration for those two little volumes, which I here recommend to all young ladies as the most charming tales they can read. He asked me whether I would not undertake one myself. Herodotus was in the press, but if I could get it ready mine should be next. Whereupon I offered to say what might be said to the readers of English on the commentaries of Julius Caesar. I at once went to work, and in three months from that day the little book had been written. I began by reading through the commentaries twice, which I did without any assistance either by translation or English notes. Latin was not so familiar to me then as it has become since, for from that day I have almost daily spent an hour with some Latin author, and on many days many hours. After reading what my author had left behind him, I fell into the reading of what others had written about him, in Latin, in English, and even in French, for I went through much of that most futile book by the late emperor of the French. I do not know that for a short period I ever worked harder. The amount I had to write was nothing, three weeks would have done it easily, but I was most anxious in this soaring out of my own peculiar line not to disgrace myself. I do not think that I did disgrace myself, perhaps I was anxious for something more, if so I was disappointed. The book I think to be a good little book. It is readable by all, young and old, and it gives, I believe accurately, both an account of Caesar's commentaries, which of course was the primary intention, and the chief circumstances of the great Roman's life. A well-educated girl who had read it and remembered it would perhaps know as much about Caesar and his writings as she need know. Beyond the consolation of thinking as I do about it, I got very little gratification from the work. Nobody praised it. One very old and very learned friend to whom I sent it thanked me for my comic Caesar, but said no more. I do not suppose that he intended to run a dagger into me, of any suffering from such wounds I think while living I never showed a sign, but still I have suffered occasionally. There was, however, probably present to my friend's mind, and to that of others, a feeling that a man who has spent his life in writing English novels would not be fit to write about Caesar. It was as when an amateur gets a picture hung on the walls of the academy. What business had I there? Nesutor ultracrepidam. In the press it was most faintly damned by most faint praise. Nevertheless, having read the book again within the last month or two, I make bold to say that it is a good book. The series I believe has done very well. I'm sure that it ought to do well in years to come. For putting aside Caesar, the work has been done with infinite scholarship and very generally with a light hand. With the leave of my sententious and sonorous friend, who had not endured that subjects which had been grave to him should be treated irreverently, I will say that such a work, unless it be light, cannot answer the purpose for which it is intended. It was not exactly a schoolbook that was wanted, but something that would carry the purposes of the schoolroom even into the leisure hours of adult pupils. Nothing was ever better suited for such a purpose than the Iliad and the Odyssey as done by Mr. Collins. The Virgil, also done by him, is very good, and so is the Aristophanes by the same hand. End of Chapter 18. Recording by Jessica Louise, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Chapter 19 of the autobiography of Anthony Trollope. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. Ralph the Air. The Eustace Diamonds. Lady Anna. Australia. In the spring of 1871, we, I and my wife, had decided that we would go to Australia to visit our shepherd son. Of course before doing so I made a contract with a publisher for a book about the colonies. For such a work as this, I had always been aware that I could not fairly demand more than half the price that would be given for the same amount of fiction. And as such books have an indomitable tendency to stretch themselves so that more is given than what is sold, and as the cost of traveling is heavy, the writing of them is not renumerative. This tendency to stretch comes not I think generally from the ambition of the writer, but from his inability to comprise the different parts in their allotted spaces. If you have to deal with a country, a colony, a city, a trade, or a political opinion, it is so much easier to deal with it in 20 than in 12 pages. I also made an engagement with the editor of a London Daily paper to supply him with a series of articles, which were duly written, duly published, and duly paid for. But with all this, traveling with the object of writing is not a good trade. If the traveling author can pay his bills, he must be a good manager on the road. Before starting there came upon us the terrible necessity of coming to some resolution about our house at Waltham. It had been first hired and then bought primarily because it suited my post-office applications. To this reason had been added other attractions in the shape of hunting, gardening, and suburban hospitalities. Altogether the house had been a success, and the scene of much happiness. But there arose questions as to expense. Would not a house in London be cheaper? There could be no doubt that my income would decrease and was decreasing. I had thrown the post-office, as it were, away, and the writing of novels could not go on forever. Some of my friends told me already that at fifty-five I ought to give up the fabrication of love stories. The hunting, I thought, must go soon, and I would not therefore allow that to keep me in the country. And then why should I live at Waltham Cross now seeing that I had fixed on that place in reference to the post-office? It was therefore determined that we would flit, and as we were to be away for eighteen months we determined also to sell our furniture. So there was a packing up with many tears and consultations as to what should be saved out of the things we loved. As must take place on such an occasion there was some heartfelt grief. But the thing was done and orders were given for the letting or sale of the house. I may as well say here that it never was let and that it remained unoccupied for two years before it was sold. I lost by the transaction about eight hundred. As I continually hear that other men make money by buying and selling houses, I presume I am not well adapted for transactions of that sort. I have never made money by selling anything except a manuscript. In matters of horse flesh I am so inefficient that I have generally given away horses that I have not wanted. When we started from Liverpool in May 1871 Ralph the Air was running through the St. Paul's. This was the novel of which Charles Reid afterwards took the plot and made on it a play. I have always thought it to be one of the worst novels I have written and almost to have justified that dictum that a novelist after fifty should not write love stories. It was in part a political novel and that part which apportains to politics and which recounts the electioneering expenses of the candidates at Percy Cross is well enough. Percy Cross and Beverly were of course one in the same place. Nephet the breeches maker and his daughter are also good in their way and Moggs the daughter's lover who was not only lover but also one of the candidates at Percy Cross as well. But the main thread of the story that which tells of the doings of the young gentlemen and young ladies the heroes and the heroines is not good. Ralph the Air has not much life about him while Ralph who is not the air but is intended to be the real hero has none. The same may be said of the young ladies of whom one, she who was meant to be the chief has passed utterly out of my mind without leaving a trace of remembrance behind. I also left in the hands of the editor of the fortnightly ready for production on the first of July following a story called the Eustace Diamonds. In that I think that my friend's dictum was disproved. There is not much love in it but what there is is good. The character of Lucy Morris is pretty and her love is as genuine and as well told as that of Lucy Robarts or Lily Dale. But the Eustace Diamonds achieved the success which it certainly did attain not as a love story but as a record of a cunning little woman of pseudo fashion to whom in her cunning there came a series of adventures, unpleasant enough in themselves but pleasant to the reader. As I wrote the book the idea constantly presented itself to me that Lizzie Eustace was but a second Becky Sharp. But in planning the character I had not thought of this and I believe that Lizzie would have been just as she is though Becky Sharp had never been described. The plot of the diamond necklace is I think well arranged though it produced itself without any forethought. I had no idea of setting thieves after the bobble till I had got my heroin to bed in the inn at Carlisle nor of the disappointment of the thieves till Lizzie had been wakened in the morning with the news that her door had been broken open. All these things and many more Wilkie Collins would have arranged before with infinite labour preparing things present so that they should fit in with things to come. I have gone on the very much easier plan of making everything as it comes fit in with what has gone before. At any rate the book was a success and did much to repair the injury which I felt had come to my reputation in the novel market by the works of the last few years. I doubt whether I had written anything so successful as the Eustace diamonds since the small house at Allington. I had written what was much better as for instance Phineas Finn and Nina Balatka but that is by no means the same thing. I also left behind in a strong box the manuscript of Phineas Redux, a novel of which I have already spoken in which I subsequently sold to the proprietors of the graphic newspaper. The editor of that paper greatly disliked the title assuring me that the public would take Redux for the gentleman's surname and was dissatisfied with me when I replied that I had no objection to them doing so. The introduction of a Latin word or of a word from any other language into the title of an English novel is undoubtedly in bad taste but after turning the matter much over in my own mind I could find no other suitable name. I also left behind me in the same strong box another novel called An Eye for an Eye which then had been some time written and of which as it has not even yet been published I will not further speak. It will probably be published some day though looking forward. I can see no room for it at any rate for the next two years. If therefore the Great Britain in which we sailed for Melbourne had gone to the bottom I had so provided that there would be new novels ready to come out under my name for some years to come. This consideration however did not keep me idle while I was at sea. When making long journeys I have always succeeded in getting a desk put up in my cabin and this was done ready for me in the Great Britain so that I could go to work the day after we left Liverpool. This I did and before I reached Melbourne I had finished a story called Lady Anna. Every word of this was written at sea during the two months required for our voyage and was done day by day with the intermission of one day's illness for eight weeks at the rate of 66 pages of manuscript in each week each page of manuscript containing 250 words. Every word was counted. I have seen work come back to an author from the press with terrible deficiencies as to the amount supplied. 32 pages have perhaps been wanted for a number and the printers with all their art could not stretch the matter to more than 28 or 9. The work of filling up must be very dreadful. I have sometimes been ridiculed for the methodical details of my business but by these contrivances I have been preserved from many troubles and I have saved others with whom I have worked, editors, publishers and printers for much trouble also. A month or two after my return home Lady Anna appeared in the fortnightly following the Eustace Diamonds. In it a young girl who is really a lady of high rank and great wealth though in her youth she enjoyed none of the privileges of wealth or rank marries a tailor who had been good to her and whom she had loved when she was poor and neglected. A fine young noble lover is provided for her and all the charms of sweet living with nice people are thrown in her way in order that she may be made to give up the tailor and the charms are very powerful with her but the feeling that she is bound by her truth to the man who had always been true to her overcomes everything and she marries the tailor. It was my wish of course to justify her in doing so and to carry my readers along with me in my sympathy with her but everybody found fault with me for marrying her to the tailor. What would they have said if I had allowed her to jolt the tailor and marry the good-looking young lord? How much louder then would have been this censure? The book was read and I was satisfied. If I had not told my story well there would have been no feeling in favor of the young lord. The horror which was expressed to me at the evil thing I had done in giving the girl to the tailor was the strongest testimony I could receive of the merits of the story. I went to Australia chiefly in order that I might see my son among his sheep. I did see him among his sheep and remained with him for four or five very happy weeks. He was not making money nor has he made money since. I grieved to say that several thousands of pounds which I had squeezed out of the pockets of perhaps two liberal publishers had been lost on the venture. But I rejoiced to say that this has been in no way due to any fault of his. I never knew a man work with more persistent honesty at his trade than he has done. I had however the further intentions of writing a book about the entire group of Australasian colonies and in order that I might be enabled to do that with sufficient information I visited them all. Making my headquarters at Melbourne I went to Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania and then to the very little known territory of Western Australia and then last of all to New Zealand. I was absent and all eighteen months and think that I did succeed in learning much of the political, social and material condition of these countries. I wrote my book as I was travelling and brought it back with me to England all but completed in December 1872. It was a better book than that which I had written eleven years before on the American States but not so good as that on the West Indies in 1859. As regards the information given there was much more to be said about Australia than the West Indies. Very much more is said and very much more may be learned from the latter than from the former book. I am sure that anyone who will take the trouble to read the book on Australia will learn much from it but the West Indian volume was readable. I'm not sure that either of the other works are in the proper sense of that word. When I go back to them I find that the pages drag with me and if so with me how must it be with others who have none of that love which a father feels even for his ill-favoured offspring. Of all the needs a book has the chief need is that it be readable. Feeling that these volumes on Australia were dull and long I was surprised to find that they had an extensive sale. There were I think two thousand copies circulated of the first expensive edition and then the book was divided into four little volumes which were published separately and which again had a considerable circulation. That some facts were stated inaccurately I do not doubt. That many opinions were crude I am quite sure. That I had failed to understand much which I attempted to explain is possible. But with all these faults the book was a thoroughly honest book and was the result of unflagging labor for a period of fifteen months. I spared myself no trouble in inquiry, no trouble in seeing and no trouble in listening. I thoroughly imbued my mind with the subject and wrote with the simple intention of giving trustworthy information on the state of the colonies. Though there be inaccuracies, those inaccuracies to which work quickly done must always be subject, I think I did give much valuable information. I came home across America from San Francisco to New York visiting Utah and Brigham Young on the way. I did not achieve great intimacy with the great polygamist of the Salt Lake City. I called upon him, sending to him my card, apologizing for doing so without an introduction, and excusing myself by saying that I did not like to pass through the territory without seeing a man of whom I had heard so much. He received me in his doorway, not asking me to enter, and inquired whether I were not a miner. When I told him that I was not a miner, he asked me whether I earned my bread. I told him I did. I guess you're a miner, said he. I again assured him that I was not. Then how do you earn your bread? I told him I did so by writing books. I'm sure you're a miner, said he. Then he turned upon his heel, went back into the house, and closed the door. I was properly punished, as I was vain enough to conceive that he would have heard my name. I got home in December, 1872, and in spite of any resolution made to the contrary, my mind was full of hunting as I came back. No real resolutions had in truth been made, for out of a stud of four horses I kept three, two of which were absolutely idle through the two summers and winter of my absence. Immediately on my arrival I bought another, and settled myself down to hunting from London three days a week. At first I went back to Essex, my old country, but finding that to be inconvenient I took my horses to Leighton-Buzzard, and became one of that numerous herd of sportsmen who rode with the Baron and Mr. Selby Lowndes. In those days Baron Meier was alive, and the riding with his hounds was very good. I did not care so much for Mr. Lowndes. During the winters of 1873, 1874, and 1875, I had my horses back in Essex and went on with my hunting, always trying to resolve that I would give it up. But still I bought fresh horses, and as I did not give it up, I hunted more than ever. Three times a week the cab has been at my door in London very punctually, and not unfrequently before seven in the morning. In order to secure this attendance the young man has always been invited to have his breakfast in the hall. I have gone to the Great Eastern Railway, ah, so often with the fear that frost would make all my exertions useless, and so often too with that result. And then from one station or another station have traveled on wheels at least a dozen miles. After the day's sport the same toil has been necessary to bring me home to dinner at eight. This has been work for a young man and a rich man, but I have done it as an old man and a comparatively poor man. Now at last, in April 1876, I do think that my resolution has been taken. I am giving away my old horses, and anybody is welcome to my saddles and horse furniture. Singula di nobis anni predantur indes, erupureg giocos venerum conviva, lerum tendunt extorcure pomita. Our years keep taking toll as they move on. My feasts, my frolics are already gone, and now it seems my verses must go too. This is Connington's translation, but it seems to me to be a little flat. Years as they roll cut all our pleasures short. Our pleasant mirth, our loves, our wine, our sport, and then they stretch their power and crush at last even the power of singing the past. I think that I may say with truth that I rode hard to my end. Vixi pueles nuper idonios, et militavi non sine gloria, nunc arma defuncta munche bello, barbiton hic paries habebit. I've lived about the covert side. I've ridden straight and ridden fast. Now, breaches boots and scarlet pride are but mementos of the past. End of chapter 19, recording by Jessica Louise St. Paul, Minnesota. Chapter 20 of the autobiography of Anthony Trollop. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Autobiography of Anthony Trollop. The way we live now, and the Prime Minister. Conclusion. In what I have said at the end of the last chapter about my hunting, I've been carried a little in advance of the date at which I had arrived. We returned from Australia in the winter of 1872 and early in 1873 I took a house in Montague Square in which I hoped to live and hope to die. Our first work in settling there was to place upon new shelves the books which I had collected round myself at Waltham. And this work, which was in itself great, entailed also the labour of a new catalogue. As all who use libraries know, a catalogue is nothing unless it show the spot on which every book is to be found, information which every volume also ought to give us to itself. Only those who have done it know how great is the labour of moving and arranging a few thousand volumes. At the present moment I own about five thousand volumes and they are dearer to me even than the horses which are going or than the wine in the cellar which is very apt to go and upon which I also pride myself. When this was done and the new furniture had got into its place and my little book room was settled sufficiently for work, I began a novel to the writing of which I was instigated by what I conceived to be the commercial profligacy of the age. Whether the world does or does not become more wicked as years go on is a question which probably has disturbed the minds of thinkers since the world began to think. That men have become less cruel, less violent, less selfish, less brutal, there can be no doubt. But have they become less honest? If so, can a world retrograding from day to day in honesty be considered to be in a state of progress? We know the opinion on this subject of our philosopher Mr. Carlyle. If he be right, we're all going straight away to darkness and the dogs. But then we do not put very much faith in Mr. Carlyle nor in Mr. Ruskin and his other followers. The loudness and extravagance of their lamentations, the wailing and gnashing of teeth which comes from them, over a world which is supposed to have gone altogether shoddy words, are so contrary to the convictions of men who cannot but see how comfort has been increased, how health has been improved, and education extended, that the general effect of their teaching is the opposite of what they had intended. It is regarded simply as Carlyleism to say that the English-speaking world is growing worse from day to day, and it is Carlyleism to opine that the general grand result of increased intelligence is a tendency to deterioration. Nevertheless, a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give efficient dinners, and get into Parliament and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now, and as I had ventured to take the whip of the satirist into my hand, I went beyond the iniquities of the great speculator who robs everybody and made an onslaught also on other vices, on the intrigues of girls who want to get married, on the luxury of young men who prefer to remain single, and on the puffing propensities of authors who desire to cheat the public into buying their volumes. The book has the fault which is to be attributed to almost all satires, whether in prose or verse. The accusations are exaggerated. The vices are colored so as to make effect rather than to represent truth. Who, when the lash of objugation is in his hands, can so moderate his arm as never to strike harder than justice would require? The spirit which produces the satire is honest enough, but the very desire which moves the satirist to do his work energetically makes him dishonest. In other respects, The Way We Live Now was, as a satire, powerful and good. The character of Melmet is well maintained. The bear-garden is amusing and not untrue. The long-staff girls and their friend Lady Monogram are amusing, but exaggerated. Dolly long-staff is, I think, very good, and Lady Carbrury's literary efforts are, I'm sorry to say, such as are too frequently made. But here again the young lady with her two lovers is weak and vapid. I almost doubt whether it be not impossible to have two absolutely distinct parts in a novel and to imbue them both with interest. If they be distinct, the one will seem to be no more than padding to the other. And so it was in The Way We Live Now. The interest of the story lies among the wicked and foolish people, with Melmet and his daughter, with Dolly and his family, with the American woman, Mrs. Hurdle, and with John Crumb and the girl of his heart. But Roger Carbrury, Paul Montague, and Henrietta Carbrury are uninteresting. Upon the whole I by no means look upon the book as one of my failures, nor was it taken as a failure by the public or the press. While I was writing The Way We Live Now, I was called upon by the proprietors of the graphic for a Christmas story. I feel with regard to literature, somewhat as I suppose an upholsterer and undertaker feels when he is called upon to supply a funeral. He has to supply it, however distasteful it may be. It is his business, and he will starve if he neglects it. So have I felt that when anything in the shape of a novel was required I was bound to produce it. Nothing can be more distasteful to me than to have to give a relish of Christmas to what I write. I feel the humbug implied by the nature of the order. A Christmas story in the proper sense should be the emulation of some mind anxious to instill others with a desire for Christmas religious thought, or Christmas festivities, or better still with Christmas charity. Such was the case with Dickens when he wrote his two first Christmas stories. But since that, the things written annually, all of which have been fixed to Christmas like children's toys to a Christmas tree, have had no real savor of Christmas about them. I had done two or three before, alas at this very moment I have one to write, which I have promised to supply within three weeks of this time. The picture-makers always require a long interval, as to which I have in vain been cuddling my brain for the last month. I can't send away the order to another shop, but I do not know how I shall ever get the coffin made. For the graphic in 1873 I wrote a little story about Australia. Christmas set the antipodes as of course mid-summer, and I was not loath to describe the troubles to which my own son had been subjected by the mingled-it accidents of heat and bad neighbors on his station in the bush. So I wrote Harry Heathcote of Gangoyle, and was well through my labour on that occasion. I only wish I may have no worse success in that which now hangs over my head. When Harry Heathcote was over, I returned with a full heart to Lady Glencora and her husband. I had never yet drawn the completed picture of such a statesman as my imagination had conceived. The personages with whose names my pages had been familiar, and perhaps even the minds of some of my readers, the Brocks, De Terriers, Monks, Greshams and Domines, had been more or less portraits, not of living men but of living political characters. The strong-minded, thick-skinned, useful, ordinary member, either of the government or of the opposition, had been very easy to describe and had required no imagination to conceive. The character reproduces itself from generation to generation, and as it does so becomes shorn in a wonderful way of those little touches of humanity which would be destructive of its purposes. Now and again there comes a burst of human nature, as in the quarrel between Burke and Fox, but as a rule the men submit themselves to be shaped and fashioned, and to be formed into tools which are used either for building up or pulling down, and can generally bear to be changed from this box into the other, without at any rate the appearance of much personal suffering. Four and twenty gentlemen will amalgamate themselves into one whole and work for one purpose, having each of them to set aside his own idiosyncrasy and to endure the close personal contact of men who must often be personally disagreeable, having been thoroughly taught that in no other way can they serve either their country or their own ambition. These are the men who are publicly useful, and whom the necessities of the age supply, as to whom I have never ceased to wonder that stones of such strong calibre should be so quickly worn down to the shape and smoothness of rounded pebbles. Such have been to me the Brocks and the Mild Maze, about whom I have written with great pleasure, having had my mind much exercised in watching them. But had I also conceived the character of a statesman of a different nature, of a man who should be in something perhaps superior, but in very much inferior to these men, of one who could not become a pebble having too strong an identity of his own, to rid oneself of fine scruples, to fall into the traditions of a party, to feel the need of subservience, not only in acting but also even in thinking, to be able to be a bit and at first only a very little bit. These are the necessities of the growing statesman. The time may come, the glorious time when some great self-action shall be possible, and shall be even demanded as when Peel gave up the Corn Laws, but the rising man as he puts on his harness should not allow himself to dream of this. To become a good, round, smooth, hard, useful pebble is his duty, and to achieve this he must harden his skin and squallow his scruples. But every now and again we see the attempt made by men who cannot get their skins to be hard, who after a little while generally fall out of the ranks. The statesman of whom I was thinking, of whom I had long thought, was one who did not fall out of the ranks even though his skin would not become hard. He should have rank and intellect and parliamentary habits by which to bind him to the service of his country, and he should also have unblemished, unextinguishable, inexhaustible love of country. That virtue I attribute to our statesman generally. They who are without it are, I think, mean indeed. This man should have it as the ruling principle of his life, and it should so rule him that all other things should be made to give way to it. But he should be scrupulous, and being scrupulous, weak. When called to the highest place in the council of his sovereign he should feel with true modesty his own insufficiency, but not the less should the greed of power grow upon him when he had once allowed himself to taste and enjoy it. Such was the character I endeavored to depict in describing the triumph, the troubles, and the failure of my prime minister. And I think that I have succeeded. What the public may think, or what the press may say, but I do not yet know the work having is yet run but half its course. Footnote. Writing this note in 1878 after a lapse of nearly three years, I'm obliged to say that as regards the public the prime minister was a failure. It was worse spoken of by the press than any novel I had written. It was specially hurt by a criticism on it in the spectator. The critic who wrote the article I know to be a good critic, and fair to me, but in this case I could not agree with him, so much do I love the man whose character I had endeavored to portray. That the man's character should be understood as I understand it, or that of his wife's, the delineation of which has also been a matter of much happy care to me, I have no right to expect, seeing that the operation of describing has not been confined to one novel, which might perhaps be read through by the majority of those who commenced it. It has been carried on through three or four, each of which will be forgotten even by the most zealous reader almost as soon as read. In the prime minister my prime minister will not allow his wife to take office among, or even over, those ladies who are attached by office to the Queen's Court. I should not choose, he says to her, that my wife should have any duties unconnected with our joint family and home. Who will remember in reading those words that in a former story published some years before, he tells his wife when she has twitted him with his willingness to clean the Premier's shoes, that he would even allow her to clean them if it were for the good of the country. And yet it is by such details as these that I have, for many years past, been manufacturing within my own mind the characters of the man and his wife. I think that Plantagenet palacer Duke of Omnium is a perfect gentleman. If he be not, then am I unable to describe a gentleman. She is by no means a perfect lady, but if she be not all over a woman, then I am not able to describe a woman. I do not think it probable that my name will remain among those who in the next century will be known as the writers of English prose fiction. But if it does, that permanence of success will probably rest on the character of Plantagenet palacer, Lady Glencora, and the reverend, Mr. Crawley. I have now come to the end of that long series of books written by myself, with which the public is already acquainted. Of those which I may hereafter be able to add to them, I cannot speak, though I have an idea that I shall even yet once more have recourse to my political hero as the main stay of another story. When the Prime Minister was finished, I at once began another novel, which is now completed in three volumes, and which is called Is He Poppin' Joy? There are two poppin' joys in the book, one succeeding to the title held by the other, but as they are both babies and do not in the course of the story progress beyond babyhood, the future readers, should the tale ever be published, will not be much interested in them. Nevertheless, the story as a story is not, I think, a miss. Since that I have written still another three-volume novel, to which very much in opposition to my publisher I have given the name The American Senator. Footnote. The American Senator and Poppin' Joy have appeared, each with fair success. Neither of them has encountered that reproach which, in regard to the Prime Minister, seemed to tell me that my work as a novelist should be brought to a close, and yet I feel assured that they are very inferior to the Prime Minister. It is to appear in Temple Bar and is to commence its appearance on the first of them next month. Such being at circumstances I do not know that I can say anything else about it here. And so I end the record of my literary performances, which I think are more in amount than the works of any other living English author. If any English author's not living have written more, as may probably have been the case, I do not know who they are. I find that taking the books which have appeared under our names I have published much more than twice as much as Carlisle. I have also published considerably more than Borteur, even including his letters. We are told that Varro, at the age of eighty, had written four hundred eighty volumes, and that he went on writing for eight years longer. I wish I knew what was the length of Varro's volumes. I comfort myself by reflecting that the amount of manuscript described as a book in Varro's time was not much. Varro too is dead and Voltaire, whereas I am still living and may add to the pile. The following is a list of the books I have written, with the dates of publication and the sums I have received for them. The dates given are the years in which the works were published as a whole, most of them having appeared before in some serial form. Names of works, date of publication, total sum received. The McDermott's of Ballet-Claran, 1847, 48, 6, 9. The Kellys and the O. Kellys, 1848, 123, 19, 5. Lavendee, 1850, 20, 0, 0. The Warden, 1855, 727, 11, 3. Barchester Towers, 1857. The Three Clerks, 1858, 250, 0, 0. Dr. Thorn, 1858, 400, 0, 0. The West Indies and the Spanish Main, 1859, 250, 0, 0. The Bertrump's, 1859, 400, 0, 0. Carried Forward, 2219, 16, 17. Names of works, date of publication, total sums received. Brought Forward, 2219, 16, 17. Castle Richmond, 1860, 600, 0, 0. Framley Parsonage, 1861, 1000, 0, 0. Tales of All Countries, first series, 1861. Second series, 1863, more than 1830, 0, 0. Third edition, 1870. Orley Farm, 1862, 3,135, 0, 0. North America, 1862, 1250, 0, 0. Rachel Ray, 1863, 1645, 0, 0. The Small House at Allington, 1864, 3000, 0, 0. Can You Forgive Her, 1864, 3525, 0, 0. Miss Mackenzie, 1865, 1300, 0, 0. The Belt and the State, 1866, 1757, 0, 0. The Claverings, 1867, 2800, 0, 0. The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867, 3000, 0, 0. Nina Polatka, 1867, 450, 0, 0. Linda Tressel, 1868, 450, 0, 0. Phineas Finn, 1869, 3200, 0, 0. He was right, 1869, 3200, 0, 0. Brown, Jones and Robinson, 1870, 600, 0, 0. The Vicar of Bullhinton, 1870, 2500, 0, 0. And Editors Tales, 1870, 378, 0, 0. Caesar, Ancient Classics, 1870, 0, 0, 0. Footnote, this was given by me as a present to my friend John Blackwood. Sir Harry Hutzpah of Humboldtweight, 1871, 750, 0, 0. Wealth the Air, 1871, 2500, 0, 0. The Golden Lion of Grand Pair, 1872, 550, 0, 0. Justice Diamonds, 1873, 2500, 0, 0. Australia and New Zealand, 1873, 1300, 0, 0. Phineas Redux, 1874, 2500, 0. Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, 1874, 450, 0, 0. 48,389, 17, 5. Names of works, date of publication, total sum received. Brought forward, 48,389, 17, 5. Lady Anna, 1874, 1200, 0, 0. The Way We Live Now, 1875, 3000, 0, 0. The Prime Minister, 1876, 2500, 0. The American Senator, 1877, 1800, 0, 0. Is He Pop and Joy, 1878, 1600, 0, 0. South Africa, 1878, 850, 0, 0. John Caldegate, 1879, 1800, 0, 0. Sundries, 7800, 00. 68,939, 17, 5. It will not, I am sure, be thought that in making my boast as to the quantity I have endeavored to lay claim to any literary excellence. That, in the writing of books, quantity without quality is a vice and a misfortune has been too manifestly settled to leave a doubt on such a matter. But I do lay claim to whatever merit should be accorded to me for persevering diligence in my profession. And I make the claim, not with a view to my own glory, but for the benefit of those who may read these pages, and when young may intend to follow the same career. Nulladies sine linea, let that be their motto, and let their work be to them as is his common work to the common laborer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need Tye no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving, as men have sat or said that they have sat. More than nine-tenths of my literary work has been done in the last twenty years, and during twelve of those years I followed another profession. I have never been a slave to this work, giving due time, if not more than due time, to the amusements I have loved. But I have been constant, and constancy in labor will conquer all difficulties. Guta cava tilapidem non vi, sed sepe cadendo. It may interest some if I state that during the last twenty years I have made by literature something near seventy thousand. As I have said before in these pages, I look upon the result as comfortable, but not splendid. It will not, I trust, be supposed by any reader that I have intended in this so-called autobiography to give a record of my inner life. No man ever did so truly, and no man ever will. Rousseau probably attempted it, but who doubts but that Rousseau has confessed in much the thoughts and convictions rather than the facts of his life? If the rustle of a woman's petticoat has ever stirred my blood, if a cup of wine has been a joy to me, if I have thought tobacco at midnight in pleasant company to be one of the elements of an earthly paradise, if now and again I have somewhat recklessly fluttered a five note over a card-table, of what matter is that to any reader? I have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought me to no sorrow. It has been the companionship of smoking that I have loved rather than the habit. I have never desired to win money, and I have lost none. To enjoy the excitement of pleasure but to be free from its vices and ill effects, to have the sweet and leave the bitter untasted. That has been my study. The preachers tell us that this is impossible. It seems to me that hitherto I have succeeded fairly well. I will not say that I have never scorched a finger, but I carry no ugly wounds. For what remains to me of life I trust for my happiness still chiefly to my work, hoping that when the power of work be over with me, God may be pleased to take me from a world in which, according to my view, there can be no joy. Secondly, to the love of those who love me, and then to my books. That I can read and be happy while I am reading is a great blessing. Could I remember as some men do what I read? I should have been able to call myself an educated man, but that power I have never possessed. Something is always left, something dim and inaccurate, but still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more. I am inclined to think that it is so with most readers. Of late years, putting aside the Latin classics, I found my greatest pleasure in our old English dramatists, not from any excessive love of their work which often irritates me by its want of truth to nature, even while it shames me by its language, but from curiosity in searching their plots and examining their character. If I live a few years longer, I shall, I think, leave in my copies of these dramatists down to the close of James I, written criticisms on every play. No one who has not looked closely into it knows how many there are. Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore, I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written. End of chapter 20, recording by Jessica Louise, Minneapolis, Minnesota. End of the autobiography of Anthony Trollop.