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h
THE INDIAN MARKET WIZARDS
Conversation with India’s Top Traders

This free e-book is created by Kirubakaran Rajendran, founder of www.squareoff.in it’s a

compilation of important information shared by these top traders which was originally
published in Moneycontrol.com through series of interviews done by Shishir Asthana
 Table of Contents
Investing

Amit Gadre…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..7

Vinay Vaidya………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..10

Market Profile

Jay Chandran………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..15

Options Trading

P R Sundar…..………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..19

IT Jegan…..…..………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..22

Manish Dewan.……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..24

Pran Katariya….……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..26

Jyoti Budhia .….……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..28

Sivakumar Jayachandran..……………………………………………………………………………………………..31

Mitesh Patel…………………..……………………………………………………………………………………………..34

Vishvesh Chauhan..………..……………………………………………………………………………………………..38

Price Action – Charts – Indicators

Prathamesh Godbole..…………………………………………………………………………………………………..44

Manas Arora..………………………………………………………………………………….…………………………….46

Tasneem Mithaiwala……………………………………………………………………….…………………………….48

Abhinand Basavaraj …………………………………………………….………………….…………………………….50

Sovit Manjani. ……….…………………………………………………….………………….…………………………….52

Navy Ramavat ……….…………………………………………………….………………….…………………………….55

Naresh Nambisan ….…………………………………………………….………………….…………………………….59

 Trading Tools | Option Tools | Trading Bots

Prashant Shah...……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..63

Santosh Kumar Pasi ..……………………………………………………………………………………………………..66

Nitesh Khandelwal..………..……………………………………………………………………………………………..69

Kirubakaran Rajendran…………………………………………………………………………………………………..71

Trading Systems

Manu Bhatia…...……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..76

Subhadip Nandy……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..79

Vivek Gadodia...……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..81

Alok Jain …...…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..84

Junaid Shaikh..………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..86

Techno - Funda

Devang Jhaveri..……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..90

Zafar Shaikh.…...……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..93

Trading Psychology

Madan Kumar..……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..97

Dr Amit Malik..……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..101

Nishant Arora..……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..105
 Introduction

It was a normal business day; I was working at office desk, researching about some trading system and
responding to emails. Then our support team received an email from the domain Network 18, and this is
the exact extract of email body.

This is Shishir Asthana here from Moneycontrol.com. I generally do a feature interview with
traders/investors/fund managers as a weekly feature on our site. In this regard I was thinking of
featuring Mr. Rajendran. Can I have his contact details so that I can take the conversation
forward?

I have been trading since 2008 and have been writing more than 800 + articles related to trading, algo
trading and other topics related to stock market in Quora platform. But 10 years back when I was
working at Infosys, I use to open check price charts, fundamental information about company and stock
market news in Moneycontrol website, in fact that was my home page, where I refer the site first and
office emails latter.

So when I got the email from Moneycontrol about featuring myself, I was so thrilled, am sure every
Trader who has been interviewed would have felt the same. In Twitter there is general misconception
that all these interviews are paid interviews but this was the moment I realized that these interviews
that moneycontrol publishes are not really paid interviews. None of the person that has been
interviewed by Moneycontrol paid any money to them.

Later I went through all interviews that has been published so far, downloaded them and read them line
by line. So that I can know what should I convey in the interview, that should be beneficial to every
trader who reads my interview. In this process, I realized there is tons of valuable information shared by
every trader. And each and every story is so unique that it gives lot of self confidence to any struggling
trader that one day they too can be successful.

Hence I have decided to write an ebook to put forth all these interviews in one place, so that anybody
can refer this book and gain the knowledge. Almost every trader in this book are unique, few say they
trade based on charts, indicators and open interest but there are other traders who say they only follow
price and nothing else. Yet all traders are successful. You are going to learn their thought process, how
did they achieve trading success? What’s the secret sauce, (if there’s any)? Of all traits, one thing that is
very common among all traders is Discipline.

After all, it’s not the trading system that makes money, it’s the trader who trades the trading
system does all the wonders.

Am sure, the next few hours that you are going to spend will be a life changing experience for you. I wish
you all success in your trading journey.
Investing
 Overview

Amit Gadre, @Longterm_wealth a 35-year engineering graduate who knew by when he would like
to achieve his financial freedom and how to do so even before he worked for a single day. The fact that
he managed to do so by quitting his job five years ahead of the initial target is a tribute to his effort.
Gadre a self-confessed voracious reader followed the value investing route to liberate himself. Enjoying
his freedom in both financial and time front, Gadre lives off the dividend from his investments. A SEBI
registered financial advisor Gadre who lives in Nashik helps others achieve their dream. He holds free
training sessions for anyone who is willing to listen and put in the effort.

Q: Even before taking up your first job you had set a retirement target date on yourself and knew the
path you will take to achieve it. Few people have this clarity of thought. Can you talk us through your
journey?

A: What really changed for me was when I first read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad during my first year in
engineering. I learned what are assets and liabilities in day-to-day life. How small set of right decisions
make a huge difference in the future. It was important to keep investing in assets that create passive
income streams. My father used to invest in stocks with a good dividend yield. Heading a panel of
lawyers for Bank of Maharashtra gave my father the relevant exposure to understand business and
investing. But for me, I had to re-invent the wheel.

Through voracious reading I educated myself in investing that laid the foundation for me. I was
convinced that equities are the route to financial freedom. The first share I bought was in 2003, during
my third year of engineering. The share was bought from the scholarship money I used to receive and
save. However, this was also the year when I lost my father. I had cleared all my exams for future studies
in the US but my father’s demise changed the course of my life, for good.

Though I completed my engineering and then my management I was clear that the aim for all that I was
doing was to attain financial freedom. For me, a job was just a means of saving enough money to invest
and I used to save aggressively. I had set a target of achieving financial freedom by 40. But thankfully I
was able to cut short the journey by five years and quit my job at Siemens when I was 35.
 Investing Strategy

Q: How do you zoom in on your investment target?

A: The first filter that I run is to look for companies with a market capitalization (Mcap) of over Rs 10,000
crore. I avoid smaller companies since it is possible to get multi-bagger companies in bigger companies.
Here you have a proven management that has gone through various business cycles and has the
expertise to survive business downturns. They are a much better version of themselves when they were
a Rs 100 crore company. These companies have the ability to grow faster and gain from the economies
of scales as compared to smaller ones.

Many people, especially the smaller investors bet on companies with a Mcap of Rs 100 crore with an aim
of the company reaching a Mcap of Rs 10,000 crore or a 100 times move. While there may be some,
they are few and far between, probably 1 or 2 out of 100. I wait for these 1 or 2 companies. I wait for
proven winners. I am willing to ride a winner in its journey ahead from say Rs 20,000 crore to Rs 10 lakh
crore over the next 10-20-30 years.

After the first filter, I look for sectors which have a huge growth potential. Say like the housing finance
companies. In India, the mortgage to GDP ratio is still only 9-10 percent, while in developed countries it
is 60-70 percent. With a growing young population and aspiration, housing finance sector is bound to
grow. Within the sector, I then get down to identifying good businesses, ideally leaders with positive
cash flows, high return on equity (RoE) of above 20 percent and return on capital employed (RoCE).

Not to mention decent management quality, growth visibility, and a DNA to share profit with
shareholders. The icing on the cake would be a company that funds its expansion through internal
accruals. I generally look for companies with a profit growth of 25-26 percent CAGR.

As Mohnish Pabrai, author of Dhandho Investor says if have a company growing at 26 percent
CAGR it will double in value in three years and will be four times in six years.

Q: In the frontline space, do you see opportunities currently?

A: There is normally a buying opportunity in all phases of the market. Take, for example, the
pharmaceutical sector currently. The sector has gone through torrid times over the last few years. Some
of the companies are giving global companies a run for their money. These companies are now trading
at 15-17 times price to earnings valuation. They may have trouble going forward too, but the troubles of
the last few years have shown that they can navigate the storm.

IT sector also more or less has a similar tale to tell. They have gone through some tough times and have
come out learning from their experience. Housing finance companies are also available at compelling
valuations in some cases.
The other sector that has caught my eye is the two-wheelers. Here the stocks have taken a beating on
account of a price war started by the number two player in the space. But both the top companies are
now available at 16-17 price-earnings multiple with no debt on their books. If India has to grow then
rural consumption theme will have to come into play. When the rural consumption is playing out the
two-wheeler sector will see traction.

What is important is to stick to the process and to look out for compounding machines and stay invested
in good and bad times. You need to stick to the process of picking stocks and the companies will deliver,
some sooner others later. If the process is right and we have picked a good company all that is needed is
to sit tight and be patient. While valuations are important, I generally look to invest in either one or all
the top three companies.

Q: Can you walk us through your strategy and your thought process by talking about one of your
multibaggers?

A: Without naming the company, I will talk about a housing finance company which I invested in 2011
while still being employed. In fact, in 2011 the mortgage to GDP ratio which we had talked about earlier
was at 6-7 percent as compared to 9-10 percent now. After identifying the sector I was looking for a
company in the space with which was available at a reasonable valuation and had a good financial
matrix. The company I bought was available at a price to book value of 1.5 times. This has now increased
to 2.25 times, but the point to note here is the loan book of the company has grown at a rapid pace. The
dividend yield at that point in time was at 7 percent and price to earnings was at 10 times.

ROE of the company was at 20 percent in 2011 which is now at 30 percent. More importantly, the
company was already working on its cost to income ratio which was showing a declining trend. It further
improved since then. In 2011 the cost to income ratio was at 20, it is now at 12.5. The management had
always delivered whatever it said in media or in analyst meets. Its business model was robust and the
company was well managed with its process and risk management in place. Rating agency CRISIL had an
AAA rating on the company.

Q: Do you meet management or take management commentaries at face value before investing?

A: The kind of companies I am interested in generally is very well tracked by media as well as analysts.
Their disclosure quality and management capability are above par. That is the benefit of investing in
bigger companies, the checks and balances have been done and dusted. Analysts drill these companies
rigorously and the ease with which the management replies to their queries is reassuring. The smaller
companies need to be screened with a fine comb. A company which has crossed the threshold of Rs
10,000 crore has generally done so after clearing many hurdles.
Q: How extensively do you work on projecting future earnings of a company?

A: I generally use the discounted cash flow but that is only to get the bull and bear case valuation. This is
because even a small change in the assumption of terminal value will change the numbers dramatically.
I rather look at overall sector growth and then come down to relative valuations. If a sector is growing at
say 15 percent, the leaders generally will grow at a much faster pace. It is the relative valuation
parameters like earning yields or dividend yields that play a much important role in my stock pickings.

Q: Are there any no-go sectors for you and when do you sell?

A: I generally avoid cyclical as timing is important in these businesses. Entry and exit timings play a very
important role in this kind of stocks. I am a passive investor I rarely sell my stocks.

As Philip Fisher says, if the buying is right selling happens in only three conditions. First when the
management is diversifying into non-core businesses. Second is when the valuations have run
much ahead of its fundamentals. Like say, if the FMCG sector is available at 80 PEs but its
growth expectation is only 10 percent. Finally, selling happens when there is a new investing
idea.

In such case, the least conventional idea goes out and makes room for the new one. Though I buy with
an assumption to hold it for a long time I monitor my stocks very closely on a quarterly basis. Any
variation from my assumption for a quarter or two is tolerable but if the basic assumption has gone
awry then I do not hesitate in selling.

Say if my assumption for growth was 22 percent and the company is managing only 5 percent for few
quarters, there is definitely something that has gone out of control I do not hesitate in selling such
companies. Secondly, if there is a problem with the management where they are not walking the talk or
there are reports of miss-appropriation of funds or other red flags then to I get out of such investments.

Though my success rate in picking companies to invest in is 75-80 percent in my style of investing value
buys can turn out to value traps occasionally. As I invest against the crowd such occurrences do take
place, I acknowledge the mistake that my assumptions of the sector or growth were wrong and I sell the
stock. It is surgical if the premise is not right there is no point in waiting for the price to come up.
 Overview

Vinay Vaidya, who is more comfortable talking in numbers than words, is always looking to
improve his strategy. A trader as well as an investor, he created a strategy by taking inputs from all
investing greats. Unlike other traders and investors, Vaidya comes from a different genre. He was the
CEO of Anagram Car Finance and Apple Securities before finally hanging up his boots as CEO and MD of
Interconnect Stock Exchange to spend time with his two daughters who were graduating. He also moved
out of Mumbai to Baroda to pursue his dream of building a mathematical wealth creation model.

Q: From heading businesses to conceptualizing software for trading and investing, can you walk us
through your journey.

A: Markets have always fascinated me, even when I was doing my first year in engineering in 1974-75. I
used to look at prices and watched them change daily. I used to wonder what makes these prices
change. For the next 22 years, I could not figure out what was driving this change. I completed my post-
graduation from Ahmedabad in Electrical Engineering – Control Systems and took up a job in the same
field. At the first possible opportunity, I joined a business school with the clear intent of moving to
financial markets as soon as possible. I continued to follow the market and watched prices move. On a
friend’s advice, I bought my first stock - Max India - in 1983-84, without a clue about the company. This
friend, who later became a renowned investor, told me to look for reasons why the price moved rather
than just tracking prices.

In 1986, I completed my cost accountancy and started to understand accounting and finance, the
underbelly of a business. I soon set up a small scale business. It taught me the biggest lesson in finance
and investing: it is not growth or profit that determines a strong company but cash flows. If a business
does not have continuous positive cash flow, then its survival will be at stake. This is what happened to
us. I joined Anagram Finance to start and grow their car finance division on a condition they would
transfer me to the broking division whenever it starts.

After a few years, I got a break when Atul Nishar, founder of Hexaware Technologies, offered me the
CEO post at Apple Securities, a broking firm. In 2001-02, I started reading up on markets and
fundamentals. By 2003-04, I started making bigger markets bets. This period also coincided with some
good IPOs. Even then, I did make my share of mistakes in picking stocks.

Q: When you were doing well professionally and investing successfully what prompted you to quit
everything and start on your own?

A: I wanted to spend more time with my family. Both my daughters were nearing graduation. I needed
to spend as much time with them as possible before they got married. I also wanted to pursue my
dream of building a mathematical wealth creation model. I could not have done justice to the project by
staying in the job. In January 2009, with the help of two software developers, I started work on the
project, which we called Ekkalavya.
Q: Can you elaborate on this software?

A: Since we trade as well as invest, our software has about 300 indicators. Of this, about 140 are
fundamental, 130 are technical and 30 are derivative data based indicators.

We sharpened our skills from various market gurus, reading their works and converting them into
mathematical formulas which went into the software.

Benjamin Graham introduced us to the mathematical approach of investment analysis, Warren

Buffet taught us the benefits of compounding, investing in cash cow businesses like insurance,
and having a long term view. Charlie Munger and Philip Fischer helped us appreciate the value
of cigar butt investing. Our local hero Raamdeo Agrawal gave us the formula for expansion of
market capitalisation, which is a mix of business growth and price-to-earnings expansion or
contraction. From Aswath Damodaran, we got the most critical formula for estimating future
PE. There are 3-4 other formulas for estimating future PE.

Investing Strategy

Q: You seem to have crunched a research outfit into your computer is it as efficient.

A: Without undermining the work of an analyst, we are able to generate and pinpoint all information
into a 3 stage formula. To me, the annual report and regular public reporting are good enough to take a
call on the company. I cannot base a 3-5 year investment decision on this information as even
manufacturing companies are not sure of their outlook beyond a few years. For me, numbers tell a
better and clearer picture. Nothing beyond the annual report is needed to get a fix on the value that a
business needs to be assigned. Living in Baroda I do not have the bandwidth to attend meets. I have
used this handicap into an advantage by concentrating on going as deep as possible rather than
spreading myself thin.

Q: You mentioned that you trade as well as invest, can you throw more light on both.

A: The first uses the fundamental approach only. Here we pick up companies where we expect an
expansion in mcap in future, which can come from business as well as PE expansion. We buy and hold
companies for a period of 3-5 years or doubling of mcaps from our initial buy price, whichever is earlier.
After this target is achieved we relook at the company for future action. We invest in a company if there
is a 22 percent growth visibility. A company growing 25 percent year-on-year would double in 3 years,
given the benefit of compounding. We chose 22 percent as we reinvest dividends. But evaluation and
selecting companies is only 25 percent of the work.
The remaining factors are position sizing and risk management. For long term buys, we generally build
the position over time. If we intend to hold a company for 3-5 years, we build our position over 8-10
months. If there is a sharp drop in price after our first entry, we bring forward our buying to capitalise on
this opportunity.

In the second model, we trade for a 6-7 percent gain or exit with a 2-3 percent loss. This strategy is
completely software driven, with entries and exits all defined by the software. We use the profit of this
strategy to buy shares from the first model. We use retained earnings or cash flow from this strategy to
buy strong stocks from our first model.

The third most important aspect in my model is money management. If a portfolio has 15 stocks bought
over a period of 8-10 months, then deploy 6 percent in each stock and leave the remaining for a rainy
day. Each stock is then deployed in 10 equal parts, thus 0.6 percent is deployed each time. At any given
point of time, we ensure that no stock should have more than 20 percent drawdown, which is done by
using the momentum strategy to cushion the fall. In the momentum strategy, the software generates 10
outputs. If seven of these are favorable, we take a position in the counter.

Q: You have been training youngsters on the benefit of wealth creation, can you enlighten our readers
about it.

A: Wealth creation is a serious business, you need to treat it like one and not as a part-time activity.
There are three things needed for wealth-creation: skill, temperament and capital. Everybody is capable
of saving. The problem comes in deploying savings. Take the case of a regular employee. He fights with
his management for an 8-10 percent increment every year. But then deploys the surplus in a product
that barely beats inflation or gives it to a broker whose main intention is to generate brokerage. Worse,
the person trades by following television experts or reading recommendations on a public platform. If a
person spends 10-12 hours a day in a job that has the potential to grow 8-10 percent every year through
increments, then the surplus has to be invested in an instrument which is able to generate a much
higher return.

Capital has to be deployed in instruments that can generate at least 15-20 percent, only then will wealth
be created. Equity is the only instrument that can provide this kind of return, but it needs time. In the
compounding of money formula, you have interest rate and time or ‘n’ as a critical variable. Beyond 25
years, it is the ‘n’ that is critical and gives multibagger returns each year. Either you spend time learning
the skill or outsource it. Every fund manager is wrong at some point in time, but if they have a well-
defined process and track record, that is good enough to invest your money with him. If one still does
not wants to part with commission, it is best to invest in low cost Nifty BeES which still performs better
than most fund managers.
Market Profile
 Overview

Jaychandran, (@niftywizard) went on a revenge spree after losing some trades, taking random
trades and deviating from his strategy. End result – he managed to blow up a huge account in a matter
of days. Many traders have gone through this spell, but what makes Jayachandran's story different is
that he is the son of a farmer and blew up the money that his father gave him after selling a parcel of
the farmland. He literally locked himself in to learn the art and science of trading. It took him three years
to repay his father. Jaychandran is one of the few traders in India who approaches trading with a
technique called Market Profile.

Q: You have a unique trading style but before talking about your trading can you tell us about your
background and how you came to the market?

A: I come from a village 130 kilometers from Chennai. After I completed my engineering I manage to get
one a job in a multinational company for software testing. When I entered the company I saw
employees jumping and shouting on their seats. I was under the impression that the excitement was on
account of successfully completing a code. But this was in 2007 and the employees were trading in the
market. I felt happy since I was also interested in the market. I asked an employee them how do I get
involved in the market. I was told I would need to open an account with a broker and pump in some
money.

The very next day I opened a broking account and asked my father Rs 30,000 to trade. My friend advised
me to buy a call option. Without knowing anything about options I bought Rs 30000 worth of worth of
Nifty call option.

Without understanding what derivatives are I bought call options for my entire capital. Within days this
money became Rs 500. I didn't know what to tell to my father so I told my cousin about the event and
he said that since I did not make money in the call option let’s put the money in a put option. The
market during this time was very volatile the Rs 500 of put soon became Rs 30000 again. I was relieved
to recover my money and took the money out. I gave the money back to my father but this was the
turning point in my life.

I saw that Rs 30000 can become Rs 500 and Rs 500 can again become Rs 30,000 in a short time. I was
hooked on trading. I told my father that I would like to quit my job and take up trading seriously. I
requested him to take care of my expenses for one year and if after a year I was not successful I will take
up a job. I am lucky to have such parents, they agreed to what I said. I had 1 year to plan my trading
business I went about looking for strategies in the market and the first thing that internet search
showed me was market profile techniques.
 Trading Strategy

Q: How was the transition from learning to actual trading?

A: I paper traded for 4-5 months before jumping in. Luckily for me in those days markets were in my
favor and were in the mean reversal mode market. This was an easy zone where I used to buy low and
sell high almost every day and money was easy to come by. I used to wonder how people could ever
lose money in the market.

I used to be shorting every time the market gapped up and go long every time the market used
to gap down. I was making good money in those days. In a matter of 4 months, I was up by
around 30%.

Just when I was getting comfortable, the problem started. The market started trending and my entire
strategy went for a toss. Every time I used to short on a gap up the market just went on going higher. I
ended up losing the money made in the 3-4 months.

Q: What was the change you noticed?

A: Markets generally are in a mean revert mode, so my strategy used to work very well during this stage.
However during a trending period, the strategy did not work and I had to incorporate corrections into it,
which I successfully did. With this knowledge, I entered the market again. I did phenomenally well for
the next two years and was clocking 120 % a year. This gave me the confidence to increase my size.

During this time my father sold a parcel of land farmland. I asked my father to give me the
money to trade in the markets. He did trust me and my track record. I managed to blow up the
Rs 70 lakhs that he gave me in less than 15 days.

Q: How did this happen when you were trading so well. What about money and risk management?
How did your father react?

A: Till that time I was trading on a small amount so I did not pay much attention to money management
it was only after the event that I learned money management. Rs 70 lakh was a huge fee to pay for
money management.

The loss of Rs 70 lakh was on account of random trading. I was revenge trading after my first few
trades went wrong. Every trade I was taking was to recover the loss of the earlier trades. Since
the amount was huge the psychological impact was high. I traded without bothering about the strategy.
I was having a gambler's mindset, I need to recover my earlier loss anyway possible.
My strategy is basically dependent on India VIX (volatility index) if India VIX is higher I am confident of
taking money out of the market left right and center. When the VIX is lower, I do not trade. I realised
there is a day to trade in the market and there is a day to stay away from it.

Method and strategy is only a small part of the game. Money and mind management decides the
success of a trader. So the next 8 months I just tried to figure out how best I can trade. In 2012 I asked
my friend for a loan of Rs 5 lakhs and started trading again. The next 2 to 3 years I nailed every move in
the market in a matter of 3 and a half years I was able to recover the entire Rs 70 lakh which I lost in less
than 15 days. I returned the Rs 70 lakh to my father and I was left with some more money which I use
other capital to trade in the market.

This is one lesson that I give to every trader giving money can be done and half a day but making money
will take years and years of dedicated effort. There are no shortcuts to making money.

Q: What is the holding time for your trade and the timeframe you trade in?

A: Since I trade on only on days when VIX is high my holding period is generally one hour. But I trade for
a fixed target. Depending on the market my target moves from 50 to 100 points move on the Nifty. I use
a mix of market profile and price action for context which I do on the 30 minute chart. I prefer trading
on a 100 tick chart, the other timeframes I am comfortable is the 3 and 5 min timeframes.

One advice that I like to give is that to try to win in small amounts before getting in the big
league. If you cannot make money with $100 what in the world do you think you can do it in
$10,000.

If you trade for the money you will never make it, because it will affect your mind. Trade for the 3Ps –
passion, process and patience and you will get what you deserve from the market.
Options Trading
 Overview

PR Sundar (@PRSundar64) From a person who managed to lay hands on his first pair of
slippers when he reached the 10th grade to be one of the largest individual option sellers in the country
is an inspiring journey. PR Sundar, a math teacher, learned about options from the most basic source -
the stock exchange booklet. Born in a poor family, a post graduate in mathematics, took to teaching as
there were few job opportunities back then. A teaching assignment in Singapore helped him save capital
to think about returning back to India and starting a business. A strange happenstance brought Sundar
to the market and he has never looked back.

Q: How did you end up trading options?

A: Like most others, my entry into the market was through the cash market. I found the cash market
offered very low trading returns, so I moved to the futures market. The problem here was that the risk
was high. I wanted an instrument where the risk was low and the reward high. Options offered me the
perfect playground. The good thing about options was that it gave one the option to choose the perfect
mix between risk and reward according to one likes.

Option selling is like sitting in front of a bonfire. If you are too close, you can get burnt. If you are
sitting too far, then you will not enjoy the warmth.

You need to sit at the right distance from the fire. Similarly, in options, if you are trading a strike price
which is too far away from the current price, the reward will be low as will the risk. If you are trading
close to the market price, then the risk will be higher. It is this flexibility that options offer and the
probability of success is what attracted me to them.

Option selling is like running an insurance company. An insurance company sells protection to
many people, but only in a few cases does it have to pay claims as fewer people die. It provides
for a catastrophe by taking a re-insurance cover.

I buy an option only in case the strategy needs to be insured or what in market parlance is known as
hedged.

Q: Did having a maths background make it easier for you to get through the math involved in option
pricing?

A: The only book I read in options was that provided by the National Stock Exchange to clear NCFM. I
have a clear idea of what the option Greeks stand for, but I rarely use it in my decision making. The
market price of the option determines the Greeks value and not the other way round.
In order to be successful trader you need two things: edge and hedge. Edge is your market view and
hedge comes into play when your edge is not working out. I am a jack of all and master of none. I look at
everything, technical charts and all kind of data before taking a view on the market. Based on these
inputs, I take a view on the market and my position. At most times, the view goes wrong and that’s
where hedging comes into play.

Trading Strategy
Q: What option selling strategies do you deploy?

A: I mainly trade in index options. Around 95 percent of my trades are in the Nifty and Bank Nifty. I start
out by looking at all data points pertaining to the market like institution flows, call-put data and open
interest. I then form a view after glancing at the charts. It is only after that do I decide on the strategy to
choose.

I normally take low-risk trades, so I like to opt for a short strangle, iron condor, short straddle or
butterfly strategy.

My success is not based on my view or strategy; it is how I manage the trade even when the view is
wrong. I divide our trade into 5-6 components and invest in 5-6 strategies. Around 60 percent of my
capital is deployed this way and the remaining 40 percent is for fire-fighting. Apart from the strategies, I
also trade various expiry contracts. I may have a Nifty position in the current month, next month, far
month, six months contract and even a one-year contract. In the case of Bank Nifty, it will be weekly and
then monthly contracts.

Q: Since the key to your success is managing the trade, how do you salvage a position that is against
your initial assumption?

A: There are four ways in which one can manage a position.

First, if we have a short straddle trade and the market have moved violently against my position after a
few days of initiating the trade, then the chances are that I may be in profit on account of time decay. I
can simply square of this trade and build a new position. But if the volatility has increased in a very short
time, then one can adjust the trade by shifting the contract around where the market is trading.

The second way is to average the position by adding a new position around the market price.

The third way is to add a futures position in line with the market direction.

The fourth way is to exit by taking a loss.

In my case, most of the time the trade management and hedging works. Only occasionally do I get a
trade like a black swan event which hits me badly. Like the November 8, demonetization trade, where
the market opened with a big gap down and started recovering immediately. Our assumption was that it
would keep on going lower. Such days give us a loss which takes away 2-3 months of profits, but we are
okay with it and factor in such days in our trading.

Q: You have a very aggressive expiry day strategy, can you walk us through an expiry day?

A: Every Thursday, I trade in the Bank Nifty and on the last Thursday of the month, I trade in both the
Bank Nifty as well as Nifty. At the start, I deploy around 10 percent of the pre-decided limit and then
progressively keep on adding to that position. I keep on hedging or shifting my position based on the
market’s movement. I deploy all my capital by 2:00 pm. By 2:30-2:45 pm, I either book a profit/loss or
keep a stop-loss on trades. This is because between 3 and 3:30 pm on expiry day there is a lot of
volatility.

Q: You have continued with your profession of teaching, only now you teach traders. What exactly
can a trader learn from your trading classes?

A: My main aim through these classes is to create awareness of option selling and remove the myth
surrounding option selling. The general talk is that option selling has unlimited risk.

The option buyer is said to operate with limited risk and an opportunity to gain unlimited reward. But no
one talks of the probability of winning as an option buyer.

Option seller, on the other hand, is operating with a very high probability of winning. While an option
buyer has to bring in capital to buy, an option seller can use collateral and need not bring in funds.

Further, the seller has the flexibility of hedge his position using the same collateral, but the buyer will
have to bring in additional capital. But option selling is not for a small investor, it requires capital.

Anyone can gamble, but few can run a casino. It is the casino that always has the slight edge.

I teach traders how option selling can be a good business, provided it is managed like a business. It is the
management of trade that I focus on. I try to drill in the fact that having a view is fine but one need to be
prepared for any eventuality, just as one does in any business.
 Overview

Jegathesan Durairaj (@itjegan) is an option trader, 10 times consecutive winner of

Zerodha’s 60 days challenge, who punches over 100 trades a day, especially on expiry day. His humble
background (his parents were masons in a village close to Madurai) shows up on his trading style where
he goes after a trade even if there is a very small profit potential, not leaving any money on the table.
Jegan studied his way out of poverty by completing (MCA) and worked as a senior technical lead in one
of the top IT company. He has resigned from his job and is a fulltime trader now.

Q: How did you start trading options?

A: I was inspired by the book Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. One thing that struck me from the
book was to imitate what the rich men do. In my reading on the markets, I found out that the big
institutions and rich investors traded in options, that too in selling options. So I went through many
workshops, read books and articles to learn about option selling and ever since I have been an option
writer.

Q: Could you tell us about your option trading style?

A: I do both position and intraday, but nearly 50 percent of my profits come through intraday, that too
by trading on the expiry day only. Most of my trading is in index-related options. Within indices, I prefer
to trade in Bank Nifty because it offers a weekly expiry. In weekly options, the time decay is very fast, so
if you sell options and get the direction right the returns are faster. In case of Nifty, I hold it for a longer
period of 10-12 days provided the view remains the same.

Trading Strategy

Q: What kind of strategies do you use?

A: I no longer trade a naked position; I always trade a protected position.

My main strategies are calendar, butterfly, iron condor and expiry related trading. I do short
straddles for positional trades and short strangles for intraday trades.

In some of these strategies, like the iron condor, the returns are less at around 18 percent per annum.
But for me, the 18 percent is over and above the return I get from the investment in the balanced fund
which I am using as leverage.

If the view is flat I will use a double butterfly using both the call and the put options. If the view
is of a bullish market I will use a put calendar. I will hold on to the position till expiry if my view
of the market does not change.
Q: How do you form a view of the market, is it technical analysis or are there other data points you
look out for.?

A: I primarily look at futures and options data to arrive at a view. Open interest analysis, put-call ratio
(PCR) analysis, delivery volume and Max Pain point. I do look at technical charts but I am more
comfortable and have trust in the data points.

Q: can you walk us through how you trade on the expiry day?

A: What I do is I split my day’s trading or exposure limit that the broker gives me into 20 units of 5
percent each. This means I am taking a position of only 5 percent of my day’s limit in every trade I take.
Now as the market moves I form a view and take a position. I trade looking at various time frames. So if
the market is falling I will keep on selling call options looking at different time frame charts. And if it is
moving higher I will sell put options. I only trade out-of-the-money options and in those strike prices
which are least sensitive to market movement.

at 10 a.m. I will be looking to sell an option with a price of Rs 5,

at 12 p.m. I am searching for options at Rs 3,

by 3 p.m. I am selling options that are trading at Rs 1.

On expiry day these prices might be available on strike prices that are 700 points away from where the
market is trading. On a normal day, these prices may be 300 points away, but high volatility results in a
higher premium.

Q: What exactly can a trader learn from your trading classes?

A: I only take traders who are already trading in options and know the basics. I do not have to teach
them what call and put option. The second criteria are that they should have at least Rs 10 lakh as
trading capital. Since my trading style requires one to take multiple positions there has to be enough
capital to take the positions. I have trained around 90 people till date, some continue to trade while
others find it difficult to take 100 trades in a day.
 Overview

Manish Dewan can be considered the all-rounder of option sellers. He is as comfortable taking
directional trades as he is in taking non-directional ones. This Delhi-based full-time trader comes from a
business family, which is why he is so adept in taking advantage of every opportunity he sees.

Q: Coming from a business family, how did you choose the tough path of becoming a full-time trader?

A: My introduction to the market was near the peak of the technology boom in 2000. I had no idea of
the markets when I entered it. All I knew was the indices that I saw on TV. But as markets were
booming, making money was easy for even a rookie like me. When the dust settled after the crash, we
had wiped out nearly 98 percent of our capital. It was a reasonably sized capital, which could have
bought a decent sized real estate in those day. After my MBA and an 18-month stint with a portfolio
management services firm --PN Vijay Financials -- I worked for JM Financial as a trader. My job involved
acquiring high net-worth clients and making them trade through my trading strategies, which were non-
discretionary in nature. A non-discretionary account is one where the client is advised but the final call
rests with the client.

Later I joined a start-up founded by a South African investor who wanted to set-up a financial services
company in India. I was heading the equity broking part of the business. But the company had to close
down in a year’s time as the person had a huge trading position in global agricultural commodity
markets which took a big hit. By this time the markets were in the doldrums and jobs in the broking
industry were not sought after. I too was not keen on taking a marketing job anymore. I decided to
enroll for a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) course and trade using my savings.

Q: How did you convert to an option seller then?

A: I then tried selling options using various strategies like Iron Condor or Butterflies. There were times I
was making money, but a loss would take away the profit of 2-3 trades. I attended a class on options by
Santosh Pasi. Here I gained a much better understanding of volatility as well as using different strategies
in different market conditions, how to manage a trade when it moves against your position as well as
position sizing. For the next two months, I observed if the learning’s were actually translating into
profits.

After I gained confidence, I started ramping up my trading size aggressively. I do not take decisions
looking at Option Greeks. My decision depends on how I expect the stock to behave going forward,
whether it will be range bound or directional. I am also taking more directional trades rather than non-
direction ones, which option writers generally do. Even in a neutral trade, if I spot an opportunity I
include a directional bias.
Q: Take us through the way you trade?

A: I trade using multiple strategies, but deploy a Bank Nifty strangle every week. These I exit when the
price reaches 80-85 percent of my profit target. I prefer to exit these trades a day before expiry, so that I
have room left (margin) to trade on expiry day. In the case of stocks, I compulsorily look at charts and
employ an options strategy depending on what the charts tell me. In technical analysis, I mainly use
Relative Strength Index (RSI), moving averages, Fibonacci and Elliot Waves to arrive at a conclusion.

Expiry day is the most important trading day for me. On other days, I am a seller of out-of-money (OTM)
options, but on expiry day I trade at-the-money contracts (ATM). On expiry day, I deploy capital more in
directional trades rather than non-directional ones (most traders deploy non-directional strategies on
expiry day). On this day, volatility is generally high and the bulk of premium is in ATM contracts, so I shift
from strangles to straddles.

After establishing a straddle I wait for the market to make a move on either side, off-late it is on the
lower side. I move my position in sync with the market move. If it is trending lower, I will aggressively
sell call options and cut my put position that was initiated when a straddle was established. So, from a
non-directional position, I have now moved to a directional trade. Around 2.30 pm I start taking a
position on the opposite side. I am now looking at the 3 min and 15 min charts. At 2.30 pm, I look for
probable areas where the market will not be breached. Say if the Bank Nifty has fallen by 350 points,
then I sell puts 100 points lower. But if it still continues to fall, then I employ a stop-loss of 50 percent of
the max profit of the option price while simultaneously selling more call options.
 Overview

Pran Katariya (@KatariyaPran) a chemical engineer from IIT Delhi, Katariya is also a chartered
accountant, a national level ranked table tennis player and loves his music, especially old Hindi movies.
He organises stage shows across the country under the name Klub Nostalgia which is also a very popular
channel on the YouTube. Besides this Katariya is a successful individual trader who trades large position,
managing his family money. He went to the US to be trained under the best.

Q: How did your trading journey start?

A: By 2005 I decided to go full time into trading. Even in those days there was a plan in my trading but
the psychology needed to execute was missing. I used to be shaken up by a series of losses. I then
realized that this was not working for me and I needed professional help. I went to the US and got
trained with the best. I enrolled for a course with SMB Capital founded by Mike Bellafiore author of One
Good Trade and The Playbook, for a structured program in trading. I also went through the course
offered by the famous Dr. Van Tharp. SMB has a very intensive and structured training program where
they take you through the entire trading process.

We worked from 6.00 in the morning to 9.30-10.00 pm every day. Those under training were attached
to one of the 6-7 super traders who were all multi-million dollar traders. Every morning the super
traders came up with a list of what was called ‘stock in play’. These were generally intraday or swing
trades which the traders held for 2-3 day. One day, during lunch Seth Freudberg who was heading the
options desk asked me if I had ever traded options.

I took to options more easily and learned many commonly used and proprietary strategies used by
traders in SMB Capital under the mentorship of Seth. Dr. Van Tharp’s training helped me with the
psychology aspect. For me one of the main takeaways was I knew what not to trade. These training
helped cut down my learning curve by at least 3-4 years.
 Trading Strategy
Q: After learning from the best, what is the strategy that you mainly trade?

A: I mainly trade an income generating strategy called Weirdor, it is also known as the Jeep strategy
because of the shape of the payoff diagram that represents a jeep.

If the Nifty is trading at say 10,600 I would sell 10 lots of every out of the money put, say the
9,600 put. For every 10 put I sell, I will buy 1 put that is slightly closer. So in this case I would buy
one 10,100 put. Then in order to make the trade delta neutral I would sell 2 call options which
can be around 11,100/11,200. I prefer this strategy over the strangle because the breakeven in
Weirdor is wider and a small move or day-to-day volatility in the market does not impact the
trade.

In case the Nifty falls by say 100 points all I have to do is buy one more put which would bring my
breakeven point lower by 100 points. If the delta is not getting adjusted or if the loss is double of the
reward then I would take the loss. In case the market moves higher, I would simply move the put side
higher and come out of the call options that were written earlier.

Q: What about other income strategies that you take?

A: I also trade strangles as part of the income strategy, but not on the weekly Bank Nifty. What I look for
is time to be on my side before I place a trade. I normally place my trade 40 days before expiry. When it
comes to options there is only one certainty – time decay. Volatility and price cannot be predicted so
you need time and distance to make adjustments to your trade. Wide distance between the call and put
options helps you keep your losses small even if there is a fast move.

Take the case of demonetisation which saw a 1,200 points move on the Nifty in a single day. My strangle
trade was 1,600 point wide. I had sold the put at 130 which I covered at 390 and the call option which
was sold at 90 went to zero. I booked a small loss and was comfortable in taking the loss. In such
situations, it is better to book your loss and stay out for a few days before taking the next trade. The
strangles that I trade is good for all implied volatility (IV) scenario. Many traders do not take strangle
trades in low IV scenario but I have found out and confirmed it from traders in the US that low IV
environment is more profitable.

I never wait till the end. I book my profit when I am getting 50-60 percent of the maximum profit
potential. I also get out of my position seven days before the expiry irrespective of the fact that
the trade is in profit or loss.

Normally, I do not take more than a 4 percent risk on a Nifty trade but in case of a Bank Nifty trade, I
would not exceed my risk by more than 2 percent. At any point in time I have not more than 7-8 trades
in the market and take about 15-16 trades in a month. Out of this, the win rate is generally 12-13 trades.
I normally take a trade with an 80% probability of winning.
 Overview

Jyoti Budhia (@jyotibudhia) has been exposed to the markets from an early age. She has been
trading conventional strategies for a long time but it was her discovery of using option premiums
unconventionally and adopting new risk management strategies that have made her a consistent trader.
Jyoti Budhia is also a professional trainer who has trained nearly 50,000 participants as part of NSE’s
training program in the last 12 years.

Q: You have been in the market from a very young age, can you walk us through your journey?

A: I have been in the market since the age of 12. My father was a sub-broker and I followed him in the
BSE trading ring back then. After college, I rushed back to the market. In those days, I was among the
few women in the ring, but despite the crowd in the ring, women were always treated very respectfully
in the ring. I was treated as a daughter by the seniors who also guided me in my initial learning. In 1991-
92, I started plotting technical charts under their guidance. They also taught me the nuances of
fundamental analysis. Equipped with this knowledge I traded in the markets. Since then, I have gone
through cycles of profit and loss. These losses are all part of the learning process. After every loss, I go
back to the drawing board and try to learn from it.

Trading Strategy

Q: How has your trading process evolved over the years?

A: I look out for flag patterns, rounding tops and bottoms, triangle breakout or breakdowns. I also look
for stocks near trendlines, support or resistance. After identifying stocks through this screening I then
use my proprietary strategy from trading these stocks. I use something that I call Jodi Bhav which is
nothing but the total of a straddle pair. (Straddle is an options strategy where the call and put option of
the same strike is either bought or sold).

I will explain this with a recent trade that I took. I was scanning through the charts and identified Tata
Motors DVR, which was showing a rounding top, had broken a trend line and its RSI (Relative Strength
Index) were below 30 suggesting weakness in the stock. Further, the price was below the expiry day
closing of Tata Motors DVR. For me, the expiry day closing is the pivot which I use for taking a long or
short position.
The expiry day closing of Tata Motors DVR was Rs 69.8, I added the price of call and put off 70 strike
options which were Rs 8.7. I reduced 8.7 from the expiry price which gave me a figure of 61.1, this was
my target for the stock if it falls. I bought a 60 strike put which was available at Re 1. The stock fell to 61
in four days and my put was trading at 2.40. I booked half my profit at that level.

At this point, the 55 put was available at Re 1. I wrote that put to lock my profit. If the price fell till 55 in
the coming days I would make incremental money on the trade, but if it moves up I would not lose as
the written option (55 Put) would depreciate and save my capital. I use this strategy very frequently. By
scanning, I get around 2-4 trades in a week, which is good enough for me.

The other trade I took last week was in Reliance where I created a spread strategy by buying 1200 put
and selling 1160 put. The stock was trading below the expiry price and was trading at around 1230 when
I entered the trade. The trade cost me Rs 13 when I entered. The 1240 strike Jodi Bhav was 73, which
gave me a price target of 1157. I created the spread with a target price of 1160 in mind. The price on
Thursday had touched 1157.

Titan and Aurobindo Pharma were the other trade that I took. While Titan has been good Aurobindo
Pharma has not moved much. My success rate is around 60-70 percent over the last few years. The key
aspect of my trading is the use of Jodi Bhav as a tool for calculating support and resistance levels. Take
Nifty of instance. Its expiry last month was 11250 and it's Jodi Bhav was 337. This gave me a support
level of 10913. The market touched my level on Thursday.

Q: What about exits?

A: For me, the expiry day close which is a pivot also acts as a stop loss. I will also exit if the chart turns
weak or strong depending on my position. I will exit my position in one of the three ways – either by
trailing, a complete exit either if stopped out or chart pattern does not agree to my position or I will lock
my position and let the profit run.

But under no condition do I trade without a hedge. If the trend is weak, I will short but buy a call option
against it. If the market is sideways I would prefer using an Iron Condor or an Iron Butterfly trade rather
than straddles or strangles. At any point I have only 3-4 positions as monitoring them is easy.

The risk-reward on my trades are never lower than 1:2 and have been generating 2-3 percent per month
consistently. Despite the drawdowns, the returns have been around 25-30 percent over the last few
years.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 Theodora. I don’t see that it is a bad word.
Pulcheria. It may be good German, but it is poor English.
Theodora. It is not German at all; it is Latin. So, my dear!
Pulcheria. As I say, then, it is not English.
Theodora. This is the first time I ever heard that George Eliot’s style was
bad!
Constantius. It is admirable; it has the most delightful and the most
intellectually comfortable suggestions. But it is occasionally a little too
long-sleeved, as I may say. It is sometimes too loose a fit for the thought, a
little baggy.
Theodora. And the advice he gives Gwendolen, the things he says to her,
they are the very essence of wisdom, of warm human wisdom, knowing life
and feeling it. “Keep your fear as a safeguard, it may make consequences
passionately present to you.” What can be better than that?
Pulcheria. Nothing, perhaps. But what can be drearier than a novel in
which the function of the hero—young, handsome and brilliant—is to give
didactic advice, in a proverbial form, to the young, beautiful and brilliant
heroine?
Constantius. That is not putting it quite fairly. The function of Deronda
is to make Gwendolen fall in love with him, to say nothing of falling in love
himself with Mirah.
Pulcheria. Yes, the less said about that the better. All we know about
Mirah is that she has delicate rings of hair, sits with her feet crossed, and
talks like an article in a new magazine.
Constantius. Deronda’s function of adviser to Gwendolen does not strike
me as so ridiculous. He is not nearly so ridiculous as if he were lovesick. It
is a very interesting situation—that of a man with whom a beautiful woman
in trouble falls in love and yet whose affections are so preoccupied that the
most he can do for her in return is to enter kindly and sympathetically into
her position, pity her and talk to her. George Eliot always gives us
something that is strikingly and ironically characteristic of human life; and
what savours more of the essential crookedness of our fate than the sad
cross-purposes of these two young people? Poor Gwendolen’s falling in
love with Deronda is part of her own luckless history, not of his.
 Theodora. I do think he takes it to himself rather too little. No man had
ever so little vanity.
Pulcheria. It is very inconsistent, therefore, as well as being extremely
impertinent and ill-mannered, his buying back and sending to her her
necklace at Leubronn.
Constantius. Oh, you must concede that; without it there would have
been no story. A man writing of him, however, would certainly have made
him more peccable. As George Eliot lets herself go, in that quarter, she
becomes delightfully, almost touchingly, feminine. It is like her making
Romola go to housekeeping with Tessa, after Tito Melema’s death; like her
making Dorothea marry Will Ladislaw. If Dorothea had married any one
after her misadventure with Casaubon, she would have married a trooper.
Theodora. Perhaps some day Gwendolen will marry Rex.
Pulcheria. Pray, who is Rex?
Theodora. Why, Pulcheria, how can you forget?
Pulcheria. Nay, how can I remember? But I recall such a name in the
dim antiquity of the first or second book. Yes, and then he is pushed to the
front again at the last, just in time not to miss the falling of the curtain.
Gwendolen will certainly not have the audacity to marry any one we know
so little about.
Constantius. I have been wanting to say that there seems to me to be two
very distinct elements in George Eliot—a spontaneous one and an artificial
one. There is what she is by inspiration and what she is because it is
expected of her. These two heads have been very perceptible in her recent
writings; they are much less noticeable in her early ones.
Theodora. You mean that she is too scientific? So long as she remains
the great literary genius that she is, how can she be too scientific? She is
simply permeated with the highest culture of the age.
Pulcheria. She talks too much about the “dynamic quality” of people’s
eyes. When she uses such a phrase as that in the first sentence in her book
she is not a great literary genius, because she shows a want of tact. There
can’t be a worse limitation.
Constantius. The “dynamic quality” of Gwendolen’s glance has made
the tour of the world.
 Theodora. It shows a very low level of culture on the world’s part to be
agitated by a term perfectly familiar to all decently-educated people.
Pulcheria. I don’t pretend to be decently educated; pray tell me what it
means.
Constantius (promptly). I think Pulcheria has hit it in speaking of a want
of tact. In the manner of the book, throughout, there is something that one
may call a want of tact. The epigraphs in verse are a want of tact; they are
sometimes, I think, a trifle more pretentious than really pregnant; the
importunity of the moral reflections is a want of tact; the very diffuseness is
a want of tact. But it comes back to what I said just now about one’s sense
of the author writing under a sort of external pressure. I began to notice it in
Felix Holt; I don’t think I had before. She strikes me as a person who
certainly has naturally a taste for general considerations, but who has fallen
upon an age and a circle which have compelled her to give them an
exaggerated attention. She does not strike me as naturally a critic, less still
as naturally a sceptic; her spontaneous part is to observe life and to feel it,
to feel it with admirable depth. Contemplation, sympathy and faith—
something like that, I should say, would have been her natural scale. If she
had fallen upon an age of enthusiastic assent to old articles of faith, it seems
to me possible that she would have had a more perfect, a more consistent
and graceful development, than she has actually had. If she had cast herself
into such a current—her genius being equal—it might have carried her to
splendid distances. But she has chosen to go into criticism, and to the critics
she addresses her work; I mean the critics of the universe. Instead of feeling
life itself, it is “views” upon life that she tries to feel.
Pulcheria. She is the victim of a first-class education. I am so glad!
Constantius. Thanks to her admirable intellect she philosophises very
sufficiently; but meanwhile she has given a chill to her genius. She has
come near spoiling an artist.
Pulcheria. She has quite spoiled one. Or rather I shouldn’t say that,
because there was no artist to spoil. I maintain that she is not an artist. An
artist could never have put a story together so monstrously ill. She has no
sense of form.
Theodora. Pray, what could be more artistic than the way that Deronda’s
paternity is concealed till almost the end, and the way we are made to
suppose Sir Hugo is his father?
 Pulcheria. And Mirah his sister. How does that fit together? I was as
little made to suppose he was not a Jew as I cared when I found out he was.
And his mother popping up through a trap-door and popping down again, at
the last, in that scrambling fashion! His mother is very bad.
Constantius. I think Deronda’s mother is one of the unvivified
characters; she belongs to the cold half of the book. All the Jewish part is at
bottom cold; that is my only objection. I have enjoyed it because my fancy
often warms cold things; but beside Gwendolen’s history it is like the empty
half of the lunar disk beside the full one. It is admirably studied, it is
imagined, it is understood, but it is not embodied. One feels this strongly in
just those scenes between Deronda and his mother; one feels that one has
been appealed to on rather an artificial ground of interest. To make
Deronda’s reversion to his native faith more dramatic and profound, the
author has given him a mother who on very arbitrary grounds, apparently,
has separated herself from this same faith and who has been kept waiting in
the wing, as it were, for many acts, to come on and make her speech and
say so. This moral situation of hers we are invited retrospectively to
appreciate. But we hardly care to do so.
Pulcheria. I don’t see the princess, in spite of her flame-coloured robe.
Why should an actress and prima-donna care so much about religious
matters?
Theodora. It was not only that; it was the Jewish race she hated, Jewish
manners and looks. You, my dear, ought to understand that.
Pulcheria. I do, but I am not a Jewish actress of genius; I am not what
Rachel was. If I were I should have other things to think about.
Constantius. Think now a little about poor Gwendolen.
Pulcheria. I don’t care to think about her. She was a second-rate English
girl who got into a flutter about a lord.
Theodora. I don’t see that she is worse than if she were a first-rate
American girl who should get into exactly the same flutter.
Pulcheria. It wouldn’t be the same flutter at all; it wouldn’t be any
flutter. She wouldn’t be afraid of the lord, though she might be amused at
him.
Theodora. I am sure I don’t perceive whom Gwendolen was afraid of.
She was afraid of her misdeed—her broken promise—after she had
committed it, and through that fear she was afraid of her husband. Well she
might be! I can imagine nothing more vivid than the sense we get of his
absolutely clammy selfishness.
Pulcheria. She was not afraid of Deronda when, immediately after her
marriage and without any but the most casual acquaintance with him, she
begins to hover about him at the Mallingers’ and to drop little confidences
about her conjugal woes. That seems to me very indelicate; ask any woman.
Constantius. The very purpose of the author is to give us an idea of the
sort of confidence that Deronda inspired—its irresistible potency.
Pulcheria. A lay father-confessor—horrid!
Constantius. And to give us an idea also of the acuteness of Gwendolen’s
depression, of her haunting sense of impending trouble.
Theodora. It must be remembered that Gwendolen was in love with
Deronda from the first, long before she knew it. She didn’t know it, poor
girl, but that was it.
Pulcheria. That makes the matter worse. It is very disagreeable to see
her hovering and rustling about a man who is indifferent to her.
Theodora. He was not indifferent to her, since he sent her back her
necklace.
Pulcheria. Of all the delicate attention to a charming girl that I ever
heard of, that little pecuniary transaction is the most felicitous.
Constantius. You must remember that he had been en rapport with her at
the gaming-table. She had been playing in defiance of his observation, and
he, continuing to observe her, had been in a measure responsible for her
loss. There was a tacit consciousness of this between them. You may contest
the possibility of tacit consciousness going so far, but that is not a serious
objection. You may point out two or three weak spots in detail; the fact
remains that Gwendolen’s whole history is vividly told. And see how the
girl is known, inside out, how thoroughly she is felt and understood. It is the
most intelligent thing in all George Eliot’s writing, and that is saying much.
It is so deep, so true, so complete, it holds such a wealth of psychological
detail, it is more than masterly.
Theodora. I don’t know where the perception of character has sailed
closer to the wind.
Pulcheria. The portrait may be admirable, but it has one little fault. You
don’t care a straw for the original. Gwendolen is not an interesting girl, and
when the author tries to invest her with a deep tragic interest she does so at
the expense of consistency. She has made her at the outset too light, too
flimsy; tragedy has no hold on such a girl.
Theodora. You are hard to satisfy. You said this morning that Dorothea
was too heavy, and now you find Gwendolen too light. George Eliot wished
to give us the perfect counterpart of Dorothea. Having made one portrait
she was worthy to make the other.
Pulcheria. She has committed the fatal error of making Gwendolen
vulgarly, pettily, drily selfish. She was personally selfish.
Theodora. I know nothing more personal than selfishness.
Pulcheria. I am selfish, but I don’t go about with my chin out like that;
at least I hope I don’t. She was an odious young woman, and one can’t care
what becomes of her. When her marriage turned out ill she would have
become still more hard and positive; to make her soft and appealing is very
bad logic. The second Gwendolen doesn’t belong to the first.
Constantius. She is perhaps at the first a little childish for the weight of
interest she has to carry, a little too much after the pattern of the
unconscientious young ladies of Miss Yonge and Miss Sewell.
Theodora. Since when it is forbidden to make one’s heroine young?
Gwendolen is a perfect picture of youthfulness—its eagerness, its
presumption, its preoccupation with itself, its vanity and silliness, its sense
of its own absoluteness. But she is extremely intelligent and clever, and
therefore tragedy can have a hold upon her. Her conscience doesn’t make
the tragedy; that is an old story and, I think, a secondary form of suffering.
It is the tragedy that makes her conscience, which then reacts upon it; and I
can think of nothing more powerful than the way in which the growth of her
conscience is traced, nothing more touching than the picture of its helpless
maturity.
Constantius. That is perfectly true. Gwendolen’s history is admirably
typical—as most things are with George Eliot: it is the very stuff that
human life is made of. What is it made of but the discovery by each of us
that we are at the best but a rather ridiculous fifth wheel to the coach, after
we have sat cracking our whip and believing that we are at least the
coachman in person? We think we are the main hoop to the barrel, and we
turn out to be but a very incidental splinter in one of the staves. The
universe forcing itself with a slow, inexorable pressure into a narrow,
complacent, and yet after all extremely sensitive mind, and making it ache
with the pain of the process—that is Gwendolen’s story. And it becomes
completely characteristic in that her supreme perception of the fact that the
world is whirling past her is in the disappointment not of a base but of an
exalted passion. The very chance to embrace what the author is so fond of
calling a “larger life” seems refused to her. She is punished for being
narrow, and she is not allowed a chance to expand. Her finding Deronda
pre-engaged to go to the East and stir up the race-feeling of the Jews strikes
me as a wonderfully happy invention. The irony of the situation, for poor
Gwendolen, is almost grotesque, and it makes one wonder whether the
whole heavy structure of the Jewish question in the story was not built up
by the author for the express purpose of giving its proper force to this
particular stroke.
Theodora. George Eliot’s intentions are extremely complex. The mass is
for each detail and each detail is for the mass.
Pulcheria. She is very fond of deaths by drowning. Maggie Tulliver and
her brother are drowned, Tito Melema is drowned, Mr. Grandcourt is
drowned. It is extremely unlikely that Grandcourt should not have known
how to swim.
Constantius. He did, of course, but he had a cramp. It served him right. I
can’t imagine a more consummate representation of the most detestable
kind of Englishman—the Englishman who thinks it low to articulate. And
in Grandcourt the type and the individual are so happily met: the type with
its sense of the proprieties and the individual with his absence of all sense.
He is the apotheosis of dryness, a human expression of the simple idea of
the perpendicular.
Theodora. Mr. Casaubon, in Middlemarch, was very dry too; and yet
what a genius it is that can give us two disagreeable husbands who are so
utterly different!
Pulcheria. You must count the two disagreeable wives too—Rosamond
Vincy and Gwendolen. They are very much alike. I know the author didn’t
mean it; it proves how common a type the worldly, pincée, selfish young
woman seemed to her. They are both disagreeable; you can’t get over that.
Constantius. There is something in that, perhaps. I think, at any rate, that
the secondary people here are less delightful than in Middlemarch; there is
nothing so good as Mary Garth and her father, or the little old lady who
steals sugar, or the parson who is in love with Mary, or the country relatives
of old Mr. Featherstone. Rex Gascoigne is not so good as Fred Vincy.
Theodora. Mr. Gascoigne is admirable, and Mrs. Davilow is charming.
Pulcheria. And you must not forget that you think Herr Klesmer
“Shakespearean.” Wouldn’t “Wagnerian” be high enough praise?
Constantius. Yes, one must make an exception with regard to the
Klesmers and the Meyricks. They are delightful, and as for Klesmer
himself, and Hans Meyrick, Theodora may maintain her epithet.
Shakespearean characters are characters that are born of the overflow of
observation—characters that make the drama seem multitudinous, like life.
Klesmer comes in with a sort of Shakespearean “value,” as a painter would
say, and so, in a different tone, does Hans Meyrick. They spring from a
much-peopled mind.
Theodora. I think Gwendolen’s confrontation with Klesmer one of the
finest things in the book.
Constantius. It is like everything in George Eliot; it will bear thinking of.
Pulcheria. All that is very fine, but you cannot persuade me that
Deronda is not a very ponderous and ill-made story. It has nothing that one
can call a subject. A silly young girl and a solemn, sapient young man who
doesn’t fall in love with her! That is the donnée of eight monthly volumes. I
call it very flat. Is that what the exquisite art of Thackeray and Miss Austen
and Hawthorne has come to? I would as soon read a German novel outright.
Theodora. There is something higher than form—there is spirit.
Constantius. I am afraid Pulcheria is sadly æsthetic. She had better
confine herself to Mérimée.
Pulcheria. I shall certainly to-day read over La Double Méprise.
Theodora. Oh, my dear, y pensez-vous?
Constantius. Yes, I think there is little art in Deronda, but I think there is
a vast amount of life. In life without art you can find your account; but art
without life is a poor affair. The book is full of the world.
Theodora. It is full of beauty and knowledge, and that is quite art enough
for me.
Pulcheria (to the little dog). We are silenced, darling, but we are not
convinced, are we? (The pug begins to bark.) No, we are not even silenced.
It’s a young woman with two bandboxes.
Theodora. Oh, it must be our muslins.
Constantius (rising to go). I see what you mean!
1876.
 IV

ANTHONY TROLLOPE
When, a few months ago, Anthony Trollope laid down his pen for the last
time, it was a sign of the complete extinction of that group of admirable
writers who, in England, during the preceding half century, had done so
much to elevate the art of the novelist. The author of The Warden, of
Barchester Towers, of Framley Parsonage, does not, to our mind, stand on
the very same level as Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot; for his talent
was of a quality less fine than theirs. But he belonged to the same family—
he had as much to tell us about English life; he was strong, genial and
abundant. He published too much; the writing of novels had ended by
becoming, with him, a perceptibly mechanical process. Dickens was
prolific, Thackeray produced with a freedom for which we are constantly
grateful; but we feel that these writers had their periods of gestation. They
took more time to look at their subject; relatively (for to-day there is not
much leisure, at best, for those who undertake to entertain a hungry public),
they were able to wait for inspiration. Trollope’s fecundity was prodigious;
there was no limit to the work he was ready to do. It is not unjust to say that
he sacrificed quality to quantity. Abundance, certainly, is in itself a great
merit; almost all the greatest writers have been abundant. But Trollope’s
fertility was gross, importunate; he himself contended, we believe, that he
had given to the world a greater number of printed pages of fiction than any
of his literary contemporaries. Not only did his novels follow each other
without visible intermission, overlapping and treading on each other’s
heels, but most of these works are of extraordinary length. Orley Farm, Can
You Forgive Her?, He Knew He Was Right, are exceedingly voluminous
tales. The Way We Live Now is one of the longest of modern novels.
Trollope produced, moreover, in the intervals of larger labour a great
number of short stories, many of them charming, as well as various books
of travel, and two or three biographies. He was the great improvvisatore of
these latter years. Two distinguished story-tellers of the other sex—one in
France and one in England—have shown an extraordinary facility of
composition; but Trollope’s pace was brisker even than that of the
wonderful Madame Sand and the delightful Mrs. Oliphant. He had taught
himself to keep this pace, and had reduced his admirable faculty to a
system. Every day of his life he wrote a certain number of pages of his
current tale, a number sacramental and invariable, independent of mood and
place. It was once the fortune of the author of these lines to cross the
Atlantic in his company, and he has never forgotten the magnificent
example of plain persistence that it was in the power of the eminent novelist
to give on that occasion. The season was unpropitious, the vessel
overcrowded, the voyage detestable; but Trollope shut himself up in his
cabin every morning for a purpose which, on the part of a distinguished
writer who was also an invulnerable sailor, could only be communion with
the muse. He drove his pen as steadily on the tumbling ocean as in
Montague Square; and as his voyages were many, it was his practice before
sailing to come down to the ship and confer with the carpenter, who was
instructed to rig up a rough writing-table in his small sea-chamber. Trollope
has been accused of being deficient in imagination, but in the face of such a
fact as that the charge will scarcely seem just. The power to shut one’s eyes,
one’s ears (to say nothing of another sense), upon the scenery of a pitching
Cunarder and open them upon the loves and sorrows of Lily Dale or the
conjugal embarrassments of Lady Glencora Palliser, is certainly a faculty
which could take to itself wings. The imagination that Trollope possessed
he had at least thoroughly at his command. I speak of all this in order to
explain (in part) why it was that, with his extraordinary gift, there was
always in him a certain infusion of the common. He abused his gift,
overworked it, rode his horse too hard. As an artist he never took himself
seriously; many people will say this was why he was so delightful. The
people who take themselves seriously are prigs and bores; and Trollope,
with his perpetual “story,” which was the only thing he cared about, his
strong good sense, hearty good nature, generous appreciation of life in all
its varieties, responds in perfection to a certain English ideal. According to
that ideal it is rather dangerous to be explicitly or consciously an artist—to
have a system, a doctrine, a form. Trollope, from the first, went in, as they
say, for having as little form as possible; it is probably safe to affirm that he
had no “views” whatever on the subject of novel-writing. His whole manner
is that of a man who regards the practice as one of the more delicate
industries, but has never troubled his head nor clogged his pen with theories
about the nature of his business. Fortunately he was not obliged to do so,
for he had an easy road to success; and his honest, familiar, deliberate way
of treating his readers as if he were one of them, and shared their
indifference to a general view, their limitations of knowledge, their love of a
comfortable ending, endeared him to many persons in England and
America. It is in the name of some chosen form that, of late years, things
have been made most disagreeable for the novel-reader, who has been
treated by several votaries of the new experiments in fiction to unwonted
and bewildering sensations. With Trollope we were always safe; there were
sure to be no new experiments.
His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual.
This gift is not rare in the annals of English fiction; it would naturally be
found in a walk of literature in which the feminine mind has laboured so
fruitfully. Women are delicate and patient observers; they hold their noses
close, as it were, to the texture of life. They feel and perceive the real with a
kind of personal tact, and their observations are recorded in a thousand
delightful volumes. Trollope, therefore, with his eyes comfortably fixed on
the familiar, the actual, was far from having invented a new category; his
great distinction is that in resting there his vision took in so much of the
field. And then he felt all daily and immediate things as well as saw them;
felt them in a simple, direct, salubrious way, with their sadness, their
gladness, their charm, their comicality, all their obvious and measurable
meanings. He never wearied of the pre-established round of English
customs—never needed a respite or a change—was content to go on
indefinitely watching the life that surrounded him, and holding up his
mirror to it. Into this mirror the public, at first especially, grew very fond of
looking—for it saw itself reflected in all the most credible and supposable
ways, with that curiosity that people feel to know how they look when they
are represented, “just as they are,” by a painter who does not desire to put
them into an attitude, to drape them for an effect, to arrange his light and his
accessories. This exact and on the whole becoming image, projected upon a
surface without a strong intrinsic tone, constitutes mainly the entertainment
that Trollope offered his readers. The striking thing to the critic was that his
robust and patient mind had no particular bias, his imagination no light of
its own. He saw things neither pictorially and grotesquely like Dickens; nor
with that combined disposition to satire and to literary form which gives
such “body,” as they say of wine, to the manner of Thackeray; nor with
anything of the philosophic, the transcendental cast—the desire to follow
them to their remote relations—which we associate with the name of
George Eliot. Trollope had his elements of fancy, of satire, of irony; but
these qualities were not very highly developed, and he walked mainly by
the light of his good sense, his clear, direct vision of the things that lay
nearest, and his great natural kindness. There is something remarkably
tender and friendly in his feeling about all human perplexities; he takes the
good-natured, temperate, conciliatory view—the humorous view, perhaps,
for the most part, yet without a touch of pessimistic prejudice. As he grew
older, and had sometimes to go farther afield for his subjects, he acquired a
savour of bitterness and reconciled himself sturdily to treating of the
disagreeable. A more copious record of disagreeable matters could scarcely
be imagined, for instance, than The Way We Live Now. But, in general, he
has a wholesome mistrust of morbid analysis, an aversion to inflicting pain.
He has an infinite love of detail, but his details are, for the most part, the
innumerable items of the expected. When the French are disposed to pay a
compliment to the English mind they are so good as to say that there is in it
something remarkably honnête. If I might borrow this epithet without
seeming to be patronising, I should apply it to the genius of Anthony
Trollope. He represents in an eminent degree this natural decorum of the
English spirit, and represents it all the better that there is not in him a grain
of the mawkish or the prudish. He writes, he feels, he judges like a man,
talking plainly and frankly about many things, and is by no means destitute
of a certain saving grace of coarseness. But he has kept the purity of his
imagination and held fast to old-fashioned reverences and preferences. He
thinks it a sufficient objection to several topics to say simply that they are
unclean. There was nothing in his theory of the story-teller’s art that tended
to convert the reader’s or the writer’s mind into a vessel for polluting
things. He recognised the right of the vessel to protest, and would have
regarded such a protest as conclusive. With a considerable turn for satire,
though this perhaps is more evident in his early novels than in his later
ones, he had as little as possible of the quality of irony. He never played
with a subject, never juggled with the sympathies or the credulity of his
reader, was never in the least paradoxical or mystifying. He sat down to his
theme in a serious, business-like way, with his elbows on the table and his
eye occasionally wandering to the clock.
To touch successively upon these points is to attempt a portrait, which I
shall perhaps not altogether have failed to produce. The source of his
success in describing the life that lay nearest to him, and describing it
without any of those artistic perversions that come, as we have said, from a
powerful imagination, from a cynical humour or from a desire to look, as
George Eliot expresses it, for the suppressed transitions that unite all
contrasts, the essence of this love of reality was his extreme interest in
character. This is the fine and admirable quality in Trollope, this is what
will preserve his best works in spite of those flatnesses which keep him
from standing on quite the same level as the masters. Indeed this quality is
so much one of the finest (to my mind at least), that it makes me wonder the
more that the writer who had it so abundantly and so naturally should not
have just that distinction which Trollope lacks, and which we find in his
three brilliant contemporaries. If he was in any degree a man of genius (and
I hold that he was), it was in virtue of this happy, instinctive perception of
human varieties. His knowledge of the stuff we are made of, his observation
of the common behaviour of men and women, was not reasoned nor
acquired, not even particularly studied. All human doings deeply interested
him, human life, to his mind, was a perpetual story; but he never attempted
to take the so-called scientific view, the view which has lately found
ingenious advocates among the countrymen and successors of Balzac. He
had no airs of being able to tell you why people in a given situation would
conduct themselves in a particular way; it was enough for him that he felt
their feelings and struck the right note, because he had, as it were, a good
ear. If he was a knowing psychologist he was so by grace; he was just and
true without apparatus and without effort. He must have had a great taste for
the moral question; he evidently believed that this is the basis of the interest
of fiction. We must be careful, of course, in attributing convictions and
opinions to Trollope, who, as I have said, had as little as possible of the
pedantry of his art, and whose occasional chance utterances in regard to the
object of the novelist and his means of achieving it are of an almost
startling simplicity. But we certainly do not go too far in saying that he gave
his practical testimony in favour of the idea that the interest of a work of
fiction is great in proportion as the people stand on their feet. His great
effort was evidently to make them stand so; if he achieved this result with
as little as possible of a flourish of the hand it was nevertheless the measure
of his success. If he had taken sides on the droll, bemuddled opposition
between novels of character and novels of plot, I can imagine him to have
said (except that he never expressed himself in epigrams), that he preferred
the former class, inasmuch as character in itself is plot, while plot is by no
means character. It is more safe indeed to believe that his great good sense
would have prevented him from taking an idle controversy seriously.
Character, in any sense in which we can get at it, is action, and action is
plot, and any plot which hangs together, even if it pretend to interest us only
in the fashion of a Chinese puzzle, plays upon our emotion, our suspense,
by means of personal references. We care what happens to people only in
proportion as we know what people are. Trollope’s great apprehension of
the real, which was what made him so interesting, came to him through his
desire to satisfy us on this point—to tell us what certain people were and
what they did in consequence of being so. That is the purpose of each of his
tales; and if these things produce an illusion it comes from the gradual
abundance of his testimony as to the temper, the tone, the passions, the
habits, the moral nature, of a certain number of contemporary Britons.
His stories, in spite of their great length, deal very little in the surprising,
the exceptional, the complicated; as a general thing he has no great story to
tell. The thing is not so much a story as a picture; if we hesitate to call it a
picture it is because the idea of composition is not the controlling one and
we feel that the author would regard the artistic, in general, as a kind of
affectation. There is not even much description, in the sense which the
present votaries of realism in France attach to that word. The painter lays
his scene in a few deliberate, not especially pictorial strokes, and never
dreams of finishing the piece for the sake of enabling the reader to hang it
up. The finish, such as it is, comes later, from the slow and somewhat
clumsy accumulation of small illustrations. These illustrations are
sometimes of the commonest; Trollope turns them out inexhaustibly,
repeats them freely, unfolds them without haste and without rest. But they
are all of the most obvious sort, and they are none the worse for that. The
point to be made is that they have no great spectacular interest (we beg
pardon of the innumerable love-affairs that Trollope has described), like
many of the incidents, say, of Walter Scott and of Alexandre Dumas: if we
care to know about them (as repetitions of a usual case), it is because the
writer has managed, in his candid, literal, somewhat lumbering way, to tell
us that about the men and women concerned which has already excited on
their behalf the impression of life. It is a marvel by what homely arts, by
what imperturbable button-holing persistence, he contrives to excite this
impression. Take, for example, such a work as The Vicar of Bullhampton. It
would be difficult to state the idea of this slow but excellent story, which is
a capital example of interest produced by the quietest conceivable means.
The principal persons in it are a lively, jovial, high-tempered country
clergyman, a young woman who is in love with her cousin, and a small,
rather dull squire who is in love with the young woman. There is no
connection between the affairs of the clergyman and those of the two other
persons, save that these two are the Vicar’s friends. The Vicar gives
countenance, for Christian charity’s sake, to a young countryman who is
suspected (falsely, as it appears), of murder, and also to the lad’s sister, who
is more than suspected of leading an immoral life. Various people are
shocked at his indiscretion, but in the end he is shown to have been no
worse a clergyman because he is a good fellow. A cantankerous nobleman,
who has a spite against him, causes a Methodist conventicle to be erected at
the gates of the vicarage; but afterward, finding that he has no title to the
land used for this obnoxious purpose, causes the conventicle to be pulled
down, and is reconciled with the parson, who accepts an invitation to stay at
the castle. Mary Lowther, the heroine of The Vicar of Bullhampton, is
sought in marriage by Mr. Harry Gilmore, to whose passion she is unable to
respond; she accepts him, however, making him understand that she does
not love him, and that her affections are fixed upon her kinsman, Captain
Marrable, whom she would marry (and who would marry her), if he were
not too poor to support a wife. If Mr. Gilmore will take her on these terms
she will become his spouse; but she gives him all sorts of warnings. They
are not superfluous; for, as Captain Marrable presently inherits a fortune,
she throws over Mr. Gilmore, who retires to foreign lands, heart-broken,
inconsolable. This is the substance of The Vicar of Bullhampton; the reader
will see that it is not a very tangled skein. But if the interest is gradual it is
extreme and constant, and it comes altogether from excellent portraiture. It
is essentially a moral, a social interest. There is something masterly in the
large-fisted grip with which, in work of this kind, Trollope handles his
brush. The Vicar’s nature is thoroughly analysed and rendered, and his
monotonous friend the Squire, a man with limitations, but possessed and
consumed by a genuine passion, is equally near the truth.
Trollope has described again and again the ravages of love, and it is
wonderful to see how well, in these delicate matters, his plain good sense
and good taste serve him. His story is always primarily a love-story, and a
love-story constructed on an inveterate system. There is a young lady who
has two lovers, or a young man who has two sweethearts; we are treated to
the innumerable forms in which this predicament may present itself and the
consequences, sometimes pathetic, sometimes grotesque, which spring from
such false situations. Trollope is not what is called a colourist; still less is he
a poet: he is seated on the back of heavy-footed prose. But his account of
those sentiments which the poets are supposed to have made their own is
apt to be as touching as demonstrations more lyrical. There is something
wonderfully vivid in the state of mind of the unfortunate Harry Gilmore, of
whom I have just spoken; and his history, which has no more pretensions to
style than if it were cut out of yesterday’s newspaper, lodges itself in the
imagination in all sorts of classic company. He is not handsome, nor clever,
nor rich, nor romantic, nor distinguished in any way; he is simply rather a
dense, narrow-minded, stiff, obstinate, common-place, conscientious
modern Englishman, exceedingly in love and, from his own point of view,
exceedingly ill-used. He is interesting because he suffers and because we
are curious to see the form that suffering will take in that particular nature.
Our good fortune, with Trollope, is that the person put before us will have,
in spite of opportunities not to have it, a certain particular nature. The
author has cared enough about the character of such a person to find out
exactly what it is. Another particular nature in The Vicar of Bullhampton is
the surly, sturdy, sceptical old farmer Jacob Brattle, who doesn’t want to be
patronised by the parson, and in his dumb, dusky, half-brutal, half-spiritual
melancholy, surrounded by domestic troubles, financial embarrassments
and a puzzling world, declines altogether to be won over to clerical
optimism. Such a figure as Jacob Brattle, purely episodical though it be, is
an excellent English portrait. As thoroughly English, and the most striking
thing in the book, is the combination, in the nature of Frank Fenwick—the
delightful Vicar—of the patronising, conventional, clerical element with all
sorts of manliness and spontaneity; the union, or to a certain extent the
contradiction, of official and personal geniality. Trollope touches these
points in a way that shows that he knows his man. Delicacy is not his great
sign, but when it is necessary he can be as delicate as any one else.
I alighted, just now, at a venture, upon the history of Frank Fenwick; it is
far from being a conspicuous work in the immense list of Trollope’s novels.
But to choose an example one must choose arbitrarily, for examples of
almost anything that one may wish to say are numerous to embarrassment.
In speaking of a writer who produced so much and produced always in the
same way, there is perhaps a certain unfairness in choosing at all. As no
work has higher pretensions than any other, there may be a certain
unkindness in holding an individual production up to the light. “Judge me in
the lump,” we can imagine the author saying; “I have only undertaken to
entertain the British public. I don’t pretend that each of my novels is an
organic whole.” Trollope had no time to give his tales a classic roundness;
yet there is (in spite of an extraordinary defect), something of that quality in
the thing that first revealed him. The Warden was published in 1855. It
made a great impression; and when, in 1857, Barchester Towers followed it,
every one saw that English literature had a novelist the more. These were
not the works of a young man, for Anthony Trollope had been born in 1815.
It is remarkable to reflect, by the way, that his prodigious fecundity (he had
published before The Warden three or four novels which attracted little
attention), was enclosed between his fortieth and his sixty-seventh years.
Trollope had lived long enough in the world to learn a good deal about it;
and his maturity of feeling and evidently large knowledge of English life
were for much in the effect produced by the two clerical tales. It was easy to
see that he would take up room. What he had picked up, to begin with, was
a comprehensive, various impression of the clergy of the Church of England
and the manners and feelings that prevail in cathedral towns. This, for a
while, was his speciality, and, as always happens in such cases, the public
was disposed to prescribe to him that path. He knew about bishops,
archdeacons, prebendaries, precentors, and about their wives and daughters;
he knew what these dignitaries say to each other when they are collected
together, aloof from secular ears. He even knew what sort of talk goes on
between a bishop and a bishop’s lady when the august couple are
enshrouded in the privacy of the episcopal bedroom. This knowledge,
somehow, was rare and precious. No one, as yet, had been bold enough to
snatch the illuminating torch from the very summit of the altar. Trollope
enlarged his field very speedily—there is, as I remember that work, as little
as possible of the ecclesiastical in the tale of The Three Clerks, which came
after Barchester Towers. But he always retained traces of his early
divination of the clergy; he introduced them frequently, and he always did
them easily and well. There is no ecclesiastical figure, however, so good as
the first—no creation of this sort so happy as the admirable Mr. Harding.
The Warden is a delightful tale, and a signal instance of Trollope’s habit of
offering us the spectacle of a character. A motive more delicate, more
slender, as well as more charming, could scarcely be conceived. It is simply
the history of an old man’s conscience.
The good and gentle Mr. Harding, precentor of Barchester Cathedral,
also holds the post of warden of Hiram’s Hospital, an ancient charity where
twelve old paupers are maintained in comfort. The office is in the gift of the
bishop, and its emoluments are as handsome as the duties of the place are
small. Mr. Harding has for years drawn his salary in quiet gratitude; but his
moral repose is broken by hearing it at last begun to be said that the
wardenship is a sinecure, that the salary is a scandal, and that a large part, at
least, of his easy income ought to go to the pensioners of the hospital. He is
sadly troubled and perplexed, and when the great London newspapers take
up the affair he is overwhelmed with confusion and shame. He thinks the
newspapers are right—he perceives that the warden is an overpaid and
rather a useless functionary. The only thing he can do is to resign the place.
He has no means of his own—he is only a quiet, modest, innocent old man,
with a taste, a passion, for old church-music and the violoncello. But he
determines to resign, and he does resign in spite of the sharp opposition of
his friends. He does what he thinks right, and goes to live in lodgings over a
shop in the Barchester High Street. That is all the story, and it has exceeding
beauty. The question of Mr. Harding’s resignation becomes a drama, and we
anxiously wait for the catastrophe. Trollope never did anything happier than
the picture of this sweet and serious little old gentleman, who on most of
the occasions of life has shown a lamblike softness and compliance, but in
this particular matter opposes a silent, impenetrable obstinacy to the
arguments of the friends who insist on his keeping his sinecure—fixing his
mild, detached gaze on the distance, and making imaginary passes with his
fiddle-bow while they demonstrate his pusillanimity. The subject of The
Warden, exactly viewed, is the opposition of the two natures of Archdeacon
Grantley and Mr. Harding, and there is nothing finer in all Trollope than the
vividness with which this opposition is presented. The archdeacon is as
happy a portrait as the precentor—an image of the full-fed, worldly
churchman, taking his stand squarely upon his rich temporalities, and
regarding the church frankly as a fat social pasturage. It required the
greatest tact and temperance to make the picture of Archdeacon Grantley
stop just where it does. The type, impartially considered, is detestable, but
the individual may be full of amenity. Trollope allows his archdeacon all the
virtues he was likely to possess, but he makes his spiritual grossness
wonderfully natural. No charge of exaggeration is possible, for we are made
to feel that he is conscientious as well as arrogant, and expansive as well as
hard. He is one of those figures that spring into being all at once, solidifying
in the author’s grasp. These two capital portraits are what we carry away
from The Warden, which some persons profess to regard as our writer’s
masterpiece. We remember, while it was still something of a novelty, to
have heard a judicious critic say that it had much of the charm of The Vicar
of Wakefield. Anthony Trollope would not have accepted the compliment,
and would not have wished this little tale to pass before several of its
successors. He would have said, very justly, that it gives too small a
measure of his knowledge of life. It has, however, a certain classic
roundness, though, as we said a moment since, there is a blemish on its fair
face. The chapter on Dr. Pessimist Anticant and Mr. Sentiment would be a
mistake almost inconceivable if Trollope had not in other places taken pains
to show us that for certain forms of satire (the more violent, doubtless), he
had absolutely no gift. Dr. Anticant is a parody of Carlyle, and Mr.
Sentiment is an exposure of Dickens: and both these little jeux d’esprit are
as infelicitous as they are misplaced. It was no less luckless an inspiration
to convert Archdeacon Grantley’s three sons, denominated respectively
Charles James, Henry and Samuel, into little effigies of three distinguished
English bishops of that period, whose well-known peculiarities are
reproduced in the description of these unnatural urchins. The whole
passage, as we meet it, is a sudden disillusionment; we are transported from
the mellow atmosphere of an assimilated Barchester to the air of ponderous
allegory.
I may take occasion to remark here upon a very curious fact—the fact
that there are certain precautions in the way of producing that illusion dear
to the intending novelist which Trollope not only habitually scorned to take,
but really, as we may say, asking pardon for the heat of the thing, delighted
wantonly to violate. He took a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader
that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe. He
habitually referred to the work in hand (in the course of that work) as a
novel, and to himself as a novelist, and was fond of letting the reader know
that this novelist could direct the course of events according to his pleasure.
Already, in Barchester Towers, he falls into this pernicious trick. In
describing the wooing of Eleanor Bold by Mr. Arabin he has occasion to
say that the lady might have acted in a much more direct and natural way
than the way he attributes to her. But if she had, he adds, “where would
have been my novel?” The last chapter of the same story begins with the
remark, “The end of a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner party, must
be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.” These little slaps at credulity
(we might give many more specimens) are very discouraging, but they are
even more inexplicable; for they are deliberately inartistic, even judged
from the point of view of that rather vague consideration of form which is
the only canon we have a right to impose upon Trollope. It is impossible to
imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regard himself as an
historian and his narrative as a history. It is only as an historian that he has
the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to
insert into his attempt a back-bone of logic, he must relate events that are
assumed to be real. This assumption permeates, animates all the work of the
most solid story-tellers; we need only mention (to select a single instance),
the magnificent historical tone of Balzac, who would as soon have thought
of admitting to the reader that he was deceiving him, as Garrick or John
Kemble would have thought of pulling off his disguise in front of the foot-
lights. Therefore, when Trollope suddenly winks at us and reminds us that
he is telling us an arbitrary thing, we are startled and shocked in quite the
same way as if Macaulay or Motley were to drop the historic mask and
intimate that William of Orange was a myth or the Duke of Alva an
invention.
It is a part of this same ambiguity of mind as to what constitutes
evidence that Trollope should sometimes endow his people with such
fantastic names. Dr. Pessimist Anticant and Mr. Sentiment make, as we
have seen, an awkward appearance in a modern novel; and Mr. Neversay
Die, Mr. Stickatit, Mr. Rerechild and Mr. Fillgrave (the two last the family
physicians), are scarcely more felicitous. It would be better to go back to
Bunyan at once. There is a person mentioned in The Warden under the name
of Mr. Quiverful—a poor clergyman, with a dozen children, who holds the
living of Puddingdale. This name is a humorous allusion to his overflowing
nursery, and it matters little so long as he is not brought to the front. But in
Barchester Towers, which carries on the history of Hiram’s Hospital, Mr.
Quiverful becomes, as a candidate for Mr. Harding’s vacant place, an
important element, and the reader is made proportionately unhappy by the
primitive character of this satiric note. A Mr. Quiverful with fourteen
children (which is the number attained in Barchester Towers) is too difficult
to believe in. We can believe in the name and we can believe in the
children; but we cannot manage the combination. It is probably not unfair to
say that if Trollope derived half his inspiration from life, he derived the
other half from Thackeray; his earlier novels, in especial, suggest an
honourable emulation of the author of The Newcomes. Thackeray’s names
were perfect; they always had a meaning, and (except in his absolutely
jocose productions, where they were still admirable) we can imagine, even
when they are most figurative, that they should have been borne by real
people. But in this, as in other respects, Trollope’s hand was heavier than
his master’s; though when he is content not to be too comical his
appellations are sometimes fortunate enough. Mrs. Proudie is excellent, for
Mrs. Proudie, and even the Duke of Omnium and Gatherum Castle rather
minister to illusion than destroy it. Indeed, the names of houses and places,
throughout Trollope, are full of colour.
I would speak in some detail of Barchester Towers if this did not seem to
commit me to the prodigious task of appreciating each of Trollope’s works
in succession. Such an attempt as that is so far from being possible that I
must frankly confess to not having read everything that proceeded from his
pen. There came a moment in his vigorous career (it was even a good many
years ago) when I renounced the effort to “keep up” with him. It ceased to
seem obligatory to have read his last story; it ceased soon to be very
possible to know which was his last. Before that, I had been punctual,
devoted; and the memories of the earlier period are delightful. It reached, if
I remember correctly, to about the publication of He Knew He Was Right;
after which, to my recollection (oddly enough, too, for that novel was good
enough to encourage a continuance of past favours, as the shopkeepers say),
the picture becomes dim and blurred. The author of Orley Farm and The
Small House at Allington ceased to produce individual works; his activity
became a huge “serial.” Here and there, in the vast fluidity, an organic
particle detached itself. The Last Chronicle of Barset, for instance, is one of
his most powerful things; it contains the sequel of the terrible history of Mr.
Crawley, the starving curate—an episode full of that literally truthful pathos
of which Trollope was so often a master, and which occasionally raised him
quite to the level of his two immediate predecessors in the vivid treatment
of English life—great artists whose pathetic effects were sometimes too
visibly prepared. For the most part, however, he should be judged by the
productions of the first half of his career; later the strong wine was rather
too copiously watered. His practice, his acquired facility, were such that his
hand went of itself, as it were, and the thing looked superficially like a fresh
inspiration. But it was not fresh, it was rather stale; and though there was no
appearance of effort, there was a fatal dryness of texture. It was too little of
a new story and too much of an old one. Some of these ultimate
compositions—Phineas Redux (Phineas Finn is much better), The Prime
Minister, John Caldigate, The American Senator, The Duke’s Children—
betray the dull, impersonal rumble of the mill-wheel. What stands Trollope
always in good stead (in addition to the ripe habit of writing), is his various
knowledge of the English world—to say nothing of his occasionally laying
under contribution the American. His American portraits, by the way (they
are several in number), are always friendly; they hit it off more happily than
the attempt to depict American character from the European point of view is
accustomed to do: though, indeed, as we ourselves have not yet learned to
represent our types very finely—are not apparently even very sure what our
types are—it is perhaps not to be wondered at that transatlantic talent
should miss the mark. The weakness of transatlantic talent in this particular
is apt to be want of knowledge; but Trollope’s knowledge has all the air of
being excellent, though not intimate. Had he indeed striven to learn the way
to the American heart? No less than twice, and possibly even oftener, has he
rewarded the merit of a scion of the British aristocracy with the hand of an
American girl. The American girl was destined sooner or later to make her
entrance into British fiction, and Trollope’s treatment of this complicated
being is full of good humour and of that fatherly indulgence, that almost
motherly sympathy, which characterises his attitude throughout toward the
youthful feminine. He has not mastered all the springs of her delicate
organism nor sounded all the mysteries of her conversation. Indeed, as
regards these latter phenomena, he has observed a few of which he has been
the sole observer. “I got to be thinking if any one of them should ask me to
marry him,” words attributed to Miss Boncassen, in The Duke’s Children,
have much more the note of English American than of American English.
But, on the whole, in these matters Trollope does very well. His fund of
acquaintance with his own country—and indeed with the world at large—
was apparently inexhaustible, and it gives his novels a spacious,
geographical quality which we should not know where to look for
elsewhere in the same degree, and which is the sign of an extraordinary
difference between such an horizon as his and the limited world-outlook, as
the Germans would say, of the brilliant writers who practise the art of
realistic fiction on the other side of the Channel. Trollope was familiar with
all sorts and conditions of men, with the business of life, with affairs, with
the great world of sport, with every component part of the ancient fabric of
English society. He had travelled more than once all over the globe, and for
him, therefore, the background of the human drama was a very extensive
scene. He had none of the pedantry of the cosmopolite; he remained a
sturdy and sensible middle-class Englishman. But his work is full of
implied reference to the whole arena of modern vagrancy. He was for many
years concerned in the management of the Post-Office; and we can imagine
no experience more fitted to impress a man with the diversity of human
relations. It is possibly from this source that he derived his fondness for
transcribing the letters of his love-lorn maidens and other embarrassed
persons. No contemporary story-teller deals so much in letters; the modern
English epistle (very happily imitated, for the most part), is his unfailing
resource.
There is perhaps little reason in it, but I find myself comparing this tone
of allusion to many lands and many things, and whatever it brings us of
easier respiration, with that narrow vision of humanity which accompanies
the strenuous, serious work lately offered us in such abundance by the
votaries of art for art who sit so long at their desks in Parisian quatrièmes.
The contrast is complete, and it would be interesting, had we space to do so
here, to see how far it goes. On one side a wide, good-humoured, superficial
glance at a good many things; on the other a gimlet-like consideration of a
few. Trollope’s plan, as well as Zola’s, was to describe the life that lay near
him; but the two writers differ immensely as to what constitutes life and
what constitutes nearness. For Trollope the emotions of a nursery-governess
in Australia would take precedence of the adventures of a depraved femme
du monde in Paris or London. They both undertake to do the same thing—to
depict French and English manners; but the English writer (with his
unsurpassed industry) is so occasional, so accidental, so full of the echoes
of voices that are not the voice of the muse. Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola,
Alphonse Daudet, on the other hand, are nothing if not concentrated and
sedentary. Trollope’s realism is as instinctive, as inveterate as theirs; but
nothing could mark more the difference between the French and English
mind than the difference in the application, on one side and the other, of this
system. We say system, though on Trollope’s part it is none. He has no
visible, certainly no explicit care for the literary part of the business; he
writes easily, comfortably, and profusely, but his style has nothing in
common either with the minute stippling of Daudet or the studied rhythms
of Flaubert. He accepted all the common restrictions, and found that even
within the barriers there was plenty of material. He attaches a preface to one
of his novels—The Vicar of Bullhampton, before mentioned—for the
express purpose of explaining why he has introduced a young woman who
may, in truth, as he says, be called a “castaway”; and in relation to this
episode he remarks that it is the object of the novelist’s art to entertain the
young people of both sexes. Writers of the French school would, of course,
protest indignantly against such a formula as this, which is the only one of
the kind that I remember to have encountered in Trollope’s pages. It is
meagre, assuredly; but Trollope’s practice was really much larger than so
poor a theory. And indeed any theory was good which enabled him to
produce the works which he put forth between 1856 and 1869, or later. In
spite of his want of doctrinal richness I think he tells us, on the whole, more
about life than the “naturalists” in our sister republic. I say this with a full
consciousness of the opportunities an artist loses in leaving so many corners
unvisited, so many topics untouched, simply because I think his perception
of character was naturally more just and liberal than that of the naturalists.
This has been from the beginning the good fortune of our English providers
of fiction, as compared with the French. They are inferior in audacity, in
neatness, in acuteness, in intellectual vivacity, in the arrangement of
material, in the art of characterising visible things. But they have been more
at home in the moral world; as people say to-day they know their way about
the conscience. This is the value of much of the work done by the feminine
wing of the school—work which presents itself to French taste as
deplorably thin and insipid. Much of it is exquisitely human, and that after
all is a merit. As regards Trollope, one may perhaps characterise him best,
in opposition to what I have ventured to call the sedentary school, by saying
that he was a novelist who hunted the fox. Hunting was for years his most
valued recreation, and I remember that when I made in his company the
voyage of which I have spoken, he had timed his return from the Antipodes
exactly so as to be able to avail himself of the first day on which it should
be possible to ride to hounds. He “worked” the hunting-field largely; it
constantly reappears in his novels; it was excellent material.
 But it would be hard to say (within the circle in which he revolved) what
material he neglected. I have allowed myself to be detained so long by
general considerations that I have almost forfeited the opportunity to give
examples. I have spoken of The Warden not only because it made his
reputation, but because, taken in conjunction with Barchester Towers, it is
thought by many people to be his highest flight. Barchester Towers is
admirable; it has an almost Thackerayan richness. Archdeacon Grantley
grows more and more into life, and Mr. Harding is as charming as ever.
Mrs. Proudie is ushered into a world in which she was to make so great an
impression. Mrs. Proudie has become classical; of all Trollope’s characters
she is the most often referred to. She is exceedingly true; but I do not think
she is quite so good as her fame, and as several figures from the same hand
that have not won so much honour. She is rather too violent, too vixenish,
too sour. The truly awful female bully—the completely fatal episcopal
spouse—would have, I think, a more insidious form, a greater amount of
superficial padding. The Stanhope family, in Barchester Towers, are a real
trouvaille, and the idea of transporting the Signora Vesey-Neroni into a
cathedral-town was an inspiration. There could not be a better example of
Trollope’s manner of attaching himself to character than the whole picture
of Bertie Stanhope. Bertie is a delightful creation; and the scene in which, at
the party given by Mrs. Proudie, he puts this majestic woman to rout is one
of the most amusing in all the chronicles of Barset. It is perhaps permitted
to wish, by the way, that this triumph had been effected by means
intellectual rather than physical; though, indeed, if Bertie had not despoiled
her of her drapery we should have lost the lady’s admirable “Unhand it,
sir!” Mr. Arabin is charming, and the henpecked bishop has painful truth;
but Mr. Slope, I think, is a little too arrant a scamp. He is rather too much
the old game; he goes too coarsely to work, and his clamminess and cant
are somewhat overdone. He is an interesting illustration, however, of the
author’s dislike (at that period at least) of the bareness of evangelical piety.
In one respect Barchester Towers is (to the best of our recollection) unique,
being the only one of Trollope’s novels in which the interest does not centre
more or less upon a simple maiden in her flower. The novel offers us
nothing in the way of a girl; though we know that this attractive object was
to lose nothing by waiting. Eleanor Bold is a charming and natural person,
but Eleanor Bold is not in her flower. After this, however, Trollope settled
down steadily to the English girl; he took possession of her, and turned her
inside out. He never made her a subject of heartless satire, as cynical
fabulists of other lands have been known to make the shining daughters of
those climes; he bestowed upon her the most serious, the most patient, the
most tender, the most copious consideration. He is evidently always more
or less in love with her, and it is a wonder how under these circumstances
he should make her so objective, plant her so well on her feet. But, as I have
said, if he was a lover, he was a paternal lover; as competent as a father who
has had fifty daughters. He has presented the British maiden under
innumerable names, in every station and in every emergency in life, and
with every combination of moral and physical qualities. She is always
definite and natural. She plays her part most properly. She has always
health in her cheek and gratitude in her eye. She has not a touch of the
morbid, and is delightfully tender, modest and fresh. Trollope’s heroines
have a strong family likeness, but it is a wonder how finely he discriminates
between them. One feels, as one reads him, like a man with “sets” of female
cousins. Such a person is inclined at first to lump each group together; but
presently he finds that even in the groups there are subtle differences.
Trollope’s girls, for that matter, would make delightful cousins. He has
scarcely drawn, that we can remember, a disagreeable damsel. Lady
Alexandrina de Courcy is disagreeable, and so is Amelia Roper, and so are
various provincial (and indeed metropolitan) spinsters, who set their caps at
young clergymen and government clerks. Griselda Grantley was a stick;
and considering that she was intended to be attractive, Alice Vavasor does
not commend herself particularly to our affections. But the young women I
have mentioned had ceased to belong to the blooming season; they had
entered the bristling, or else the limp, period. Not that Trollope’s more
mature spinsters invariably fall into these extremes. Miss Thorne of
Ullathorne, Miss Dunstable, Miss Mackenzie, Rachel Ray (if she may be
called mature), Miss Baker and Miss Todd, in The Bertrams, Lady Julia
Guest, who comforts poor John Eames: these and many other amiable
figures rise up to contradict the idea. A gentleman who had sojourned in
many lands was once asked by a lady (neither of these persons was
English), in what country he had found the women most to his taste. “Well,
in England,” he replied. “In England?” the lady repeated. “Oh yes,” said her
interlocutor; “they are so affectionate!” The remark was fatuous, but it has
the merit of describing Trollope’s heroines. They are so affectionate. Mary
Thorne, Lucy Robarts, Adela Gauntlet, Lily Dale, Nora Rowley, Grace
Crawley, have a kind of clinging tenderness, a passive sweetness, which is
quite in the old English tradition. Trollope’s genius is not the genius of
Shakespeare, but his heroines have something of the fragrance of Imogen
and Desdemona. There are two little stories to which, I believe, his name
has never been affixed, but which he is known to have written, that contain
an extraordinarily touching representation of the passion of love in its most
sensitive form. In Linda Tressel and Nina Balatka the vehicle is plodding
prose, but the effect is none the less poignant. And in regard to this I may
say that in a hundred places in Trollope the extremity of pathos is reached
by the homeliest means. He often achieved a conspicuous intensity of the
tragical. The long, slow process of the conjugal wreck of Louis Trevelyan
and his wife (in He Knew He Was Right), with that rather lumbering
movement which is often characteristic of Trollope, arrives at last at an
impressive completeness of misery. It is the history of an accidental rupture
between two stiff-necked and ungracious people—“the little rift within the
lute”—which widens at last into a gulf of anguish. Touch is added to touch,
one small, stupid, fatal aggravation to another; and as we gaze into the
widening breach we wonder at the vulgar materials of which tragedy
sometimes composes itself. I have always remembered the chapter called
“Casalunga,” toward the close of He Knew He Was Right, as a powerful
picture of the insanity of stiff-neckedness. Louis Trevelyan, separated from
his wife, alone, haggard, suspicious, unshaven, undressed, living in a
desolate villa on a hill-top near Siena and returning doggedly to his fancied
wrong, which he has nursed until it becomes an hallucination, is a picture
worthy of Balzac. Here and in several other places Trollope has dared to be
thoroughly logical; he has not sacrificed to conventional optimism; he has
not been afraid of a misery which should be too much like life. He has had
the same courage in the history of the wretched Mr. Crawley and in that of
the much-to-be-pitied Lady Mason. In this latter episode he found an
admirable subject. A quiet, charming, tender-souled English gentlewoman
who (as I remember the story of Orley Farm) forges a codicil to a will in
order to benefit her son, a young prig who doesn’t appreciate immoral
heroism, and who is suspected, accused, tried, and saved from conviction
only by some turn of fortune that I forget; who is furthermore an object of
high-bred, respectful, old-fashioned gallantry on the part of a neighbouring
baronet, so that she sees herself dishonoured in his eyes as well as
condemned in those of her boy: such a personage and such a situation
would be sure to yield, under Trollope’s handling, the last drop of their
reality.
There are many more things to say about him than I am able to add to
these very general observations, the limit of which I have already passed. It
would be natural, for instance, for a critic who affirms that his principal
merit is the portrayal of individual character, to enumerate several of the
figures that he has produced. I have not done this, and I must ask the reader
who is not acquainted with Trollope to take my assertion on trust; the reader
who knows him will easily make a list for himself. No account of him is
complete in which allusion is not made to his practice of carrying certain
actors from one story to another—a practice which he may be said to have
inherited from Thackeray, as Thackeray may be said to have borrowed it
from Balzac. It is a great mistake, however, to speak of it as an artifice
which would not naturally occur to a writer proposing to himself to make a
general portrait of a society. He has to construct that society, and it adds to
the illusion in any given case that certain other cases correspond with it.
Trollope constructed a great many things—a clergy, an aristocracy, a
middle-class, an administrative class, a little replica of the political world.
His political novels are distinctly dull, and I confess I have not been able to
read them. He evidently took a good deal of pains with his aristocracy; it
makes its first appearance, if I remember right, in Doctor Thorne, in the
person of the Lady Arabella de Courcy. It is difficult for us in America to
measure the success of that picture, which is probably, however, not
absolutely to the life. There is in Doctor Thorne and some other works a
certain crudity of reference to distinctions of rank—as if people’s
consciousness of this matter were, on either side, rather inflated. It suggests
a general state of tension. It is true that, if Trollope’s consciousness had
been more flaccid he would perhaps not have given us Lady Lufton and
Lady Glencora Palliser. Both of these noble persons are as living as
possible, though I see Lady Lufton, with her terror of Lucy Robarts, the
best. There is a touch of poetry in the figure of Lady Glencora, but I think
there is a weak spot in her history. The actual woman would have made a
fool of herself to the end with Burgo Fitzgerald; she would not have
discovered the merits of Plantagenet Palliser—or if she had, she would not
have cared about them. It is an illustration of the business-like way in which
Trollope laid out his work that he always provided a sort of underplot to
alternate with his main story—a strain of narrative of which the scene is
usually laid in a humbler walk of life. It is to his underplot that he generally
relegates his vulgar people, his disagreeable young women; and I have
often admired the perseverance with which he recounts these less edifying
items. Now and then, it may be said, as in Ralph the Heir, the story appears
to be all underplot and all vulgar people. These, however, are details. As I
have already intimated, it is difficult to specify in Trollope’s work, on
account of the immense quantity of it; and there is sadness in the thought
that this enormous mass does not present itself in a very portable form to
posterity.
Trollope did not write for posterity; he wrote for the day, the moment;
but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket. So
much of the life of his time is reflected in his novels that we must believe a
part of the record will be saved; and the best parts of them are so sound and
true and genial, that readers with an eye to that sort of entertainment will
always be sure, in a certain proportion, to turn to them. Trollope will remain
one of the most trustworthy, though not one of the most eloquent, of the
writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself. The heart of man
does not always desire this knowledge; it prefers sometimes to look at
history in another way—to look at the manifestations without troubling
about the motives. There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of
imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for
emotions of recognition. It is the latter that Trollope gratifies, and he
gratifies it the more that the medium of his own mind, through which we
see what he shows us, gives a confident direction to our sympathy. His
natural rightness and purity are so real that the good things he projects must
be real. A race is fortunate when it has a good deal of the sort of
imagination—of imaginative feeling—that had fallen to the share of
Anthony Trollope; and in this possession our English race is not poor.
1883.
 V

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

I
If there be a writer of our language at the present moment who has the
effect of making us regret the extinction of the pleasant fashion of the
literary portrait, it is certainly the bright particular genius whose name I
have written at the head of these remarks. Mr. Stevenson fairly challenges
portraiture, as we pass him on the highway of literature (if that be the road,
rather than some wandering, sun-chequered by-lane, that he may be said to
follow), just as the possible model, in local attire, challenges the painter
who wanders through the streets of a foreign town looking for subjects. He
gives us new ground to wonder why the effort to fix a face and figure, to
seize a literary character and transfer it to the canvas of the critic, should
have fallen into such discredit among us, and have given way, to the mere
multiplication of little private judgment-seats, where the scales and the
judicial wig, both of them considerable awry, and not rendered more august
by the company of a vicious-looking switch, have taken the place, as the
symbols of office, of the kindly, disinterested palette and brush. It has
become the fashion to be effective at the expense of the sitter, to make some
little point, or inflict some little dig, with a heated party air, rather than to
catch a talent in the fact, follow its line, and put a finger on its essence: so
that the exquisite art of criticism, smothered in grossness, finds itself turned
into a question of “sides.” The critic industriously keeps his score, but it is
seldom to be hoped that the author, criminal though he may be, will be
apprehended by justice through the handbills given out in the case; for it is
of the essence of a happy description that it shall have been preceded by a
happy observation and a free curiosity; and desuetude, as we may say, has
overtaken these amiable, uninvidious faculties, which have not the glory of
organs and chairs.
We hasten to add that it is not the purpose of these few pages to restore
their lustre or to bring back the more penetrating vision of which we lament
the disappearance. No individual can bring it back, for the light that we look
at things by is, after all, made by all of us. It is sufficient to note, in passing,
that if Mr. Stevenson had presented himself in an age, or in a country, of
portraiture, the painters would certainly each have had a turn at him. The
easels and benches would have bristled, the circle would have been close,
and quick, from the canvas to the sitter, the rising and falling of heads. It
has happened to all of us to have gone into a studio, a studio of pupils, and
seen the thick cluster of bent backs and the conscious model in the midst. It
has happened to us to be struck, or not to be struck, with the beauty or the
symmetry of this personage, and to have made some remark which, whether
expressing admiration or disappointment, has elicited from one of the
attentive workers the exclamation, “Character, character is what he has!”
These words may be applied to Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson; in the
language of that art which depends most on direct observation, character,
character is what he has. He is essentially a model, in the sense of a sitter; I
do not mean, of course, in the sense of a pattern or a guiding light. And if
the figures who have a life in literature may also be divided into two great
classes, we may add that he is conspicuously one of the draped: he would
never, if I may be allowed the expression, pose for the nude. There are
writers who present themselves before the critic with just the amount of
drapery that is necessary for decency; but Mr. Stevenson is not one of these
—he makes his appearance in an amplitude of costume. His costume is part
of the character of which I just now spoke; it never occurs to us to ask how
he would look without it. Before all things he is a writer with a style—a
model with a complexity of curious and picturesque garments. It is by the
cut and the colour of this rich and becoming frippery—I use the term
endearingly, as a painter might—that he arrests the eye and solicits the
brush.
That is, frankly, half the charm he has for us, that he wears a dress and
wears it with courage, with a certain cock of the hat and tinkle of the
supererogatory sword; or in other words that he is curious of expression and
regards the literary form not simply as a code of signals, but as the key-
board of a piano, and as so much plastic material. He has that voice
deplored, if we mistake not, by Mr. Herbert Spencer, a manner—a manner
for manner’s sake it may sometimes doubtless be said. He is as different as
possible from the sort of writer who regards words as numbers, and a page
as the mere addition of them; much more, to carry out our image, the
dictionary stands for him as a wardrobe, and a proposition as a button for
his coat. Mr. William Archer, in an article[2] so gracefully and ingeniously
turned that the writer may almost be accused of imitating even while he
deprecates, speaks of him as a votary of “lightness of touch,” at any cost,
and remarks that “he is not only philosophically content but deliberately
resolved, that his readers shall look first to his manner, and only in the
second place to his matter.” I shall not attempt to gainsay this; I cite it
rather, for the present, because it carries out our own sense. Mr. Stevenson
delights in a style, and his own has nothing accidental or diffident; it is
eminently conscious of its responsibilities, and meets them with a kind of
gallantry—as if language were a pretty woman, and a person who proposes
to handle it had of necessity to be something of a Don Juan. This bravery of
gesture is a noticeable part of his nature, and it is rather odd that at the same
time a striking feature of that nature should be an absence of care for things
feminine. His books are for the most part books without women, and it is
not women who fall most in love with them. But Mr. Stevenson does not
need, as we may say, a petticoat to inflame him: a happy collocation of
words will serve the purpose, or a singular image, or the bright eye of a
passing conceit, and he will carry off a pretty paradox without so much as a
scuffle. The tone of letters is in him—the tone of letters as distinct from that
of philosophy, or of those industries whose uses are supposed to be
immediate. Many readers, no doubt, consider that he carries it too far; they
manifest an impatience for some glimpse of his moral message. They may
be heard to ask what it is he proposes to demonstrate, with such a variety of
paces and graces.
The main thing that he demonstrates, to our own perception, is that it is a
delight to read him, and that he renews this delight by a constant variety of
experiment. Of this anon, however; and meanwhile, it may be noted as a
curious characteristic of current fashions that the writer whose effort is
perceptibly that of the artist is very apt to find himself thrown on the
defensive. A work of literature is a form, but the author who betrays a
consciousness of the responsibilities involved in this circumstance not
rarely perceives himself to be regarded as an uncanny personage. The usual
judgment is that he may be artistic, but that he must not be too much so;
that way, apparently, lies something worse than madness. This queer
superstition has so successfully imposed itself, that the mere fact of having
been indifferent to such a danger constitutes in itself an originality. How
few they are in number and how soon we could name them, the writers of
English prose, at the present moment, the quality of whose prose is
personal, expressive, renewed at each attempt! The state of things that one
would have expected to be the rule has become the exception, and an
exception for which, most of the time, an apology appears to be thought
necessary. A mill that grinds with regularity and with a certain commercial
fineness—that is the image suggested by the manner of a good many of the
fraternity. They turn out an article for which there is a demand, they keep a
shop for a speciality, and the business is carried on in accordance with a
useful, well-tested prescription. It is just because he has no speciality that
Mr. Stevenson is an individual, and because his curiosity is the only receipt
by which he produces. Each of his books is an independent effort—a
window opened to a different view. Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is as
dissimilar as possible from Treasure Island; Virginibus Puerisque has
nothing in common with The New Arabian Nights, and I should never have
supposed A Child’s Garden of Verses to be from the hand of the author of
Prince Otto.
Though Mr. Stevenson cares greatly for his phrase, as every writer
should who respects himself and his art, it takes no very attentive reading of
his volumes to show that it is not what he cares for most, and that he
regards an expressive style only, after all, as a means. It seems to me the
fault of Mr. Archer’s interesting paper, that it suggests too much that the
author of these volumes considers the art of expression as an end—an
ingenious game of words. He finds that Mr. Stevenson is not serious, that he
neglects a whole side of life, that he has no perception, and no
consciousness, of suffering; that he speaks as a happy but heartless pagan,
living only in his senses (which the critic admits to be exquisitely fine), and
that in a world full of heaviness he is not sufficiently aware of the
philosophic limitations of mere technical skill. In sketching these
aberrations Mr. Archer himself, by the way, displays anything but
ponderosity of hand. He is not the first reader, and he will not be the last,
who shall have been irritated by Mr. Stevenson’s jauntiness. That jauntiness
is an essential part of his genius; but to my sense it ceases to be irritating—
it indeed becomes positively touching and constitutes an appeal to
sympathy and even to tenderness—when once one has perceived what lies
beneath the dancing-tune to which he mostly moves. Much as he cares for
his phrase, he cares more for life, and for a certain transcendently lovable
part of it. He feels, as it seems to us, and that is not given to every one. This
constitutes a philosophy which Mr. Archer fails to read between his lines—
the respectable, desirable moral which many a reader doubtless finds that he
neglects to point. He does not feel everything equally, by any manner of
means; but his feelings are always his reasons. He regards them, whatever
they may be, as sufficiently honourable, does not disguise them in other
names or colours, and looks at whatever he meets in the brilliant candle-
light that they shed. As in his extreme artistic vivacity he seems really
disposed to try everything he has tried once, by way of a change, to be
inhuman, and there is a hard glitter about Prince Otto which seems to
indicate that in this case too he has succeeded, as he has done in most of the
feats that he has attempted. But Prince Otto is even less like his other
productions than his other productions are like each other.
The part of life which he cares for most is youth, and the direct
expression of the love of youth is the beginning and the end of his message.
His appreciation of this delightful period amounts to a passion, and a
passion, in the age in which we live, strikes us on the whole as a sufficient
philosophy. It ought to satisfy Mr. Archer, and there are writers who press
harder than Mr. Stevenson, on whose behalf no such moral motive can be
alleged. Mingled with this almost equal love of a literary surface, it
represents a real originality. This combination is the keynote of Mr.
Stevenson’s faculty and the explanation of his perversities. The feeling of
one’s teens, and even of an earlier period (for the delights of crawling, and
almost of the rattle, are embodied in A Child’s Garden of Verses), and the
feeling for happy turns—these, in the last analysis (and his sense of a happy
turn is of the subtlest), are the corresponding halves of his character. If
Prince Otto and Doctor Jekyll left me a clearer field for the assertion, I
would say that everything he has written is a direct apology for boyhood; or
rather (for it must be confessed that Mr. Stevenson’s tone is seldom
apologetic), a direct rhapsody on the age of heterogeneous pockets. Even
members of the very numerous class who have held their breath over
Treasure Island may shrug their shoulders at this account of the author’s
religion; but it is none the less a great pleasure—the highest reward of
observation—to put one’s hand on a rare illustration, and Mr. Stevenson is
certainly rare. What makes him so is the singular maturity of the expression
that he has given to young sentiments: he judges them, measures them, sees
them from the outside, as well as entertains them. He describes credulity
with all the resources of experience, and represents a crude stage with
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