Autobiography of Anthony Trollope eBook

a single note while writing or preparing it.  Preparation, indeed, there was none.  The descriptions and opinions came hot on to the paper from their causes.  I will not say that this is the best way of writing a book intended to give accurate information.  But it is the best way of producing to the eye of the reader, and to his ear, that which the eye of the writer has seen and his ear heard.  There are two kinds of confidence which a reader may have in his author,—­which two kinds the reader who wishes to use his reading well should carefully discriminate.  There is a confidence in facts and a confidence in vision.  The one man tells you accurately what has been.  The other suggests to you what may, or perhaps what must have been, or what ought to have been.  The former require simple faith.  The latter calls upon you to judge for yourself, and form your own conclusions.  The former does not intend to be prescient, nor the latter accurate.  Research is the weapon used by the former; observation by the latter.  Either may be false,—­wilfully false; as also may either be steadfastly true.  As to that, the reader must judge for himself.  But the man who writes currente calamo, who works with a rapidity which will not admit of accuracy, may be as true, and in one sense as trustworthy, as he who bases every word upon a rock of facts.  I have written very much as I have, travelled about; and though I have been very inaccurate, I have always written the exact truth as I saw it ;—­and I have, I think, drawn my pictures correctly.

The view I took of the relative position in the West Indies of black men and white men was the view of the Times newspaper at that period; and there appeared three articles in that journal, one closely after another, which made the fortune of the book.  Had it been very bad, I suppose its fortune could not have been made for it even by the Times newspaper.  I afterwards became acquainted with the writer of those articles, the contributor himself informing me that he had written them.  I told him that he had done me a greater service than can often be done by one man to another, but that I was under no obligation to him.  I do not think that he saw the matter quite in the same light.

I am aware that by that criticism I was much raised in my position as an author.  Whether such lifting up by such means is good or bad for literature is a question which I hope to discuss in a future chapter.  But the result was immediate to me, for I at once went to Chapman & Hall and successfully demanded (pounds)600 for my next novel.

CHAPTER VIII

The “Cornhill magazine” And “Framley Parsonage”