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FEMALE NOVELISTS
No. V.—Mrs. Trollope.
Goethe complained that modern poets put too much water in their ink. Of many modern novel-wrights, we may similarly, or inversely, complain that they put too little ink in their water. No wonder, then, that the manuscript so soon becomes fade, colourless, illegible, and survives not the "first reading." Even a large piece of bullion will only supply a certain amount of gold-leaf, and cover a limited surface. Genius, too, has its boundaries. If it pass them, it must pay the penalty, and that is sometimes a heavy toll. Genius has no infinite mood. In trying to prove that it has, it becomes an irregular verb. Mrs. Trollope is one of those who, by over-writing, refuse to do themselves justice. At least, she writes too fast, and gives way too indulgently to the rash speed of her grey-goose quill, so that it sometimes, in the nature of things, leads her a wild-goose chase. Her gold-leaf is beaten too thin; her ink, though abounding in gall, is diluted with too much water. Not that we hold the impossibility of a prolific author being a great author, confronted as such a theory is by ancient and mediæval literature, belied as such an unwise saw is by so many modern instances. But there are cases in which the fecundity proves the weakness of the offspring, as well as the vigour of the parent. The talent is too widely diffused, instead of being wisely concentrated. Three or four of Mrs, Trollope's works are marked by a more terse and compact habit of thought, and show, by their superiority to the rest of the family, what she can produce when she likes. Assuredly this lady's industry and exuberance of invention entitle her to the proverbial name she enjoys, or endures, for prolific authorship. With Virgil's rustic we may admiringly exclaim:
O quoties, et quæ nobis Galatea locuta est![1]
In vain have reviewers tried to keep up with her. A blue-stocking who travels in seven-leagued boots may well run critics and criticasters out of breath—she triumphantly ascending the hill Difficulty, os fresh as a daisy, while they wallow, and struggle, and give up the race (and almost the ghost) in the Slough of Despond. Pant and puff as they will to run her home, she is'in a trice miles out of sight, over the hills and faraway, and wondering what those sluggard lameters are doing in the rear. It was once suggested by Tom Moore,[2] as an expedient to keep pace with the celeritas incredibilis of certain literary Cæsars, that they should each have a reviewer appointed expressly, auprès de sa personne, to give the earliest intelligence of his movements, and do justice to his multifarious enterprises, But would one such officer suffice in the case of Mrs, Trollope? We trow not. Poor wight, he would "strike" ere the first year was out; and his successor, however able-bodied and conscientious a man-of-all-work, would find the accumulated arrears too much for him, protest that the place was too hard for him, and go off at a month's warning.
