The Three Clerks | Page 3

when I came to know her husband. I
never learned to love competitive examination; but I became, and am,
very fond of Sir Charles Trevelyan. Sir Stafford Northcote, who is now
Chancellor of the Exchequer, was then leagued with his friend Sir
Charles, and he too appears in The Three Clerks under the feebly
facetious name of Sir Warwick West End. But for all that The Three
Clerks was a good novel.'
Which excerpt from Trollope's Autobiography serves to throw light not
only upon the novel in question, but also upon the character of its
author.
Trollope served honestly and efficiently for many a long year in the
Post Office, achieving his entrance through a farce of an examination:--
'The story of that examination', he says, 'is given accurately in the
opening chapters of a novel written by me, called The Three Clerks. If
any reader of this memoir would refer to that chapter and see how
Charley Tudor was supposed to have been admitted into the Internal
Navigation Office, that reader will learn how Anthony Trollope was
actually admitted into the Secretary's office of the General Post Office
in 1834.'
Poe's description of the manner in which he wrote The Raven is
incredible, being probably one of his solemn and sombre jokes; equally
incredible is Trollope's confession of his humdrum, mechanical
methods of work. Doubtless he believed he was telling the whole truth,
but only here and there in his Autobiography does he permit to peep out
touches of light, which complete the portrait of himself. It is impossible
that for the reader any character in fiction should live which has not
been alive to its creator; so is it with Trollope, who, speaking of his
characters, says,

'I have wandered alone among the rooks and woods, crying at their
grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. I
have been impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only
excitement to sit with the pen in my hand, and drive my team before
me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel.'
There is a plain matter-of-factness about Trollope's narratives which is
convincing, making it difficult for the reader to call himself back to fact
and to remember that he has been wandering in a world of fiction. In
The Three Clerks, the young men who give the tale its title are all well
drawn. To accomplish this in the cases of Alaric and Charley Tudor
was easy enough for a skilled writer, but to breathe life into Harry
Norman was difficult. At first he appears to be a lay-figure, a priggish
dummy of an immaculate hero, a failure in portraiture; but toward the
end of the book it is borne in on us that our dislike had been aroused by
the lifelike nature of the painting, dislike toward a real man, priggish
indeed in many ways, but with a very human strain of obstinacy and
obdurateness, which few writers would have permitted to have entered
into the make-up of any of their heroes. Of the other men, Undy Scott
may be named as among the very best pieces of portraiture in Victorian
fiction; touch after touch of detail is added to the picture with really
admirable skill, and Undy lives in the reader's memory as vividly as he
must have existed in the imagination of his creator. There are some
strong and curious passages in Chapter XLIV, in which the novelist
contrasts the lives and fates of Varney, Bill Sykes and Undy Scott; they
stir the blood, proving uncontestibly that Undy Scott was as real to
Trollope as he is to us: 'The figure of Undy swinging from a gibbet at
the broad end of Lombard Street would have an effect. Ah, my fingers
itch to be at the rope.'
Trollope possessed the rare and beautiful gift of painting the hearts and
souls of young girls, and of this power he has given an admirable
example in Katie Woodward. It would be foolish and cruel to attempt
to epitomize, or rather to draw in miniature, this portrait that Trollope
has drawn at full length; were it not for any other end, those that are
fond of all that is graceful and charming in young womanhood should
read The Three Clerks, so becoming the friend, nay, the lover of Katie.

Her sisters are not so attractive, simply because nature did not make
them so; a very fine, faithful woman, Gertrude; a dear thing, Linda. All
three worthy of their mother, she who, as we are told in a delicious
phrase, 'though adverse to a fool' 'could sympathize with folly '.
These eight portraits are grouped in the foreground of this
'conversation' piece, the background being filled with slighter but
always live figures.
Particularly