Its lines are deeply indented and coarsely grained, and do not fall on pleasant places. In anatomising her subjects, Mrs. Trollope shows no profound psychological science; in fact, her incisions are often but skin-deep; but then she gashes to and fro after a terrible sort, and produces jagged wounds, and leaves unsightly scars, and seems to revel in diagrams of morbid pathology. Her illustrations are generally lively, not always truthful, and frequently farfetched. The absurdities and abuses of social life have had few sharper inquisitors, but many of abler discrimination and more practical judgment. Fools and villains are not to be shamed and reformed, or their ugliness to be made a warning, by unqualified expositions of their actual or their ideal excesses. Satire, by being too broad, too unconditional, too straightforward, defeats its being's end and aim. Its acute angles become obtuse, and its parallel lines never meet their object. According to Sir Walter Scott, the nicest art of satire lies in a skilful mixture of applause and blame: there must be an appearance of candour, and just so much merit allowed, even to the object of censure, as to make the picture natural.[1] But in no case is Mrs. Trollope a friend to the media va. If she scolds, it must be vehemently; if she admires, it must be sweepingly—like the duke, with whom
Railing and praising were the usual themes,
And both, to show his judgment, in extremes.
In the same manner, her humourists are too often buffoons; her wit trenches on caricature; her romance goes Surrey melodramatic lengths; her comedy merges in farce. A blackguard à la Trollope is all black. In reading her fictions we are consciously en rapport with a clear-seeing and clever woman, who surpriscs us with the extent, the variety, and the lucidity of her visions; but we feel the while that truth and nature are sacrificed or forgotten—that the clairvoyance is a skilful delusion, the performance of make-believe, the performer a professional artiste. Sometimes, indeed, Mrs. Trollope draws from life, and supplies the finishing touches as well as the outline from the same source. But as a rule, she overdoes nature, or contrives to do without it—novis saltem judicibus. The celebrity of that literary scandalum to the taste of Uncle Sam, "Domestic Manners of the Americans," which he reckons to "whip creation" in the article of scan. mag., was not rivalled by the accompanying novel, "The Refugee in America," with which Mrs. Trollope clenched her argument. The former was fiction enough, on American showing—it was all "tarnation romance" from beginning to end; and to follow it up by a professed work of fancy or unreality, was adding insult to injury. From the vulgarism and utilitarianism of this prosaic theme, she turned in the following year (1833) to Italy and the sixteenth century, producing "The Abbess," a romance rich in convent characteristics, love intrigues, and Inquisition unpleasantries. The same strong and pointed lance that had just run-a-muck against Yankeedom, was now couched, in the same martial and uncompromising spirit, against old abuses of ultramontanism. There is ingenuity, but no great grasp of passion or power in this tale; some of the characters are spirited, but they
- ↑ Thus Dryden's Portraiture of Shaftesbury ("Absalom and Architophel") qualifies the censure so artfully with praise of his talents, as to render his faults even more conspicuous and more hateful.—Scott's "Life of Dryden," § 5.
