ANTHONY TROLLOPE
(From a drawing by Samuel Lawrence in the possession of Mrs. Anthony Trollope)

ANTHONY
TROLLOPE
HIS WORK, ASSOCIATES
AND LITERARY ORIGINALS
BY T. H. S. ESCOTT

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN. MCMXIII

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh

TO THOSE OF
ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S
NAME AND BLOOD NOW LIVING, AND
TO THE FEW SURVIVORS AMONG HIS
FRIENDS WHOSE MEMORY OF HIM IS
FRESH AND DEAR, THIS MONOGRAPH
IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED

PREFACE

THE beginning of my very juvenile acquaintance with Anthony Trollope has been incidentally, but naturally, mentioned in the body of the present work. Some of my nearest relatives had been with him at Winchester, and had maintained their friendship with him till, during the sixties, there began my own mature knowledge of him and the personal connection, literary or social, that lasted till his death. In or about 1873, I was commissioned by its editor to write for a magazine—now no doubt defunct—“something full of actuality” about Trollope’s novels, how he came to write them and who sat to him for his characters. “Be sure,” were my editor’s instructions, “you put down nothing but what you get from Trollope, and he wishes to appear about himself.” Not only, to the best of my ability, did I do this; but, in the little writing-room at his Montagu Square house, he himself went through every word of the proof with me. So pleased did he seem to be with my performance that he supplemented his remarks on it with many personal and literary details about himself and those with whom, at the successive stages of his career, he had to do. The material thus given covered indeed his whole life from his infancy in Keppel Street down to the settlement in Montagu Square, I think in 1873. “May I,” I asked, “make some notes to ensure my remembering correctly?” “Certainly,” was the answer. “They will be no good for what you have now sent to the printer, but some day, perhaps, you will have more to say about me, and then your memoranda will tell you as much as I know myself.” In 1882, partly through Trollope’s good offices, I succeeded the then Mr. John Morley in The Fortnightly Review editorship. During the short time then remaining to my friend, he more than once referred to the notes he had given me nearly ten years earlier, adding, “Be sure you take care of them.”

In this way I have been nearly spared all necessity of consulting for the present work Trollope’s own autobiography. Freshness therefore will, I think, be found a characteristic of this volume. At the same time, I have been greatly helped at many points by the oldest of Trollope’s, till recently, surviving intimates, the late Lord James of Hereford, and Trollope’s artistic colleague, to whom especially my obligations are infinite, Sir J. E. Millais, as well as by Mr. Henry Trollope, the novelist’s son. The account of Trollope’s earlier Post Office days owes a great deal to the good offices of the few now living who had to do with him at St. Martin’s-le-Grand: Mr. H. Buxton Forman, C.B., Mr. Lewin Hill, C.B., Colonel J. J. Cardin, C.B., and Mr. J. C. Badcock, C.B. To these names I must add that of Sir Charles Trevelyan, who could recall Trollope’s entrance in the public service, and who, before his death in 1886, talked to me more than once about The Three Clerks and the reputed portrait in it of himself. Similarly, Sir William Gregory of Coole Park, Galway, the Harrow contemporary of Trollope and of Sidney Herbert, before his death in 1892 supplied me with much material illustrating Trollope’s earlier days in Irish and London society. I have also been greatly helped as regards Trollope’s postal services at home and abroad by Mr. Albert Hyamson of the General Post Office, as well as in respect of Trollope’s closing days by Dr. Squire Sprigge, and in his Sussex retirement by the Rev. A. J. Roberts, Vicar of Harting. The sketch of Trollope in the hunting-field is, I believe, true to the life. And this because its particulars, in the most obliging manner secured for me by the son of Trollope’s oldest sporting friend, Mr. Sydney Buxton, came from those of his family who had ridden by Trollope’s side with the Essex hounds, or from Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. Trollope’s Garrick Club contemporary, my old friend Sir Charles Rivers Wilson, has, I believe, ensured accuracy for the account of his long connection with an institution dearer to him than any other of the kind.

T. H. S. ESCOTT.

West Brighton,
May 1913.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

HARTING GRANGE. NORTH FRONT.

CHAPTER I
APPRENTICESHIP TO LIFE

A “tally-ho” story—Anthony Trollope’s ancestry, historical and apocryphal—Among the Hampshire novelists—Frances Milton’s girlhood—Acquaintance with Thomas Anthony Trollope—Marriage and settlement in Keppel Street—Bright prospects soon clouded—Deep in the mire of misfortune—The American experiment and its consequence—Sold up—Mrs. Trollope becomes a popular authoress—Anthony at school—A battle-royal and its sequel—Rough customs at Harrow—“Leg-bail”—A family flight to Bruges—The future novelist as usher and prospective soldier—Friendly influences at the Post Office—Autobiographical touches in famous novels.

THE Norman Tallyhosier, who accompanied William the Conqueror to England, when hunting with his royal master in the New Forest, happened to kill three wolves; the King at once dubbed him “Troisloup.” The changes and corruptions of successive centuries left the word Trollope. Such at least was the traditional account of the patronymic volunteered by Anthony Trollope, when at Harrow, to his school-fellow, Sidney Herbert, and afterwards forcibly extracted from him upon many different occasions by the boys, whose fancy it tickled or whose incredulity it provoked. Such scepticism was the more pardonable, because the earliest Trollope of any distinction, Sir Andrew, in the fifteenth century, rose to knighthood during the Wars of the Roses from beginnings more humble than would be expected in the case of one whose forefathers were personages at the Norman Court. However that may be, the Trollope stock can claim description as ancient, honourable, and of high degree. Amid many changes of employment and fortune, Anthony Trollope’s bearing and conduct were those of one who, while modestly proud of his ancestral honours, yet always saw in them a Sparta given him by birth to adorn a social capital entrusted to him by nature for laying out at intellectual interest. Throughout all his trials and vicissitudes he lived with men distinguished by their position or achievements. Comparing himself with these, he might well be satisfied, not only with his power of transmuting manuscript into money, but with having done as little as any, and less than some, to bring discredit upon family antecedents and an historic name.

When Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography appeared in 1883, much of its contents was already familiar outside the limit of his personal intimates. No man so largely preoccupied, as his temperament and pursuits made him, with himself, ever talked less about his interests and affairs except with a few particular friends in the privacy of home life. In the year of his death, 1882, mentioning to the present writer the sheets of self-record whose preparation he had several years before finished, he described them as a series of pegs. “On them,” he added, “may be hung those materials about my life and work which may be gathered by those who, like yourself, may be disposed to say something about me.”

For several reasons presently to appear, nothing could better match later associations of the Trollope family than for its mythical founder first to have been heard of in the county where much of his mother’s girlhood was passed, and where Anthony sometimes found a retreat for his declining years. Troisloup’s descendants—to assume that there existed some foundation in fact for the story which, without having thought much about it, young Anthony presaged the novelist’s inventiveness by telling his Harrow schoolmates—made no further contributions to Hampshire history, but gradually identified themselves with the north-midland or the northern counties. When the family baronetcy was created in 1641 the Trollopes had settled near Stamford, and soon supplied Lincolnshire with one of its great territorial magnates in Sir John Trollope, who for more than a quarter of a century represented the southern division of the county. He belonged to those “men of metal and large-acred squires” mentioned by Disraeli as forming Lord George Bentinck’s chief bodyguard of the Tory revolt against Sir Robert Peel in 1846. This was that typical county member who, during the full-dress debates on the Bill for opening the ports, agreed with Sir Charles Burrell, Sir William Jolliffe, and Sir Charles Knightley not to follow their leader. Under protection, it had been repeatedly said during the debate and on other occasions, the land failed to provide food for the people; Sir John Trollope declared there was not in his own neighbourhood a single acre lying waste, that from 1828 to 1841 Lincoln county had enlarged its wheat produce by 70 per cent., while the population had only increased 20 per cent. Thus, argued Sir John, there was a large surplus available to feed the manufacturing districts.

So long as he could persuade himself of a protectionist reaction being even remotely possible, Sir John Trollope stuck to the House of Commons, and took an active part in its business. Not indeed till some time after his leaders had suddenly acquiesced in free trade did he, in 1868, become Lord Kesteven. The exact place of Anthony Trollope in the family to which he belonged may be best described by saying that the high Tory, protectionist M.P. just mentioned, the seventh baronet, and the novelist were descended from a common ancestor, Sir Thomas Trollope, the fourth baronet. Between these two cousins of the Trollope name may be traced, as will appear hereafter, certain affinities of character and temperament as well as of blood. At each successive stage of his career Anthony Trollope was what circumstances made him. Few courses in an entirely new direction have ever shown more clearly and more perceptibly than Trollope’s the impress of hereditary influences. These, however, were less on the paternal than on his mother’s side.

The Hampshire, whose hunting-ground may or may not have witnessed the Norman lupicide’s threefold feat, began in the early eighteenth century to be the nursing mother of novelists. First, in order of time as well as of fame, comes Jane Austen, born at Steventon Rectory in 1775. Miss Austen’s works are as severely undenominational and as studiedly secular as those of Maria Edgeworth, or as the educational system of Thomas Day. Elsewhere in the same county, towards the close of the Georgian era, appeared an author possessing little in common with the woman of genius who opened her series with Sense and Sensibility. Charlotte Mary Yonge’s best known works of fiction are still The Heir of Redclyffe and The Daisy Chain. These, with Heartsease and The Monthly Packet, formed the most popular manuals in High Church households throughout the first half of the Victorian age. Five years after Jane Austen’s birth, her parents brought with them to Heckfield Vicarage, from their earlier home at Stapleton, near Bristol, the girl who, as Thomas Anthony Trollope’s future wife, was to become Anthony Trollope’s mother. To her third son, while yet a boy, she imparted the desire of emulating the industry and skill by which she was then supporting the household. The living at Heckfield had come to Frances Milton’s father from New College, of which he had been a Fellow; it provided him with leisure for intellectual pastimes, always praised but seldom remunerated, and provided his vividly imaginative, keen-witted, and sarcastic daughter with opportunities for her earliest studies of provincial character and life. The Rev. William Milton was a mathematician with a turn for practical mechanics. He had elaborated a patent that for some time he hoped might make his fortune; he had given proof of real ability in his favourite pursuit by submitting, during his stay at Stapleton, a scheme to the authorities of the town for improving Bristol port. Some merit these suggestions must have had, for the lines they indicated were afterwards followed in the actual development of the land and sea approaches to the harbour. The city corporation voted their thanks to the author of the design, but gave him nothing more.

Meanwhile the unsuccessful inventor’s daughter Frances Milton, by her personal endowments of a pleasant face, a bright manner, and a clever, sarcastic tongue, was attracting admirers. Amongst these was a young Chancery barrister, like Miss Milton’s father a Wykehamist and a Fellow of New College.

One of Mr. Milton’s sons, Henry Milton, obtained an appointment in a branch of the Civil Service afterwards ornamented by one of the Milton name,[1] and was frequently visited by his sisters at his London rooms. In this way Frances Milton and her lover contrived to see a good deal of each other. The street where Frances Milton now kept house for her brother was the same, Keppel Street, as that in which, though at a different number, the Chancery barrister, with his wife, was afterwards to live, and his children, amongst them his third son Anthony, were to be born. Thomas Anthony Trollope’s Lincoln’s Inn chambers were within a few minutes’ walk. When the two lovers were not billing and cooing together in Bloomsbury, they were exchanging letters dealing with many other subjects besides their own mutual attachment. In the earlier days of courtship the swain addressed his epistles to Henry Milton on the understanding that his sister was to see them. Sometimes on both sides these epistles ran into elaborate and rather pedantic essays, while on the gentleman’s they were couched in carefully thought out and even precious language natural to a clever, reflective, well-read, and rather supercilious young college don. Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads were coming out in 1798. Not less conservative in his taste than in his politics, Thomas Anthony Trollope had only a sneer for the fearful and wonderful products of the new romantic school: if Miss Milton wished to see some new poems that were at least good literature, let her read what had just been given to the world by two Wykehamist bards. One of these was named Jones, the other Crowe. Both were Fellows of New College, and both had won the highest praise of experts like Thomas Moore and Samuel Rogers. When he deals with other subjects, Thomas Anthony Trollope’s epistolary style undergoes a portentous change. Both the gentleman and the lady are equally business-like, precise, and severely the reverse of ornate in the forecasts of their united future. Read with the intervening reminiscence of David Copperfield, Thomas Anthony Trollope’s summary of his present, and estimate of his prospective circumstances, curiously remind one of the language in which Wilkins Micawber described his obligations to “my friend” Traddles, as well as of the complete arrangements he had made for discharging these claims in full. The sum and substance of the Milton-Trollope calculations is that at their marriage the husband—his fellowship of course given up—would, from his Lincoln’s Inn practice and his patrimony, be able to count on something like nine hundred a year. On the other side the wife would bring a dowry of thirteen hundred pounds, independently of any resources provided by her father. As a fact, however, she was to receive a paternal allowance of fifty pounds a year, as well as occasional additions for clothes or other specific purposes.

On the strength of these figures there seemed nothing rash in encountering the risk of an early union. Accordingly, on the twenty-third of the proverbially unlucky month of May 1809, the marriage was celebrated at the bride’s home, Heckfield. Then came the settlement at 16 Keppel Street; there they remained almost uninterruptedly until their migration to Harrow. There too were born their first five children; while two daughters came in Harrow Weald. Of this family, five died before they were sixty, the eldest son, Thomas Adolphus, and the third, Anthony, dealt with in these pages, reached the threshold of old age, though Anthony fell short by fifteen years of his elder brother’s term. As soon as the Keppel Street children could, in nursery phrase, take notice, they must have found themselves observed by interesting and distinguished company. The father was known among solicitors for a man quite as able as he was queer-tempered, and for a thoroughly sound lawyer. He had also just chanced upon one of those little personal advertisements sometimes useful at the Bar. His friend the artist Hayter was then, on the Duke of Bedford’s commission, painting the picture that speedily became famous, Lord William Russell’s trial; in Thomas Anthony Trollope he found the original for a foremost member of the legal group of spectators in the court.

Forensic success, however well won by brains, knowledge, and industry, sometimes suddenly, sometimes by faintly observed degrees, is apt to melt away. The head of the Keppel Street household could found, and to some extent build up, a valuable practice, but he was without the temper or tact which would ensure a politic or even a civil answer to a fool. And to him, especially in the legal world, most people seemed fools. The attorneys who brought briefs to his chambers, if their replies to his questions did not exactly suit his phraseological whim, found themselves as browbeaten as if they had been refractory or prevaricating witnesses badgered by a cross-examining counsel. For a long time Thomas Anthony Trollope’s clients meekly submitted to their fate, and, notwithstanding his ill-temper and unpopularity, the bitter-tongued lawyer made so handsome an income as to exchange the fogs of the Bloomsbury home for the clear air and fine views of a bracing suburb. Harrow, as within an easy drive of the law courts, was the spot selected. The residence, substantially built after its owner’s designs, and comfortably furnished, received the name of Julians. But though from one point of view a monument of Thomas Anthony Trollope’s legal triumphs, it proved a forerunner of his fall. As if under the breath of some evil genius, who could have been none other than himself, the rising fabric of his professional prosperity, by slow but sure degrees, crumbled into dust. Once having discovered that they could get their work done practically as well elsewhere by counsel not superior to the common courtesies of life, the long-enduring solicitors brought their papers to Trollope no more. Every week ruin, crushing and complete, drew visibly nearer. At last there was decided on a move of the whole family from Keppel Street to Julians.

Thomas Anthony Trollope’s New College Fellowship implied a competent acquaintance with Greek and Latin; he had shown his turn for the law when he won the Vinerian Scholarship. His ambition was that his sons should follow in his steps. Beginning to despair of that, he grew discontented with his own position at the Bar, notwithstanding his brilliant start as an equity lawyer. The growing infirmities of his temper frightened away clients; his practice fell off. With something like infatuation he resolved on exchanging a profession in which he might have made his fortune, and could still have done well, for a pursuit so absolutely ruinous as farming. For the failure now in store his own perverse impetuosity could alone be blamed. He was the most industrious of men, as well as the most exemplary and self-denying in all the relationships of life. “The truth is,” said Anthony Trollope, “my father soon found that the three or four hundred acre farm, which he rented of Lord Northwick, had been taken by him on a false representation of its opportunities. Even in the bitterness of spirit caused by the consequent disillusion, he looked forward, as he said, ‘to some compensation in having more time to teach me and my brother Tom our classics.’”

The Julians experiment initiated a series of reverses that beggared the father; it would have left the sons without home or education, but for the extraordinary exertions of a resourceful, gifted, and heroic wife. Anthony Trollope’s mother had an indomitable faculty of finding material for success in the very welter of misfortune. The eligible modern mansion Julians had, of course, soon to be deserted for the much less dignified and commodious Julians farm. Next came settlement beneath a smaller and meaner roof. Even here Mrs. Trollope contrived almost miraculously to transform her environment, and convert what threatened to become a ruin into an habitable if not a comfortable shelter. It was only after her departure on missions of domestic duty that Anthony Trollope and his father realised the full misery growing out of the removal from Bloomsbury to Harrow Weald. Weak lungs had been inherited by most of the children from their father, whose health now, under the quickly successive trials, had permanently given way. Further gold invested in the agricultural experiment would, it had now become clear, only pave and hasten the approach to the Bankruptcy Court.

“If he looks at a card, if he rattles a box,
Away fly the guineas from this Mr. Fox.”

The sentiment of the familiar couplet was exactly applicable to Thomas Anthony Trollope. Except in the possession of the most capable and unselfish wife in the world, and of children all intellectually above the average, and in two instances destined to achieve fame as well as fortune, fate and luck had an undying grudge against him. Part of his little house property had become commercially useless because the title-deeds were lost. At the same time something went wrong with money which, at her marriage, had been settled on Mrs. Trollope.

Mrs. Amelia Jenks Bloomer and Bloomerism did not become household words till 1849. Almost fifty years Mrs. Bloomer’s senior, Robert Owen had acquired in the State of Indiana twenty thousand acres of land for establishing a communistic colony near the Wabash River, known as New Harmony. Miss Frances Wright constituted herself in England at once the missionary of Owen’s socialistic gospel and, by her habit, the anticipatory pioneer of the Bloomer dress. In the Bloomer costume, afterwards a standing subject of pictorial jokes in Punch, she delivered a series of enthusiastic lectures throughout the south of England. By her various proofs of disinterested zeal for the movement, she secured first the interest, then the admiration and friendship, of the lady who presided over the Trollope ménage successively in London and at Harrow, and whose natural sympathies always impelled her towards whatever novelty might excite popular laughter and opposition. The short tunic, the wide sash round the waist, the full trousers gathered in at the ankles, and the broad-brimmed straw hat, generally held in the hand, all proclaiming the presence of the earliest lady lecturer from the new world, were soon familiar beneath the Trollope roof. They imprinted themselves indelibly on the young Anthony’s mind. About the same time he made some other useful or interesting acquaintances of a cosmopolitan sort. Chief amongst these was the French republican soldier, General Lafayette, who had fought in the United States army against the English. The Trollope family’s experiences, whenever and wherever gathered, formed a common stock on which all might and did draw as they chose for conversational or literary use. In his parents’ earlier continental trips Henry was the son usually taken, Anthony being left behind to the tender mercies of his brother Tom, and his school work at Winchester. Afterwards, however, Anthony found himself compensated for missing his share in these earlier excursions by a quick succession, in a few years, of more pleasure trips abroad than a lifetime brings to most English boys.

For the moment, however, the effect of Miss Wright’s visits to Julians or to the other Harrow abodes was to fill Thomas Anthony Trollope with dreams of regaining in the new world what he had lost in the old; and the rest of that clever but self-deluded good man’s record really suggests an exaggerated version, from which Dickens’s genius shrank, of the money-making experiments resorted to by Wilkins Micawber. America was a young country, just acquiring a taste for the prettinesses and elegancies of life. A bazaar or store for fancy goods, not of course in New York, but at some provincial capital like Cincinnati, might prove a success. The premises might also include a room to be used for lectures or fine art exhibitions; if the latter, the French artist, Auguste Hervieu, had long been an intimate of the Trollope household, and might render valuable service. As a fact, the accomplished and amiable Gaul had already been induced by Miss Wright to establish himself on American soil. Nashoba, however, whither he had been directed, disappointed him; he was now free to place himself entirely at the disposition of Mrs. Trollope and the son, Henry, who had accompanied her. Commercially, the transatlantic trip miscarried not less signally than everything else to which Anthony Trollope’s father put his hand. At the same time it turned his wife into a highly popular author, and created in her third son, then a lad of seventeen, a determination to imitate the maternal performance. The United States experience also provided a theme for her earliest essay at recovering with her pen the prosperity that had been blighted by her husband’s evil star. Even in some of the later fiction that proved the chief gold-mine, Frances Trollope brought in her American experiences. These, however, long before that, had formed the exclusive subject of the book on which alone her earliest reputation rested. Domestic Manners of the Americans had been roughed out in a first draft before her return voyage to England was at an end.

By this time, her husband’s embarrassments had reached the desperate stage. In 1834 came the final crash. Mrs. Trollope now divided her time between the direction of her home and the preparation of the book which was to support it. Her husband occupied himself with his pen to less profitable account. Even the pretence of farming had been well-nigh given up. Early one morning in the March of 1834, young Anthony, then a Harrow boy of nineteen in his last half, was told to drive his father to London in the gig, which up to that time had been retained. To the boy’s surprise, the point to be made for was not the more or less familiar legal quarter, but St. Katherine’s Docks. Here the father disappeared into a vessel bound for Antwerp; the lad regained the cottage at Harrow, to find it in the bailiffs’ hands. The landlord, Lord Northwick, had in fact put in an execution. The Trollopes, however, had made substantial and loyal friends in the Harrow district. To know Mrs. Trollope was to admire her courageous activity under calamities, crushing or paralysing in their character and degree. When her own roof-tree had been rooted up, offers of hospitality poured in from every side. Still the eventual necessity of securing a home remained. The father of the family had found the conventional ambulatory solution of the difficulty, and, giving his creditors the security of “leg-bail,” had fled, as we have seen, across the Channel. For the present their settlement was Bruges, a house called the Château D’Hondt, just outside St. Catharine Gate. Here the father recedes into the background. The central figure of the whole Belgian episode is his wife, who during these years left the impress of her own personality, moral and intellectual, in characters so distinct upon her son that her example decided for him what was to be his life’s business. Her pen formed the staff on which the whole family leaned, and alone supported the roof which sheltered them. Her husband’s days were visibly numbered. Lung disease of a hopeless kind had set in with her son Henry and her daughter Emily. Always nursing her invalids, she never failed to produce her daily tale of “copy” for the printer.

At the time of her husband’s death in 1835 she was busy at, and soon after published, her work on Paris and the French. The vivacity and truth of this volume made it a success within a few weeks of its coming out. It was not till some years later, when her son Anthony, preparing at the time for authorship, directed attention to it, that its chapter devoted to George Sand was discovered to be the best thing of its kind that had yet come from an English pen. Mrs. Trollope’s books, beginning with Domestic Manners of the Americans in 1832 and, twenty-four years later, ending with Fashionable Life, were mostly written in the intervals of nursing, feeding, and in all ways caring for husband and children smitten with a mortal disease. So far as they influenced her third son, they will be reverted to in these pages. Mrs. Trollope was a well-born, well-bred, well-connected, delicately nurtured as well as exemplary woman. Her father, William Milton, the Heckfield clergyman, had gone to the ancient and honourable stock of Gresleys for his bride. The daughter of this marriage, Frances, had from her childhood lived in the best society, metropolitan or provincial, during its most exclusive periods. Her wealthier relatives and acquaintances never allowed their connection with her to drop. Hence the opportunities which, quite as much as those given by his paternal relationships, introduced Anthony Trollope himself, as a young man, to the most desirable houses of his day.

Meanwhile the elder Trollope’s death had been preceded by a crisis in the life of his third son. Thirteen years before the date now reached, his parents’ settlement at Harrow had naturally caused him to be sent as a day-boy to the great school, then in the ground-swell left by domestic disturbances which, though they had occurred so long since as almost to be forgotten, projected some demoralising influence upon a generation yet to come. In 1805, Joseph Drury retired from the headmastership. George Butler was elected his successor by Archbishop Manners-Sutton’s casting-vote, against Mark Drury, the local favourite. The poet Byron, then a boy at the school and a monitor, led a rebellion against the new Head. Other disturbances and barrings-out followed. Twelve years before Anthony’s entrance there had happened events not favourable to the position of day-boys at the school. The Harrow parishioners in 1810 petitioned Chancery for the restriction of the school to local residents, chiefly, of course, shopkeepers. The counsel employed by the school bore a name, Fladgate, which, in connection with the Garrick Club, was to be well known by Anthony Trollope in later years. The whole episode, being much talked about at the time, had the effect of familiarising Trollope, while a boy, with the old school of lawyers, figuring so frequently in his novels. Sir William Grant, as Master of the Rolls, thought the boarders so essential to the school’s prestige and prosperity, that he would not sanction any limitation of their number. He risked, however, offending the masters by insisting on fresh guarantees as regards day-boys for the rights of residence. “The controversy,” said Trollope to the present writer, “had the effect of adding a fresh sting to my position as a day-boy. The masters snubbed me more than ever because I was one of the class which had brought about legal interference with their vested interests. The young aristocrats, who lived sumptuously in the masters’ houses, treated me like a pariah.”

At the same time the tenant of Julians Farm supplemented the supervision of the boy’s home-lessons with Spartan severity of physical discipline, at least one box on the ear for every false quantity in a Latin line. Nor was there any gilding of the pill with pocket-money, books, or even proper clothes. Harrow had then a larger percentage of exceedingly rich men’s sons among its boys than either Eton or Winchester. Anthony’s appearance may often have been against him; but the public opinion of the place, if not at first, would in the long run have declared itself against persecuting a boy who was not a fool, who knew the use of his fists, and against whom the worst that could be said was that he came from a poor home. He was, however, as throughout life he remained, morbidly sensitive. “My mother,” he said to me in the year of his death, “was much from home or too busy to be bothered. My father was not exactly the man to invite confidence. I tried to relieve myself by confiding my boyish sorrows to a diary that I have kept since the age of twelve, which I have just destroyed, and which, on referring to it for my autobiography some time since, I found full of a heart-sick, friendless little chap’s exaggerations of his woes.”

In all great schools sets are inevitable, and disappointments, heartburnings, and jealousies at real or imaginary exclusions are rife. Trollope, however, showed himself capable of holding his own, both in the schoolroom and in the playground. Judge Baylis, his contemporary, admits that home boarders were often bullied and pursued with stones, but emphatically testifies that Trollope, being big and powerful, got off easily; he once, it seems, fought a boy named Lewis for nearly an hour, punishing his adversary so heavily that he had to go home. Of course it was, as at every big English school of the time, a rough and occasionally a brutal life, enlivened with such customs as “rolling-in,” “tossing,” and “jack-o’-lantern”; this last was put down by Longley, who followed Butler as headmaster during Trollope’s time. The education was exclusively Latin and Greek, as it was everywhere else. But at home Anthony Trollope received a thorough grounding in modern languages, especially French and Italian, from his accomplished mother, and was noticed by his contemporary Sydney Herbert as a boy full of general knowledge. At a private school kept by one of the Harrow Drurys near Sunbury, some of the time coming between his two Harrow periods was sandwiched in with really good results. Among his Harrow friends other than Herbert were the three Merivales: John, afterwards Registrar in the Court of Chancery, Herman, the permanent Colonial Under-Secretary, and Charles, the Roman historian, who, as Archdeacon of Ely, remained Trollope’s friend through life, and whom I have met at dinner at his house in Montagu Square.

His father’s ambition to get Anthony, like his brothers Thomas and Henry, into Winchester was fulfilled in 1827, when Anthony had for his fellow-Wykehamists, amongst others, Roundell Palmer, Robert Lowe, and Cardwell. The three years of St. Mary Winton were followed in 1830 by another Harrow spell of three or four. After that Anthony Trollope, like the rest of his family, remained a wanderer upon the face of the earth, and homeless until his parents gained a resting-place at Bruges. Disraeli’s Young Englanders in Coningsby, despairing of a career in England, are about to join the Austrian service. Young Anthony Trollope, if not from any Disraelian motive, seriously determined to do the same thing. Subject to an examination in European languages, he contrived to secure the promise of a cavalry commission in the Austrian army. To place himself in the way of picking up the necessary acquaintance with continental tongues, he became for a few weeks an usher in a Belgian school. From that slavery he was delivered by the unexpected opening of the employment that was to make him first a useful member of society, and then a distinguished and a successful man.

In A Publisher and His Friends, the second John Murray, at Mrs. Trollope’s request, is said to have obtained for her third son the Post Office clerkship which took him back in 1834 from Bruges to London. Other influences, however, co-operated in the same direction as those of Albemarle Street. Among Mrs. Trollope’s wide, varied, and influential acquaintance was Mrs. Clayton Freeling, daughter-in-law of the then chief secretary at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Sir Francis Freeling. That lady overflowed with admiration of the splendid struggle made by her friend to keep her home together and secure a future for her boys. Sir Henry Holland, the great physician of the time, a man whose word on any subject went for much in official and political circles, had already helped the future Sir Henry Taylor to a career in the Colonial Office; he had also, as one gathers from his autobiography, been looking out for a chance of doing the Trollopes a good turn. Any one of these agencies would have been enough in young Anthony Trollope’s case. Their combination in his favour gave him the additional advantage of reminding the heads of the department he entered that he possessed powerful friends in high places. His family connections stood him also in good stead. So, said Mrs. Freeling, they ought to do, especially with the Postmaster-General; for had not young Anthony’s kinsman, Admiral Sir Henry Trollope, Sir Thomas Trollope’s grand-nephew, not only rendered his country heroic service at sea in the French wars, but also won special fame and promotion as a sort of amateur postman by carrying despatches from the chief commander of the fleet abroad to the Government in London—particularly in 1781, during the whole episode of Gibraltar’s release by Admiral Rodney. Sixteen years later he secured fresh distinction in suppressing the mutiny at the Nore. For reward a peerage and the capital to support it would not have been excessive. As it was, he only received such a pension as enabled him to lead a country gentleman’s life in Herefordshire. The utmost therefore, urged Mrs. Freeling, that the Whigs then in power could do for her friend’s boy would be only an instalment towards paying the arrears of the public debt due for Admiral Trollope’s tact, presence of mind, and naval eminence. Finally, protested this indefatigable lady, the Whigs owed some reparation for their breach of faith towards her protégé’s father.

Thomas Anthony Trollope had indeed been actually promised a London police-magistrateship by Lord Melbourne, who wriggled out of his engagement under some backstairs pressure. Their reverses therefore had not robbed the Trollope family of “friends at Court.” Young Anthony, in fact, belonged by birth and connection to the governing classes. He might well have aspired to a higher branch in the Civil Service. During the Victorian era another man of letters, more brilliant perhaps but less famous afterwards than Trollope became, Grenville Murray, was given a position in the Foreign Office without satisfying any severer test of fitness than was done by Trollope when he began work at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. From one point of view what he had picked up at Harrow and Winchester formed the least remunerative part of his equipment. As a public school boy he had learned to look after himself, let people see he was a gentleman, intended to be treated as one, and to adapt himself to circumstances. As much classics as either school gave him he might have acquired in his father’s study, if the teacher and the scholar had not come to open war before the course was over. As it was, Thomas Anthony Trollope, almost as soon as his son could hold a pen, taught him the points to be aimed at in letter-writing—clearness, conciseness, abstinence from the repetition of words or ideas, and the non-introduction of any unnecessary or irrelevant matter. At the same time he instructed him by example in the theory and practice of précis writing. This formed the morning’s educational routine in the Harrow home. After tea came the mother’s turn. Mrs. Trollope was a far more cultivated woman than might be supposed from her books. Proud, as well as fond, of all her boys, she taught them of an evening enough French, German, and Italian to speak and write these languages correctly, as well as understand them when spoken, without difficulty, and converse in them with ease.

“As for my father,” once said Trollope, “while the soul of honour and unselfishness, after he gave up the Bar he showed a want of ballast, a fickleness, and an inability to make both ends meet, really reminding one of Micawber in David Copperfield.” Trollope’s own apprenticeship to work for his livelihood came some years later than it had done to Dickens. Years after the establishment of his literary fame, Trollope adopted the habit of interspersing his stories with touches as really autobiographical as anything in David Copperfield. He had not long exchanged the Harrow home for continental wandering, when his efforts to support himself began. These took an educational direction. His eldest brother eventually became, under Dr. Jeune, a master at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. To that height Anthony did not aspire, and was satisfied, till some other employment came, if he could cease to be a burden to his mother, by giving English lessons to small boys in a Belgian school.

CHAPTER II
THE NOVELIST AND THE OFFICIAL IN THE MAKING

Activity at the Post Office during the thirties—The romance of letter-carrying—One of the State’s bad bargains—Trollope’s unhappy life, in the office and out of it—The novelist in the making—London at the beginning of the Victorian era—Lost opportunities—Mrs. Trollope’s influence on her son’s works—Her religious opinions as portrayed in The Vicar of Wrexhill—Anthony’s first leanings to authorship—Literary labours of others of his name—With his mother among famous contemporaries at home and abroad—The trials of a youthful London clerk—Trollope’s remarkable friends of school and social life.

WITH his junior clerkship at the Post Office in 1834, Anthony Trollope’s working life begins; now also commences his conscious preparation for the literary labours that, seriously entered on a few years later, were only to cease when death took the pen from his hand. The atmosphere of the department which he was to serve for thirty years had in it much calculated to stimulate the energies and even excite the imagination of the new-comer. Till 1829 the postal headquarters had been, amongst other places, at a house once belonging to Sir Robert Vyner in Lombard Street. The St. Martin’s-le-Grand building had therefore been occupied just five years when Anthony Trollope entered upon his Post Office experiences. The early thirties were a season of great activity, of novel and awakening enterprise at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Sir Francis Freeling, supported, as chief secretary, by the Postmaster-General, the Duke of Richmond, aimed at nothing less than reorganising the entire service. Within a short time there were introduced thirty-nine specific reforms. These dealt with the conveyance of letters by sea as well as land. The whole system of mail-packets, when thus entirely recast, gradually made deliveries from foreign parts as safe as those within the United Kingdom. The steam-locomotive had just opened a rivalry with the horse-drawn car which few people believed would at an early day achieve complete success. As a fact, it was not till 1854 that Anthony Trollope saw the Mail-Coach Office department become obsolete in the vocabulary of St. Martin’s-le-Grand.

The youth of nineteen, who after the fashion already described now became a Government servant, with his boyish readiness for rebellion against any constraints on his liberty, of course fretted at times against his occupation. From his mother, however, he had inherited the imaginative faculty which was to do more than make him a novelist. It had indeed already given him some feeling of the national and imperial services that might be rendered by the department to whose staff he belonged. “Why,” he asked himself, “should not that great achievement be sensibly promoted by my individual efforts?” The new ambition, however, did not at once save him from trouble for unpunctuality and for scamping his work. Still, he gradually became conscious of associations with the national life and movement which ennobled even a junior clerk’s daily drudgery. A romantic instinct had already invested the whole system which gave him employment with a poetry of its own. Looking back, he saw the opportunities for letter communication first considered and long remaining an exclusively royal privilege. The lads with whom he was thrown counted for lost every odd half-hour not spent in drinking, smoking, and card-playing. Like them, he saw only his natural enemies in blue-books and official documents of every kind. But one day, when there were no high-jinks with his brother clerks, he lighted upon, and out of curiosity dipped into a heap of musty records, which told him how, throughout the Tudor period, the Master of the Posts was as entirely a Court official as the king’s fool. The maintenance of post-horses out of public taxes only gave loyal subjects the satisfaction of knowing that they effectually contributed to their sovereign lord’s conveniences and comforts. “As I pieced these fragments together into a continuous story, I found myself,” Anthony Trollope would say, “not for the first time, but more unmistakably than I had ever felt before, realising that a Post Office servant’s career might be one of profit to himself as well as of usefulness to his fellow-creatures in all their concerns and interests, whether as citizens or as family breadwinners. From what I saw had been done in the past, I mentally constructed a scheme of possibilities for the future.” Not till the seventeenth century, as Anthony Trollope saw, did the Post Office even attempt to secure, for all the king’s tax-paying subjects, speed and certainty in their communications with each other, both inland and overseas. Every step forward covered a very little distance; without painfully sustained caution and vigilance, there was the risk or rather certainty of relapse. As a fact, after that no inch advanced ever had to be retraced.

For half a dozen years young Trollope had to be at St. Martin’s-le-Grand daily from ten to six. During that time, the irregularities of postal deliveries throughout the United Kingdom steadily diminished, and the Post Office clerk in whom we are interested recognised that there was good and even great work to be done in his branch of the public service. He decided that all the snubs and reprimands with which, justly or unjustly, he might be visited, should not cow him into incapacity for doing his part. Not that the Anthony Trollope of fact, as distinguished from him of fiction, can ever have been in more danger of finding his energies trampled out by autocratic or plain-spoken officialism in London than at an earlier period by schoolmasters or schoolfellows at Harrow. At St. Martin’s-le-Grand, however, during the years which preceded his Irish appointment in 1841, he was unquestionably, by all who were set over him, looked upon as one of the State’s bad bargains. Sir Francis Freeling’s successor in the chief secretaryship was Colonel Maberly. Maberly in due course was followed by Rowland Hill, not in the order of official promotion, but under the urgent pressure of public opinion. Who, from all sides came the question, but the master-mind that had invented penny postage was equal to supervising and directing the official arrangements by which his own great reforms were to be carried out? With both Maberly and Hill, Trollope at different periods was on terms not merely of disaffection, or even of veiled rebellion, but of open war. Between 1834 and 1841, after Freeling’s retirement, he seemed to his new chief, Maberly, an ill-conditioned youth, always in scrapes. From 1854-64 it was one long duel between the outsider, Secretary Hill, and Trollope as champion of the department’s old exclusive officialism.

Throughout the Maberly period, Trollope lacked the two conditions for doing himself justice—a reasonably sympathetic superior, and anything like home comforts. The privations of lodging-house life, and the snubs of those in authority over him at the Post Office, produced in him a chronic, brooding discontent, which left him without wish or power to show what he had it in him to become. Naturally ambitious, and with a nervous longing for the good opinion of his fellow-creatures, he no sooner found himself balked in gratifying these two master passions than, hopeless of any change for the better, he sank into a lethargy of disgust, not more with his position than with himself. As a boy he began to keep a diary in the hope of relieving a constitutional melancholy, almost paralysing his moral and mental power. The daily entries, however, yielded him none of the consolation he had expected. The continual introspection incidental to the task only produced depressing and unwholesome effects. His one real solace was the habit of private study that he never lost through life. The Harrow and Winchester school-books had not been dispersed in the wreck of his home, but were carried about with him wherever he went. His Latin rudiments at least he had learned thoroughly at school or at home. Great was his happiness one day during 1840 in discovering that he could read Horace and Cicero in the original, not as task work, but with pleasure as literature.

Then there were the English writers, a taste for whom his mother had not so much encouraged in her son as created. Of the old Elizabethan classics, Spenser had become his favourite. From Fielding onwards, he spent long evenings in his lodgings over the makers of English prose fiction, making notes while he read as if he had been taking them up for an examination. Jane Austen, however, gave him more pleasure than all her predecessors put together. Very early in his Post Office days, he came to the conclusion that Pride and Prejudice pleased him better than any other fiction he had ever read, was not perhaps so great a work as Ivanhoe, but was immeasurably above Tom Jones. Considered therefore as an intellectual and literary seed-time, quite apart from the business habits they helped to form, Trollope’s early Post Office years were very far from being misspent. Throughout life it was Trollope’s tendency to ponder a petty vexation or trivial crossing of his own will till it became a grievance. Of harsh experiences his youth had a full share. The embittering official relations with Maberly first, with Rowland Hill afterwards, and the hardship of an ill-kept and cheerless Marylebone lodging, were the sequel to a stern preparatory training, whether at school or home. Yet no one more indignantly than Trollope himself would have resented the suggestion of his spirit having been in any way broken by the paternal boxes on the ear over his Latin syntax, by his Winchester flagellations, or afterwards by his daily Post Office reprimands and rows.

Dwelling on the bright rather than the dark places of his early retrospect, he had, at the age of nineteen, entered the Civil Service, not unprepared to do the work expected of him, but also bent upon tasting all those enjoyments which his school friends had found in London life, and to which domestic poverty or severity had so far made him almost a stranger. Some reminiscences of the London Trollope knew in the thirties, though qualified by many modernising touches, may be found in the pictures of City life given in The Three Clerks. The life as a Post Office clerk he was free to lead was never better described than by Aytoun and Martin:

“When I smoked my independent pipe along the quadrant wide,
With the many larks of London flaring up on every side,
Felt the exquisite enjoying, tossing nightly off, oh heavens!
Brandy at the cider cellars, kidneys, smoking hot, at Evans.
Or in the Adelphi sitting, half in rapture, half in tears,
Saw the glorious melodrama conjure up the shades of years.”

The existence which thus had the authors of the Bon Gaultier Ballads for its laureates found its prose historian in Albert Smith, who, from the doings of Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen in Pickwick, drew the inspiration which produced the Medical Student, the Gent, and various other treatises on the fast life of the shabby-genteel. These were once accepted as manuals of fashion; they still serve to illustrate the difference between then and now. The side streets of the West End were throughout the thirties honeycombed with gambling-houses. The larger thoroughfares were ablaze with “free-and-easys” or dancing saloons. It was the dull, heavy, coarse, debauched London, which had not then at any point given place to the bright and amusing London, that Trollope lived to see. Of this chiefly pre-Victorian, gin-and-bitters-drinking capital, the most characteristic features are sketched from life in The Three Clerks. Touches of it are not wanting to his other stories, and may be seen at one or two points in the passages between John Eames and his landlady’s daughter in The Small House at Allington.

Anthony Trollope, during his early Post Office years, might excuse himself for falling into his own Charlie Tudor’s Bohemian ways on the plea of isolation from the domestic life of his social equals, and the coldness of his own kith and kin. For that solitude no one was to blame but himself. He was shy, proud, rather awkward after the fashion of callow youths, and in his out-of-office hours apt to show an irritable impatience of all conventional restraints. In after years he deplored that as a youth he had avoided the humanising influence of intercourse with refined women. The drawing-rooms and tea-tables of his lady relatives belonging to the Lincolnshire baronet’s branch were open to him; he shunned them all, some for one reason, some for another. Mrs. Clayton Freeling, his earliest benefactress, would have always welcomed him beneath her roof; he seldom or never came. She wrote letters to him of entreaty that, for his brave and clever mother’s sake, he would make the best of the opening she had helped to secure him. Her social circle was agreeable and wide; within its circumference he had only to choose eligible acquaintances. His early Belgian experiences had gained him some lifelong friends; one or two tours with his parents in Germany, as well as the many good wishers, won by his father and mother when Lafayette’s guests at La Grange, might, had he cared for it, have opened for him a wide, varied, and genuinely agreeable visiting-list. As a fact, not till he had reached middle age and fame did he really care for society. Had this taste come earlier, the kinsfolk of his own name were a host in themselves.

The whole Trollope clan, with their innumerable outlying connections—Gresleys, Hellicars, and Meetkerkes—had all in 1809 welcomed the Trollope-Milton marriage, to which he owed his existence. Thomas Anthony Trollope’s wife had no sooner achieved success with her pen than her countless kinsfolk rallied round her, while John Forster’s and Sir Henry Taylor’s ever helpful interest survived the long series of her husband’s reverses.[2] Before the settlement of Anthony Trollope’s parents in Keppel Street, Sir John and Lady Trollope had been at great pains to find out a suitable and really useful present for the occasion. They were only consoled for their absence from the wedding by an early prospect of making their new cousin’s (the bride’s) acquaintance, and in seeing a very great deal of them both, perhaps in due time of others, in town. Afterwards, when the tide had turned against him, even in the darkest hour of his misfortunes, his relatives of the titled branch had stood by Anthony Trollope’s father. The family seat in Lincolnshire, Casewick, was still open to him during his worst troubles, and his wife describes their visits there as the bright spots in their lives. Many others of the Trollope family were scattered through the Midlands. The laymen of the family had in some cases risen to consideration during the Middle Ages, and contracted alliances with countless stocks at least as good as themselves. Amongst those connections were some Dutch immigrants named Meetkerke. A Miss Penelope Meetkerke, by her marriage with the Rector of Cottery St. Mary, Herts, had become Anthony Trollope’s grandmother, and had left posterity which, if soon becoming extinct, in Anthony Trollope’s youth flourished sufficiently to provide him with a welcome beneath many comfortable roofs.

But all this time Anthony Trollope’s mother was not only, as she had always been, his wisest counsellor and best friend, but the one influence that, continuing to form and furnish his mind, necessarily shaped his career. Returning to England after her husband’s death at Bruges in 1835, she had created a new mode of industry for herself and domestic centre for those she loved at Hadley, near Barnet. Anthony Trollope had the satisfaction of seeing a favourite sister, Cecilia, become the wife of a Civil Service official, afterwards Sir John Tilley, and comfortably settled in Cumberland, whence she lavished invitations on her brother. Frances Trollope, too, at her various settlements, abroad even more than at home, had it within her reach to bring many little pleasures into his existence. At Hadley he passed some nights every week in the bedroom always kept in readiness for him, and on several occasions there were for him excursions to Paris, where his mother long pitched her tent. In the home surroundings, Anthony’s intellectual promise had shown itself neither so brightly nor so soon as had been the case with his eldest brother Tom, or his sister Cecilia. His mother, however, at no time doubted in her heart that he would eventually become the household’s bright particular star. She had noticed the daily entries in his childish journal, regularly kept but carefully guarded because at Winchester some of its records had brought down upon the writer the furious application of a cricket-stump by Tom. Again, almost so soon as he could hold a pen, Anthony took to describing imaginary situations in which he placed himself, explaining and justifying his conduct in those fictitious circumstances. Frances Trollope not only thought this good practice for an infant novelist; she gradually led on her boy to discuss the details he depicted in their effect upon characters other than his own. This, if the most useful and instructive, formed the least stimulating part of her son’s training for that literary walk she had made her own. In the Harrow days The Magpie formed the manuscript exhibition of the family talent, supplemented by a few outsiders, Drurys and Grants. Here Anthony at first had seemed to lag behind the other contributors. He soon picked up, and had the satisfaction of finding his little contributions in prose and verse generally given a place. It was not, however, these boyish essays, but the regular appearance at short intervals of his mother’s publications, which sealed young Anthony’s resolution to make authorship the chief business of his life.

It will not be difficult, when the proper place for doing so is reached, to find in Frances Trollope’s volumes the germs from which grew some of Anthony Trollope’s novels. Especially in the case of the clerical novels that first brought him fame, the son’s fidelity to the maternal example stands revealed. As a clergyman’s daughter, Frances Trollope in her earliest days had seen more of parsonage life than, at a corresponding period, was the experience of her son. None of her books created such a stir as The Vicar of Wrexhill, which fluttered the dovecots of evangelicalism in 1837, just eighteen years before her son made his earliest hit with The Warden. That story presented no occasion for its display; but those which came after showed pretty clearly that their author had inherited some at least of his clever parent’s antipathy to evangelical modes of conversation and temper. Not that Frances Trollope, in the other schools of religious or moral thought then more or less active, found her ideas better represented than by the evangelicals themselves. She regarded as worthless for any practical influence upon daily conduct the godless ethics incorporated into the educational systems of Richard Edgeworth and of Thomas Day. On the other hand, she never found the slightest spiritual attraction in the High Anglican novelists with a purpose, represented at first by Elizabeth Sewell, and afterwards by Charlotte Yonge.

The personages and incidents described in The Vicar of Wrexhill may or may not have included the Harrow clergyman, J. W. Cunningham. The more carefully wrought accounts of mental distress, aggravated by Calvinistic treatment, were a transcript of the ordeal through which her friend Henrietta Skerrett had passed. Subsequently she had misgivings lest her caricature might have gone too far, and showed some anxiety in admonishing her children to remember that, while in matters of religion, as of daily life, all excess must have its dangers, some good might surely be found in every form of faith honestly held. She had, she said, been brought up a Church of England woman. On the same lines she honestly tried to train her children, putting them through their Church catechism, collect, epistle, and gospel every Sunday, and seriously begging them to remember that once they began by being unbelievers, they would probably end with becoming Whigs or even Radicals. Meanwhile it was one of the detested Whigs, Sydney Smith himself, who was advertising the novelist and delighting all those for whom she laboured by quoting The Vicar of Wrexhill in his letter to Lord John Russell.

The evangelicals at that time were notorious for an officious and pushing activity which made them interfere the more energetically where they were the least welcome, and which secured for them, it was said, far more than their due share of the good things in the Church. Hence the great and immediate success of Mrs. Trollope’s satire upon Low Churchmanship, more particularly in its social or secular aspects. It at once had the effect of deepening popular interest in the author, and gave her a place among the celebrities of the season. Incidentally this novel produced two other results. In the first place, so far as he ever gave such matters a thought, it imbued Anthony Trollope with his earliest prejudices against evangelicalism. Secondly, it reflected attention on its writer’s earlier works. Thus the critics were set upon discovering merits they had at first missed in Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, issued a twelvemonth earlier. This was altogether a stronger composition than others of the series, which had by this time given their author a high place among the literary favourites of the period. Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw appeared about half a generation in advance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; to that book it is without any resemblance in spirit or treatment. It had, however, the undoubted effect of recruiting fresh popular forces to the side of the movement already started against slavery.

His mother’s dauntless industry furnished Anthony Trollope with an inspiration which was to last throughout his life. With it there also came shrewd and sensible advice. The boy had an idea that, after the manner of one of his own Three Clerks, he might have increased his pocket-money without any fresh draft on the family exchequer by newspaper scribbling. Frances Trollope would not hear of it. “You left school,” she said, “sooner than you ought to have done, or than we once expected there would be any need for you to do. Make good the dropped stitches of your own education before you take upon yourself to teach or to amuse others in print. Remember the time for reading is now. Reading you must have, not so much because of what it will tell you as because it will teach you how to observe, and supply you with mental pegs on which to hang what you pick up about traits and motives of your fellow-creatures.” “We Trollopes,” was the burden of this lady’s wise counsels, “are far too much given to pen and ink as it is without your turning scribbler when you might do something better. Harrow and Winchester will stand you in good stead at the Post Office; make St. Martin’s-le-Grand the instrument that will open the oyster of the world. Imitate my particular industry as much as you like, only do not let the publishers break your heart by treating its products as their playthings.” Anthony may have seen the wisdom of the advice; never for a moment did he abandon his deeply formed and silently cherished designs of literary fame. His brother Henry had been preferred before him by the home circle to conduct the already mentioned Magpie. Very good. The race of life should no sooner begin in earnest than he would run that relative off his legs, and make all who bore the Trollope name proud of it for his sake. In 1840, too, his brother Tom had made so successful a dash into print with A Summer in Western France, that even his cautious mother thought he might look forward to giving up his Birmingham mastership. About this time, too, Charles Dickens, then at the height of his Pickwick fame, and long Mrs. Trollope’s friend, introduced himself to the household. This, of course, had the effect of deepening Anthony’s self-dedication to the novelist’s calling. From the very first, whether at home, school, or at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the attempt by entreaty or argument to shake a purpose or conviction once formed aroused his instinct of pugnacity, as well as of contradiction.

The scenes and figures with which Frances Trollope filled her countless canvases were so diversified that they could not but include many types of character and place which her son afterwards made his own. To the goodwill of her critics and of the literary rank and file Frances Trollope was indifferent. Such a discipline as she had gone through developed the sterner rather than the gentler qualities of womanhood. Adversity and bereavement had pointed her pen with a sarcastic sharpness, inherited only in a very moderate degree by her son, as much above her in humour as he is below her in satire. Of that Mrs. Trollope showed herself aware, when during the last eight years of her life, having read The Warden, she impressed on her son the wisdom of working the peculiar vein of narrative comedy it disclosed. “Of this,” she said, “you owe nothing to me, and as yet I have observed nothing like it in others of your period.” Mrs. Trollope’s comedy of the sort that best suited the taste of the thirties and early forties is seen at its best in The Widow Barnaby, The Widow Married, The Widow Wedded, Hargrave, the Man of Fashion, The Lottery of Marriage, and in Petticoat Government, to name only a few out of many. Of the group now mentioned, the earliest, The Widow Barnaby, with its sketches of Bath and Cheltenham ball-rooms, and of the conquests which the eminently marriageable aunt set her niece an example of making, gave Anthony Trollope some crude hints on which he greatly improved for Mrs. Greenow’s adventures in Can You Forgive Her? Mrs. Trollope’s novels further resembled her son’s after 1855 in being none of them failures; most of them indeed proved successively, in their way, little goldmines. Family reminiscences, especially of a literary kind, were not in Anthony Trollope’s way. Admiration of his mother’s heroic performances with her pen in the way of bread-winning was unmixed with any admission of having himself profited, either in his work, or in his relations with his readers or with the publishers, from her gifts or from her reputation. “She kept us all,” he would say, “from homelessness and want. As regards myself,” he continued, “my special debt to her was that, but for the ‘open sesame’ which my sonship to her gave me, I should have had to wait much longer than I did for my initiation into life and society upon all those levels which it is part of a novelist’s stock-in-trade to know.”

Throughout the years following her husband’s death, Mrs. Trollope’s literary biography was less of a personal record than a family chronicle. Her industrial prosperity did not entirely exempt her from occasional buffetings with publishers and editors. Such anxieties she talked over with her favourite third son. A good while, therefore, in advance of his turning author on his own account, Anthony Trollope had seen something of the storms and cares which agitate the novelist’s course. He only accompanied his mother once or twice to the great houses which opened their doors for her reception at Paris. But she no sooner returned than she confided to the lad whatever she had seen and heard during his absence. In this way, while still working himself up through junior positions at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Anthony Trollope received animated accounts from his mother of her Paris experiences. Amongst these was her presentation at the Palace of Louis Philippe and his Queen. On that occasion, Mrs. Trollope’s keen speech and ready wit, according to a family tradition not perhaps entirely substantiated, inspired her with an epigram in the same vein as Lady Blessington’s well-known witticism at the expense of Napoleon III.[3] Admiring Domestic Manners of the Americans, the French king, who himself in 1796 had found a refuge beyond the Atlantic, smilingly asked Mrs. Trollope whether she would like to revisit the United States. “I longed,” was her comment, “to return the question to him.” Her son told the present writer she actually did so. The most valuable and interesting result to Anthony himself of his mother’s frequent domicile and great popularity abroad was an insight into all the great salons, with their ornaments, of the time. Madame Récamier and Madame Mohl, as yet only Miss Clarke, were among the most distinguished of these ladies. The connection between the brightest as well as generally the best society of London and Paris was even closer under the Orleanist monarchy than that between the fastness or smartness of the two capitals became under the third Empire or has ever been since then. The future Lord Lytton and his brother, Sir Henry Bulwer, were both noticed by young Trollope in this company, where the most commanding figure was, however, universally recognised in the tall, well-proportioned form with the handsome face, and its bright but grave expression, of Sir Henry Taylor. The cosmopolitan coteries of which his mother’s name sufficed to make her son free were more miscellaneously representative than any other social assemblies of the time.

Friction against all sorts of odd people in the business of making a livelihood out of her pen had not left Frances Trollope without the pride of order and lineage becoming a daughter of the ancient Gresley stock. That spirit she wished to remain in the family. Not, therefore, without some misgivings did she see the mixed society of the time open its doors to her sons. She was equally ready to satirise the polite systems of Paris and Vienna. She enjoyed, however, both capitals in their way. As for the French metropolis, it ought of course to be under a legitimist sovereign. Failing, however, a Bourbon of the older branch, she could manage to do with the bourgeois Court of Louis Philippe. With respect to her boys, they had, she thanked Providence, enough of the Trollope and Milton pride to keep them proof against contracting any democratic taint of ideas or of demeanour. She had at first intended that they should ripen into Parliament men. Fate had decided against that. She had herself, by holding up to both of them the dark side of the picture, done what she could to cool the literary enthusiasm both of Tom and Tony. The rest she must leave to Heaven. The literary gift, indeed, was much to be thankful for. She had beheld its growth with pride, and done what she could to train it in her children, but only as the intellectual ornament, adding a suitable grace and finish to those whom Providence had above all things intended should be gentlefolk. It was something to be, as Mrs. Trollope had undoubtedly made herself, the most talked of and the most widely read among novelists. If that achievement were not enough on which to rest, Mrs. Trollope, it must be remembered, was a very sensitive and impressionable, as well as clever and energetic woman. From her infancy she had lived among those who always spoke as if the socially levelling movement, inseparable from the Whig and Radical propagandism of the time, must have results ruinous, not only to Church and Throne, but to the privileged classes, whose welfare was as essential to the country as that of the Crown and Altar itself.

To Mrs. Trollope there had seemed something of an indignity in her son being bound over to Government service under an arbitrary taskmaster at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Whoever his chief there may have been, Colonel Maberly or Rowland Hill, the fetters that bound him did not prove very galling. No short-handedness in the department, no vindictive coercion by the head of his room ever prevented young Anthony Trollope from promptly obeying his mother’s invitation when she saw some opportunity socially favourable for her boy. In town or country she rose every morning at half-past four, and, sitting down to work at once, got nearly her day’s task accomplished before breakfast. When she visited her daughter and son-in-law in Cumberland, she made a kind of triumphal progress through the county, crowning her round of visits with a little stay at Lowther Castle, the headquarters of north country Toryism. Her host, Lord Lonsdale, knew she had at least one son a Government clerk; she must have him up there for a little change, to show him the place. And so, throughout Anthony Trollope’s youthful turn at the Post Office, it continued. Money troubles, of course, he had. A young man without private means, however much in luck’s way, could not have rubbed shoulders with the best people in England and France without being sorely put to it at times for ready cash. Naturally he got into debt, and had small transactions with the petty usurers, then as now ready to accommodate youthful civilians on the security of their weekly wage. His recourse to the professional money-lender had the advantage of preserving to him many private friendships which might otherwise have been forfeited. Even as regards his mother, if there were advances to him from that quarter, they generally came at her initiative rather than at his own request. She usually contrived to have enough for her own industry and health. Even when her ventures were most prosperous, she denied herself much that she would have liked. Her son therefore, in all his juvenile straits, seldom, if indeed ever, drew upon her. Others with whom he was more or less closely connected, Meetkerkes or Miltons, were suffered to know nothing whatever about his difficulties.

A well-connected young man like Anthony Trollope, however pressed at any particular time, could always, if prepared to pay the price, have raised ready money enough for existing personal needs. His transactions with money-lenders were not, even in his earliest and most impecunious youth, serious enough to prevent a settlement with the usurers before the debt had swelled to any large amount. Such experiences of this sort as he had find their way, after a rather monotonous fashion, into many of his novels. They first appear in The Three Clerks, declared, both by Robert Browning and, in terms still more enthusiastic, by his wife, the poetess, to be Trollope’s best piece of work up to the year 1858. After an eleven years’ interval the accommodating M‘Ruen of The Three Clerks is reintroduced in the same capacity, as the Clarkson who holds the bill backed by Phineas Finn for Laurence Fitzgibbon. Whatever the name under which he trades, or the period to which he belongs, this dealer in ready cash is a personal reminiscence of Trollope’s boyish out-at-elbows Post Office days. In each of the novels now mentioned the burden of his talk admits only of a slight verbal variation. The form of the reproach to Charley Tudor is, “You are so unpunctual”; the exhortation to Phineas is, “Now, do be punctual.”

Trollope had, however, managed his small money matters on the whole so well that he left no debts behind him when, in 1841, a friendly loan of £200, duly repaid, supplied him with his Irish outfit. That was exactly six years before he made the approach to literature by the road of journalism. Charles Dickens, who admired his mother’s cleverness and courage, had given her his good offices with the man who, as editor of The Examiner in 1847, was to become a power on the weekly press. As a fact Dickens’ introduction of Mrs. Trollope to John Forster was destined to promote her son’s interests by opening to him the columns of The Examiner, after the manner presently to be described, in 1848.

One more famous friend of a very different kind from Forster had been brought by family accident within Anthony Trollope’s reach. This was Lord Ashley, afterwards to become Lord Shaftesbury. Recognising Frances Trollope’s cleverness, and anxious to enlist it on the side of his own philanthropies, he had encouraged her to interest the public in the miseries of industrial life in the Black Country. The representative of the “poor man’s peer” with Mrs. Trollope in this matter had been his secretary, a dweller in Camberwell, the father of no less a son than Benjamin Jowett. The story embodying Mrs. Trollope’s fulfilment of the Shaftesbury suggestion, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, was published in 1840, when, greatly to her disgust, it found more friends among the Chartists than in any other class. Ashley did not succeed to the family title till 1851. By that time Anthony Trollope had left St. Martin’s-le-Grand for ten years. But some time before then the future Lord Shaftesbury’s concern for Irish distress made him open communications with Anthony Trollope, as one who had inherited his mother’s faculty of keen observation, and whose opinion, based on local knowledge of Irish difficulties and wants, promised to be, as it proved, of real value to practical and philanthropic statesmanship. This however, like the various events connected with it, will more fittingly find a place in a new chapter.

CHAPTER III
THE IRELAND THAT TROLLOPE KNEW

A fresh start—Off to Ireland—The dawn of better things—Ireland in the forties and after—The Whigs and Tories in turn make vain efforts to remove the nation’s chief grievances—The most deep-seated evils social rather than political—Trollope’s bond of union with the “distressful country”—Sowing the seed of authorship on Bianconi’s cars and in the hunting-field—“It’s dogged as does it”—Ireland’s hearty welcome to the Post Office official—Trollope and his contemporaries on the Irishman in his true light—The future novelist at Sir William Gregory’s home—The legislation of 1849—The history and race characteristics of the Irish and the Jews compared—Irish novelists of Trollope’s day—Marriage with Miss Heseltine in 1844—His social standing and hunting reputation in Ireland—Interesting notabilities at Coole Park—Triumphant success of Trollope’s Post Office plot—Scoring off the advocate.

IN his periodical murmurings at the dispensations of fate, Anthony Trollope spared himself at least as little as he did others. In the retrospective censures upon Colonel Maberly and any others in authority over him during his initiation into the Government service, he magnified rather than extenuated his own shortcomings. Private letters about him to his own relatives from those of the Freeling family, who long remained in more or less close touch with the Post Office, show the low esteem in which he complains of having been held by his official masters to have been for the most part imaginary. The impression, even in its most unfavourable aspects, left behind him at St. Martin’s-le-Grand on his transfer to Ireland in 1841 was not so much one of incapacity for work as of indisposition to it. If he showed himself to be unpunctual, spiritless, and untidy, that was generally put down to want, not of power, but of proper training for his duties. According to the habit of the time, all subjects not classical had been “extras” at Anthony Trollope’s schools. Thanks to his home lessons, from the beginnings of his official course he could express himself clearly and tersely; he had inherited and retained throughout life his mother’s clear, flowing calligraphy. Of arithmetic, however, he knew little or nothing. Here, as in other respects, he improved as he went on. A spruce and finished official in his youth he never indeed became; but, on landing at Dublin in the September of 1841, he had outgrown the unpunctuality, the want of method, and the gaucheries which so often opened against him the vials of Colonel Maberly’s wrath. Thrown on his own resources in dealing with all sorts of people, from departmental overseers in St. Martin’s-le-Grand to lodging-house landladies in Marylebone, he had picked up enough worldly wisdom and insight into character to compensate for any failing of personal or official equipment.

Once in Ireland, he had no sooner looked round him than he fancied he could see a resemblance between the condition of the country and his own state and prospects. This inspired him with a kind of sympathetic affection for the Irish people. In the June before Trollope landed at Dublin, Queen Victoria’s first Parliament had come to an end, with the result that, of the long-promised Whig reforms for Ireland, the only instalments actually carried into effect were an unpopular Poor Law of doubtful efficacy, and certain measures, largely dictated by the Conservative opposition, for dealing with the inveterate evils of tithe collection as well as with municipal corporations. It was the Irish tithe abuses which had caused a literary admirer of Anthony Trollope’s mother, Sydney Smith, to say: “There is no cruelty like it in all Europe, in all Asia, in all discovered parts of Africa, and in all that we have ever heard of Timbuctoo.” For centuries Ireland had been not only the object of English misrule and neglect, but the victim of the English party system. The exigencies of that party system secured periodical surrenders to Irish agitators, which were called concessions, and spasmodic outbursts of eleemosynary lavishness, which were in reality merely part payments of long overdue debts. Three years before the Victorian era began, the Tories, led by Peel, had made way for the Whigs under Melbourne. Whoever was out or whoever was in, O’Connell remained master of the position. Without truckling to that dictator, neither Whig nor Tory minister thought of moving a step. The habit of English surrender to Irish importunity, when sufficiently persevering and acute, had, when Anthony Trollope crossed St. George’s Channel, produced the feeling that agitation and outrage were the two infallible instruments for wresting the demands of the moment. Neither of the two great political connections had shown more statesmanship than its rival in its Irish policy. But for the three months nominal tenure of office by Peel in 1835, the Whigs had enjoyed unbroken control of affairs during more than a decade.

Now, in the month of Anthony Trollope’s first crossing the Irish Channel, a change had come, and the Tories were to have their turn. When therefore Trollope passed his first night in Dublin, the Castle was enjoying the novel experience of a Conservative Viceroy, Lord de Grey. His official term coincided with some attempt at improving the state of the country from which much was hoped. The most important and promising project recommended by his predecessors Peel, however, had shelved. Five years before Trollope’s departure from St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the Whig ministers had contemplated introducing railways into Ireland. Peel’s opposition to that proposal precluded him from himself adopting it, notwithstanding his private conviction of its usefulness. Instead he took the earliest step towards that Roman Catholic endowment at which, when out of office, he had so often shied. In the early future, he let it be understood, he would increase the education grant and qualify the Roman Catholics for receiving gifts and holding property for charitable and religious uses. At the same time, he promised an extension of the county franchise, and votes in boroughs to all who paid poor rates. The great feature in the Conservative surrender to popular Irish feeling was the abandonment of Protestant ascendency as an administrative principle. There was now appointed for dealing with charitable bequests a new Commission, half of whose members were Irish Papists, and whose secretary belonged to the same denomination. The new policy secured a permanent endowment for paying Roman Catholic priests and building Roman Catholic chapels.

But these measures of Irish relief, however well received, attracted less attention than the personality of the man who, as Trollope settled down to his Post Office work, had just been installed at the viceregal lodge. The magnificent presence, the great wealth, the fine temper, and the impartial sympathies of Lord de Grey had not yet, and indeed never did, endear him to the Irish heart; but they had really impressed the Irish imagination. The personnel of Peel’s whole administration was marked by two characteristics: first, its deference to the principle of aristocratic connection; secondly, its recognition of past official services. The chief Irish secretary under Lord de Grey, Lord Eliot, was, like Grey himself, the subject of Orange criticism. Such censure in the circumstances of the time was looked upon as a recommendation, while as for Lord de Grey, the only doubt felt about him was whether he might not prove somewhat too much of the beau sabreur to labour only for peace. Never since the introduction of constitutional government could Ireland have been more under the control of an individual ruler than when Trollope made his acquaintance with the country. Neither his Tory supporters nor the most influential of his personal adherents, Stanley and Graham, had been consulted in the appointments made. If further proof were needed of the Prime Minister’s determination to dominate the administration, it would be found in the fact that, to make sure of crossing swords himself with Palmerston in the Commons over imperial policy, he dispensed with a Foreign Under Secretary in the Lower House. To the Irish people therefore, as Trollope discovered directly he began to know something of the country, Peel was not only the head of the new Government, but concentrated in himself its most decisive authority and its highest prerogatives.

The educational reforms and the Roman Catholic educational subsidies to which Peel had early given the Conservative sanction were not to be carried out in Grey’s time, and did not come within Trollope’s observation. “Property has its duties as well as its rights.” So in 1838 had said Thomas Drummond, the engineer officer who filled for five years the chief secretaryship. The words dwelt in the Irish mind long after their echoes had died away from the Irish ear. In his new quarters, Anthony Trollope had no sooner time to look round than he descried everywhere detailed proof of Drummond’s remark having lost none of its force since it was first made. Excessive population and deficient production were the two great evils, each social rather than political, of the land from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear. In England there was at this time an average of one agricultural labourer to every thirty-four cultivated acres. In Ireland the average was one to every fourteen. One-third of the entire population depended for food on the little plots round their cabins on the barren hillside or on the uncertain moor. The great monument of English enterprise for relieving Irish need was the large workhouse in each new Poor Law district, execrated by the masses, and only acquiesced in by those who were better off. Within two years of Trollope’s arrival in Dublin, there had set in a steady increase of crime, and an addition, visible on all sides, to the chronic distress. Nor did the lot of those who owned the soil display to Trollope much that raised them greatly above its industrial occupants. His boyish acquaintance with his father’s agricultural failures in Harrow Weald seemed to repeat themselves, as he observed the struggles of the Irish squireens, in the dilapidated tenements that they still called their country houses, to postpone indefinitely the evil day of being sold up by the attorney and the usurer. The urban neighbourhoods were no better off than the rural. Most of the towns within Trollope’s district had once been the seats of some small industries. Many if not most of these had now declined into a languor which had often caused them to be entirely abandoned, and had sometimes withdrawn the bulk of the population they had formerly supported from their homes.

On all sides, therefore, melancholy and desolation were in the foreground on which Trollope daily gazed. In the desponding moods of which he had naturally many after first realising his loneliness in a strange country, Trollope’s fancy could not but detect a certain congeniality between his own lot, present or future, and the dismal destinies, the depressing sights and sounds surrounding him. The distressful country thus found, in its newest comer, one who at heart was as distressful as itself. The social and political atmosphere of the country, even before Trollope came, had begun to be stirred by the note of Celtic preparation for throwing off the Saxon yoke. Trollope’s apprenticeship to his Irish work corresponded with the birth of the Young Ireland movement. In that, however, there could be nothing which appealed to his imagination with anything like the force of the human wastage, daily in some new form presented to his eye.

But if his surroundings seemed saddening, almost, at times, to stupefaction, Trollope gradually extracted from them food for honest and severe thought, as well as a stimulus for invigorating exertion, both of body and mind. In Ireland for the present he had to live. Ireland therefore should yield him the material out of which he should make for himself a name among State servants, as well as reputation and perhaps fortune with his pen. When the forties were drawing to a close, railway development was among the specifics periodically applied to the healing of Irish distress. But when Trollope first knew the country that mode of treatment belonged to the future. The popular method of locomotion was that begun in the year of his own birth, 1815, by an Italian settler, who thought he saw the beginnings of a fortune. Charles Bianconi started his operations in 1815 by running cars from Clonmel to Cahir. Of these conveyances he had travelling in 1841 as many as sufficed regularly at short intervals to touch all the more important southern and western towns. The daily total of the collective miles covered by them was three thousand six hundred. The animals used would have been enough to mount a cavalry regiment. Half the secret of Bianconi’s success was, as he explained to Trollope, the discovery of short cuts between the different stages, and ensuring to his vehicles a maximum of speed with a minimum expenditure of motive power. Trollope was not slow to profit by the hint, nor would he ever have done so well as he did in the capacity of surveyor but for Bianconi’s itinerary instructions. The shrewd Milanese also took him behind the scenes of the Irish people in their daily life. “The most apparently poverty-stricken of the peasant farmers for whom my cars have found fresh markets,” he said, “are very often, notwithstanding their dirty and dilapidated dwellings, comparatively well-to-do. And when, filled with pity for a man looking sadly out-of-elbows, you drop some sympathetic word, you must be prepared to hear that his cows and sheep upon the mountains are to be reckoned by tens and scores, and to be told that he is, maybe, richer than your honour.” Thus early in his Hibernian apprenticeship did the new surveyor, as regards the state of the people among whom he was to live, receive the extra official lessons that, supplemented by his own later observation, made him a sounder authority on most Irish subjects than nine-tenths of the statesmen legislating for them at Westminster.

The way of business was also to prove with Trollope the way of amusement and sport. Anthony Trollope had learned to sit a horse in the Spartan severity of the Harrow Weald days. Dared or commanded by his brother Tom to put, bare-backed, a half-broken steed at hedges or ditches in the biggest field of the paternal farm, he was taught at least how to stick on, and never forgot the lesson. “It’s dogged as does it” was often in the mouth of a smaller personage in Orley Farm; and, as will presently be seen, it was doggedness which made Trollope both a sportsman and a novelist.

During his clerkly days at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the already mentioned visits to his sister, Lady Tilley, in Cumberland, and to other houses which had stables, helped him to complete his equestrian education. When therefore, at the age of twenty-six, he began in Ireland, he knew all about riding to hounds, could take up his own line across country, and hold his own against the rest of the field. To create the nucleus of a hunting stable, and secure a really good single mount to begin with, Trollope found easy enough. For some time before the end of his Irish term the one hunter had grown into three, each equally serviceable and creditable to its owner’s judgment of horseflesh. The only trouble at the beginning of his Irish hunting days was a misgiving as to the welcome waiting him from his fellow-sportsmen. Already he had been disappointed at the little notice of his workmanlike turnout, as he flattered himself, taken in the village where he was staying. He had, however, no sooner taken his part in a forty minutes’ run, with a good scent and over a stiffish country, than his sporting, and consequently his social fortune was made. Adventures are to the adventurous. The bustling novelty of his Irish situation had effectually roused Trollope from his moody reveries, had taken him out of himself, and wakened to new life dormant energies of mind as well as body.

On all sides, without any efforts of his own or introductions from others to smooth the way, sprang up acquaintances, soon to develop into lifelong friends. On one of these occasions the chase for the day had come to an end; the fox was killed, and Trollope, finding himself some dozen miles farther from home than he had reckoned, was meditating how to make his way back to the little inn where he put up before the darkness had descended upon a country of which he knew nothing. “My house,” said a friendly voice at his elbow, “is close here, and with us you must stay till to-morrow, and perhaps, when you know what sort of people we are, for some little time after.” The next morning he saw his hosts were in the thick of preparations for a ball that night. Gentlemen partners were sadly wanted for the dance. The visitor surely would not refuse his presence at a pinch, and would let his new friends send for his evening clothes, which were of course with his other things at his temporary headquarters on the other side of the moor. At the age of five-and-twenty Anthony Trollope, if even then something of a heavy weight, was not the less a dancing man, and in favour with lovely young ladies. “Be sure to send my pumps with the rest of my things,” was the message he emphasised to the raw Irish factotum whom he had just taken into his service. The portmanteau thus commanded duly arrived, and, when unpacked, proved to contain in the way of footgear only a pair of bedroom slippers and some boots, double-ironed on the soles, waterproof, absolutely impervious to cold or wet, and made before he left London according to their purchaser’s special instructions, for the roughest sporting use. Beneath the roof where he was staying no foot was so near Trollope’s as to yield it a covering which would safely carry him through the evening’s evolutions. To trouble his host further was quite out of the question. There was, therefore, nothing to do but to take the manservant into his confidence. “Do not,” came that person’s comforting reply, “make yourself uneasy. I will send on a quick pony a boy who knows all the short cuts. The dance shall be kept back an hour or so. By the time it fairly begins, your pumps, I engage, will be waiting before your dressing-room fire.” All of which things, as Trollope in one of his short stories has related, came to pass.

Trollope’s early experiences in Ireland were of the priest as well as of the squire. Once at least he found in the popish vicar of a remote Galway village an ex-Guardsman with whose fashionable escapades, a few years earlier, Mayfair and St. James’s had rung. All that, at first hand, he now saw and heard confirmed him in an impression which had gradually been deepening ever since he set foot in the country. The Irish traditionally had the reputation of being a pastoral and agricultural people. What Trollope now learned and saw for himself of their real characteristics, especially of their keen business instinct, and insistence in their purchases on getting full value for their money, showed him a race qualified above all things to excel in trade. “Old Trollope banging about,” was Froude’s description of Trollope when engaged in his study of mankind. He confessed, however, the accuracy of Trollope’s Irish impressions, and with his own pen several years later illustrated the Irish aptitudes from the same point of view as Trollope had taken. In 1889 appeared Froude’s only novel, an Irish one, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. Its central idea was the permanent ruin of the Irishman at home by centuries of anarchy, of misrule, and by all the evils that followed in their train. Only transplant him sufficiently far from his native soil to conditions that give scope for his keenness in bargain making and his shrewd instinct when to take and when to avoid commercial risks, and he becomes the wariest and surest builder up of fortunes on the face of the earth. Thus, the hero of Froude’s story, Patrick Blake, with his warehouses and his shipping on the Loire, develops not only into a leader of men but a prince among capitalists, and yet, at every turn of his fortunes, in thought, word, and deed, remains a genuine Celt.

Much the same idea, notwithstanding the difference of its setting forth, was present to another writer, whom Froude may not have known, but who was among the most intimate of Trollope’s comrades of the pen. Charles Lever’s college scapegraces or hard-riding, hard-drinking subalterns have but to leave the old home behind them, and then, as surely as they do so, achieve military or diplomatic fame. The spirited and accurate description of Waterloo in Lever’s most popular novel is but the culminating point of Charles O’Malley’s march from one success to another, since the day on which the Duke of Wellington, then Sir Arthur Wellesley, had embarked at Cork his contingent for the Peninsula. Trollope, indeed, never elaborated this thought as deliberately and circumstantially as was done by Froude in The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, or even as Lever in his short stories and O’Dowd papers. The fact itself, however, had been perceived by Trollope long before it had been put down in his note-book by Froude, who, by the way, lived long enough to take Trollope more seriously than he had at first been disposed to do, and to acknowledge that his breezy or boisterous exterior veiled unsuspected gifts of sagacious insight and accurate inference. Galway was known by Trollope even better than Dublin. Again and again in his smaller pieces are reminders that the most prosperous business houses in Cadiz and Madrid were founded by men who went forth from Connaught to seek their fortunes in the sunniest South, and whose descendants still kept a hold on the concerns founded by their sires.

Once he had fairly settled down to his Irish work, Trollope’s manner took on the official veneer which it never afterwards quite lost, but which no more suppressed than it entirely concealed the genuine, genial nature which won him friends thick and fast in the hunting-field and on his daily rounds. There was one social centre, whose owners and whose guests made it a second home for the visitor, and a most instructive school for the study of Irish life and character. Immemorially belonging to successive generations of Gregorys of official rank and great local consideration, Coole Park, near Gort, then had as its master, Trollope’s old Harrow schoolfellow, Sir William Gregory, who lived till 1892, and who had entered Parliament as member for Dublin shortly after Trollope’s Irish course began. Here the novelist found himself in a hotbed of social varieties, and in the heart of a district literally overflowing with the local colour, incidents, and personages enriching his earliest novel. The period was that in which the old picturesque, lawless régime of Sir Jonah Barrington’s memoirs had not been effaced by the modern Anglicising dispensation. In his little park, full of retainers who would have risen as one man to repel any invasion of his ancestral roof, William Gregory lived a patriarchal life simple enough in its ordinary course, but fringed with some of the circumstance proper to a stock rooted in the soil from mythical times. Few visitors of consideration passed any time in Connaught without Coole Park’s hospitable doors opening to them.

The earliest year of Trollope’s Irish residence saw him an habitué of the place, and introduced him to the home life, not only of the local magnates, but of the surrounding peasantry, then generally in the clutches of the “gombeen man,” sometimes a peasant himself, sometimes a shopkeeper or fifth-rate solicitor, who, at usurious rates of interest, used to advance the tenants money to make up their rent. Gregory, if not Trollope, lived to see all this changed, and the “gombeen man’s” occupation taken from him by the fixing of those fair rents which have created a race of peasant proprietors that shrink from no sacrifice to keep their instalments fully paid up. The master of Coole Park shared with his visitor most of his literary, political, and especially classical tastes which had survived the bodily ill-usage of Harrow and Winchester, as well as the subsequent privations of Harrow Weald. Gregory and Trollope had both kept up a trifle of their Greek, as well as a little more of their Latin. They could cap with each other quotations from Virgil or Horace, or the more familiar passages of less known authors. Each of them read the old authors with tolerable ease and therefore with some real enjoyment, not as subjects crammed for examinations, but as literature. Coole Park in these days had declined a good deal from the glories of its social gatherings and of its convivial junketings in the ancestral past. But, to quote Charles Lever, met here among others by Trollope, the Coole Park hosts set a noble example to the whole countryside in not letting the gaieties of their well-appointed roof be interfered with by irregularly paid rents. The declining prosperity of the territorial class, however reluctant Trollope and others may have been to forecast such a prospect, was manifestly destined to result in the legislation actually brought by the year 1849. Of course, when the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849 actually came, Trollope, or those who saw things through the same spectacles as himself, had no good to say about it.

The pauper landlords, who had not the means to put their tenants in the way of doing justice to the land they occupied, were never so personally odious to the tillers of the soil as the new men brought in after 1849. “Down at heels, out at elbows, with no clothes in his wardrobe, and nothing but an overdraft at his bankers, the landlord of whom I saw so much in the early forties was yet in a way the father of his people, and, in his rough, thriftless way, had real care for his tenantry. Heaven protect the Irish tenant from the territorial speculator whom the Encumbered Estates Act could not but instal in his place.” Nothing in its way could be more shrewd or sensible than Trollope’s view of the national results likely to flow from the legislation of 1849. “True,” he said, “these measures will bring fresh capital into the country, but at what a price. The new and improved owners, urged on by their scientific bailiffs, will promptly put up rents all round. The old vicious circle will once again begin with a changed centre, and under fresh conditions. There will be the old poverty. Another land question of a more acute sort will thus have been prepared for. It will, unless I am greatly mistaken, be managed by agitators of a kind yet unknown who will work the business entirely for their own venal ends.” How far this prediction had its fulfilment was exemplified by Trollope in the last of his Irish novels, The Land Leaguers, left unfinished because of his death. This, however, by the way.

It is enough here to point out that Ireland was the country in which Trollope first showed the literary value of the observant habits that his Post Office work had caused him to pick up and gradually to perfect. The mental alertness and the inquisitorial searching below the surface and behind the scenes for the causes of whatever met his eye were essentially the products of his official training. Their exercise upon the facts and characters of daily life was due to the happy chance that sent him across St. George’s Channel; and his Irish experiences first called into activity all the more important powers that were afterwards to bring him fame and fortune in the Barchester novels.

For the rest, Trollope well repaid the warmth of his Irish welcome by combating the traditional misrepresentation of the Irish character. Racial generalisations, he saw, must always suggest so many exceptions as to be practically worthless. Nations exhibit largely prevalent tendencies rather than fixed and universal traits. To quote from Trollope’s table-talk: “As well call all Welshmen thieves because of the nursery lines about Taffy as pronounce thriftlessness a peculiarly Irish fault on the strength of Samuel Lover’s caricatures in Handy Andy, Lever’s portrait of an Irish dragoon, or the casual impressions of a holiday trip in Kerry and Connemara.” So far back as 1780, Arthur Young, in his Tour in Ireland, had touched on the fallacies besetting the popular conception of the tendencies and aptitudes specially distinctive of the exceedingly mixed races that inhabited the country. During the nineteenth century, however, Trollope, among Englishmen, was the earliest observer and writer to bring the same truth out in prominent relief, and so to impress it upon an acute student of his countrymen like Lever as to cause him, in his later stories, to modify his own opinions about the essentially representative features of his Irish types. A clever Dublin lady, under whose eye Trollope made his earliest Irish observations, told me his close looking into the commonest objects of daily life always reminded her of a woman in a shop examining the materials for a new dress. He could therefore not fail to have been struck, while on his official rounds, by the frequent signs in the local physiognomy and temperament in Galway and, indeed, throughout all Connemara, of a Jewish as well as Spanish strain largely mingled with the aboriginal Celtic.

Trollope, it has been seen, had entered on his Irish employment with a firm persuasion of being destined to follow the maternal example, and to commence novelist as soon as he had got together enough material for his first chapter. The resolve of devoting himself to fiction gained fresh strength from his early visits, already described, to Coole Park. The beginning there of his acquaintanceship with Charles Lever was in itself to Trollope a literary event. Lever’s earliest novel, Harry Lorrequer, had at that time been recently running through the Dublin University Magazine. With the exception of his mother, the creator of Charles O’Malley was the earliest writer of fiction whom Trollope had ever known. Of Fenimore Cooper he had heard much from his mother, who often saw him in Paris. Walter Scott, it occurred to him, had by his genius thrown the glamour of romance over the Highlands; he who wrote The Last of the Mohicans had rescued the Red Indians from the commonplace. In like manner too the Irish romancist to whom Gregory had made him known had comically idealised the mess-room and parade-ground. Why, in the fullness of time should not Anthony himself find some class of the community from which to extract literary entertainment for readers on the lookout for novelty? Pending that, it would not be waste of time to found a preliminary essay upon the daily doings of the people among whom for the present his lot was cast. Miss Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and The Absentee he had read about the same time as he first pored over the pages of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Then, at the close of the eighteenth century, and before the middle of the nineteenth, had come from various hands many Irish stories racy of the soil with which Trollope first made acquaintance in Gregory’s library.

Mrs. S. C. Hall’s masterpiece, The Whiteboy, did not come before 1845. Long before then, however, she had made hits on both sides of St. George’s Channel with, to name only a few in a long list, The Buccaneer and The Outlaw. Two years Mrs. Hall’s senior, but like her then still living and flourishing, was William Carleton; his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, having first appeared in The Christian Examiner, was republished as a book in 1830. Nine years later appeared Carleton’s longest, most ambitious and, as Trollope found it, really stimulating story, Fardorougha the Miser. So far as Lever himself had been under any obligations to his predecessors, it was rather to the ideas and incidents, than to the personages scattered through Lady Morgan’s vivacious pages. Far the most famous Irish novel of the time was Gerald Griffin’s The Collegians, which owed most of its later fame to its having formed the foundation of the popular Irish melodrama, The Colleen Bawn. The forties were too early for Trollope to meet, at Coole Park or elsewhere, a writer born in 1830, and so exactly fifteen years his junior. This was the now little known, if not entirely forgotten, Charles Joseph Kickham, who, dying in 1882, had lived long enough, as the writer of Sally Cavanagh, or The Untenanted Graves, and Knocknagow, or The House of Tipperary, to be acclaimed the Irish Dickens. None of the writers nor their books now mentioned proved so useful to Trollope as one or two from William Carleton’s pen. The first of these was a volume that had followed Fardorougha the Miser in 1839, and that, under the title of Tales of Ireland, was always compared by Trollope to Dean Ramsay’s Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character. Three more of Carleton’s books completed Anthony Trollope’s literary training for the work of an Irish novelist. These were Valentine M‘Clutchy, the Irish Agent, The Tithe Procter, and The Squanders of Castle Squander.

Going to Ireland as a bachelor, Anthony Trollope had been naturally expected, by the public opinion of the localities where he became known, to find a wife among its residents. It was indeed on Irish soil, at a well-known seaside resort, that he first met the lady to whom he in 1842 became engaged, and who in 1844 took his name. Her home, however, was in Yorkshire, at Rotherham, near Sheffield, where her father, Mr. Heseltine, had the management of a bank. With his marriage closes the earliest instalment of Anthony Trollope’s Irish experiences. He had begun his abode in the country as a man entirely unknown except to the few who had heard of his mother’s books. That did not always prove a recommendation, for from the day of her having found, as was said, in the Harrow clergyman named Cunningham, the Vicar of Wrexhill’s original, Mrs. Trollope had been charged with putting her friends or enemies into her stories. To such an extent was this supposed to be the case that when, several years afterwards, Charles Lever was thrown into her society at Florence, he markedly avoided her, whether as a partner at a whist-table or a next-door neighbour at dinner. Anthony Trollope’s friendship therefore with Lever, so far from originating in his acquaintance with Mrs. Trollope, would have been rather hindered by it, and was indeed a very gradual growth that had not reached maturity even when Trollope’s novels had become at least as popular as those of Lever himself.

But, during the earlier years of his long sojourn amongst them, the Irish classes and masses knew Trollope, not as a writer, but as the impersonation of the severest officialism. Not having gone to a University after school, nor even since his school-days having had time to move in society and assimilate its easier ways, he long combined much of youthful crudity with civilian stiffness. He had, in fact, unconsciously formed his manner upon that of the men who were around him and above him at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. As a companion and conversationalist he lacked the lightness of touch, the elasticity and ease communicated to each other by young men of his station in life, at college, at the club, or in the companionship of travel. At Harrow, none of his school-fellows had done him a better turn than William Gregory, his later friend of Coole Park, by disposing of a rumour, which local invention had not been slow to embroider with more sinister legends, that Trollope’s father was an outlaw. Hence, of course, the discreditable appearance of the boy himself. What an outlaw meant, none of them exactly knew. But the word had an evil sound. Doubtless the person whom it indicated must, by certain misdemeanours, have made himself the enemy of his species. This is the kind of defamatory gossip which pursues its victim long after the incidents that have given rise to the lie are forgotten. Gregory therefore sometimes found occasion for repeating to his Connaught neighbours the contradiction by which he had so signally served his friend at school.

The best idea of Trollope’s sporting life in Ireland during these years is to be gathered, not from any of the rather bald entries in his characteristically honest autobiography, but from certain passages in his book, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, presently to be mentioned. Roscommon county was credited by Trollope with the best gentlemen riders to be met with throughout Ireland.[4] But, in truth, during the forties Trollope could enter no Irish hunting-field without finding himself before a picked tribunal of experts in horseflesh and horsemanship. To these judges his performances in the saddle soon approved themselves. Courage and perseverance he never wanted; he soon acquired notable skill in shaping his course to the point for which quarry and pack were likely to steer. He knew also how to get out of his mount the utmost performance with the least exhaustion. Between himself and the animal he bestrode there existed a real sympathy. Still it was some time before the critics of the covert-side allowed his hands on his horse to be as good as his seat was firm. On the whole, however, he gradually won among sportsmen something like the reputation in the Connaught chase that was afterwards to be secured by his own Phineas Finn for the management of Lord Chiltern’s “Bonebreaker” on the broad pastures and the awkward banks and ditches of Northamptonshire. His taste for the stage made him also a real country-house acquisition when private theatricals were going on.

In the ball-room he showed the same inexhaustible vigour and energy as in the hunting-field. In this way his own feats and accomplishments, to the speedy extension of his visiting-list, justified in all quarters the introductions given him by his friends at Coole Park. Galway has been immemorially pre-eminent among Irish counties for its hospitality. The entertainments of Lord Clancarty at Garbally had secured European fame, before Trollope’s day, for the best known, most cosmopolitan and convivial of its owners—British Ambassador successively at the Hague and at Brussels, as well as for a short time English representative at the Vienna Congress. The Garbally festivities, however, were rather stories of which Trollope had heard than scenes in which he had played a part. His introduction behind the scenes of Irish politics and journalism grew out of no other cause than his intimacy at Coole Park. In 1842 his friend Gregory became Member for Dublin. Had Trollope chosen to do so, he could have said a great deal about this electoral contest, and could have acquainted us with some among the most typical and miscellaneous Irish notabilities of the time. Those in whose company we should have found ourselves would have included Sir John and Lady Burke, a host and hostess of the patrician and joyous old school; their handsome son, about whose wavy golden hair the maidens of his native land went wild; Granby Calcraft, a broken-down Irish swell whom Thackeray had seen and satirised; a gentleman named Nolan, but universally known as “Tom the Devil”; as well as the little group whose members, next to the candidates themselves, were active combatants in the Dublin election. These included two academic clergymen, one Tresham Gregg, the other Professor Butt, both of them Protestant patriots, vying with each other in the strength of their lungs and in the exuberance of their spoken or written rhetoric. The company would have been incomplete had it not included the greatest character of his time, Remy Sheehan, with a figure like a peg-top, but brimful of the finest Irish brains, who reinforced by the pen in his paper and by his speech on the platform the Castle power that promoted Gregory’s triumph, and that was exercised throughout by the Viceroy, Lord de Grey, through his chief secretary, Lord Eliot.

By 1850, though with his literary spurs still to win, Trollope had risen from the surveyor’s clerkship to the position of Post Office inspector. In that capacity he found himself intellectually pitted against the shrewdest and most popular of Irish advocates then living. This encounter of wits ended in a victory for Trollope. At that time, it must be prefaced, Post Office orders were as practically unused as postal notes were unknown. Small sums, when transmitted by post, were sent in coin of the realm. These enclosures occasionally went wrong. Trollope made it part of his duty to rectify, by tracing, these miscarriages. Such a quest he once pursued, after a method of his own, in county Cork. He marked a sovereign, and, carefully wrapping it up in a sheet of notepaper, enclosed it in a stamped envelope, addressed by him to the furthest post-town in the district. Having posted this in the ordinary way, he began his operations. Riding on horseback, he timed himself to reach every stage on the road taken by the vehicle carrying the post-bags, just before the coach or mail-cart came in. At every successive stoppage he practically asserted the right of a Government inspector to search the mail-bags. The process was continued throughout the journey till the stage at which the inspector, looking into the bag, found his letter had been opened, had been re-sealed, and the decoy coin it contained abstracted. His next move was to retrace his way to the village most recently passed through.

The police now conducted the search, and found the marked sovereign in the postmistress’s possession. That lady, a great local favourite as it happened, was placed on her trial shortly afterwards at the Tralee Assizes. Her many friends co-operated to secure for her defence Isaac Butt, then one of the chief counsel on the circuit, afterwards C. S. Parnell’s predecessor in the Home Rule leadership at Westminster. Butt no sooner got Trollope into the witness-box than he began to cross-examine him after the fashion for which he was famous. In this case the barrister’s object was to play upon the inspector’s notoriously choleric sensibilities, to worry him into some contradiction or blunder of testimony, and thus hold him up before the jury as a reckless circulator of libels and sarcasms about Irish things and persons, for the amusement of an English audience. Reading aloud or describing certain passages alleged to have been penned by Trollope concerning Ireland, Butt asked whether a man who wrote thus loosely could be trusted in his assertions about the truth and honesty of others.

Never did the ingenious and ably executed plan of an eminent advocate more completely miscarry. Trollope never once lost his temper or his head. Instead of being bewildered, he remained clear and exact from first to last. Was he, asked Butt, perfectly certain that he had marked in a particular way one side or both sides of the coin? Yes, he was; and with overwhelming politeness he again described, for the benefit of the jury, the secret meaning of the mark he had chosen, and the instrument with which he had made it. At one point, indeed, he showed the faintest sign of hesitation. Just then he remembered that a witty Scotsman in the House of Commons had recently called the Irish members, Isaac Butt among them, “talking potatoes.” The thought of the simile at once smoothed out the frown on Trollope’s face. As a fact, it was a duel between two men not, upon the whole, ill-matched. Butt knew of Trollope’s rasping manner and proneness to passionate explosion. Nothing of that sort showed itself now. The witness maintained his composure unruffled throughout, disarming, as to some extent it seemed, even his legal adversary by his urbane good-humour. The two, however, found the opportunity of exchanging Parthian shots at each other, just before they separated. “Good-morning, triumphant Post Office Inspector,” was Butt’s farewell utterance. Trollope’s amiably satirical, if rather baldly tu quoque rejoinder, was, “Good-morning, triumphant cross-examiner.”

CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST TWO IRISH NOVELS

Trollope’s first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran—“The best Irish story that has appeared for half a century”—Clever effects of light and shade—The story’s principal characters and their allegorical significance—Typical sketches of Irish life and institutions—The working of the spy system in detection of crime—Some specimens of Trollopian humour—The Kellys and the O’Kellys—Trollope’s second literary venture—Links with its predecessor—Its plot and some of the more interesting figures—The squire, the doctor, and the parson.

HAD Anthony Trollope’s first novel found many Irish readers before the trial in the Tralee courthouse, Isaac Butt might have based upon it some more interrogatories or sarcasms than those recorded in the last chapter, to prejudice his audience against its author. He would have found his material in the trial scene at Carrick towards the story’s close. In 1844, the year of his marriage, Trollope had been moved from his station in western Ireland to Clonmel in the south. By this time he had not only completed the plan, but had written a volume of his earliest novels. In his Autobiography, as well as in the text itself of The Macdermots, the circumstances out of which his first attempt at fiction grew have been explained by the author in words that, transferred to Mr. Thorold’s introduction,[5] need not be repeated here. The book itself had been begun in September 1843. Finished at Clonmel, it was taken by its author in 1845 to England. On this occasion he approached no publisher directly, but placed the manuscript in his mother’s hands, to do with it what she could. Her good offices secured its publication on the half-profit system by Newby in 1847.

The critics were very generally against this initial venture, which, for all practical purposes, fell indeed still-born from the Press. Naturally the author considered it a failure. Here, however, he was less than just to himself; for, if it had gone very wide of immediate success, it belonged to that class of miscarriages which nevertheless to the judicious seem as full of promise as Benjamin Disraeli’s maiden speech. The collective wisdom of the Commons would have none of that; but individual members, who were also seasoned and trustworthy judges, predicted great things for the parliamentary débutant on the strength of those rhetorical extravagances which had been laughed down. So with The Macdermots of Ballycloran. The professional reviewers had little but what was contemptuous to say about it. There were others—reviewers in their time—whose knowledge of literature generally and of Ireland in particular made their opinion worth having. These soon recognised in the book a true picture of the country, a correct insight into its people, real felicity as well as power in seizing the genius of the place and time, and bodying it forth in words. Such were William Gregory himself, whose house had really been the cradle of the story, and his friend, possessed of a literary taste not less sound than his own, Sir Patrick O’Brien, M.P. for King’s County during most of the Victorian age. These, and others equally competent to form an opinion in such a matter, did not hesitate to call Anthony Trollope’s earliest work the best Irish story that had appeared for something like half a century.

Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) had introduced readers to the first unconventional Irishman they had seen for generations. This was Thady Quirk, who, unlike his predecessors in fiction, contrived to express himself without a stage brogue, and supplied entertainment as well as, when necessary, information, though not decorating every other sentence with a bull. As a fact, Trollope probably borrowed nothing from Miss Edgeworth. The only resemblance between Castle Rackrent and The Macdermots is to be found in the truth to nature, the freshness, the simplicity, and the strength common to each. Had he, however, incurred such an obligation, he would but have followed the example of Sir Walter Scott, who, it will be remembered, attributed his own Waverley to the inspiration of the Irish authoress. About the same time that Anthony Trollope was busy on his first novel, Emily Brontë had been achieving immortality with her single romance. Wuthering Heights and The Macdermots of Ballycloran resemble each other in that they are moving and powerful rather than pleasant reading. Both writers were possessed, in a degree equally deep and overpowering, by their different subjects. Gloom pervades the atmosphere of each. But whereas the sombreness of Wuthering Heights lacks relief throughout from any gleam of humour or even light, the tragic effects of The Macdermots are heightened by the social incidents and conversational by-play that form the staple of successive pages or even chapters, amid the squalor, the misery, the sin, and the horrors following each other thick and fast as the story approaches its blood-stained climax. Reading Shakespeare with her sons, Frances Trollope had pointed out the art with which the coarse dialogue of the watchmen in Macbeth, the grave-digger’s mirthful memories of Yorick in Hamlet, and the nurse’s frivolities in Romeo and Juliet are the skilfully planned preludes that, through force of contrast, intensify the terror and melancholy of the appalling sequel. There is something not unworthy to be called Shakespearean in the transitions that mark Trollope’s first novel. The peasant marriage-junketings, the race dinner with the ball to follow, contrast with and heighten those later acts of the drama where the curtain rises on the battered and bleeding body of the villain of the piece, while his avenging murderer stands, a doomed man, at the gallows’ foot, and his victim succumbs to the long drawn-out agonies of the ordeal which had deprived her of fair fame, of home, of brother, as well as the, through all, blindly loved author of her guilt.

Trollope’s first two novels, like a few more, following after a long interval and to be examined in their proper place, dealt exclusively with Ireland and the Irish as he had seen both during the earlier years of his acquaintance with the country. The waste of gifts, of energies, and the persistent refusal profitably to employ qualities and occasions out of which fortunes might be made, had appealed to Trollope’s sense of pathos, directly he began to know the country. Long after their crazy roof-trees had ceased properly to shelter them from the wind and rain, starving families refused to exchange their homes for the large workhouses that now studded the land. The fortunes of men and women who ought to have been leaders of the middle class were melting to nothingness before the fire of failures and losses that seemed as irresistible as fate. A sort of dry-rot, as Trollope put it, moral and intellectual not less than material, seemed preying everywhere on the vitals of the people. And this in a land whose men lacked few endowments which, with due discipline and direction, would have brought them success, and whose daughters abounded in the beauty, brightness, and grace that are heaven’s best means for making homes happy and refined. Miss Edgeworth in Castle Rackrent, it has been seen, tells her story through the medium of an old dependent of the place before its fortunes had quite gone. In the opening pages of The Macdermots, Trollope employs for the same purpose the guard of the Boyle coach. His are the reminiscences out of which the novelist manufactures the fall from their high estate of a family boasting the inevitable Irish kings for their ancestors. For the rest, the sketches of place and character are from what Trollope saw with his own eyes while going his Post Office rounds, or from what he had picked up while staying with his friends at Coole Park.

The head of the household, Larry Macdermot, known only by his Christian name to his children, to his tenants, who seldom pay their rents, and to his creditors impatiently waiting to foreclose their mortgages, is a whining, helpless imbecile, in years little, if at all, past middle age, but, from the combined effects of misfortune and whisky-soaking, already in his dotage. As a younger son, Larry’s father had inherited some six hundred acres, let in small holdings, and a house recently constructed for him by a builder named Flannelly, who has, of course, a mortgage upon it. This roof, now sadly out of repair, just sheltered Larry himself, his daughter Feemy, and his son Thady, who acted as his bailiff. The young man keeps up the pretence of transacting the business of the property by passing a few hours every morning in a tumble-down room which he calls his office. Thady’s parts, like many of his qualities, are naturally good. He is neither a profligate nor a drunkard, but the poverty, squalor, and ignorance in which he has been brought up have starved the energies that, in happier surroundings, might have retrieved the fortunes of a race whose degradation, never out of his sight or mind, keeps him in a chronic condition of grievance and discontent. By a few quiet but skilful touches in Trollope’s best manner, signs in Thady of sensitiveness to the jeopardised Macdermot honour gradually reveal themselves. They mark the slow dawn of a presentiment that he is the agent chosen by fate for punishing him who has inflicted the one foul stain yet possible on the Macdermot honour.

Ballycloran itself, with its down-at-heel occupants, typifies allegorically, with sustained power and rugged picturesqueness, the agricultural and pastoral Ireland which Trollope had seen and studied in all its varieties. Less indomitably idle than his drivelling father had always been, as well as in all respects a better man, Thady might have been trained to a life of family and national service. His habitually dormant powers might at any time have been roused to vigorous, fruitful action but for the deadening and demoralising influence of his environment. Innocent and ignorant of the sins of cities, he was comparatively free from the commonest vices of the country. Father Mathew’s mission had not yet inflamed the Irish peasantry with a passion for temperance; but without any such teaching, Thady Macdermot had never fallen a victim to strong drink. His chief enemy was his own temperament, which, when we first meet him, it is clear may, in some unforeseen conditions, be suddenly and dangerously kindled into ferocious passion. Less from any words escaping him on the subject than his habitual air of sullen and silent preoccupation do we know that he thinks of little else than his own decadence from his forefathers. He had always felt that his family was sinking lower and lower daily, without finding it in him to arrest the process for the future, or move a finger in repairing the ruin of the past. Therefore he had only become more gloomy, more tyrannical. His one companion and his only resource is his pipe, his one employment to fill and refill it. Into such a lot neither pleasure nor excitement could enter, and, especially for a Celt, Trollope would have his readers feel, that way madness lies.

Thus, through the gradual development of the plot, we know instinctively that some Nemesis will declare itself on an existence which has lost the force or the desire to rise out of an atmosphere whose slow poison has stunted and deformed its growth. In its joylessness as well as in its decline from the better fortunes of earlier days, the picture of Ballycloran not only reflected the prevailing depression, agricultural and industrial, of the country, but harmonised with the lamentations from fashionable lips over the final eclipse of the gaiety of its capital. Irish society leaders of the good old days, when the sporting season did not keep them to their castles in Connaught or Ulster, used on a grand scale to keep up their houses in Fitzwilliam or Merrion Square in their native metropolis. All that had gone. Huge, overgrown, vulgar London had snuffed out select, elegant, and refined Dublin, whose stately quadrangles and picturesque avenues were deserted by their proper occupants for some spick-and-span new mansions which stared one out of countenance in Tyburnia, or some more modest tenement in a dingy angle of Mayfair. The glories of the Viceregal Court had long since begun to pale. The impatiently waited royal visits that it was hoped might bring compensation were as yet repeatedly delayed. In this way the fair city on the Liffey had been largely shorn of its attractions and pleasures, just as the rich soil of the surrounding country was impoverished by ignorance and neglect. Some hint of this formed the minor key in Trollope’s powerful and pathetic dirge over the progressive extinction of the family lamps at Ballycloran. In certain details, therefore, as well as in general idea, the Macdermots formed the microcosm of an entire people. Its genius, always feminised as Erin, is appropriately personified by the daughter of the ill-starred house, on the common ruin of whose members the curtain falls. Trollope’s Irish experiences, as has been already said, gave him some acquaintance with the Young Ireland movement, and its combined appeals to the patriotic and romantic sensibilities, as well as to the cupidity, of a populace readily lending itself to the wiles of skilled agitators.

The oratorical or literary blandishments of Smith O’Brien’s self-summoned and mercenary camp-followers caught their victims in snares exactly paralleled by the novels with which Feemy had debauched her imagination and by the appeals of the lover who wrought her overthrow. Her picture given in the first chapter of the story is a delineation of racial features not peculiar to any one epoch of Irish narrative. The girl’s temperament is that of her nation; her form and figure are the perennial attributes of those belonging to her sex and class. Here is the daughter of the Macdermots, the incarnation of her country. At the age of twenty, when the reader first sees her, Feemy was a tall, dark girl, with that bold, upright, well-poised figure so peculiarly Irish. She walked as if all the blood of the old Irish princes was in her veins. Her step, at any rate, was princely. Feemy also had large bright-brown eyes, and long, soft, shining, dark-brown hair, which was divided behind, fell over her shoulders, or was tied with ribbons. She had the well-formed nose common to all of those coming of old families; and a bright olive complexion, only the olive was a little too brown, the skin a little too coarse. Feemy’s mouth, moreover, was half an inch too long. But her teeth were white and good, and her chin was well turned, with a dimple large enough for any finger Venus might put there. In all, Feemy was a fine girl to a man not too well-accustomed to refinement. Her hands were too large and too red, but if Feemy had got gloves enough to go to Mass with, it was all she could do in that way. For the rest, she was as badly shod as gloved. She shared, therefore, with her other beautiful countrywomen an entire absence of the neatness whose attraction, did they but understand it, for men might have prevented their appearing so often as poor Feemy too usually appeared.[6] In the figure thus described, there lay energies and passions as strong as those concealed in her brother, if only any object stimulating their fair and wholesome exercise had presented itself.

“Men, some to business, some to pleasure take,
But ev’ry woman is at heart a rake.”

By which familiar couplet Pope of course meant nothing more than that the essentially feminine and, it may be, entirely blameless appetite for enjoyment, for the most part only a love of change, is no more eradicable from the sex than love of power.

This maiden scion of a decayed stock rebelled with the whole strength of her being, not so much against the poverty or the meanness as against the intolerably dull sameness of life in the jerry-built tenement, now hardly fifty years old. The mortgage on this, held by its constructor Flannelly, places at his mercy the doomed remnants of those who had once owned the estate. Something has been already said about the popular Irish murmurs at the waning splendours of the Viceregal Court. The continuance of many material abuses might have been acquiesced in almost without complaint if Dublin Castle had become once more the living and shining centre of a social system ablaze with hospitalities, and communicating a sense of importance, stir, and of quickly circulating capital, such as would have gratified even those excluded from its entertainments. The time nominally taken by Trollope for his story is the nineteenth century’s third decade. He himself, we have seen, did not reach Ireland till 1841, and drew only what he actually saw. Nor, since his arrival, had anything happened to betray him into anachronism.

In the fifties, not less than they had done in the forties, the poets, prophets, preachers, and teachers of The Nation still expatiated in glowing terms on the good time coming when, with the aid of republican France, Ireland should receive from the statesmen who were her sons the glories of a new birth, and Dublin should once again be as it was when it had its own parliament sitting in St. Stephen’s Green. Like expectations had been encouraged in Feemy by the literature she loved. With the help of the saints and of luck, her novelists had taught her that a lover, brave, handsome, gallant, and sufficiently well-to-do, who would think of nothing else but pouring silver, gold, and precious stones into his sweetheart’s lap, would yet appear to her at some appointed time not known. For such a prospect she had fitted herself with some accomplishments. She could play on an old spinet which had belonged to her mother, she had made herself a good dancer, and found herself lifted into another sphere when, with the help of the music and the movement, she forgot in her partner’s arms the cares, the meanness, and the gloom of the family hearthside.

When alone, however, she still fed her fancy with the cheap, ill-printed, trashy, and mischievous books that were to the Irish girlhood in her day what the penny novelette and the sixpenny shocker have, since her time, become to readers of her age, sex, and condition on both sides of St. George’s Channel. While Feemy’s town sisters might have been in raptures over the broadsheets wherein an earthly paradise was promised by writers who addressed with equal skill the romantic taste of the kitchen and the political passions of the mob, Feemy was giving her eyes, her heart and soul to The Mysterious Assassin, as her only refuge from Thady Macdermot’s everlasting talk about potatoes, oats, pigs, and from the dread, darkening the household like a cloud, that, impatient for principal as well as interest, Mr. Joe Flannelly of Carrick-on-Shannon might come down upon Ballycloran, to make himself master of the place and all within it.

Well would it have been for the Macdermots had their fair representative sought no further distraction from her dulness than the trivial and vulgar reading that, whatever its faults, was not calculated to do more lasting harm to the reader than was received by town labourers and rural peasants from the tawdry sedition mongers of Gavan Duffy’s literary staff. Writing in the earlier forties, Trollope economised his approval of most English measures for reforming Irish abuses. Even when not bad in themselves, those expedients might be corrupted by the human agents to which they were entrusted. The establishment of an Irish constabulary force dates from Liverpool’s administration and Wellington’s Lord-Lieutenancy in 1823. Changes in that body continued to be made till the consolidation of the various Acts connected with the subject had for its sequel Sir Robert Peel’s establishment in 1836 of the Irish Constabulary. Just a generation later, at Queen Victoria’s command, this body became known by its present name, the Royal Irish Constabulary. The duties of this imperial force, from the first, included certain civil services not imposed upon policemen of the United Kingdom. Such are the yearly collection of agricultural statistics, the management of the decennial census, the conduct by auction sales of goods taken under distress warrants, the inspection of weights and measures, the practical administration of the Food, Drugs, and Explosives Acts. The Irish Constabulary, too, are charged with the prevention of smuggling and of illicit distillation. The officers of this force are now chosen by Civil Service examinations. Vacancies for district inspectors are filled, one half by cadets, and one half by selected constables of exceptional merit.

To this body in its earlier days, as reconstituted by Peel, belonged the evil genius of Trollope’s first novel, Myles Ussher. Captain Ussher was his local title; for the revenue police were at that time organised as a military force. He had of course received his appointment without submission to any educational test. The natural son of a wealthy landed proprietor in Ulster, he owed his appointment entirely to family influence. He could read, write, knew something of figures, and had once learned, but had long since entirely forgotten, some Latin grammar.

There are touches in the description of this man showing that the novelist had profited by the Ethics, which, to quote Trollope’s words to the writer, “at least helped me here, though they had not done so in the Oxford scholarship examination for which I read them.” For Ussher’s valour was the spurious courage that comes of ignorance, and arises in equal parts from animal spirits and from not having yet experienced the evil effects of danger rather than from real capabilities of enduring its consequences. In other words, we are told, never having been hit in a duel, he would have no hesitation in fighting one; never having had a bad fall on horseback, he was a bold rider; never having had his head broken in a row, he would readily go into one. To pain, if it were not absolutely disabling, he was indifferent, because, not having yet suffered its acute form, he lacked the imagination to make him realise the possibility of sometimes experiencing it to such a degree. This kind of courage is shrewdly declared by Trollope to be that by far the most generally met with, as well as fully sufficient for the life Captain Ussher had to lead. The quality that chiefly gave Ussher some vogue with the better classes of his district, was his unfailing self-confidence and unconcealed belief in his ability, whether in war or love, to carry through any purpose he had taken up. His keen, calculating Irish brain had taught him the universal readiness to accept men at their own valuation of themselves. Acting on that principle, he had created for himself an impression, strong everywhere but especially among women, of being irresistible in whatever he might take up, and of having received from fate itself a guarantee against failure, whether in things of business or of the heart. Add to all this that, in a country where a little money goes a long way, Ussher contrived to be always supplied with ready cash.

What wonder therefore if in this favourite of destiny Feemy’s novel-nourished, romance-excited, and ill-regulated fancy saw the realisation of her fondest visions? Of course the mounted policeman, with the graceful seat on his horse, the uniform which became his handsome figure so well, became to her one of the knightly figures with whom the writers that she loved had peopled her imagination. And then his conversation, resembling Othello’s, about “most disastrous chances, moving accidents by flood and field, and hair-breadth escapes” in the regions where his duty lay, “of rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven.” Feemy probably had never read Shakespeare, or she might have learned wisdom from Desdemona. A sense of Æschylean fate, no more to be shunned than softened, runs through this tragedy, whose closing acts are not without the strength and pathos of Dickens in Oliver Twist, and at some points touch the Shakespearean level. Feemy’s father may not, indeed, have loved Ussher, or even “oft invited him.” But not on that account a less frequent or warmly received guest, he rode from his barracks, three miles distant, at Mohill, to Ballycloran to pass almost daily a whole morning or evening. Captain Ussher’s local unpopularity as a Protestant and a remorselessly vigilant official was nothing to his disadvantage in Feemy’s eyes. She saw in it only a proof of her lover’s devotion to his duty, and of his heroic determination of not flinching from any risk of life or limb in fulfilling the obligations he had taken upon himself.

The one member of the Ballycloran household who sees through the policeman’s designs upon the girl is Pat Brady, Thady Macdermot’s counsellor, rent-collector, and factotum. Even Thady, but for hampering considerations, would not lack the spirit to repel Ussher’s advances, and by doing so secure his sister’s safety. What, however, he mentally asks, can he do? The exciseman, on the strength of a mere vague suspicion, is not to be forbidden the house. That at best would only provoke his sister’s indignant disgust. Thady therefore remains inactive, and the only effect of the vague hints and irresponsible suggestions received from different quarters is to intensify a silent, sullen hatred of the man. That, henceforth, by a series of slow degrees—the description of which is Trollope’s earliest exhibition of high literary art—becomes his ruling passion. Not that, even yet, he has in his heart doomed Ussher to death for his intrusions upon the fallen family’s hospitality, and for the scandalous gossip that is raised against Feemy. Till the final stage comes within sight, Thady’s detestation is for the most part speechless, except when the accident of Ussher’s voice or presence rouses the young man to a passing fit of uncontrollable fury. About this time Ussher made a professional coup which, while more than ever concentrating upon himself the ill-will of the district at large, and in particular of Thady Macdermot, showed such adroitness and such contempt of personal danger combined as to deepen poor Feemy’s admiration of her hero. A wretch named Cogan, a Government spy, disclosed all the secrets of the trade in illicit potheen: the men who chiefly conducted it, and the places where the run spirits were to be found. The pauper peasants had been driven to this traffic because it offered the only chance of avoiding starvation.

Ussher’s official triumph in running the “potheen men” to earth leads directly up to the catastrophe. It secures the policeman’s promotion, but inflames to madness his detestation by Thady, who, little better than a peasant himself, sympathises with the peasantry that Ussher is hunting down. Feemy, on the other hand, idolising her lover’s intrepidity, ignores the local misery that is wrought by his daring devotion to duty. She thus unconsciously widens the gulf between her brother and herself. Trollope’s Post Office discipline, hardening his sensibilities, and constantly giving a fresh edge to his natural acumen, fitted him successfully to investigate in all its workings the contraband spirits trade and the spy system used for its detection. This fact gave more than an ordinary novelist’s value to what he had to say on the subject. Among the lower classes, two typical specimens of the human degradation it works are seen in Joe Reynolds and Pat Brady. Reynolds is a mere desperado, waging a truceless war with the world and with law. Brady has never been reduced to Reynolds’ straits for money and food; indeed the occupation alone of squeezing arrears from the Macdermot tenantry has always placed him a little above the dread of starvation. Will the young master of Ballycloran be induced, through Brady as the tool of Reynolds, to join the “boys” in exacting reprisals for the harshness meted out to them by the law?

The “boys” are bent on drawing Thady into their schemes of revenge, likely to prove murderous, upon two of his special abominations, not only Ussher but the builder, Flannelly’s man of business, Keegan, who aimed at himself possessing Ballycloran. With a sigh of relief, the reader finds Thady resist the “boys’” overtures, and, for the time, hopes he may yet be kept from the crowning crime which destiny had seemed to reserve for him. One of Ussher’s most recent captures goes by the name of Tim. This, on a much earlier page, has caused an ejected cottager to anticipate the policeman’s end with the words: “I’d sooner be in Tim’s shoes this night than in Captain Ussher’s, fine gentleman as he thinks hisself.” So far, however, Thady holds aloof from any projects of retribution, likely to involve bloodshed, against the men whose names had become bywords throughout the countryside. Nevertheless, we are still made to feel that, superhuman agencies, in the shape of foreordained circumstances, will draw Thady’s neck into the hangman’s noose.

What did Trollope, after careful inquiry, find the spy system, in its social and moral consequences, to be? At the outset he admits that paid informers frequently bring to justice criminals who would otherwise slip through the meshes of the legal net. On the other hand, the system involves not only the degradation of all concerned with it, but very often the grossest miscarriages of justice. Chief among the villainies of Irish espionage is the premium placed upon false informations by the prospect of blood-money. Next to that evil comes the deliberate manufacture of offences by those who have a money interest in fabricating baseless charges against the innocent and unwary. Trollope does not charge the Government with encouraging these informers, or even recognising them. All he says is that those charged with the execution of criminal laws do frequently secure their own advancement by the most iniquitous and demoralising methods.[7]

The resistance offered by Thady Macdermot to the schemes of ruffians who would stick at nothing fills many powerful pages in Trollope’s first story. The young master of Ballycloran is preoccupied with the issues of his sister’s fate, and maddened with the insinuations to which Ussher’s visits gave the point. Ussher himself will die a violent death, but as regards who is to deal the avenging blow the reader is kept in the sustained agony of a trying and artistically prolonged suspense. Some of those seized by Ussher for systematic evasion of the Excise duties protest their innocence while, bound together in twos and threes with cords, they are being huddled off to prison. To one of these Ussher exclaimed: “You mean to threaten me, you ruffian.” “I doesn’t threaten you”, was the answer, “but there is them as does; and it will be a black night’s work to you for what you are doing with the boys, for trying to make out the rint with the whisky, not for themselves but for them as is your friends.” Thus dramatically is set forth the Irish question, as it seemed to Trollope when he first knew the country. At the same time, the followers of his narrative, their interest in the characters now fairly roused, experience a sense of relief at discovering that they may think that Thady at least will be no party in doing the execrated policeman, or anyone else, to death.

The atmosphere at this point is so heavily charged with moral issues as to be depressing almost beyond tolerance. After the example set in such cases by Shakespeare, and indeed in a way Shakespeare might have approved, Trollope at once relieves the situation and at the same time, by the force of contrast, deepens its tragedy with humorous interludes more illustrative of Irish character than descriptions that should run to many pages. The peasants, whose inability to pay high rent for miserably bad land, and who, in Trollope’s words, have had recourse to illegal means for easing them of their difficulties, may have been driven to become “ribbon men,” but, even when separated from ruin by less than a step, throw themselves heart and soul into the noisy hilarities of a wake or a wedding. The description of Pat Brady’s marriage-feast, followed by the improvised cottage ball, might be the letterpress written up to some painting from the brush of an Irish Morland. Even the moody young master of Ballycloran, who is among the guests, in spite of his scowling glances and his inaudible imprecations on the policeman, has caught the contagious gaiety of the occasion. Ussher, also of the company, leads out Feemy as his partner. The prevailing merriment cannot indeed dispel the haunting thought that it may prove to be a dance of death. But the party itself ends, as it began, in whisky and in peace. Thady indeed, having taken more whisky than is his wont, exchanges hot words with Ussher afterwards. But the popular voice hints only, if at all, at what is to come in Brady’s whisper to Joe Reynolds: “It’s little Mr. Thady loves the Captain, and it’s little he ever will.”

This small melodramatic touch is followed by pen-and-ink pictures of society and sport, again driving the figure of a skeleton at the feast into the distant background. Carrick is to have some races, and afterwards a race ball. The night before, there is a dinner; one of the chief figures at this is a gentleman jockey, Bob Gayner, whose life is spent in riding steeplechases, and consequently in reducing his weight to the lowest possible figure. At this particular banquet he has not swallowed a mouthful. Our last sight of him is, when the diners disperse, standing against the fire-place sucking a lemon, with a large overcoat on, and a huge choker round his neck.

Quick, however, on the heels of all this festivity comes the warning that mischief more serious than ever is in the wind. The parish priest in The Macdermots, Father John, never proselytises, never intrigues, and only exacts from his flock alms enough to keep body and soul together. His device, however, to keep Feemy out of danger by moving her from Ballycloran to the care of Mrs. McKeon, together with her husband touched off in one of Trollope’s happiest character miniatures, has failed. The lover who, on one plea after another, had evaded Feemy’s repeated request of marriage, thinks now of nothing less than of making her his wife, but, being content to retain her as a possession, has no objection to punish Thady Macdermot for his unmannerly speech by carrying off his sister. How that design fails of execution, and how Feemy is not abducted, but Ussher, at the instant of lifting her into the carriage, is felled to the ground a corpse by Thady’s smashing bludgeon, forms a scene comparable, for blood-curdling force of description, with Nancy’s murder by Bill Sykes, and did indeed win from Charles Dickens his earliest admission that Trollope had strength as well as glibness. The long-drawn-out strain on her whole being of the events thus summarised has caused Feemy’s days to be numbered. She dies suddenly while waiting to give evidence at her brother’s trial. All that remains now is the execution of the death-sentence on Thady. The last words that he hears before the bolt is drawn are those of Father John’s prayer that God will receive him into His mercy.

The scenes of violence and desolation on which the curtain falls may almost be compared for impressiveness with any picture of the collective ruin wrought by Nemesis in Greek drama, or as the close of Hamlet itself. Yet the gloom which darkens the whole narrative derives at once, for the moment, relief from lighter interludes. Bob Gayner in The Macdermots prepares the way for Dot Blake in The Kellys and the O’Kellys. One chapter also in Trollope’s first novel so overflows with comedy passing into farce as appropriately to presage the rich and varied humour that is on the whole the dominant note of his second effort. Among the magistrates whom Thady Macdermot’s crime have called in solemn conclave together, are two, Jonas Brown of Brown Hall and Mr. Webb of Ardrum. In all respects but social or official status, these two form a complete contrast. The ungenial and unpopular Brown, one of Ussher’s most habitual hosts, has from the first angrily maintained the absence of any extenuating feature in the murder committed by Thady Macdermot. Webb, on the other hand, naturally amiable and beloved throughout his neighbourhood, almost goes so far as to deny Thady’s moral criminality. In the attempt to rescue something of his sister’s honour he merely committed justifiable homicide. His remarks on Thady’s opponents had been so severe as to be taken for personal insults by the Brown faction. The master of Brown Hall therefore demands from Webb a written assurance that his words were pointed at no member of the Brown family, but receives an answer regretting that he cannot comply with such a request. This, it must be remembered, was in the days before the duel had become obsolete.

Brown’s two sons, Fred and George, have from the first been spoiling for a fight. “The sod’s the only place now, father,” each exultingly exclaims, adding: “I like him the better for not recanting.” Fred takes a more serious view, remarks that Webb is a cursed good shot, suggests his father should make his will before he goes out. It would also be as well, in case of accidents, to have a doctor handy, for, as one of the sons thoughtfully remarks: “Though so vital a part as the head be not touched, the body is all over tender bits,” devoutly adding, in words that really have a touch of Dogberry or Shakespearean clown about them: “May heaven always keep lead out of my bowels; I’d sooner have it in my brains.” The father has fidgeted a good deal between these two fires of filial thoughtfulness and counsel, but so far has said nothing. At the last remark, his patience deserts him, and he exclaims: “D—— your brains! I don’t believe you’ve got any,” presently adding that the affair is one of which he has had some experience, while as yet neither of the young men has been out. The preliminaries of the duel may be comedy; the combat itself rises to farce. The Macdermots contains, as will have been seen, touches of more polished humour than this, though in most cases it is broad enough to suggest Anthony Trollope’s inheritance of the gift from his clever mother.

Such passages as that last dwelt upon in The Macdermots prepared, as had been suggested, the way for the transition to the next novel, The Kellys and the O’Kellys. That story, indeed, is not without some incidents only less sombre than those which diffuse their colour through the earlier book. It is characteristic of Trollope’s novels that the underplot is often of as much importance, and the source of as sustained an interest, as the main plot itself. In The Kellys and the O’Kellys, the secondary narrative not only keeps pace with the primary, but reflects the general character of its interest and displays a parallel for some of its occurrences. The period, a little later than the time chosen for The Macdermots, is that of O’Connell’s agitation, trial, and unimpaired ascendency. Among those brought to Dublin by the Liberator’s appearance before his judges are two men. One is the head of the O’Kelly, as of the Kelly clans, now Lord Ballindine; the other is a young man of about his own age, a widow trader’s son, Martin Kelly, whom the nobleman contemptuously acknowledges as a sort of fifteenth cousin. This group is completed by the evil genius of the story, Dot Blake. Both the peer and the peasant happen just now to be united by a similarity of object, more closely binding them for the moment than the tie of remote kinship. Fond of the turf, with one or two horses in training for the English “classical” races, Viscount Ballindine is bent on improving his finances by sharing his title with an heiress, Fanny Wyndham; her guardian, the Earl of Cashel, having other views for her, is actively concerned to prevent communications between his ward and her lover.

Now for Martin Kelly. Simeon Lynch, the Ballindine estate manager, under the present Viscount’s father, has feathered his nest so well as to have amassed a fortune that has raised his children far above the social level of their birth. His son, Barry Lynch, has even been at Eton with young Lord Ballindine; though in Barry’s case the “learning of the humanities have not softened manners or prevented them from being fierce.” His daughter Anastasia, known as Anty, divides the paternal property with her brother. She is therefore a very considerable catch. Nevertheless the plebeian Martin Kelly, with his Irish self-confidence, has set his heart on winning her. That project is resisted as strongly, by Anty’s brother, as Fanny Wyndham’s guardian objects to his ward’s union with Ballindine. Lord Cashel does what he considers his duty to the young lady in his charge shrewdly and, so far as her lover is concerned, harshly. Much whisky, and a money greediness that has swallowed up other passions, have gradually degraded Barry Lynch into a ruffianly sot, with no other thought than, by foul means if fair fail, to become master of his sister’s share in the property their father divided equally by will between them. The brother’s drunken ferocity proves the death-warrant to his schemes. Driven from home by Barry’s barbarity, Anty Lynch finds a humble refuge beneath the roof of Mrs. Kelly, Martin Kelly’s mother. To these extremities, the relations between Fanny Wyndham and Lord Ballindine naturally present no parallel. Even with them, however, the course of true love runs at least as roughly as is its proverbial wont.

The figures gathered round the leading personages in this twin drama illustrate the closeness with which Trollope studied every phase of Irish life. They are as racy of the soil as Charles Lever himself. Their truth and freshness indeed so much impressed Lever that they suggested to him the new variety of Irish character to be met with in his latest writings. The Irish squire who lives more by his wits than his land, Walter Blake, might indeed, had he wanted such inspiration, have supplied the germ of Dudley Sewell in Sir Brook Fossbrooke, and the other products of the post-Lorrequer period. An effeminate, slightly made man of about thirty, good-looking, gentlemanlike, with a cold, quiet, grey eye, and a thin lip, infallible on racing matters, riding boldly good horses, always drinking the very best claret that Dublin could procure, a finished gambler, who makes his six hundred a year, as to style of life, do the work of as many thousands. Here is a description entirely in the later Leverian style, and with the Leverian ring in the words of the well-bred, sporting adventurer, who plays his own game with such an entire absence of scruple, and with such polished serenity, that his friend Frank Ballindine has to thank some of Dot Blake’s remarks to Lord Cashel for the temporary rupture of his engagement with Fanny Wyndham. Lever’s first profession was medicine. How well Trollope understood its Irish representatives may be seen from his sketch of Doctor Colligan, who, attending Anty Lynch in the illness brought on by her brother’s brutality, resents, by knocking him down, a hint from Barry that he would make it worth the physician’s while to contrive the patient’s death. Of special interest, in view of what Trollope’s next novel was to be, is the Anglican clergyman on the Ballindine property, George Armstrong, whose life is a battle with tradesmen and tithe-payers, but who, though on one occasion Frank Ballindine has to supply him with a suit of clothes before despatching him on some errand to his lady-love, can always enjoy a good dinner when he gets one, and pilots his sorry hunter so cleverly as generally to be in at the death when out with hounds.

CHAPTER V
COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE AND ITS LITERARY FRUITS

Trollope’s Examiner articles—Opposing religious experiences of boyhood and early manhood—Moulding influences of his Irish life—The cosmopolitan in the making—Interest in France and the French—La Vendée—Trollope’s relation to other English writers on the French Revolution—The moving spirits of the Vendean insurrection—Peasant royalist enthusiasm—Opening of the campaign—The Chouans of fact and fiction—A republican portrait-gallery—Barère—Santerre—Westerman—Robespierre—Eleanor Duplay.

AT the time of their first appearance the two Irish novels just described were commercial and literary failures. They preceded, however, even if they did not help to bring about, a turn for good in their author’s fortunes. It was indeed only after the full establishment of Trollope’s reputation that both The Macdermots and The Kellys and the O’Kellys were shown by the reflected light of success to abound in promise. The discovery might have been made earlier had not the books long remained practically unknown. However, Dickens’ friend and biographer, John Forster, then the most formidable critic and exacting editor on the London Press, thought sufficiently well of Trollope’s work to commission from him for The Examiner certain articles about the districts chiefly affected by the successive ravages of plague and famine in 1847. The broken fences, the deserted farms, and the monotonously endless stretches of misery and destitution in Trollope’s Post Office district, including Cork, Kerry, and Clare, were soon to be further disfigured by sights more terrible. Starvation did but prepare the way for the most hideous forms of new and ghastly disease.

Sufferers soon found their skins tight drawn, like a drum, to the face, and covered with small light hairs, as of those on a gooseberry. The poor wretches thus plague-stricken, having no longer roofs to shelter them, were huddled together in wigwams pitched under park walls, with no other food than that which the charity of the owners of these demesnes supplied. Conspicuous among the landlords who answered these appeals were Lord Dunkellin and Edmund O’Flaherty of Knockbane, near Galway. Out of all this misery, the political agitators, largely imported from the other side of the Atlantic, had begun in 1846 to make capital. This was their way of drawing Ireland into the subversive vortex which had already sucked in nearly the whole European continent. The appeal of the sedition mongers seemed to Trollope a failure, or at best but partially and superficially successful. As to the general condition in 1848, he told The Examiner that it was not a revolutionary year, at least for Ireland. They talked about rows. But these, he said, existed only in newspaper columns. From Portrush to Waterford, and from Connemara to Dublin, there would be found no trace of any widespread, popular plan for converting peasant occupiers into sovereign proprietors. No one realised more fully than the Connaught crofter the folly and futility of the talk about abolishing the difference between employers and employed. In England, wrote Trollope, there was too much intelligence to look for any general improvement on a sudden. In Ireland there was too little intelligence to look for any improvement at all.

The English Government, now under Sir Robert Peel, had taken the first step towards relieving Irish distress by freeing the ports for the admission of foreign grain in 1846. Trollope himself had seen the universal alleviation following the arrival of Indian corn for the starving people. Next, Lord John Russell, as Prime Minister in 1847, instituted relief-works to help the unemployed masses. These measures were attacked from two different quarters. Among the Irish peasantry some complained of not being fed absolutely for nothing. The landed classes were disposed to doubt the necessity of any State interference at all. But in his third Irish novel, Castle Richmond (1860), dealing with the famine period, Trollope himself testified to the alacrity shown by the territorial class in co-operating with the State. And Trollope was likely to be an impartial judge. His personal sympathies were not then with the Whigs. The English public man with whom he was chiefly in communication, the philanthropic Lord Shaftesbury, having served under Wellington and Peel, passed for a Conservative. The main points of his Examiner articles have been already given. The whole little series formed an answer to the charges against ministers brought by their censors, alike in Press and Parliament. The seven years he had passed on the other side of St. George’s Channel had indeed been turned to such good account as to make him an authority on Irish affairs in their then most prominent aspect.

Meanwhile, by the personal intercourse of society, or by instructive and inspiring correspondence with useful friends, Trollope had improved his acquaintance with men, manners, and things in a way that was afterwards to bear literary fruit. Between 1846 and 1850, his mother still lived at Florence, and though Anthony did not actually visit Florence till 1853, he and Mrs. Trollope, during those years, held regular and copious communication with each other through the post. In this way many pleasant glimpses are caught of diverse personalities famous, or at least interesting. There is F. W. Faber, first met at Mr. Sloane’s, the wealthy Anglo-Florentine, who gave the church of Santa Croce its new front. To Faber, Trollope was apparently first attracted by his having been the most brilliant Harrovian of his time. This acquaintanceship at once deeply interested Mrs. Trollope, and was to have a lasting effect upon her son. His first religious lessons may have been those in the Church catechism. He had then been taken in spiritual charge by Cunningham, the evangelical vicar of Harrow, caricatured, it was generally believed, in Mrs. Trollope’s Vicar of Wrexhill. To that divine he did his best in the way of listening as a duty, but the copious interspersion of casual conversation by him and other Low Church teachers with scriptural tags and devout ejaculations first made Trollope secretly think he was talking nonsense. In this way the youthful Anthony imbibed a sceptical disgust for the social ways and religious tenets of all that school. Filled with these prejudices, he came under a spiritual influence very different from any of which so far he had any experience.

His Winchester days had closed with missing New College. A little later he found himself hopelessly beaten for a small entrance scholarship on a minor foundation at Cambridge. To both Universities he made several short visits. At Oxford he heard the future Cardinal Newman preach from the pulpit of St. Mary’s. The effect of those sermons was deepened by many conversations with the preacher, and afterwards with the already mentioned F. W. Faber, whose personal charm was felt as strongly by Anthony as it had been by his mother, through whom indeed the son first knew that accomplished divine and poet, both in his Anglican and his Roman stage. Not indeed that Anthony Trollope was ever near to becoming a partisan of either side. Still at the outset his sympathies were, as afterwards, inclined towards the moderate, lettered, and generally accomplished members of the High Church party. As a boy, while with his parents abroad, he had seen and liked the home life of Roman Catholics. During the interval that separated his Irish stories from his third novel, he turned to good account the opportunities provided him by his mother for improving his knowledge of continental institutions, secular or religious, and the personal types they tended to produce. At each fresh point of his literary evolution Trollope’s industry in some degree took on the colour of the surroundings amid which it was exercised. The earlier of his Irish books grew out of his Post Office work in the “Isle of Saints.” Between 1848 and 1850, his cosmopolitan training had begun, and indeed advanced some way. Some years later his Tales of All Countries was to form a memorial of his experiences as a citizen of the world. Before these, came La Vendée. That novel, if written at all, would have been written probably in a very different manner but for the recent widening in his social, religious, and political horizons.

Trollope had been born amid the world-wide ferment of the ground swell following the great national convulsion in France with which the eighteenth century closed. Those commotions had seemed the more real and recent to his childhood from the constant conversational references to them as portending what England herself might expect. He had heard stories of the privations and hair-breadth escapes experienced by refugees from the reign of terror when struggling to place the Straits of Dover between themselves and their oppressors of the first French republic. In those parts of England from the first, at least by name familiar to him, he had seen the country houses where the royalist émigrés had found an asylum more than once during the years between the murder of the French king and the Vienna Congress. He had heard English prejudice describe French loyalty to the old régime as a mere pose, and Protestant prejudice refuse to see anything that was worthy the name of “true religion and undefiled” in the teachings of the Popish priesthood or in the daily life of their most loyal devotees. His more recent intercourse with men like Faber and Newman had, without leading him to a spiritual crisis, caused him to review and recast his religious conceptions. He had been taught as a boy to turn his back on all pre-Reformation doctrines and rites. His own experiences had now more than reconciled him to the working of the papal system in Ireland. On the whole he had found the Irish Roman Catholic priests kindly and far from bigoted men, honestly anxious to do their duty towards their flock, as well as towards the official representatives of that Protestant ascendency which in their heart they were bound to detest. Neither had Trollope, always open though his keen eyes were, known many authentic cases of priestly greed, intrigue, intolerance, or proselytism. The conventional charges, in fact, made by evangelicals against the hierarchy and officials of a foreign Church could from Trollope’s own experience be disproved. The mere fact of such accusations being brought deepened his distrust and dislike of Low Churchism and all its ways.

Possessed by such a spirit of reaction from the popular Calvinism which his mother had lashed in The Vicar of Wrexhill, he sat down, after The Kellys and the O’Kellys, to his third novel, La Vendée. By that time half a century had passed since the issues and methods of the French Revolutionaries, which destroyed Burke’s friendship with Fox, had left Whiggism in a state of intestine feud. An impulse such as had urged Coleridge and Southey into the Tory camp produced in Trollope a desire to write a story showing the French royalists in politics at their best, and the reasonableness of their religion as one by which to live and die. His public school associations had been genuine Wykehamist—that is to say, high Tory in Church and State. As a boy of fifteen he had heard of the “three days” which, on July 27, 1830, sent the last of the Bourbons, Charles X, from his French throne across the English Channel. At the age of thirty-three, while, as has been seen, going his Post Office rounds through Connaught, he had watched the progress of the second French Revolution of the nineteenth century. He might have been presented in his British asylum to the lately arrived “Mr. Smith,” who was none other than the Louis Philippe formerly, with the results already described, visited in his palace by Trollope’s mother. Hodie tibi, cras mihi, while La Vendée was in course of preparation for the press, English Tories and many who were not Tories had persuaded themselves that reform in politics, dissent in religion, and the progressive removal of ancient landmarks in Church or State would gradually bring this country under the same pernicious influences as those which had unsettled and devastated the greater part of the world beyond the Dover Straits. In La Vendée Trollope successfully fulfilled the twofold end of flattering conservative sentiment, religious or political, and of breaking comparatively fresh soil, as well as portraying new characters in a period that then seemed almost modern.

Readers of Disraeli’s novels will remember the advice urged by Rigby on Coningsby to “read Mr. Wordy’s history of the late war, in twenty volumes, proving clearly that Providence was on the side of the Tories.” No one knew better than Rigby’s reputed original, John Wilson Croker, or for that matter Disraeli himself, the compendious utility of Alison’s History of Europe. Elsewhere Trollope may easily have found the historic facts on which he based his third novel. From Alison he learned to deduce a moral in accord with the prevailing English sentiment. Like many of his countrymen who cared nothing for party, Trollope felt something of disgust at the Whig enthusiasm for Napoleon as the reconstructor of the European system, notwithstanding his rise to power by violating all those principles of civil and religious liberty which Whigs, by their historic traditions, were bound to hold sacrosanct. Without pretending to be a specialist in modern French history, Trollope knew enough of the country and the people to look for the real security of a gradual return to law and order, not in the exercise of coercive force by any individual however great, but in the national instincts and tendencies making for conservatism, political or religious, and, as he thought, underrated by recent English writers on the subject. This aspect of national character and life it became his business to bring out in La Vendée. His Irish stories had already maintained and illustrated the view that the Celt as he existed on the other side of St. George’s Channel could be as business-like, as thrifty, as sober in thought as the Saxon or the Lowland Scot himself. So La Vendée was to dispose of similar fallacies about the French rooted in the English mind. Genuine religion could exist in a Roman Catholic land, as well as genuine loyalty and uncalculating patriotism among a people conventionally considered fickle, frivolous, and, naturally incapable of the patient, self-repressive, and sustained effort by which Northern nations are content slowly to await and effect the reforms that Southern races precipitate and mar by revolutions.

Trollope occupies a middle place among the three novelists of the Victorian age who have acknowledged the literary fascination of the French revolutionary period in some one of its aspects, or in the events growing out of it. Carlyle, essentially a humourist before being an historian, first made the subject his own, and in some degree helped by his research and method his successors in their treatment of it. Five years after Carlyle, Bulwer-Lytton wrote Zanoni, the earliest English novel descriptive of Paris during the Terror. Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities came out some time later, in 1859. Trollope’s contribution, therefore, to the romance of the revolutionary series, chronologically might have owed something to Alison, who alone among those of an earlier date had touched the phases of the theme specially appealing to our novelist. In fiction the dates just given would exempt him from any suspicion of obligation to Bulwer or Dickens. His originality stamps itself on the opening chapter of La Vendée, and is consistently maintained throughout. Before the action of the novel begins, its royalist heroes can no longer doubt the resolution reached by the municipality of Paris that the king should fall. The Convention, in fact, was already founding the republic. The actual process, indeed, had advanced far enough to array the country gentlemen of La Vendée (1850) and their retainers in arms against the new régime. The entirely fresh descriptive feature of the opening chapters is the account of social Paris when the Jacobins were entrapping Louis XVI.

Here Trollope drew not on Alison, but the first-hand knowledge conveyed to him by his mother. Mrs. Trollope, in her turn, had been taken behind the political scenes of the period by the man whom the royalists in her son’s story agreed could alone save the throne. This was the same General Lafayette that Trollope’s parents had visited in his French country house and that always remained their chief friend abroad. During the early months of 1792, most of the haute noblesse had exchanged the French capital for London or for the English country houses, many of them, as has been already said, familiar to Trollope. They left, however, behind them enough of wit, beauty, and fashionable brilliance to prevent the capital from losing its character of the Western world’s polite metropolis. The city, in a phrase of a contemporary writer, H. S. Edwards, that took Trollope’s fancy, from having been the Lutetia of the ancients had become the lætitia of the moderns. Intellectual interest in the progress of the Revolution, up to the beginning of the king’s imprisonment, had the effect of obliterating class distinctions. It produced a certain solidarity between the professional classes which supplied the revolutionary leaders, and the more enlightened of the aristocracy that, long since admitting the necessity of drastic social ameliorations, had, as Trollope summarises it, approved the early demands of the tiers état, had applauded the tennis-court oath, had entered with enthusiasm into the fête of the Champ de Mars. These had credulously persuaded themselves that sin, avarice, and selfishness were about to be banished from the world by philosophy.

Bitter experience had already taught them their mistake. Philosophy placed no check upon human nature’s worst passions. The high-flown panegyrics on virtue in the abstract were practically consistent with the letting loose of the tiger and the ape in individuals. The feast of reason that followed the beheading of the king proved the introduction to the long-drawn-out orgy of fiends lasting till Robespierre’s death in 1794. What refuge could there be for the now undeceived dupes of their own fond expectations but in flight? Those who from the first had remained courtiers or royalists, and those whom a spurious philanthropy had caused to dally with wholesale homicide, hastened to put the English Channel between themselves and a capital and country from which had vanished all hope of personal safety or service to their fellow-men. Some gallant spirits had long lingered on near the place of the king’s confinement, refusing even now to despair of some happy chance that might favour his escape from his enemies, and enable his friends to conduct him permanently out of danger.

Such were the historical circumstances and actual conditions of the time without a knowledge of which Trollope’s third novel cannot be rightly understood. Its title came from the new republican name for the vintage districts of Anjou and Poitou, La Vendée (vendange). Those of its gentry who had rallied round the king were known in Paris as the Poitevins. The hope of which this little group supplied the leaders was scarcely so forlorn as it has been described since, during the seven years period covered by Trollope’s novel, the Vendean resistance to the Convention was carried on not only with unfailing courage but occasionally with substantial military success. In Paris, where the story opens, the Poitevins had attracted to their number some among the more moderate members of the Assembly, and particularly certain of those who had been officers of the royal bodyguard. They formed themselves into a club whose meetings were held in the Rue Vivienne. The last of these gatherings took place on August 12, 1792, and lasted just long enough to acquaint all present with the final and complete defeat of the moderates, who so far had clung to the conviction that in some unexplained manner the monarchy would be preserved from final overthrow. Against all gentler counsels, against, in Trollope’s words, the firmness of Roland, the eloquence of Vergniaud, the patriotism of Guadet, the brute force of Paris had prevailed.

Louis XVI, his worst enemies could not deny, had inherited none of his predecessor’s vices, and had shown himself the friend of popular rights. He had indeed actually himself convoked the Assembly that had no sooner come together than it resolved on his destruction. The Poitevins, however, had correctly estimated their resources in their respective neighbourhoods. With a good heart they now welcome and prepare for open war. When told that the sovereign’s defenders are outvoted in the Assembly and that resistance to the people is vain, they one and all protest against dignifying by that name the mob of blood-thirsty ruffians who for the time have the capital at their mercy. The real voice of the French people is for the monarch’s restoration to his rights. Under the Vendean gentry as leaders the masses will rise like one man against the demagogues who so foully misrepresent them. The real enemies of France and of the king are in each case the same men. To save the country from the usurpations of the Assembly falsely called national is also to deliver the lawful ruler from the dungeon to which, in the midst of this heroic oratory, comes the news of Louis having been consigned.

That for the present the mission of the patriots in Paris cannot proceed further is now admitted by all. Before, however, the patriots disperse, each to his own provincial neighbourhood, we have made acquaintance with the clearly and picturesquely characterised individuals of whom they consist. Its most prominent member, Lescure, is a type, historically true, of the educated and enlightened Frenchman, keenly alive to the abuses and evils of the aristocratic system that were at the root of popular degradation and distress. His mind had been nurtured, and his political education derived, from studying classical republicanism, as it existed in Athens and Rome. He was deeply read in Rousseau, Voltaire, and in the whole literature of the encyclopædists. An amiably philanthropic disposition had combined with tendencies of his intellectual culture to take for his watchwords Liberty, Fraternity, though not, it would seem, Equality. On perceiving the new movement to mean universal surrender to an ignorant and brutal mob, he drew back, to find himself gradually pressed into the presidency of the little Poitevin society. This personification of high-minded and cultivated philanthropy numbered amongst its followers the youthful heir to an ancient and wealthy territorial marquisate, Henri de Larochejaquelin.[8] His principles had been formed on those of his elder, Lescure, but his temperament, eager, impetuous, delighting in the rush and whirl of social gaiety, forms a contrast to his staid and judicious senior. In one respect he stands out as a product of the period. The new generation was often noticeable for the precocious manhood developed in the hothouse atmosphere of a convulsive epoch. Since reaching his seventeenth year, the young noble now mentioned, in consequence of his father’s ill-health, had taken upon himself the paternal estates’ management, and his sister Agatha’s guardianship.

Adolphe Denot is another who has a place in this little company. Born to a position of territorial ownership in Poitou, Denot represents in Trollope’s story the superficial votaries of political change, ready to take up with the newest mode in public affairs, without the trouble of inquiring into its significance or worth. Without Lescure’s historical knowledge and reflective habits, he belonged to the same section of French society as that in which Lescure had been reared. The earliest French protests against the tyranny of ages came from the French nobility themselves. Never in the theatre at Versailles had louder applause been excited than by the lines of Voltaire’s play, produced during the interval separating the first from the last quarter of the eighteenth century: “I am the son of Brutus, and bear graven on the heart the love of liberty and a horror of kings.” In the cheers that greeted these words, Trollope’s Denot might have followed the vogue by joining. J. J. Rousseau no doubt made himself personally responsible for the doctrine of the people’s sovereignty and its consequences. Before, however, its proclamation by him, Voltaire’s wit had secured the notion acceptance with rank, fashion, aristocracy, and even the Court circle. Recently, however, the enthusiasts for freedom in the royal playhouse had discovered everything which savoured of revolution to be insufferably vulgar. He had therefore gone over to Larochejaquelin’s lead, and enrolled himself under Lescure in the little Poitevin clique. Petted and caressed, as Trollope puts it, by the best and fairest in France, the revolution was still in its infancy when men discovered it to be a beast of prey, big with war, anarchy, and misrule.

The royalist organisation now described having been disbanded in the capital, the scene changes to those regions of southern France known as La Vendée. The country gentlemen of Anjou and Poitou were generally landlords of the smaller kind. They lived in comfort, but without any ambition for mere splendour. No pride in the antiquity of their race prevented their treating their tenants and household retainers less as dependents than equals. The instances of this now given exemplify Trollope’s favourite thesis that in a patrician dispensation characterised by thoughtfulness on the part of its controllers for those who live under it, there is more of the true democratic spirit than marks the most levelling variety of popular self-rule. The gentlemen of La Vendée have no sooner reappeared in their country homes than the counter-revolution, without any fostering agitation on their part, almost of its own accord sets in.

The Vendeans had heard from their rural seclusion of the king’s imprisonment, and of the insults offered by his republican jailors to the time-honoured ordinances of Church and State. There is no need for Lescure, Larochejaquelin, and the others to stimulate the local peasantry by fresh appeals against the emissaries of the detested republic. These only show themselves for the purpose of enrolling fresh conscripts, and forcibly apprehending a reluctant recruit. The spontaneous popular resistance ends in a pitched battle, with victory for the royalists. Operations are now on a larger scale. The struggle is no longer between small local garrisons on the one hand, and hastily levied, imperfectly disciplined royalist bodies on the other. Henceforth two armies, each tolerably marshalled and fairly equipped, meet each other in the field. Sieges are laid, attacks are delivered, sometimes repelled and sometimes succumbed to; all the combatants are engaged, towns are captured, private parks transform themselves into entrenched camps. Durbellière particularly, the country seat of the Larochejaquelins, becomes the theatre of a war conducted with sanguinary resolution on both sides, and with constantly varying fortunes. Among each host brave deeds in plenty are done. With the royalists the most picturesque, heroic, and victorious figure is that of Henri de Larochejaquelin, whose red sash and shoulder-band prove the same talisman of triumph as the snow-white plume of Henry of Navarre when he defeated the Duke of Mayenne at Ivry.

With the republicans too were to be found men equally capable or courageous, if less personally attractive. In the French romance that followed the Irish novels Trollope made no pretence of making his imagination the handmaid of history. Bulwer-Lytton, in The Last of the Barons, circumstantially constructed a bold and picturesque hypothesis as a plausibly conjectural explanation of the quarrel between Edward IV and Warwick. That was not at all in Trollope’s way. Equally little is his inclination, after the fashion of Sir Walter Scott, to play fast and loose with recorded facts, and to represent authenticated events in the light, and from the point of view, which happened to suit him. For the most part Trollope follows through every detail the accurate chronicle of the time. In one case, however, that he may account for the disappearance from his narrative of the character he calls Adolphe Denot, he departs from the historic record. According to Trollope, the Chouans, or Bretons who continued the Vendean War, followed a mysterious, if not an actually insane leader. The alleged mystery is mere invention. No personage of the period is more historical than Jean Cottereau, who from the first led the Bretons, and whose signal, the cry of the screech-owl (chat-huant), gave their name to the little Breton band. Nor can it be said that the historian’s version of events is, even for artistic purposes, improved on by the novelist’s discovery, in the Vendean leader, of Adolphe Denot, who, in an hour of what his friends charitably called mental aberration, had left the good cause of Church and King, had thrown in his lot with the revolutionaries. Since then he had remained out of sight.

At the point now under consideration, the novelist might indeed have done better, for himself as well as for his readers, had he exercised his fancy at least on the lines marked out by the historian. At the same time he deserves the praise of having caught the spirit of his period, as well as of having imbued his pages with a fair amount of genuine local colour. One word may be said about the pen-and-ink artist’s methods and the effect of his picture as a whole. The pervading tone, subdued if not, as in his first story, The Macdermots, sombre, at well-chosen points is relieved by the introduction of those lighter tints that Trollope’s quick eye for the humorous never failed in the right place to bring out. In the loyalist households, of the Vendean squires, the servants are treated less as inferiors than equals. Seeing in their employers their friends, and during war-time their comrades, they vie with each other in proving their devotion to the good cause. There thus sets in among them a generous rivalry as to who shall be nearest their lords in the hour of peril. Such a competition provides many happy openings for sketches of votaries of the sceptre and the crozier outdoing each other in the still-room and the servants’ hall.

There still remain Trollope’s estimates of the republican managers who, differing about much, agreed in calling the Vendeans mean curs, fit only for utter extermination. Six years earlier than the writing of La Vendée, Macaulay’s article on Barère had appeared in the spring number of The Edinburgh Review. The estimates of that particular revolutionary leader given by the historian and by the novelist generally agree with each other, but in every detail show the mutual independence of their writers. Macaulay’s account is an oratorical indictment, delivered in a more than usually impressive manner, and declaring that an amalgam of sensuality, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery, mendacity, and barbarity, such as in a novel would be condemned for caricature, was realised in Barère. Beside the essayist’s portrait of Bertrand Barère, place that in the novel which is our immediate concern, the one man, in a little party armed to the teeth, without sword, constantly playing with a little double-barrelled pistol, which he continually cocked and uncocked, and of which the fellow lay on the table before him. A tall, well-built, handsome man about thirty years of age, with straight black hair brushed upright from his forehead, his countenance gave the idea of eagerness and impetuosity rather than of cruelty or brutality. He was, however, essentially egotistical and insincere. A republican not from conviction but from prudential motives, he only deserted the throne when he saw that it was tottering.

For a time Barère supported the moderate party in the republic, and voted with the Girondists. He gradually joined the Jacobins, as he saw they were triumphing over their rivals. He was afterwards one of those who handed over the leaders of the Reign of Terror to the guillotine, and assisted in denouncing Robespierre and St. Just. He was one of the very few who managed to outlive the Revolution, and did so for nearly half a century. Nature had not formed him to be a monster gloating in blood. The republic had altered his disposition, and taught him, among those with whom he associated, to delight in the work which they required at his hands. Thus he became one of those who loudly called for more blood, while blood on every side was running in torrents. He too it was who demanded the murder of the queen, when Robespierre would have saved her. Before the Revolution he had been a wealthy aristocrat; he still wears the costume of his earlier period in the blue dress-coat, buttoned closely, notwithstanding the heat of the weather, round his body; the carefully tied cravat, disfigured by no wrinkle; the tightly fitting breeches that show the well-shaped leg. As a contrast to this sometime nobleman gibbeted by Macaulay, Trollope presents one to another notoriety of the period, known as the “King of the Faubourgs.” This was a large, rough, burly man, about forty years of age, of Flemish descent, by trade a brewer, by name Santerre, without fine feelings to be distressed at the horrid work set him to do, but filled with a coarse ambition, which made him a ready tool for the schemers who used his physical powers, courage, and wealth to their own ends.

The gallery given us by Trollope contains one more portrait, of fresher interest in itself, and not less life-like in its swift, sure strokes. Westerman in Carlyle’s description appears as an Alsatian. With Trollope he is a pure Prussian, a mercenary soldier who, banished from his native land, took service as a private in the army of the French republic, was soon promoted to be an officer, and after this promotion, foreseeing the future triumph of the extreme republicans, declared himself their adherent, and, joining Dumourier’s army, became that general’s aide-de-camp at the time of his attempt to sell the French legions to their Prussian and Austrian adversaries. Then Westerman left his master, and had since been the most prompt and ruthless military executioner of the Convention’s sternest behests. Westerman, as drawn by Trollope, is both soldier and politician. Two other military personages directing the campaign against the Vendeans, Bourbotte and Chouardin, take no interest in the affairs of State, and are merely rough, bold, brave fighters. Conspicuous among the Vendean leaders was Cathelineau. His spirited and fearless life’s work, crowned by a soldier’s brave death, excited the sympathetic admiration of the republic’s two military servants. That tribute to an enemy’s great qualities was enough to draw down upon them the anger of their superiors, especially of Barère. It was not, however, a time to visit such offences with a severe penalty. Both Bourbotte and Chouardin escaped without any formal reprimand.

To the sketch of Robespierre and the analysis of his character, Trollope, as might be expected, gives particular care. Here he supplements rather than follows those who before him had made this subject their own. “Seagreen incorruptible” was, says Carlyle, physically a coward, kept from flinching or turning tail only by his moral strength of purpose. Not so, is Trollope’s verdict. Courage indeed went conspicuously in hand with constancy of resolution, temperance in power, and love of country. If at the last he gave way, it was from the inward torment caused him too late by the discovery that his whole career had been a blunder, and that none of the objects which he had first set before himself were fulfilled. Poor mutilated worm, exclaims the novelist of La Vendée, what was there of pusillanimity in the remorse of conscience prostrating his whole physical frame, when he compared the aims which animated him at his beginnings with the results he saw all about him at his close? From Carlyle, Trollope knew of Mirabeau’s prophecy on hearing Robespierre’s maiden speech: “This man will do somewhat; he believes every word he says.” So staunch and sympathetic a Tory as Alison echoes as well as amplifies that view. And with him Trollope, who like many other writers about this period had learnt the usefulness of Alison, agrees.

To the English novelist, not less than to the English historian, Robespierre’s career stands out not as the offspring of any individual character, but as representing the delusions of the age. Chief among those errors ranked a belief in the natural innocence of man. With this fallacy had united itself another—the lawfulness of doing evil that good might come. Once exterminate by wholesale bloodshed all who embodied the debasing influences of a corrupt aristocracy, the masses would rise to the full height of their native greatness. Thus a triumphant democracy, enthroned upon mountains of patrician corpses, would wield its beneficent sceptre over a purified and reanimated society. Here as elsewhere agreeing with, perhaps indebted to, Alison, Trollope also speaks of Robespierre as omnipotent in Convention and in the Committee, but as having, too, his master, the will of the populace of Paris. In union with and in dependence on that, he could alone act, command, and be obeyed. Alison puts the same idea rather differently when he says: “Equally with Napoleon during his career of foreign conquest, Robespierre always marched with the opinions of five millions of men.”

Apart from the failure of moral fortitude and nerve which weakened and clouded his end, what particular feature in Robespierre’s temperament and life gave colour to the charge of cowardice that Carlyle at least considers so irrefutable? The answer is suggested by Trollope in what forms the most original passage in this portion of his story. One fond and tender dream Robespierre could never banish. Once let France, happy, free, illustrious, and intellectual, own how much she owed to the most disinterested patriot among her sons, Robespierre would retire to his small paternal estate in Artois; evincing the grandeur of his soul by the rejection of all worldly rewards, receiving nothing from his country but adoration. While in Trollope’s pages he is represented as preoccupied with visions like these, his garret is entered by a young woman, decently but very plainly dressed. This was Eleanor Duplay, who, when Robespierre allowed himself to dream of a future home, was destined to be the wife of his bosom and the mother of his children. Eleanor Duplay possessed no mark of superiority to others of her age (about five-and-twenty) and station. The eldest of four sisters, she specially helped her mother in caring for the house, of which Robespierre had become an inmate. With no political aptitude or taste of her own, she had caught, as she believed, political inspiration from his words, finding in his pseudo-philosophical dogmas, at once repulsive and ridiculous to modern ears, great truths begotten of reason and capable of regenerating her fellow-creatures.

Eleanor Duplay has a special object in approaching Robespierre at this moment, which brings her into the central current of the story. She had, in fact, undertaken to plead with her father’s lodger the Vendean cause. Both the girl herself, and the public opinion whose echoes she caught, were shocked by the wholesale massacre of women and children now going on in the doomed district after which Trollope called his story. What work, she had asked herself, when rallying her courage to the task, so fitting for the wife-elect of a ruler of the people as to implore the stern magistrate to temper justice with mercy? Her lover’s reception of the first hint at her prayer is not promising. The Vendeans, he says, must be not only conquered but crushed. The religion of Christ, he goes on, declares that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children to the third and fourth generation. Hence the babes must share the fate of their parents. As for the mothers, it is, says Robespierre, a false sentiment which teaches us to spare the iniquities of women because of their sex. This interview leads up to one of the most dramatic situations of the novel, and is so managed as during its progress to bring out in effective relief the feature of Robespierre’s character, which other expositors of it have noticed, but which none illustrated so fully as Trollope. Eleanor Duplay’s petition had not been completed when her lover’s suspicion—his predominating trait—expresses itself in an outburst of dark and terrible anger. In vain she assures him that no one has set her on to talk to him of this. In ordinary men suspicion sometimes clouds love; in Robespierre, as he is here described, it strangled the possibility of love at its birth.

CHAPTER VI
ON HER MAJESTY’S SERVICE AND HIS OWN

Maternal influence in the Barchester novels—Trollope’s first literary success with The Warden—The Barchester cycle begun—Origin of the Barchester Towers plot—The cleric in English fiction—Conservatism of Trollope’s novels—Typical scenes from The Warden—Hiram’s Hospital—Archdeacon Grantly’s soliloquy—Crushing the rebels—Position of the Barchester series in the national literature—Collecting the raw material of later novels—The author’s first meeting with Trollope—The novelist helped by the official—Defence of Mrs. Proudie as a realistic study—The Trollopian method of railway travelling—A daily programme of work and play.

AT each successive stage of Anthony Trollope’s literary advance, what he wrote was, throughout his Post Office days, suggested by no premeditated adventurous effort or mission such as produced the Dotheboys Hall chapter in Nicholas Nickleby, but was coloured and conditioned by the shifting circumstances of his daily routine. His surroundings, whatever for the time they may have been, provided his theme. Out of past reminiscence, when not from present observation, grew his personages. It was not in his nature to live two lives, one that of a Post Office servant, the other that of an author. He made a single life subserve two ends, one official, the other literary. To this must be added the twofold obligation to his mother visibly pervading the works that are now being examined, as the earliest and most stable foundation of his fame. From the clerical preferences shown in The Vicar of Wrexhill he imbibed his dislike of evangelicalism and its representatives. Mrs. Trollope too, by early initiating him into the mysteries of feminine character, imparted to him the skill in feminine analysis displayed throughout each of his stories that won real and lasting popularity. Frances Trollope’s appreciations of national character and of its individual instances invest her book about France with a grace, charm, and literary effect generally wanting to her Domestic Manners of the Americans. Her sympathetic insight into French life and thought attracted her son to the same subjects, and go some way towards explaining the choice of a theme for his third novel, La Vendée. That book brought its author the first money he ever made by his pen, £20.

Except perhaps the cultured and gracious High Churchmanship of the character which gives the story its name, nothing of parental inspiration can be seen in the general temper, the subject-matter, the dramatis personæ, or their settings, of the book that, following La Vendée after an interval of five years, first raised its writer to a recognised place among the novelists of his time. This was The Warden. Its glimpses of cathedral close, cloister, and of their dignitaries at duty, or in the private ease of their own homes, owe nothing, whether as regards treatment or feeling, to Mrs. Trollope’s evangelical caricatures. Equally independent are they, on the one hand, of Mrs. Sherwood’s Low Church delineations, or, on the other, of the romances by which Elizabeth Missing Sewell and Charlotte Mary Yonge rendered lasting service to the Anglican movement in the nineteenth century’s second half. Trollope himself always disclaimed any special first-hand intimacy with clerical life or exclusively clerical society. As a fact, however, something of the sort had been always familiar to him, if not from personal experience, still from family tradition. His ancestor, a London merchant’s son, eventually a dignified and well-known Berkshire vicar, might easily, if studied from his portraits alone, have suggested particular features and whole personages for the Barchester gallery. In connection with the course of its author’s general development, now being traced, The Warden is a real landmark for other reasons than that it formed his earliest introduction to the public as a novelist who had not mistaken his calling and whose works must be read. It was his fourth attempt at fiction, and enabled him to place before his readers some lineaments and traits of his most original and best-liked creations. Its way, however, to popularity was won by slow degrees. While opening the Barchester series, The Warden did not complete its growth into world-wide favour till that series had advanced some way.

Apropos of his real start with this book, Trollope, in 1856, told Lord Houghton that only 750 copies were printed, that they remained over ten years in hand, but that he regarded the book with affection because, after having previously written and published for ten years to no satisfactory purpose, he had made £9, 2s. 6d. by the first year’s sale. “Since then,” he added with quiet satisfaction, “I have improved even upon that.” From the biographical point of view necessarily taken in these pages, The Warden is specially interesting from being the second full revelation of its author’s attitude to life and character at the dawn of his literary success. The pervading temper of The Warden closely resembles that previously shown in La Vendée, and may therefore be described as one of social, moral, and intellectual conservatism. In the English story, the personal contrasts of ecclesiastical life making up most of the book were suggested, after the fashion described by the author, during a summer ramble in Salisbury Close. That, however, was not the way in which he came by the notion, not only of The Warden, but of Barchester Towers as well.

Both novels, in Trollope’s own words to the present writer, grew out of The Times correspondence columns during a dull season of the fifties. The letters raised and argued, for several days or weeks together, the controversial issue whether a beneficed clergyman could be justified in systematic absenteeism from the congregation for whose spiritual welfare he was responsible. The ecclesiastic who had supplied the subject for this newspaper discussion was first vehemently attacked by open enemies or candid friends; he then received the best defence possible from zealous partisans; and so, after an empty bout of argument, the matter ended. With Anthony Trollope it had only just begun. The whole question appealed strongly to his natural turn for social casuistry, especially of the more disputatious sort. The disclosures of personal motive, rivalry, and object, as the discussion widened and advanced, were personified by his imagination in a company of concrete forms. The leading journal’s letters came from many different persons, and combined every possible variety of opinion. None of the correspondents were known to the novelist, while his creative touch was secretly endowing them with the nature, the habit, and the form that was to give them something like immortality in his pages. Who, he had asked himself, were these Times letter-writers in private life; what manner of men did they seem to their associates in the Church and the world, to their families at home, to their friends abroad? The mental answers to these questions, elaborated by him during his official progress throughout the country, resulted in the bodying forth of things unknown, clerical or lay.

Thus did strong imagination, as Hippolyta puts it,[9] call for the first time into existence beings who, though now belonging to a past order, for the Victorian age were as full of actuality as Septimus Harding and Archdeacon Grantly, and who will be scarcely less useful to the nineteenth-century historian than, in their pictures of the early Georgian epoch, both Lecky and Macaulay found Congreve’s Parson Barnabas, Fielding’s amiably evangelical Parson Adams, and his antithesis Parson Trulliber. With those personages there are no creations in the Barchester novels that can be compared. And this for the sufficient reason that Fielding, like Congreve, aimed at reproducing with the pen the vigorous effects of George Morland’s brush. Trollope, on the other hand, had no sooner advanced some way with The Warden and the stories which followed it than he had satisfied himself that his most successful and congenial line was that of light-comedy narrative. The social atmosphere breathed, and the men and women brought before us in the Barchester novels are not dominantly, still less exclusively, clerical. Some of the most popular types are introduced chiefly for the purpose of connecting the more or less ecclesiastical fictions that followed The Warden with the panorama of Church dignitaries that formed Trollope’s early speciality. Even in Barchester Towers several of the sketches most conspicuous for inherent vitality are altogether lay. The Stanhopes, and of these the Signora above all, who makes of her sofa a throne before which the Barchester manhood prostrates itself, Mrs. Bold with her genuine or pretended lovers, form the purely secular background against which the Quiverfuls of Puddingdale, the Crawleys of Hogglestock, are thrown out in strong, sometimes painful, but always effective, relief.

As in The Warden Archdeacon Grantly leads the way to Barchester Towers, so in Barchester Towers Mr. Arabin, Fellow of Lazarus, Oxford, links that novel to The Last Chronicle of Barset; while the Thornes of Ullathorne open the way to Doctor Thorne, Squire Thorne’s cousin, the social and medical oracle of Greshamsbury Manor, not far from Gatherum Castle, whose owner, the Duke of Omnium, is to be the central figure in the political novels. As to Doctor Thorne, the heroine, Mary Thorne, if not quite such a masterpiece as Miss Dunstable, combines with the Scatcherd portraits to explain the abiding and even growing popularity of this really great novel. What Trollope’s sympathies were in La Vendée, such they showed themselves, not only in The Warden but in all his subsequent dealing with social and political topics. “Ask for the old paths, where there is the good way, and walk therein, and find rest therein.” The Hebrew prophet’s words[10] might have furnished Trollope with a congenial text for a lay-sermon that would have summed up all his convictions and have reflected, as in a mirror, the essential and deep-rooted conservatism of his mind. At the General Election of 1868, indeed, Trollope was to stand as a Liberal for Beverley. His training in the Civil Service had long since deepened his distrust of innovation and his hearty resistance to whatever savoured of new-fangled ideas. At the Post Office, whether serving under Whig or Tory chiefs, he always stood for the straitest traditions of the department. He showed himself as obstinately conservative in the traditions of its routine as his natural tone of mind, fortified by his mother’s precepts and prejudices, had caused him to be in politics.

As a clerical portrait-painter Trollope produced his work in advance of George Eliot by four years. Nothing but mutual dissimilarity can be found between the two schools in which they were respectively trained for the work. Nor had George Eliot ever lived in Trollope’s exclusive social environment. Yet Mr. Irwine, in Adam Bede, in his refined vicarage, with his high-bred mother for housekeeper, might be claimed as a distant relation by Archdeacon Grantly, notwithstanding the diametrically opposite associations and experiences of the two novelists. With George Eliot, its Irwines imparted to the Church a grace and sweetness that made itself felt even by Dissenters and infidels. “Imagine,” Anthony Trollope seems to murmur in a series of audible asides, “the curse of a religious establishment that took its tone not from the Grantlys but the Slopes.” The Warden, like the rest of the series it opened, is too universally familiar to need any analysis of its characters or its incidents here. It contains, however, certain passages which strike the social keynote of its author’s personal predilections in matters connected with ecclesiastical polity. The portions of the book now referred to show, in such clear-cut sentences, so unambiguously and picturesquely, their author’s fondness for the old régime, notwithstanding, if not almost because of, its defects, that a few extracts from them will recall more clearly his standpoint in the Barchester books than could be done by pages of description or comment. About Septimus Harding himself nothing need be said. St. Cross Hospital, the original of his Hiram’s Hospital, lies about a mile from Winchester in the Twyford direction. Its chief custodian might naturally therefore be a Wykehamist. Could anything, therefore, so gentle have come from the college of St. Mary Winton? Anthony Trollope would have answered “Yes,” and did indeed once call The Warden an idealised photograph, whose chief features were, by an eclectic process, taken from more than one member of the Sewell family whom, if he had first seen at Winchester, he only came to know well and observe closely when visiting New College, as his brother’s guest.

Equally realistic was the genesis of the principal figures grouped round the Warden. They comprise such old friends as his devoted daughter Eleanor; John Bold, her declared lover, who is denounced by the masterful Archdeacon as an enemy of the Establishment, but whom Mr. Harding is not unwilling to take for his second son-in-law; the inmates of the hospital themselves; the grateful Bunce, the Warden’s favourite and champion; Abel Handy, who leads the rebels and malcontents; Mr. Chadwick, whose family have supplied the Bishops of Barchester with stewards from time immemorial; the local man of business enlisted on behalf of the status quo; and, in the background, the London advisers of the Warden’s friends, Cox and Cummins, who recommend Mr. Harding to seek an interview with that very eminent Queen’s Counsel, a thorough Churchman, a sound Conservative, in every respect the best man to be got, Sir Abraham Haphazard. When in due course that conference has been obtained, Trollope’s portrait of the legal pundit is at one or two points reminiscent of that sound lawyer, notwithstanding his life’s failure, his own father. There is also a paternal touch in the portrait of Mr. Harding himself. The Warden’s sumptuous treatise on church music recalls Thomas Anthony Trollope’s erudite work, the Encyclopædia Ecclesiastica, mentioned to, if not encouraged by, John Murray, but never issuing from Albemarle Street.

Anthony Trollope’s style has been said by twentieth-century critics to lack distinction. But the various pictures of Dr. Grantly’s intervention in the hospital affairs have the strength, the certainty, and the ease of touch which declared in every line the observant humorist. In the pages to which the reader will presently be referred, Trollope shows his constitutional liking for the old, well-to-do, gentlemanlike Erastianism of the Establishment not by any generalities of comment or of moral reflection, but by narrative and descriptive diction as direct, graphic, and significant as any that ever came from his own or from any other contemporary pen. Archdeacon Grantly is on his way to Hiram’s Hospital; noting the signs of picturesque prosperity around him, he thinks with growing bitterness of those whose impiety would venture to disturb the goodly grace of cathedral institutions. The Archdeacon’s complacency has at once been deepened and has developed a new sensitiveness by the mutiny among Hiram’s almsmen, for the purpose of quelling which he is now on his way to the hospital. The ringleaders have not organised the movement without some opposition. The petition to the diocesan authorities setting forth their grievances has only secured signatures with some difficulty. The hundred a year claimed by the almsmen as their right seems to several more likely to be plundered by their children or belongings than to benefit themselves. The Handy and Skulpit faction has, however, now been put on its mettle, and already snaps its fingers at the resistance of the powers that be, “especially old Catgut with Calves to help him”—otherwise Mr. Harding with his violoncello, and his son-in-law, in his ecclesiastical war paint.

All these things are well known to the Archdeacon, with whom, as the representative of Anglican orthodoxy in its most attractive form, Trollope makes it plain enough what his own sympathies are. Who, our author asks, would not feel charity for a prebendary, when walking the quiet length of that long aisle at Winchester, looking at those decent houses, at that trim grass plat, and feeling the solemn, orderly comfort of the spot? Or who could be hard upon a dean, while wandering about the sweet close of Hereford, and owning that here solemn tower and storied window are all in unison and all perfect? Again, who could lie basking in the halls of Salisbury, gaze on Jewel’s Library, and on that unequalled spire, without feeling that bishops should sometimes be rich? Looking upon this pleasant scene almost with a proprietorial interest, the Archdeacon had answered his father-in-law’s question, Why shouldn’t they petition? with a brazen echo of the inquiring words and a remark that he would like to say something to them altogether, and let them know why they shouldn’t.

Poor Mr. Harding is equally terror-stricken at this first threat of what is coming, and at his relative’s later insistence on the Warden’s company upon the occasion. And now the eventful afternoon has come; the hour has struck. See the Archdeacon as, in Trollope’s picture, he stands up to make his speech. Erect in the middle of that little square, he looked like an ecclesiastical statue placed there as a fitting illustration of the Church militant here on earth; his shovel-hat, large, new, and well pronounced, a Churchman’s hat in every inch, declared the profession as plainly as does the Quaker’s broad brim; his heavy eyebrow, large, open eyes, full mouth and chin, expressed the solidity of his order; the broad chest, amply covered with fine cloth, told how well-to-do was its estate. One hand ensconced within his pocket, he evinced the stubborn hold which our mother Church keeps on her temporal possessions. The other loose for action, was ready to fight, if need be, in her defence. Below these the decorous breeches and neat black gaiters, showing so admirably that well-turned leg, betokened the grace, the decency, the outward beauty of our church establishment. Thus much for the orator.[11] The speech that follows, read at full length in the original text, will be admitted to justify every word said about this episode here. It is also to be noticed that, within less than ten years of his earliest essay in fiction, Trollope had touched the high-water mark of his literary excellence. As regards terseness and picturesqueness combined, he never afterwards described any scene with more power and felicity than Dr. Grantly’s address to the insurgent almsmen, and his father-in-law’s inward misery while he is compelled to stand by and listen.

Greater writers than Trollope have failed always to be sure of doing their best work, as indeed they have themselves been the first to admit. “I consider,” said Murray to Byron, “about half of your Don Juan to be first-rate.” Disclaiming that measure of praise, the poet continued: “Were it as you say, I should have surpassed Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare; for about which of these can it be said that half of his work was up to the highest level of his power?” If throughout the rest of The Warden, and in its Barchester successors, Trollope had kept up the concentration of thought, the close packing of graphic phrase, and the general exercise of brain-power at the same point as in the specimens now given, he might have left behind him portraits scarcely less instinct with immortality than David Copperfield, Micawber, Steerforth, Uriah Heep, or, passing to the rival of him who created these, Arthur Pendennis, Clive, Ethel, and Colonel Newcome. Even as it is, the succession of works beginning with The Warden, ending with The Last Chronicle of Barset, and taking just twelve years for their production, will bear comparison with all but the masterpieces of Trollope’s greatest contemporaries. They will, that is, find a place only a little below The Newcomes and Our Mutual Friend or George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Among the fathers of English fiction, Trollope ranks with Richardson for novelty of ideas and genuine originality of characters. His portraits may exaggerate personal features, but the more important of his creations are met with in his pages for the first time. Good or bad, excellent or mediocre, his Barchester men, women, and children are in all their lineaments his own.

Among those figuring in Messrs. Longmans’ authors’ list during the fifties was the Rev. James Pycroft, author of The Cricket Field, as well as one or two stories. Pycroft’s opinion was justly valued and sometimes asked by William Longman. Apropos of The Warden, soon after its publication Pycroft said to Longman: “Here at least you are breaking new ground. Novels of adventure, of naval or military life, and of politics by Plumer Ward’s successor Benjamin Disraeli, must be at a discount. But the domestic economy of the Church, as it is sketched here, is absolutely virgin soil. Let your new author stick to that; so will he add to your wealth and, if he have staying power, build up his own fame.” That judgment of a clerical and literary expert, duly conveyed by the verdict of the publisher to the author, was followed in 1858 by The Athenæum calling The Warden a clever, spirited, sketchy story, upon the difficulties surrounding that vexed question, the administration of charitable trusts. Here was enough encouragement for Trollope to write, and for Longman to publish, Barchester Towers; for that, the author did not go more out of his way specially to make any clerical studies than for The Warden. He had, to quote his own words to the present writer, “seen a certain amount of clergymen on my Post Office tours, just as I had seen them before at Harrow or Winchester; I think too I may have inherited some of my good mother’s antipathies towards a certain clerical school. But if I have shown any particular knowledge of or insight into clerical life, it has been evolved from knowledge of the world in general, varied experience, real hard study, and a serious course of self-culture. And, I most emphatically add, not from special intimacy with one, or indeed any, cathedral precinct and its personages. Take my Barchester. Here and there may be detected a touch of Salisbury, sometimes perhaps of Winchester. But what I am conscious of having depicted is the Platonic idea ([Greek: idea]) of a cathedral town; after all,” he added, “in clerical nature of either sex there is a great deal of human nature. Humanity varies infinitely in its outer garb; its inward heart is much about the same everywhere. Aproned prelates and gaitered deans, with their domestic belongings, are much as the middle-aged gentlemen who are the heads of purely secular households. Is there as close a family likeness between my different Barchester books as there used to be between the successive instalments of The Naggletons in Punch; and is Mrs. Proudie more ecclesiastical because she possesses to an usual degree the petticoated intermeddler’s capacity of making her husband’s life a burden to him? Dickens gibbeted cant in the person of Dissenters, of whom I never knew anything. I have done so in Mr. Slope, an Anglican, but the unbeneficed descendant of my mother’s Vicar of Wrexhill.”

The twelve years separating The Warden from The Last Chronicle of Barset produced fifteen novels. Of these, six were variations on the Barchester theme, nine placed the reader among scenes and persons entirely new. Among the characters thus introduced to the public were some who soon became as real as their author, and whose names to-day are at least as familiar as his own. Trollope was often accused of exaggeration in the case of his Barchester folk. He met the charge in this way. “If you look at them as likenesses of persons seen in the everyday life of cathedral towns, or in their little ecclesiastical worlds elsewhere, it may be so. But from my point of view their ecclesiastical setting is merely an accident. Take them for what I meant them—typical actors and actresses in the comedy of life on the domestic and provincial stage—where am I guilty of extravagance or caricature? Cucullus non facit monachum. A man may wear a black coat and white choker, and clothe his nether limbs in priestly gear, without losing his idiosyncrasies as a human being. As Sam Slick said, there is a great deal of nature in human nature; even, he might have added, among the clerical class. I costumed and styled my people ecclesiastically for the sake of novelty. Beyond that I never intended my clerical portraiture to go.”

While making his studies and arranging his materials for the stories of English life that will bear comparison with Jane Austen, he did a good deal of reading, chiefly with a view of generally equipping himself for magazine and perhaps even newspaper writing. At the great world show in Hyde Park of 1851 he humorously proposed to exhibit four three-volume novels, all failures, but together furnishing a conclusive proof of industry. That was before the one-volume success of The Warden. The triumphant discovery of the line in which he could command success did not dispel some misgivings as to the dropped stitches and the blank places in his education. These weak points must be seen to without delay. So he sets his mother and his brother Tom certain pieces of research work to do. First they were to hunt up thirteen names, not biblical, of personal forces in the world’s history, beings of unquestionable genius—great men, great women, great captains, and great rebels. With the exception of the relatives now mentioned, Trollope certainly never requisitioned friend or kinsfolk in this way. Throughout his life he had two fears: first, lest he should write himself out; secondly, lest the intellectual nourishment he took in should be unequal to the creative effort of pen that he put forth. Hence, whether in Ireland, in Essex, or in London, he always had a regular supply of books from Mudie’s. These, if he did not look into them, he expected his wife, his niece, or some other member of his home circle to read and to talk about to him. But in England, as in Ireland, it was the Post Office servant who made the novelist.

While that process was going forward I first became known to Anthony Trollope. Living, as a child, with my parents at Budleigh Salterton in South Devon, I found one day the morning’s lessons interrupted by the announcement that a strange gentleman who seemed in a hurry desired to see my father at once. The visitor, then on his Post Office rounds in the west, and known as the author of The Warden, and the visited had not seen each other since the days when they were schoolboys at Winchester together. The stranger, I can just recollect, as I watched him at our midday dinner, seemingly added to his naturally large dimensions by a shaggy overcoat, or it may have been a large, double-breasted pea-jacket, making him look like one of those sea-captains about whom in the fifties we used to hear a great deal on the Devonshire coast. Penny postage, with all its intended benefits, was then, it must be remembered, on its trial. Every corner of the western counties had been, or at the time referred to was being, travelled over by Trollope for the purpose of ensuring the regular delivery of letters throughout the kingdom, of inquiring into all complaints, with a view of investigating the circumstances and removing the cause. This official pilgrimage was for two reasons a landmark in Trollope’s course, literary and official. It gave him all that he wanted in the way of human varieties for peopling not only the pages of The Warden but, in their earlier portions, of the other Barchester books. Secondly, it enabled him to show that the public department he had entered as a youth of nineteen had now no more active, alert, and resourceful servant than himself. He had for some time reported the usefulness of roadside letter-boxes in France, and advised their being tried in England. His proposal was experimentally adopted. On his suggestion of the exact spot for the purpose, the first pillar-box was erected at St. Heliers, Jersey, in 1853.

Four years after having created that monument of his official zeal and skill, he improved on his success with The Warden by the appearance, in 1857, of Barchester Towers. On the additions made by this new story to the group first seen in The Warden, it is needless here to dwell. Mr. Slope again illustrates Trollope’s hereditary dislike of the average evangelical clergyman. As for Slope’s patroness, Mrs. Proudie, Trollope’s apology for her may be given here in his own words. These were first addressed to the already mentioned James Pycroft, William Longman’s friend. “Before you put her down as a freak of fancy, let me ask you one question. Review the spiritual lords and their better halves such as you have known, and tell me whether it is the bishop or the bishop’s wife who always takes the lead in magnifying the episcopal office? If you and I live long enough, we shall see an indefinite extension of the movement that has already created new sees in Manchester and Ripon. In the larger and older sees there will be a cry that the diocesan work is too heavy for one man; then will come the demand for the revival of suffragan bishops. You now speak about the higher and lower order of the clergy; you will then have a superior and inferior class of prelates. If at some great country-house gathering there happen to be a full-grown wearer of the mitre and his episcopal assistant, you may expect to hear the hostess debating whether the suffragan should have his seat at the dinner-table when the guests sit down, or whether his chief might not prefer that he should come in afterwards with the children and the governess to dessert. He, good easy man, may take it all meekly enough, but not so his lady. When the suffragans are multiplied, human nature will undergo some great revolution if the suffraganesses do not contain a good many who are as fussy, as officious, as domineering, and ill-bred as my chatelaine of the Barchester palace.”

“Boy, help me on with my coat.” Those were the only words I can recollect Trollope addressing to me on the occasion just described. It was not until the earliest years of my London work, that I heard his voice again. He had then settled in or near London, and had vouchsafed me the beginnings of an acquaintance which a little later was to grow into an intimacy ended only by his death. During the seventies, my occupations took me a great deal about different parts of the United Kingdom. One November day, at Euston Station, he entered the compartment of the train in which I was already seated, on some journey due north. Just recognising me, he began to talk cheerily enough for some little time; then, putting on a huge fur cap, part of which fell down over his shoulders, he suddenly asked: “Do you ever sleep when you are travelling? I always do”; and forthwith, suiting the action to the word, sank into that kind of snore compared by Carlyle to a Chaldean trumpet in the new moon. Rousing himself up as we entered Grantham, or Preston, Station, he next inquired: “Do you ever write when you are travelling?” “No.” “I always do.” Quick as thought out came the tablet and the pencil, and the process of putting words on paper continued without a break till the point was reached at which, his journey done, he left the carriage.

Several years later, when recalling this meeting, he told me that during this journey he had added a couple of chapters to a serial story. Ever since he had first turned novelist in Ireland, he had found himself too busy with Post Office work to do much in the day, too tired and sleepy for anything like a long spell of labour at night. He recollected having heard Sir Charles Trevelyan speak of the intellectual freshness and capacity for prolonged exertion felt by him when, having gone to bed an hour or so before midnight, he woke up as long after. “Never,” said Sir Charles, “did my brain seem clearer or stronger, and the work of minute writing easier or better done than when, indisposed to sleep, I went through my papers, often in the quiet which precedes the dawn.” The suggestion was no sooner made than followed. At first Trollope exactly imitated Trevelyan, and, after a short nap, worked for an hour or two, and then composed himself to slumber again. By degrees he made the experiment of taking as much sleep as he could by 5.30 A.M. Then, if he did not wake of his own accord, he was called, in his early days by his old Irish groom, afterwards by another servant. Coffee and bread and butter were brought to him in his dressing-room. Then came the daily task of pen he had set himself. This accomplished, if in London he mounted his horse for never less than a good half-hour’s ride in Hyde Park before sitting down to the family breakfast as nearly as possible at eleven. That left him with a comfortable sense of necessary duty fulfilled, and the whole day lay before him for pleasure or business, his chief afternoon amusement being a rubber at the Garrick.

CHAPTER VII
ON AND OFF DUTY ROUND THE WORLD

Chafing in harness—“Agin the Government”—The Three Clerks—A visit to Mrs. Trollope—Florentine visitors of note in letters and art—A widened circle of famous friends—Diamond cut diamond—Trollope’s new sphere of activity—In Egypt as G.P.O. ambassador—Success of his mission—Doctor Thorne—Homeward bound—Post and pen work by the way—North and south—The West Indies and the Spanish Main—Carlyle’s praise of it—Castle Richmond and some contemporary novels—An early instance of Thackeray’s influence over Trollope’s writings—Famous editors and publishers—The flowing tide of fortune.

THE high-class Civil Service official is opposed to change. Trollope’s constitutional conservatism shows itself in his sympathetic and approving tolerance of those parts and personages in the ecclesiastical polity generally held to call more than others for the reformer’s pruning-knife. At the Post Office, towards the public, and the juniors of his department, a martinet, Trollope never outgrew something of the rebel’s readiness, on the slightest provocation, to rise against the powers that be. His feud with Rowland Hill had become, during the later years of Hill’s secretaryship, the talk of the office. During something like a quarter of a century, in divers capacities and in many different parts of the world, he had proved his strenuous, varied, self-sacrificing loyalty to the public service. Yet uniform zeal for his work did not prevent him from sometimes measuring swords with his chiefs. It was The Three Clerks, published in 1858, which, rather than any of the socio-clerical stories, first commended Trollope to Thackeray as a story-teller. What specially attracted Thackeray to this novel was its Katie Woodward, the best specimen of an English girl which the author had yet drawn. The leading incidents passed for a satire upon the scheme of competitive examinations then advocated chiefly by Sir Charles Trevelyan, the undoubted Sir Gregory Hardlines of the story. This element of caricature, and the outspoken criticism of the highest magnates, had already roused much official and personal wrath, when the novelist crowned his offence by orally preaching to the rank and file the duty of a stout stand against the attack by the ruling powers not only on their clerkly rights but their privileges as Englishmen.

At this time the Civil Service had not become a free profession. In one of the great rooms of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Trollope collected and told malcontents of the place that it was their duty to agitate till, outside office-hours and in all personal relationships, they were as much their own masters as if they had nothing to do with State employ. Mr. Secretary Rowland Hill was at once up in arms. The firebrand who had thus tried to inflame the worst passions of the Queen’s servants ought, he declared openly, to be dismissed. These words, and the incidents which had led up to them, eventually reached the Postmaster-General, then the second Lord Colchester, a member of the Derby Government. The inflammatory speaker was therefore sent for by the Minister, and told that the authorities of the department were anxious to be relieved of his services. “Is your lordship,” meekly asked Trollope, “prepared to dismiss me?” In reply Lord Colchester, who, with his father’s Eldonian Toryism, combined a certain sense of humour that his father did not possess, smiling oracularly, deprecated any recourse to extremities. From that portion of his long duel with Rowland Hill, Trollope consequently came forth with flying colours.

After such a triumph over his chief adversary, he thought he might allow himself a little holiday. His mother still lived at Florence. This town, though not becoming the national capital till 1864, had long been among the most cosmopolitan, interesting, and pleasant of social centres in Europe. Many of the names best known in Anglo-Saxon letters and art on both sides of the Atlantic were habitual visitors or occasional residents. England had its representatives in Elizabeth and Robert Browning, at their beautiful villa, Casa Guidi, its outside a thicket of flowers whose fragrance could be scented from afar, its interior a jungle of carpets and tapestry such as Clytemnestra might have bade her lord to tread on his return from Troy. Among other notable figures were E. C. Grenville Murray, of whom more will be said hereafter, and Charles Lever, then recently appointed vice-consul at Spezzia. In 1867 Lever became consul at Trieste, but neither his earlier nor his later office prevented his constant reappearance among those acquaintances on the Arno with whom, almost up to the time of his death in 1872, he appears specially at home and at his best in or out of his native Dublin.

One memorable experience Anthony Trollope brought away from his visit to his mother at Florence. She took him to see Walter Savage Landor at Fiesole. Their host some years earlier had appeared in Bleak House as Boythorn, greatly, as was said, to his own indignation. As a fact, none received more pleasure from the sketch than Landor himself. “Dickens,” he said to young Trollope, “never did anything more life-like than when he portrayed my superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness.” He then told his visitors on no account to miss reading two works which he had recently taken up, and had indeed to some extent rediscovered. One of these was Hope’s Anastasius; the other was the work[12] by which Trelawny had made his name, just a generation before Byronic associations widened his notoriety, largely developed his anecdotal vein, and qualified him for sitting to Thackeray for the portrait of Captain Sumphington. Of other famous Anglo-Florentines Trollope saw much not only then, but afterwards. For the Bleak House incident just described, exactly as I heard it from them, I am indebted to two of these, the future Lord Houghton, then Monckton Milnes, and Edward Smythe Pigott, who died, on the eve of the twentieth century, dramatic censor, but at the time now looked back upon was a brilliant young man of an old Somerset stock and of some fortune, just plunging into literature and journalism. The acquaintance thus begun gradually ripened into a lifelong intimacy. This gave Pigott the distinction of being one among the very few who can have been almost simultaneously consulted, by two nineteenth-century novelists so well known as Anthony Trollope and George Eliot, about developments of plot and character in at least two stories by each of these writers that eventually appeared about the same time.

Through some of those already mentioned, Trollope made two interesting additions to his acquaintances, either of which would have sufficed to make his stay in Florence a thing to be remembered. One of these was R. C. Trench, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, then on his Italian travels; the other was Frederick Leveson-Gower, the late Lord Granville’s brother, to whom he became subsequently indebted for much of his insight into parliamentary and party matters, all utilised by him to the full in his later political novels. Among the brethren of the brush on pilgrimage to the capital of Italian art, J. E. Millais, long afterwards to become Trollope’s friend and illustrator, was in Florence during Trollope’s visit, but did not meet him then. Frederick Leighton and G. F. Watts, however, were both for the first time seen by Trollope more than once during a foreign trip, marking a distinct stage in his intellectual growth. Watts at this time was a painter of established renown, having executed his Westminster Hall cartoon of Caractacus in 1843. Leighton had made his mark more recently, though it was on another Italian trip some years before Trollope saw him that he had gathered local colour and inspiration for his great picture of “Cimabue’s Madonna carried in procession through the streets of Florence,” and bought by Queen Victoria in 1855.

In Florence too, when Trollope first saw it, were also other men of mark and interest, with whom the acquaintance, then first made, grew afterwards in England to familiar friendship. The first and only Lord Glenesk, at that time Algernon Borthwick, proposed Trollope for the English Club. When the two men dined there for the first time together, they were joined by another famous Anglo-Tuscan, the then renowned correspondent of The Morning Post, James Montgomery Stuart, always full of good stories, especially about the twin literary leaders and rivals at the time, Carlyle and Macaulay. One was to the following effect: Sixteen years after its publication in The Edinburgh, Carlyle’s Frederick the Great wiped out Macaulay’s estimate of the Prussian sovereign. Montgomery Stuart, touching on the subject to Macaulay, whom he knew well, saw his face suddenly crimson. Then came a torrent of invective against Carlyle, whose writings Stuart was told to avoid as so much poison. As a novelist, Trollope had not then gone beneath the surface for the cross-currents and the violent eddies that disturb the waters of matrimonial life. He had a rare opportunity of studying such incidents first hand during his stay under the shadow of Brunelleschi’s Duomo; for the place then was known by the French as pre-eminently the city of les femmes galantes, and was already not less notorious than Paris itself as the abode of Anglo-Saxon couples detached, semi-detached, or some time since wholly disunited. The already mentioned Charles Lever, whose habitual absences at Florence from his Spezzia vice-consulate would have cost him his post but for the unfailing entertainment with which his vivacious reports furnished the Foreign Office, was far from being the only old friend from Ireland to repeat on Italian soil the welcome he had given on Irish to the same visitor just a generation earlier. Sir William Gregory of Coole Park, and at least one of the Moyville Vandeleurs, all from time to time shone forth in this pleasantest of Anglo-Italian constellations.

The trip now described so brightened Trollope himself as, in my old friend Pigott’s words, to make him help Charles Lever towards keeping Florence society in good spirits. It sent him back to England with a mind full of fresh ideas and characters for his books. But at this locomotive epoch Trollope was fond of applying to his own circumstances the words of Tristram Shandy’s scullion: “We are here to-day, and there to-morrow.” Before he could settle down to another novel, he was under marching orders again. The truth is St. Martin’s-le-Grand now saw in Trollope not only a capable servant but a seasoned and tactful man of the world, with the wit to turn his cosmopolitan experiences into political as well as literary capital. The service, thought Lord Colchester, still at the head of the department, might as well get out of him, while he was there, all they could. Anthony Trollope therefore found himself told off to the land of the Pharaohs under circumstances that involve some reference to previous Anglo-Egyptian relations. A new Anglo-Egyptian treaty was wanted. The chief Irish surveyor, as Trollope then was, seemed to the rulers of St. Martin’s-le-Grand the proper person to negotiate it. From Dublin, therefore, to London, quick as steam could take him, the G.P.O. ambassador sped. Preoccupied and overcharged with official affairs, he found time in the midst of arrangements for his departure eastward, to plant the new novel which he had just planned, Doctor Thorne, upon a publisher, not however on the new Burlington Street house to which he had already mentioned it. Richard Bentley, having first entertained Trollope’s terms, £400 down, for the book, cried off. The figure, he said, must be reduced by at least one hundred. In the case of the man with whom he had now to deal, it would have been wiser to refuse the manuscript outright than to make any attempt at beating down the author. The novelist at once told Mr. Bentley that, having changed his terms, he need trouble himself to think no more of the matter. The miscarriage of these negotiations was to have consequences more far-reaching than could have been foreseen by Trollope himself. He at once went to Chapman and Hall, then doing their business at 193 Piccadilly. The senior partner, Edward Chapman, agreed to take Doctor Thorne at its writer’s valuation. Thus began a connection noticeable alike in the annals of that publishing house and in the career of Trollope himself.

The time taken by these little matters did not prevent Trollope’s reaching Egypt on the appointed day. On his arrival at Cairo, the first thing that struck Trollope, like most other new-comers to the place, and unfamiliar with oriental sights, was the donkey-boys—who are, or were, to Cairo much what commissionaires are to London—waiting at central points to take messages and letters. Trollope had arranged for himself a little programme of travel in the Near East. He did not therefore propose lingering on the Nile a day longer than his mission absolutely required. One of nineteenth-century Cairo’s social peculiarities noticed by Trollope was the rarity of private or official addresses among native personages. Parcels and papers were left for them at Shepheard’s or some other hotel, and eventually came into their hands when they next happened to be passing that way. The manager of the inn where Trollope put up, in reply to a question about the residence or office of the Pasha’s minister with whom the visitor’s business lay, assured him that anything left at the hotel bureau could not fail to be placed before him. This did not at all accord with Trollope’s ideas. He insisted on sallying forth at once with all the documents; he had already ascertained in what direction he might encounter or at least hear of the official whom he wanted. Approaching the first donkey-boy visible in the street, he flung himself into the saddle and rode off on his errand. The desired individual, however, remained for the present out of sight.

On returning to his hotel, Trollope heard that his Excellency Nubar Bey had called, and was waiting to see him. That able and urbane Armenian statesman many years later became the Khedive Tewfik’s Prime Minister. Received by him at Cairo in the eighties, I found he had not forgotten his interviews with Trollope in 1858. Very pleasant, very conversational, but somewhat peremptory had he found the author of the Barchester novels. “It was, however,” continued Nubar, “some time before Mr. Trollope found me, I fear, quite satisfactory; even then his manner of negotiating had about it less of the diplomatist than of the author who might have meditated scolding his publisher if he did not come round to his terms, and of carrying his literary wares elsewhere.” The one difference between Nubar and his visitor was the rate of speed at which the mails should be carried between Alexandria and Suez. In pressing for a longer time than Trollope thought necessary, the Egyptian official was suspected by the envoy from St. Martin’s-le-Grand, as he himself said, and perhaps quite wrongly,[13] of wishing to oblige the Peninsular and Oriental Company rather than the British Government. The matter was soon adjusted in accordance with the English view.

While these diplomatic conversations were in progress, Trollope contrived, of course, not to neglect his writing. The fortnight he remained in Cairo sufficed for completing the novel already on hand, Doctor Thorne, and commencing a new story that came out a year later, The Bertrams. For that work, the rest of Trollope’s oriental wanderings (1858-59) provided useful and entertaining material. The Palestine scenes in that novel reflected the author’s experiences of a visit to Jerusalem and its neighbourhood. Then came the return journey home through Spain. In John Bull, one of the stories in Tales of All Countries (1861-1870), he recorded what happened to himself during an excursion on the Guadalquivir. In Spain there were no postal treaties to be engineered, and no English Post Offices to inspect. His adventure on the Spanish river, that of mistaking a Castilian Duke for a bull-fighter, had occurred just after a little spell of work, en route for England once more. The postal arrangements of Malta and Gibraltar were overhauled, with the result that private residents and business houses on “the Rock” received their letters more regularly, if not earlier, than they did before.

The period of Trollope’s excursions now described was historically memorable as that which witnessed the beginning of the Suez Canal. In the record of Trollope’s own life, his prodigious powers of writing against time, rivalled only by Mr. Gladstone’s feats, on his oratorical pilgrimages, of speaking against it, reached their culminating point. Six years before Trollope’s birth, the pedestrian record had been broken by Captain Barclay’s walk of a thousand miles in a thousand hours. At the age of forty-three Trollope was habitually performing analogous feats of endurance with his pen, and could have backed himself to cover more pages of two hundred and fifty words each in a working year than any writer of his time. The pace at which he passed from one piece of task-work to another, or rather combined several at the same time, caused the most brilliant of Trollope’s Post Office contemporaries, F. I. Scudamore, to say that nothing could give an idea of the man’s all-embracing versatility but Ducrow at Astley’s simultaneously riding half a dozen horses round the ring. Test the truth of this simile by the work of the twelve months that opened with the Egyptian mission. Of course, too, that record further reminds one that only a man endowed with very exceptional strength of brain and body could have prolonged his course to the threshold of old age without wearing himself out before.

The material for the serious love-making and flirtation pictures amid Syrian ruins, palm-trees, and deserts had been collected, but not entirely worked up, before that expedition closed. The finishing strokes were to be given during a hurried stay at Glasgow, whither he had been sent on Post Office business. So far, few men of Trollope’s social taste and literary notoriety could have made fewer personal acquaintances among the rank and file of his craft. About newspaper writers, and editors in particular, personally he knew absolutely nothing. His journey beyond the Tweed introduced him in Edinburgh to the most distinguished Scotch journalist of the day, Alexander Russel, who had made for himself on The Scotsman a position at least equal to that belonging in London to J. T. Delane of The Times. On the Conservative side James Hannay had not then been installed at The Edinburgh Courant. As, however, on comparing notes in London many years after the two men found out, Hannay and Trollope had just met each other beneath Professor Blackie’s roof.

The eventfulness to Trollope of the year 1858 did not end with the incidents already recorded. He had acquitted himself so well in his Egyptian treaty-making, not less than in the tour of inspection which went with it, that on his return from Scotland he had scarcely unpacked in London before receiving orders to prepare for a voyage across the Atlantic. In He Knew He was Right, Mrs. Trevelyan’s father stands for a favourable specimen of a West Indian governor. The postmasters and other officials of that sort provided for our transatlantic dependencies were often not up to Sir Marmaduke Rowley’s mark. As a consequence, the British postal service in this part of the world had become disorganised, discredited, and even somewhat discreditable, besides being, at its best, irregular and ineffective. Trollope had already given repeated proof that the public service possessed no man more competent than himself for investigating abuses, for detecting failures or weak spots in a system, and for effectively reprimanding the local officials who were responsible. These congenial tasks were now once more filled to perfection. Of course, before leaving England he had held the inevitable interview with the publisher he had selected for the book that the tour was to produce. This volume, for it did not run to more, was most of it written on board ship. He had begun his work while steaming out of Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, and had still some thousands of miles to traverse. He continued it uninterruptedly amid all the other duties of his absence.

The entire copy, ready for the printer to the last comma, was in his dressing-case when the cab from Waterloo deposited the traveller at his London door. This was in the autumn of 1858. Since leaving home he had explored the chief points in the West Indies, visited British Guiana and Columbia, as well as crossed and recrossed Central America. In the course of his homeward route, for the first time he touched New York; this and the political metropolis of the States, Washington, he was, as will be shown in due order, several times to revisit. Meanwhile, his earliest experiences of the New World were recorded in a style whose spirit, ease and picturesqueness impressed publishers and readers alike with a feeling of the vigour and variety always apparently at his command. Entirely unlike anything he had yet attempted, his descriptions of South American scenery, manners, character, and of its negro population, displayed the same swiftness and sureness of realistic touch as had hitherto made the places and personages familiar to the public from his first successes pulsate with the breath and movement of life.

The West Indies and the Spanish Main also had the effect of raising his reputation, not only with the public, but with the fellow-craftsmen of his own art. Thomas Carlyle in 1861 recognised its graphic power, and in characteristic terms endorsed its estimates of the black man’s place in creation. Carlyle’s compliment seemed the more welcome and unexpected because some years earlier, in 1851, the Chelsea sage had been the subject of remark anything but eulogistic by Trollope. “Surely,” he writes to his mother and brother, “eight shillings for Carlyle’s Latterday Pamphlets cannot be considered anything but a very bad bargain, because the grain of sense belonging to the book is smothered in such a sack of the sheerest nonsense as to be useless.” During the earlier years of the Victorian era, the social patronage of the rich and great was still considered almost, if not quite, essential for a successful advance towards literary fame. Sir Henry Taylor, of whose relations with Trollope special mention will afterwards be made, had first introduced Carlyle both to Holland and to Lansdowne House. The Blessington-D’Orsay ménage in London had ended before Carlyle had become a lion or Trollope’s great drawing-room experiences had begun. It is therefore pure fiction to speak, as some have done, of the men who wrote Sartor Resartus and The Warden respectively ever meeting each other or seeing Benjamin Disraeli and Louis Napoleon at Gore House.

The end of the fifties and the earlier sixties were to effect a transformation-scene in Trollope’s mature position and prospects, at once fortunate and complete. This was his connection with Thackeray, with the house of Smith and Elder, as with certain other of the members of its artistic or literary staff, above all J. E. Millais. In the October of 1860 Trollope, then officially resettled on the other side of St. George’s Channel, was dividing his time between Post Office inspection, in the northern parts of Ireland, and the composition of his third Irish novel, Castle Richmond. Trollope, it has been already seen, in his Examiner letters for John Forster, 1848, had defended the steps taken by the English Government for the relief of Irish distress, not as adequate in themselves, but as being the best practicable under the circumstances. That opinion, twelve years later, he now illustrated with forcible and picturesque description in Castle Richmond. But at this point a few words must be given to the relations in which this story exhibits its author with other experts in his art then living. He had found, we already know, his earliest model in Jane Austen. During the sixties and afterwards Thackeray became his declared master. In the first place the novel shows its author going, like his greatest contemporaries, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, and even Dickens himself, to Blue books for scenery, incident, and even germs of character. Trollope did not, however, as was done by Reade in Put Yourself in His Place, lift the contents of a State paper into any description of an existing evil, such as the excesses of trade unionism. Still less did he appropriate official or other printed matter, after the fashion of Collins, who, in Man and Wife, illustrated the anomalies of the Anglo-Scotch marriage laws by reproducing in extenso the reports of famous trials, and supported his attack upon the malignant effects of inordinate athleticism by citing from The Lancet the testimony of doctors who had given evidence that suited his arguments.

Trollope, in Castle Richmond, while as realistic as Collins or Reade, had assimilated his facts more artistically than either, subordinating them at every turn to the development of his characters, or rather of that development making them a perfectly natural part. Every neighbourhood, like every form of suffering and want, he describes, he had not only himself seen, but minutely studied and worked out, in his own words, as he would a sum, its true lessons. His impressions remained the more vivid because he trusted to no notes taken at the time to preserve them. For instances aptly illustrative of the exact impression he wished to convey, or of the moral he desired to point, Post Office experience and severe habits of private cultivation had made his memory serviceable enough to dispense with pocket-book and pencil. As an account at once clear, picturesque, and powerful, of the crowning calamities that came upon Ireland after the potato famine in the first half of the nineteenth century, Castle Richmond will almost bear comparison with the classical records of national visitations in other ages and in other lands, whether penned by eye-witnesses, or by men whose genius enabled them to describe that of which they had only heard, with the verisimilitude of actual experience. In the first of these classes Trollope might thus nearly claim a place with Thucydides or Boccaccio, in the second with Daniel Defoe, who lived, indeed, during the great plague of 1665, but only as a child of seven years old; while to Defoe’s earlier or later rivals must be added Pliny as chronicler of the plague at Rome in the second century B.C., and, in our own day, Father Thomas Gasquet, whose pen-and-ink picture, published 1894, of the mediæval “Black Deaths,” left on the mind an impression scarcely less powerful than that produced by the author of Robinson Crusoe himself.

In addition to the merits of Castle Richmond as an historical novel, Trollope’s impending connection with The Cornhill Magazine, under Thackeray’s editorship, invests with special interest an undesigned coincidence of idea between a central feature in the plot of Castle Richmond and in that of Esmond, published eight years before Trollope’s third Irish novel came out. Both stories show the girl’s lover as the subject of an unsought attachment conceived for him by the lady in whom he himself hopes to find only a mother-in-law. In Castle Richmond, the part of Thackeray’s Esmond falls to Trollope’s Owen Fitzgerald. Here, however, the resemblance ends. In Esmond the mother is as completely without strength of character as without fever or force of passion, and calmly bestows her affection on the young man by way of consoling him for her daughter’s cruel indifference. In Castle Richmond feminine insipidity is the daughter’s attribute, while the mother, strong to repulsiveness, deliberately tries to supplant the girl in her lover’s affections. There is this further difference too: Harry Esmond, robbed of Beatrix, finds peace and happiness in her parent, while Owen Fitzgerald, discovering Lady Clara Desmond is bent on having the heir to Castle Richmond, his own cousin Herbert, never marries at all.

A contrast in all respects to Harry Esmond’s wife, Lady Desmond stands out as the most impressive figure in the last of Trollope’s earlier novels. Her life and heart story personifies a tragic element that, though of a very different sort, marks this book as clearly as it pervades and suffuses The Macdermots. On ne badine pas avec l’amour; Alfred de Musset’s title might really serve as a motto to Trollope’s book. The beautiful girl who, from being nobody, becomes Countess of Desmond, has persuaded, or tried to persuade herself, that the marriage which brings position and title can very well dispense with love. She has no sooner acted on this principle than she finds her mistake; whether as wife or widow, to the last page of the book the misery of her desolation is unrelieved. The decline of the Desmond race, and the lonely house on a bleak moor inhabited by the last Earl’s widow, with her son and daughter, are painted with the same force of delineation as, thirteen years earlier in The Macdermots, had acquainted those able to judge for themselves with the coming of a new novelist of a most uncommon order. Rugged harshness and gloomy power have been recognised above as constituting the dominant note of The Macdermots. Qualities of the same sort contribute to invest with an air of stern melancholy rather than pathos the figure of the widow who reigns at Desmond Court in the sombre house bequeathed by her husband, entirely unrelieved by the performance of those gracious and winning philanthropies, ordained, it would seem, by Providence, by way of solacing the loneliness and lightening the shadows of bereavement. Not the stern, if passionately loving Countess, but her daughter Clara, is the one angel of good works issuing from the three-storeyed, quadrangular, heaven-forsaken old house, rumoured to cover ten acres,[14] to help the young ladies at Richmond Castle, the Miss Fitzgeralds, in the distribution of Indian corn. That was the article of food which, first prepared by Clara Desmond and her friends with their own hands in the public kitchens, had been provided by the Government for mitigating the horrors of general starvation. Castle Richmond contains in Clara Desmond, as a type of pure, winning, picturesque girlhood, a worthy successor to Katie Woodward in The Three Clerks, as well as a fit precursor of the Lucy Robarts about to be introduced in Framley Parsonage.

As regards Trollope’s approaching connection with the house of Smith and Elder and their most famous man of letters, it is worth recalling that, so far back as 1848, Anthony Trollope, like others of the G.P.O. staff, had been up in arms at the rumoured invasion of St. Martin’s-le-Grand by a fresh outsider for an assistant secretaryship. This was none other than Thackeray himself, who had received the actual offer or the promise of the place from Lord Clanricarde. Trollope’s personal associations, therefore, of his subsequent editor and model, were in marked contrast to the loving admiration animating all later references to the man in whom Trollope saw his literary and personal ideal, but in whom, had Thackeray secured the position, he would have found an adversary not less detested than Rowland Hill himself. It was in the October of 1859 that Thackeray, when entering on The Cornhill enterprise, received from Trollope an offer of a selection for the new magazine from his Tales of All Countries. The proposal brought in the shape of reply two letters, both equally satisfactory, since each of them afforded practical proof of the golden opinion, both among writers and publishers, which Trollope had now securely won. Not even excepting George Henry Lewes, no expert in his craft detected literary pretenders more keenly or exposed them more pitilessly than Thackeray. His business colleagues, Smith and Elder, like the Blackwoods and only one or two more of that day, had the gift of discovering sound promise, and of never producing anything but really good work. “Neither John Blackwood nor George Smith,” said Anthony Trollope to me many years later, “let anything worth doing slip through his fingers, rated a manuscript’s value too high or too low, or ever misjudged the humour of the hour and the taste of the public. Nor,” he added, remembering The Warden days, “did, I am bound to say, William Longman either.”

Twelve years before the date now reached, a packet of closely written letter-paper slips from an unknown parsonage on the Yorkshire moors had reached the firm subsequently connected with the author of Vanity Fair. George Smith, the life, soul, and brains of the establishment, lost not a moment in addressing himself to the unknown budget. “From 9 A.M. to noon, afterwards, with scarcely a pause, till the lamps were lighted,” he told Trollope, who told the present writer, “I read on, absorbed in the small, clear calligraphy enshrining such strange, strong thought. Beyond doubt there had fallen into my lap a precious stone of the rarest order. In forming that opinion,” continued Smith to Trollope, “I went entirely by my own judgment, and communicated it to the author the same day.” The consequence was that, in 1847, Smith and Elder brought out Jane Eyre. Its unknown, shrinking writer, who could scarcely be tempted to her publishers’ dinner-table, quietly took her place in the front rank of the English authoresses.

The master-mind of George Smith still ruled the house to which Trollope had introduced himself. Smith at least had carefully read, and was favourably impressed by, Trollope’s fresh and minute insight into provincial life and character, whatever its phases, ecclesiastical indeed first, but almost equally lay. “The man,” he said, “who can draw so well country society in cathedral towns, being himself a rider to hounds, can have nothing to learn from Surtees if he touches it occasionally from the sporting side.” Smith therefore commissioned from Trollope a three-volume novel for £1000, to be run through the new magazine. At the same time, in terms of very exceptional cordiality, Thackeray personally welcomed to his pages the author of The Three Clerks; for Thackeray, while seeing a possible rival to Trollope as a clerical novelist in the creator of Mr. Gilfil and the Rev. Amos Barton, never doubted Trollope’s qualifications for success in fiction whence churchmen and church matters should be banished. The encouraging communication to Trollope from his new editor contained one casual expression so characteristically appropriate to its recipient that in passing it may be mentioned here. Thackeray speaks of Trollope’s having “tossed a good deal about the world.” Just twelve years after this use of that expression, James Anthony Froude put, with a slight difference, the same idea when, a little more picturesquely, he spoke of Trollope as having “banged about the world” more than most people. At the point now reached there rolled to Trollope the tide which, adroitly taken by him as it was at the flood, bore him in life from the fame he had already secured to uninterrupted fortune and wealth. That tide, after, as often happens, a slight falling off of readers on his death, has, within thirty years of that event, been followed by an undoubted revival of his popularity with twentieth-century readers, not less wide and marked than that enjoyed by him in his own age. The new epoch of the varied and industrious career thus opened provides appropriate material for a fresh chapter.

CHAPTER VIII
ESTABLISHMENT IN LONDON

Resettlement in England—Bright prospects for the future—Importance of The Cornhill connection—Framley Parsonage and other novels of clerical life—Some novelists and their illustrators—Trollope’s debt to Millais—The social services of leading lights help him in his historical pictures of the day—Election to the Garrick and Athenæum Clubs—Anthony Trollope as he appeared in 1862—Leading Garrick figures—Thackeray’s social and literary mastery over Trollope—Thackeray, Dickens, and Yates in a Garrick squabble—A divided camp—Trollope on Yates and Yates on Trollope—The origin of the politico-diplomatic Cosmopolitan Club—Informal gatherings—Trollope becomes a member—Some famous “Cosmo” characters—The end of the club—Other clubs frequented by Trollope—The Fielding—The Arundel—The Arts—The Thatched House—The Turf.

THE first effect of Trollope’s connection with The Cornhill Magazine, its editor, and its owners was to make his life more literary and less official than it had so far been. Naturally, therefore, he decided on leaving Ireland as soon as he could, and on establishing himself in London, the one place where he could satisfactorily pursue the career now brought within his reach. Not, indeed, that the prospect opening to him in 1860 included a sudden or a final severance of his connection with a country where he had passed nearly a score of eventful and prosperous years, where he had first discovered his real strength, and where by slow degrees the Post Office hack had transformed himself into the popular man of letters. From the St. Martin’s-le-Grand point of view, he was but exchanging a Post Office surveyorship in Ulster for a like position in the English eastern counties, where he could generally order his movements as suited his interests and tastes.

When in 1841, on his outward journey, he first crossed St. George’s Channel at the age of twenty-six, it was with a mind agitated by morbid discontent for the past, and charged with gloomy misgivings for the future. The process of improvement had indeed been slow and often painful, but it was now complete. The clouds which so long darkened his existence had finally lifted. He no longer brooded over the gloomy retrospect; the path that lay before him was brightened by the hope born of actual achievement. From the country to which, just a quarter of a century ago, he had brought a past of failure, he took back a present of success, and a future of assured fame. The long gallops with the Meath hounds and the Ward staghounds, or the several other packs with which he rode, by quickening his circulation, had strengthened his nerves, and generally placed him in the highest state of physical fitness. With the exhilarating sense of being at home in the saddle, there had come an inspiring confidence in his powers of thought and language. Moreover, his term of Irish and English service combined had been varied by the foreign missions which, as already described, trained his pen to versatility, and brought him fresh credit in new lines of literary performance. All this had helped him so much with his London chiefs as to ensure him the home appointment for which he now applied. The surveyorship of the eastern counties, secured by Trollope after some little difficulty and delay, gave him the chance of keeping up his favourite sport by settling him comfortably in Hertfordshire, at Waltham Cross. Here he was within easy reach of more than one East Anglian pack, as well as the social life of the metropolis in which he had been born, but of which, since his boyhood, he had seen little, and of whose social life he knew nothing.

He had scarcely settled down to the combined parts of State servant, London littérateur, and eastern county fox-hunter, when he followed up his first success of The Warden with a book indicating the greatest stride in the direction of fame and fortune he had yet made. This was Framley Parsonage. The appearance of its first instalment in The Cornhill had been arranged for during one of Trollope’s earlier flights across the Channel before he had resettled himself in England. Among the stories thus far written by its author, it possessed most of actuality in its incidents, as well as of personal charm in its characters. These qualities were due to the fact that the views of life and character, clerical or lay, contained in its pages, were as a whole those of the era to which the book belonged. In 1838 the State had done something towards the restraint of pluralities in the Church. When, therefore, he had finished the book that first made its mark, the Anglicanism of Trollope’s youthful reminiscence was something more than merely threatened. There had indeed actually begun the reform of those ecclesiastical abuses and the curtailment of those privileges whose picturesque aspects on their social and personal side appealed so strongly to Trollope’s conservative and artistic sense, and his sympathies with which show themselves in all his clerical stories long after the old system was not only doomed, but already passing away. The change had begun, it must be remembered, some ten years before the appearance of The Warden. Even then the old Church and State polity was tottering to its fall. By the time Framley Parsonage was running through The Cornhill, it had been practically replaced by the new régime.

The modernised picture of clerical life from the social point of view, taken in Framley Parsonage, distinguishes it not only from anything said on the same subject by Trollope himself before, but from George Eliot’s sketch of the Anglican rector and rectory given in Adam Bede (1859). The Cornhill proprietor and editor had agreed that what they wanted from Trollope was an up-to-date socio-clerical story, depicting the most characteristic features and incidents of upper middle-class English society in provincial districts, dominated to a certain extent by orthodox ecclesiastical and aristocratic or squirearchical influence. These requirements were satisfied to the minutest detail. The rectory, the country house, and the castle, like the inmates of each, described in Framley Parsonage, exactly reflect all that was most distinctive of the sixties, and therefore invest the story with something of the usefulness to the historian of the future possessed by Jane Austen’s novels, or discerned by Lecky and Macaulay in Fielding and Smollett. There was scarcely an English village without a rectory or a house whose occupant might have passed for Lord Lufton or Mark Robarts. One used, indeed, to hear the most circumstantial stories of how Trollope had himself met these characters during his Post Office tours. He had, of course, on these official rounds, so increased in every direction a large and varied acquaintanceship that he had become something of a household word throughout England as a State servant some time before his books lay on every drawing-room table. As for Lucy Robarts, she took the hearts of the vicarage and country-house public by storm, to retain them even after Lily Dale made her bow in The Small House at Allington. Her reputed originals multiplied so rapidly that every neighbourhood soon possessed one of them, to whom the novelist, it was added, had lost his heart before he made her his heroine, and to whom he would have made an offer at a certain country ball had he not unfortunately possessed a wife already.

Framley Parsonage, therefore, from which dates his trade value with the publishers, was the earliest novel that made him a favourite with the hundreds of English households, the great event in whose lives is the arrival of the weekly book-box from Mudie’s. The personal intimacy between Trollope’s readers and his characters at the point now reached began to be quickened and deepened by J. E. Millais, whose tastes, sympathies, and exceptional insight into the life and characters depicted by Trollope qualified him, beyond any other artist of his time, to interpret with his brush the most characteristic creations of the novelist’s pen. Who shall say how much in its mental pictures of Mr. Pickwick and other Dickensian beings the popular imagination was helped by the illustrations of “Phiz”? Would the Rugby boys, for instance, described in Tom Brown, have roared with laughter, as they did, if Hablot K. Browne’s pencil had not breathed a new reality into the novelist’s account of Mr. Winkle’s equestrian difficulties, of Jingle’s boasted performances in the West Indian cricket-field, or into the fat boy’s fiendish interruption of the tender passages between Rachael Wardle and Tracy Tupman. Dickens also derived scarcely less signal service from George Cattermole in The Old Curiosity Shop, and from George Cruikshank in Oliver Twist. With writers of less genius than Dickens, such as Charles Lever and Harrison Ainsworth, their personages and situations were often saved only from complete failure by the same artist’s help.

More conspicuously than in any of these instances did Trollope’s association with Millais make the artist an active, if not the chief, partner in the creation of the novelist’s characters. In 1861 Trollope had not begun the personal acquaintance, which soon ripened into a lifelong intimacy, with the master of the brush whose personal charm and genial fellowship brought fresh brightness and lasting joy into the novelist’s life, at the same time that his drawings acquainted the Anglo-Saxon world with the manner and meaning of every expression on Lucy Robarts’ face, with her every gesture or movement, with the plaiting of her hair, with the simple little pendant of dull gold on her velvet neckband, with the fringe of her bodice, and with the very folds of her dress.

This fortunate conjunction of pen and pencil resulted to hosts of readers, American as well as English, in a real revelation of country life. These now realised, as they had never done before, the principles underlying the modern village polity with all its personal gradations in the scale of dignity and rank. Trollope’s novels and Millais’ engravings thus completed for multitudes the lessons in provincial existence and character which Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen had begun. The country parish was now shown as the State in miniature, the kingly power being represented, in the present instance, by Lord Lufton and his mother at Framley Court. Between the Court and the Parsonage the relations described reflected the union of the civil and the spiritual authority. With Framley Parsonage, therefore, in the early sixties, begins the period when Trollope’s successive books were events in the publishing year, and the instalments of his work were awaited with scarcely less interest than each coming portion of Dickens’s Great Expectations, then running through All the Year Round, or of Thackeray’s Lovel the Widower and Roundabout Papers, then appearing in the same magazine pages as Trollope’s. Thackeray, indeed, had destined his own Lovel for the chief fiction of The Cornhill. It did not seem to him quite strong enough for that honour. Hence the opening which he gave Trollope. Now, too, began Trollope’s introduction into the literary and general society of the capital in which he had been born, partly bred, and in which he had served his earliest apprenticeship to the Government service that formed the foundation of his fortunes. Of its real life, except from outside, he as yet knew nothing.

Such chance glimpses into society in London as Trollope had secured in his earliest days were due almost or entirely to the good offices of the old Harrow friend, William Gregory, who subsequently, as has been already described, did so much to make his Irish sojourn profitable as well as pleasant. Among the more prominent figures in the great world of their day occasionally visited by Trollope was Lord Clanricarde, who, in London as well as in Ireland, was fond of playing the part of Mæcenas to young men of promise. Together with Gregory, Trollope, a young man under thirty, dined with Clanricarde in Carlton House Terrace. On entering the drawing-room, they found its only occupant a fat elderly parson. He must, the new-comers whisperingly agreed, be the family chaplain. The conjecture had not been murmured in a tone low enough to prevent its being overheard by the divine, who in a moment began to convince them that he was not one of their host’s dependants by, in Trollope’s words, “chaffing them out of their lives” until they descended to the dining-room, and even after that. This incident forms Trollope’s introduction to Sydney Smith, without whom, in the early forties, no fashionable party was complete. The most useful entertainer and friend secured by Gregory to Trollope was, however, Henry Thoby Prinsep, whose acquaintanceship had proved of earlier value to Thackeray. This genial, opulent, and influential Indian official had three sons, the second, Trollope’s particular friend, being the clever and popular artist “Val” Prinsep; while the two others, still living, were respectively in the Indian Civil and Military Service. Prinsep kept open house for Trollope, as for many others, beneath his roof.

Anthony Trollope’s personal knowledge of Thackeray began to improve itself into friendship; at Thoby Prinsep’s, also, he heard many amusing stories about a gentleman’s adventures in quest of a parliamentary seat,[15] as well as met habitually the artist Millais, whom he first knew from George Smith, and who, in the manner already described, was so appreciably to promote the novelist’s advance towards a world-wide popularity. As Prinsep’s guest also, Trollope made another artistic friendship, that with the painter Watts, whom, it will be remembered, he had already seen at Florence. Among Prinsep’s other notable visitors were the reigning beauties of the time, Lady Somers, Miss Virginia Pattle, and the highly endowed daughters of a gallant officer in “John Company’s” army, now only recollected as “Old Blazer.” The same company was sometimes adorned by the great artistic and literary patron of that period, Lord Lansdowne, as well as an anecdotical Nestor of the polite world, who nearly saw the nineteenth century out, Alfred Montgomery. This gentleman humorously claimed, by his conversational reminiscences of cathedral towns, to have given Trollope some hints for his Barchester characters. Montgomery’s social services proved, indeed, scarcely less invaluable than Gregory’s, and opened to Trollope many doors on the higher levels.

At the houses now referred to, he heard all the gossip about the celebrities of the forties: how, notwithstanding his starched austerity in the House, Sir Robert Peel’s social playfulness in private life made him really delightful; how Lord Lincoln was quite the pleasantest of all Peel’s followers; how Lord George Bentinck, though private secretary to Canning, was quite uneducated, and only got into parliament by an accident, to become Tory leader by a fluke. He heard too, how, when not at a race, Lord George attended the House of Commons; how, going down to Westminster from White’s after dinner, he slept soundly all the evening on a back bench; and how, though in 1847 he had resigned over Russell’s Jew Bill, he wished all the Jews back in the Holy Land, because the Tories had become a No Popery and No Jew party. Thus Trollope was a looker-on at the game when, on the Tory side, the players were Lord Granby, as Bentinck’s successor, and Herries, who sportingly admitted that, though Bentinck had given the mount, it was Dizzy’s riding which won the race. Some of Anthony Trollope’s later novels take one to a resort called the Beargarden. In their author’s younger days a haunt that might have appropriately borne that name was the Hanover Rooms on one of their smartest gala nights. For about a century, from 1775 to 1875, these premises were used for concerts and balls, till, at the later of the dates just mentioned, they were utilised as the Hanover Square Club. When W. H. Gregory and Anthony Trollope were youths about town, these rooms were not only fashionable, but fast. In one of the vestibules or passages, the two friends witnessed a noticeable but, as it proved, a somewhat risky feat of strength by the Lord Methuen of the day, performed upon a baronet, who, from his immense estates in the principality, was known—like those who were before and after him in his title—as the King of Wales. Sir Watkin William Wynne weighed some fifteen stone. Methuen, to relieve the dullness of a waiting interval, lifted him by the trousers waist-band, and held him out at full length with one hand, only to drop him when the trousers material gave way.

In the sixties, indeed, few were left who had been fashionable figures in Trollope’s boyhood. Besides Gregory, however, when Trollope took up his eastern counties’ surveyorship, the most notable survivor, in addition to Alfred Montgomery, was Sir Henry Taylor, who had been at the Colonial Office before Trollope went to Ireland as a surveyor’s clerk. He was there still in the year that Trollope re-established himself in an English home at Waltham House. During the early sixties, Sir Henry Taylor’s literary fame and social influence, still at their height, had opened the best houses in England, both to himself and to any person of promise he might take up. No man was ever at any time less on the look out for a patron or an introduction to patrons than Anthony Trollope. Taylor himself owed his official career, as well as much of his commanding place in society, to the great physician of the time, Sir Henry Holland. That medical magnate, having in earlier years befriended Mrs. Trollope, now joined Taylor in advancing the interests of her son. The two had even hoped to secure Trollope’s election to the Athenæum by the committee, some years before that event actually took place—in 1864. Meanwhile, as Milnes’s guest at the Sterling Club, Trollope made intellectual acquaintances as distinguished as any whom he met afterwards at the Athenæum, and heard specimens of the conversation at a meal, which had been the speciality of some famous London sets, but then in the process of dying out. This was the dinner- or breakfast-table talk which, seldom or never becoming general, chiefly assumed the form of a monologue by a single brilliantly gifted performer. S. T. Coleridge in remote times had founded the school, with Sidney Smith for his successor, Macaulay and Carlyle for his subsequent followers. “It was, no doubt,” said Trollope to me, “a good discipline for an impatient and irritable listener, but it never seemed to teach one anything.” It was three years before his Athenæum membership that Thackeray’s good offices introduced Trollope to the Garrick Club, April 5, 1861, and so gave him a recognised place among the professional literary workers of his time.

His connection with this club was fraught with consequences of no small interest in themselves, as well as in their influence upon Trollope’s personal relations with some of his best-known contemporaries. The Athenæum, which some years later was to bear Trollope’s name on its books, had been founded in 1824, and stood upon the Pall Mall site once occupied by Carlton House. Its early, and indeed immediate success, was largely due to the personal efforts of John Wilson Croker, the Rigby of Disraeli’s novels, and the distinguished patronage secured by Croker for the enterprise. The name it now bears did not finally supersede the appellation first suggested, the “Society,” till 1830, when the present building, designed by Decimus Burton, opened to receive the members. The Mæcenas of his age, the great Lord Lansdowne, had deigned to become an original member. He attracted to the place not only some half-dozen of his political contemporaries or juniors in the front rank of politics, such as Sir James Mackintosh, Romilly, Macaulay and Brougham, but also the brightest lights in the firmament of literature or science at Bowood and Lansdowne House, Thomas Moore and Theodore Hook, Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday.

Trollope’s earliest club, the Garrick, was the Athenæum’s junior by some seven years. It originated in an idea thrown out at a meeting in Drury Lane Theatre, August 7, 1831. The proposal had no sooner taken definite shape than measures for translating it into existence were pushed promptly forward. By October 15, 1831, several members had been elected, the rules had been drawn up and approved, as well as the general committee appointed. The Duke of Sussex, the foremost, in all intellectual movements, of George III’s sons, had actively associated himself with the project from the first. He figured in the earliest members’ list as patron, and presided over the opening dinner, February 13, 1832, at Probat’s Hotel, 35 King’s Street, Covent Garden. Here the club was housed till, a full generation later, its establishment beneath its present roof in Garrick Street. The Garrick, therefore, known to Trollope during his earlier years in London, was not that at which, rather than at his home in Montagu Square, he found it sometimes convenient, in his later days, to entertain his friends, but the genuine and original “little G,” as Thackeray affectionately used to call it, and as Thackeray’s most devoted disciple, Trollope himself, got into the way of denominating it too.

Before describing his early Garrick associates, let it be recalled what these saw in Trollope himself. At this time, his forty-fifth year, Trollope was passing into a remarkably vigorous middle age. As for the bodily signs of advancing years, which visibly multiplied on him after having completed his first half-century, not a trace was to be found in 1862. Upright and elastic in figure, he showed to special advantage, and seemed some years younger than his age, in the saddle, from which men at the club window occasionally saw him descending, while a groom was in waiting to take his horse home. His voice, sharp, authoritative, inclining to severe always, sometimes peremptory and gruff, had in it the ring of perfect vigour and health, as of body, so of mind and nerve. The official manner, contracted, as has been seen, during the period of his Irish surveyorship, had become a part of the man himself, though it veiled a more than feminine self-consciousness. Trollope’s “abrupt bow-wow” way, as it came to be called, was not merely the personal peculiarity of a well-bred man of the world, but, by all who knew him and his antecedents, was recognised as a note of the social school in which he had been trained quite as much as an attribute of the individual. The good old High Churchmen of the pre-ritualistic period, whether at Winchester, Oxford, in the rectory, or the manor house, distrusted and discouraged the suaviter in modo, because they thought it likely to enervate the fortiter in re.

Fresh from these austere warnings, theoretical and practical, against the enfeebling influences of grace and urbanity of demeanour, Trollope began his official pupillage at St. Martin’s-le-Grand under the Draconic Colonel Maberly, who communicated to most of his juniors his own healthy contempt for mere courtesy of speech and amenity of manner. Moreover, during the early sixties, the social influence insensibly exhaled by a man of Thackeray’s intellectual calibre upon his worshippers resulted in Trollope’s modelling not only his diction but his deportment on him whom he had taken for his social patron as well as literary master. Thackeray, though spoken of by Trollope and others as one of the Garrick fathers, did not, as a fact, come in till 1832. Even thus he was by five years the club senior of Dickens, who joined in 1837. During all Trollope’s earlier time, therefore, without a rival to dispute his claim or to dissent from his ruling, in the frequent absences of Dickens, he pervaded and dominated the place. Dickens, indeed, as an old friend of his mother, welcomed Trollope on his election. Thackeray’s favour it was which admitted Trollope to the set whose central figure was the author of Vanity Fair. Thus, at the beginning of his London course, did circumstances give Trollope a place among those whose bond of union was devotion to Thackeray, and whom loyalty constrained to see personal opponents to themselves in all demurrers to their great master’s ruling.

The leading Thackerayans, and therefore Trollope’s warm partisans, among the early Garrick members, grouped themselves round a Sussex baronet, a figure prominent in the society of his time, as well as filling a position especially conspicuous and authoritative in all cricketing circles, not more in his county, where he had done much to revive the game he liked so much and played so well, than on the committee of the Marylebone Club. Wherever, indeed, manly sports of any kind were popular, there Sir Charles Taylor was a personage. With this rich, clever, sarcastic man about town was Henry de Bathe, who did not inherit the family baronetcy till 1870, but who, at the time now recalled, shared with Taylor the distinction of being a Garrick autocrat. Taylor’s shrewd, bitter social estimates and aphorisms were remembered in the club long after he was forgotten. One of his deliverances, suggested by the accuracy of Whyte-Melville’s social descriptions, had taken the form of a caution to novelists, and was given to me by Trollope, to the following effect: “Would that other writers about society would learn from Melville. Then we should hear less than we do about icing the claret and taking the chill off the champagne.” Trollope abstained from putting Taylor into any of his books. In Black Sheep, however, Edmund Yates took him for the original of his Lord Dollamore, and drew him to the life in his consultation, in all difficulties, of a favourite walking-stick.

More general and genuine than the club popularity either of Taylor or Bathe was that enjoyed by another of Trollope’s earliest and warmest Garrick friends, Mr. Fladgate, with whom may be coupled James Christie. Both of these outlived Trollope, Christie by fifteen years, Fladgate by seven, the latter retaining, to the day of his death, the affectionate style of “Papa,” bestowed upon him as one of the club’s earliest members. The solicitors to whose firm “Papa” Fladgate belonged are still the Garrick’s legal advisers. Another of Garrick’s contemporaries, or even seniors, who has lived into this third year of King George V, is Sir Charles Rivers-Wilson, to-day not only the club’s doyen, but trustee. After him comes perhaps the sole survivor of those with whom Trollope used to dine off the famous Garrick steak, Sir Bruce Seton. Two years Trollope’s junior in club standing, he was for many years a constant member of a little dining-group at the club, comprising, in addition to himself, the late Sir Richard Quain, Algernon Borthwick, who died Lord Glenesk, and William Howard Russell of The Times. The epoch now recalled was fruitful of curiosities in club character who have long since gone out of date. Among the club representatives of the drama were James Anderson and Walter Lacy, both actors of the old school, tragedians whose masters were Kemble and Kean, as well as impressive elocutionists of a certain majestic dignity. These two men, if about the same age, were not, at least in their later years, on terms of mutual friendship. Trollope, who soon became a committee-man, took a keen interest in everything that concerned the management of the place, knew the names of nearly all the servants, and had their dossiers by heart. Thus he had a closer acquaintance than he might otherwise have had with George Farmer, the club steward, whose methods remained in force long after he had passed away, who thus, within his own sphere, left his mark on the club economy, and who was also as great a despot downstairs as Taylor, Bathe, and Thackeray in the upper regions.

The details of facts and figures already given show that, during most of the sixties, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were all members of the Garrick together. “We were, however,” to quote Trollope’s own words, “two sets as widely separated from each other, and as seldom intermingling, as if we had been assembled under two entirely different roofs; I never saw Thackeray and Dickens engaged in any regular conversation. If either of them entered a room when the other and only one or two more, perhaps, were its occupants, he seemed to have come in to look for something he had mislaid, and, if he did not make rather an abrupt exit, stayed only to bury himself in a newspaper, in silence, or in forty winks. Once, and once only, I can recall Thackeray making a remark about Dickens’s writing, though to whom I shall abstain from all effort to recall. The subject was Little Dorrit, then appearing in monthly parts. ‘I cannot,’ observed some one, ‘see the falling off in Dickens complained of by his critics.’ ‘At least,’ rejoined Thackeray, ‘it must be admitted that a good deal of Little D. is d——d rot.’” And here it should be explained that, when Trollope joined the Garrick in 1861, the club was still in the ground-swell of an internal dispute which, four years earlier, had agitated it to its very foundations, and divided its members into two mutually embittered companies.

The incident which had led to this state of civil war, insignificant and even contemptible in itself, would probably have passed off without serious results, but that, after the fashion now to be described, it had the effect of ranging the two giants of the place, Dickens and Thackeray, on opposite sides. Edmund Yates had criticised Thackeray, not, it may be admitted, in the best taste, in a cheap paper so obscure as to be entirely below a great man’s notice. The material for these remarks, Thackeray maintained, could only come from the writer’s chance meeting with himself in the Garrick smoking-room. Beyond any writer of his time, Thackeray, on grounds of good taste and good sense alone, should have been magnanimous enough to pocket this annoyance as an indiscretion, of which he had himself set such flagrant examples. Such had been the ridicule and abuse heaped by his pen for years on Edward Bulwer-Lytton, on Dionysius Lardner, and only desisted from when the public began to resent the monotony of these acrimonious insults. His caricature of his own Garrick acquaintance, Archdeckne, in Pendennis as Foker, had been at least as gross a violation of all club amenities as any paragraphs written by Yates. Neither in its beginnings, its progress, nor its end was Trollope in the slightest degree mixed up in this episode, whose finale may be briefly recapitulated. At the instance of the novelist who had found such dire cause of personal offence in the poor little peccant paragraphs, Edmund Yates was called upon by the club committee to apologise to the illustrious object of his attack, or to resign. On the advice of Dickens, he refused the ultimatum; a general meeting was then held, and he was formally expelled. All this, though in every detail before his time, seemed so comparatively fresh, and formed the subject of so many conversational retrospects, that Trollope may well have found it difficult to avoid expressing an opinion on the personal merits of the case. Such casual comments are not likely to have been too gentle towards the vanquished party, and for these reasons. As a member of Thackeray’s Cornhill staff, and owing his warm reception at the club to his editor’s introduction, the author of Framley Parsonage was not, from personal accidents, likely to be prepossessed in Yates’s favour.

Trollope, though sixteen years the older of the two, had still to make his literary, if not his official reputation, when Yates entered the Post Office as clerk in the missing-letter department in 1847. Each of them may have served the same masters at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, but each was the representative and disciple of a literary school essentially different from that to which the other belonged. Trained by Dickens on Household Words, Yates first showed what he could do as a novelist in his master’s line with Broken to Harness, so early as 1854, just a year before Trollope had made himself known to the public by The Warden. The two men, therefore, notwithstanding Trollope’s seniority, were yet sufficiently near each other to be contemporaries and rivals. Yates’s expulsion from the Garrick was followed by the withdrawal, not only of Dickens himself, but of Wilkie Collins and one or two more. Independently, however, of the Yates incident, Dickens had already made up his mind to leave the club because the assistant editor of his magazine, W. H. Wills, had been rejected from it.

Henceforth Thackeray reigned at the club alone, and next to him, as it seemed to some, came Trollope. While his connection with the club, or with them, still lay in the future, Thackeray’s henchman had secured the ejection of a member for no other reason than his having incurred the personal displeasure of the great man who ruled the place. Yates, however, left some friends as well as several enemies behind him at the Garrick. Among the former was W. H. Russell, who long afterwards, when the affair had become ancient history, ventured to praise his writings in the presence of Anthony Trollope. It was then reported—and the statement has been repeated since his death—that Yates owed much of his success as a novelist to Mrs. Cashel Hoey’s co-operation. When, therefore, Trollope spoke of this lady as having written his books for him, he was originating no slander, but merely repeating a current piece of literary gossip, which Yates’s literary methods may to some extent have explained.

Most practised literary workmen in their social hours are silent, even to their intimate friends, about what occupies their pens and thoughts for the moment. That, however, was not Yates’s way. Whether he might be writing a book or editing a periodical, he liked to discuss in detail the progress of his work among those with whom he habitually lived. The mise-en-scène, and the persons of his stories furnished topics of table talk with his shrewd and highly-endowed wife first, afterwards with the clever women who were often in her drawing-room. To that number belonged Mrs. Hoey, who had worked with him on Dickens’ magazines, and who was a constant visitor at his house. To her in a special degree he unfolded the plot, incidents, and even portions of the dialogue in the novel he had in hand, inviting from her criticism, suggestions for improvement not only in single episodes, but in the structure of the book. Of course Mrs. Hoey often submitted in writing the notions for which she had been conversationally asked. Yates was not the person to underrate or even to be silent about his obligations to any literary adviser he valued, and might well have mentioned the matter to Trollope himself, had the two ever held any friendly conversation on literary matters.

As it was, Trollope erred in repeating a loose rumour as a statement of fact. That slip in judgment and tact naturally aggravated the soreness felt by Yates at his other Garrick troubles, and was deeply resented. The two men, indeed, for more than ten years remained strangers. Their oldest and kindest friend, Sir Richard, then simply Dr. Quain, expressed his pleased surprise to meet them both as guests at the same club dinner-table towards the close of the seventies, whispering in his pleasant Irish way to the host, “How did you manage to bring them two together?” Perhaps modern English literature might be searched in vain for men at once so eminent, so touchy, so ready to take offence with each other, and with all the world besides, as the four now mentioned:

“Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer.”

It seems necessary to go back to Horace’s description of Achilles for a summary of the qualities personified by the literary quartet now referred to. And yet Yates appreciated Thackeray’s greatness as well as that of his chief, Dickens; while underrating none of his rival’s masterpieces, Thackeray was fond of telling the question often put to him by his children: “Why don’t you write books, real books, like Mr. Dickens?” Apart from their mutual compliments, paid on such occasions as the Theatrical Fund dinner,[16] there was no parade of exceptional cordiality between the two greatest novelists of their age.

High genius always appreciates genius, whatever its personal setting. Dickens and Thackeray were, therefore, above the pettiness of belittling each other. Between Anthony Trollope, however, and Edmund Yates, with all their cleverness, there always existed a good deal of mutual depreciation and jealousy. Especially was this the case in and after 1868; for in that year F. I. Scudamore, who had been made a G.P.O. Secretary over Trollope’s head, took Yates for his assistant in arranging the transfer of the telegraphs from a private company to the State. Yates, therefore, thought he had as good reason as Trollope for pride in his work as a Post Office servant; while, as for his social antecedents, if he had not been, like Trollope, at a public school, he had, before going to a German university, been in its best days under Dyne, at Highgate School. Neither man had many pretensions to real scholarship, but Yates had read and remembered the regulation Latin Classics well enough to quote them quite as aptly as Trollope. In facility and force of literary expression, he was at least Trollope’s equal; in ready wit and resourcefulness he was his superior. But of the English life that Trollope depicted he knew nothing. The success of Thackeray and of Dickens he could understand and admire. Both of them describe different aspects, and hit off certain angles of personal character connected with that existence which Yates knew and had studied. But as for Trollope, with his parsons, sporting or priggish, his insipid young ladies and the green, callow boys upon whom experience was wasted, and opportunities thrown away—in a word, these washed-out imitations of Thackeray, as to Yates they seemed—it passed Yates’s comprehension that the public should find any flavour to its taste in all this. It even stirred his indignation to hear of publishers paying such a writer prices approaching those commanded by the twin chiefs of his craft themselves.

It must be remembered, too, that Yates’s notions of what constitutes conversational cleverness were largely those he had imbibed as a youth in the school of Albert Smith. Hence the opinion recorded in his autobiography, that Trollope did not shine in society and had only humour of a very second-rate kind. Yates himself, like Dickens, talked well, and talked for effect. From both his parents he had inherited marked histrionic power, which showed itself in his performances as raconteur, in the inflections of his voice and the gesture of his hands. To Trollope such action and pose were altogether foreign. With real humour, indeed, he overflowed, as has already been shown from The Macdermots and The Warden, and as will be seen more fully later on, but, unlike Yates, he kept it for his books, and never wasted it on social effects. Moreover, Trollope had committed what Yates resented as an unpardonable sin by refusing to sit for his portrait in the “Celebrities at Home” then appearing in The World. It should, however, be mentioned that, after this honour had been declined, Yates, in his magazine, Time, published about Trollope a highly eulogistic article, whose proof, before it appeared, he sent Trollope, not only to read, but to revise and touch up as he pleased. The Post Office, like other public departments, has had its literary ornaments, whose best traditions subsequently to the period now dealt with have been perpetuated by Mr. Buxton Forman, in the domain of literary criticism, and by Mr. A. B. Walkley, as an authority on the drama in all its developments. But, in the nineteenth century, Yates and Trollope ran each other a neck and neck race for priority as representatives of St. Martin’s-le-Grand in belles lettres.

High animal spirits and irrepressible buoyancy entered largely into the Dickensian estimate of social wit and humour. Few, if any, of these qualities belonged to Trollope by nature, or had become his acquisition by habit. A writer who put so much felicity and fun into the lighter passages of his stories could not, indeed, but occasionally introduce happiness and pungency into his table talk. But, as Anthony Trollope himself remarked, “the conversational credit of our family is maintained not by me but by my brother Tom.” Thomas Adolphus Trollope’s academic training, natural subtlety, and turn for humorous paradox caused him, after a fashion always entertaining and often original, to play with the problems of metaphysics and theology, amid the applause of those Florentine circles where he was better known and appreciated than in any London drawing-rooms or clubs. His brother Anthony at his best brimmed over with shrewd common-sense. Occasionally, when asked a question, he put his answer in a memorable shape, but, apart from the distinction won by his pen, was welcomed in Society not so much for a talker as for a listener.

Anthony Trollope’s election to the Athenæum has already been mentioned as coming twelve years after his admission to the Garrick. In 1874 too, he was made free of another little society that, unlike the two clubs already named, has recently ceased to exist. The Cosmopolitan Club originated in a period whose social usages, though belonging to the last half of the Victorian era, are separated from the twentieth century by a space of more than years. The earliest move made towards the formation of this little club was by A. H. Layard, in conjunction with Sir Robert Morier, among the most successful diplomatists of his time. During his Foreign Office days in London he was the occupant of some Bond Street rooms. Here the private meeting of men, for the most part belonging to politics, foreign or domestic, first became weekly or bi-weekly institutions. Other authorities, equally well informed, hold the true founder of the institution to have been Sir William Stirling Maxwell, who, before the settlement on premises of their own, gave the society a home in his Knightsbridge house. Certain it is that, after a few years, the increase in members made it necessary to start housekeeping on their own account. Among the several roofs beneath which the Cosmopolitans have settled themselves, that sheltering them during most of Trollope’s time was 45 Charles Street, Berkeley Square, where the artist, G. F. Watts, formerly had his studio. When Trollope joined the Club in or about 1874, the method of election dispensed entirely with the usual club ballot-box, which always remained as unknown as the process of blackballing itself. Together with one or two more, known to most of the members by introduction as an occasional visitor, Trollope had produced a good impression on the premises. In due time therefore, as a proof of membership, he paid the modest entrance fee at the club’s bankers. This done, till the year 1880 he remained among the most regular habitués of the place. The accommodation consisted of a single room. The weekly meetings were held on Thursday and Sunday evenings, between ten and midnight, during the session. No solid refreshments were served; but on a side-table were tea, coffee, and aerated waters, with its usual spirituous adjuncts.

Among those most frequently at the place in Trollope’s time were Tennyson, who, on his visits to London, found the “Cosmo” more congenial than most other resorts, and his friend Monckton Milnes, after 1863 Lord Houghton, who more than any other of his friends had induced Peel, when Premier, to bestow the laureateship on Tennyson after Wordsworth’s death. Abraham Hayward; Grant Duff; Lord Barrington, one of Disraeli’s secretaries; Henry Drummond-Wolff; Lord Granville’s brother, Frederick Leveson-Gower; Robert G. W. Herbert, so long permanent Under Secretary at the Colonial Office; his successor Robert Meade; and the already-mentioned Sir Richard Quain—all were conspicuous in the little group of which Trollope formed one in the tobacco parliaments of the little Mayfair caravanserai. As noticeable as any of the foregoing, and often playing a really important part in the secret political history of his period, was Dr. Quin, whom Trollope first met at the Cosmopolitan, and whose good words about Trollope’s novels helped to secure their admission to Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Perhaps the only cabinet negotiation of which Trollope knew something from behind the scenes was that pressed on Dr. Quin by Disraeli in 1868, with a view of detaching Lord Granville from his Liberal allegiance and inducing him to serve under Lord Derby. In the days now looked back upon, the Cosmopolitan Club was the paradise of the intelligent foreigner in London. Thither the French statesman Adolphe Thiers was repeatedly brought by Kinglake, and there Trollope gained an insight into political manœuvres, domestic or foreign, which he found highly useful for his later books.

The Cosmopolitan Club survived Trollope by exactly twenty-five years. Shortly after the twentieth century had completed its first decade, most of the Cosmopolitans whom Trollope knew had followed him to the grave. The younger men that now came on had their own resorts. Moreover, it must be remembered that, even until well into the nineteenth century’s second half, smoking after dinner was allowed in very few houses. Gradually the future King Edward VII’s influence removed the social prejudice against tobacco, with a result that the cigar or cigarette became not less universal than the coffee. At the same time, too, such of the old Cosmopolitans as were left felt less disposed than in their younger day to go out after dinner. The new generation also which had risen up did not appreciate the honour of membership as keenly as had been done by its predecessors. In 1902 the sanitary arrangements of the Charles Street premises were found to be in a parlous state. The house, in fact, which had not been overhauled for a century, was discovered to be literally afloat with sewage under the basement. The cost of the necessary repairs was prohibitive. Still struggling against dissolution, the club migrated to the Alpine Society’s rooms in Savile Row, and dragged on a maimed existence till 1907, in or after which it was formally wound up.

In 1862, then, Anthony Trollope’s club life began on the King’s Street, Covent Garden, premises, shortly before his day visited by the domestic convulsions already described. At the date now looked back upon, the Garrick, though by far the most distinguished of the number, was only one among several literary and theatrical societies which were not their own landlords. Among the other clubs of that class, the most notable was the Fielding, which found its home, first at Offley’s Hotel, afterwards at the Cider Cellars, and which was much frequented by Dickens and Yates, subsequently to the Garrick split. Here, after he had consulted with Trollope on the subject, an unsuccessful attempt was made by E. F. S. Pigott to bring Dickens and Thackeray amicably together. Trollope’s loyalty to Thackeray did not permit him actually to join the Fielding, but did not prevent his frequently visiting the place, chiefly as the guest of Pigott, who used, by-the-bye, to say that “Anthony’s” well-meant but impatient zeal had caused the miscarriage of the delicate personal negotiations that native kindness and tact fitted him above all men to conduct.

The Covent Garden district in Trollope’s earlier London days was honeycombed by more or less Bohemian societies, housed beneath various roofs, but all equally unfamiliar to Trollope. The Arundel Club, indeed, patronised into existence by the Talfourd family, was once visited by him, together with Charles Reade, long after it had established itself within walls of its own in Salisbury Street, Strand. But the Savage, then in its struggling infancy at Ashley’s, Henrietta Street, the Reunion in Maiden Lane, the Knights of the Round Table at Simpson’s in the Strand, he had never heard of till I myself mentioned these places to him. All these were journalistic haunts, with a certain vogue during the nineteenth century’s second half. The only advantage Trollope could have derived from entering any one of them might have been a little more first-hand knowledge than he ever possessed about newspaper writers, their manners, and their methods. An occasional glimpse of the resorts now named might have helped him to avoid the mistakes concerning newspaper life and men that, as it is, he generally commits when touching on the subject in his stories. Yet Trollope’s club experiences were far from being confined to the bodies already mentioned.

The interest in stage matters inherited by Trollope from his mother may have caused him some disappointment, but was not without its practical advantages. The exercise of attempting and failing to write a good play, The Noble Jilt, helped to produce a capital story, Can You Forgive Her?—presently to be mentioned—as well as helped him as a novelist by putting him on his guard against some of his literary defects. His admiration for his Cornhill editor and model, Thackeray, was perhaps responsible for a tendency in Trollope occasionally to buttonhole his reader, to obtrude on him the author’s own personality, and not sufficiently to leave to events and characters the telling of their tale and the pointing of their moral. The smallest experience in dramatic writing shows him who essays it, as Trollope did, the necessity of vivid effects, and the presentation of incidents in such a way as to dispense with the author’s appearance in the rôle of chorus.

The newspaper writer who turns novelist has already learned, in the exercise of his craft, the art of handling words, with other details of literary technique. Trollope, it has been seen, was practically without newspaper knowledge or training. He could scarcely have found a better substitute for these than the discipline, disappointing and fruitless as at the time it seemed, of casting his crude ideas in a dramatic shape. Socially also in the early sixties Trollope’s theatrical proclivities attracted him to certain pleasant circles that otherwise he might not have entered. Miss Kate Terry had not then become Mrs. Arthur Lewis, but chance made Trollope acquainted with that accomplished actress’s future husband. This gentleman’s rooms in Jermyn Street were at that time the social headquarters of the gifted group then engaged in forming the Artists’ Rifle Corps. Sculptors, painters, authors, as well as players assisted in the movement, out of which there also gradually grew the Arts Club. The earliest idea for its domicile was nothing grander than a modest tenement in the then pre-eminently artistic quarter of Fitzroy Square, where the Arts men would find and desire no more creature comforts than a few Windsor chairs, plain deal tables, long clays, and sanded floors. Instead of this, the new club’s originators made a successful bid for 17 Hanover Square, close to Tenterden Street. It was an historic mansion belonging to the Adam period in the eighteenth century, with elaborate marble mantelpieces, ceilings painted by Angelica Kauffmann, and superb old oak staircases. Here, in 1863, the Arts Club came into existence. To some extent the child of the secessions from the Garrick, the Arts Club in its beginnings was much favoured by the Dickensian faction. Dickens, indeed, himself never belonged to it, but his eldest son, who afterwards succeeded him in the conduct of All the Year Round, made it his chief “house of call,” and in its picturesque dining-room, together with the happily still surviving Mr. Marcus Stone, used frequently to have the author of his being for his guest. Among the most prominent of the Thackeray faction connected with the Arts in its earliest days was Anthony Trollope, who enjoyed all club life with as keen a zest as did his master, Thackeray himself.

About the same time as his connection with the Arts, Trollope became an original member of a very different fraternity. This was the Civil Service Club, 86 St. James’s Street, as its name implies, intended primarily for those composing the staff of our Government offices. The expenses of its maintenance necessitated the admission of outsiders. In 1865, therefore, it dropped the original name, to receive its present style, the Thatched House Club—a topographical designation in every way suitable, seeing that the house stands on nearly the same site as that once occupied by the historical Thatched House tavern. By the time, however, of this change, Trollope had ceased all connection with the place. Nor, he told me, did he ever re-cross its threshold until the occasion, mentioned above, on which the present writer brought him and Edmund Yates together as fellow-guests in its dining-room. Towards the close of his London life Trollope joined the Turf Club in Piccadilly which, in a previous state of existence, had been the Arlington in Arlington Street, famous for the high points of its whist and the expertness of its players. The card room at the Turf was, however, to Trollope the least of its attractions, and indeed his recreations of this sort were always, I am pretty sure, confined to afternoon whist at the Athenæum.

CHAPTER IX
IN PERIODICAL HARNESS

Trollope’s one work in the Thackerayan vein—Brown, Jones, and Robinson—Its failure—Thackeray’s two efforts to enter official life by a side door—Trollope’s opinion of “untried elderly tyros”—And of Thackeray’s limitations—His Life of Thackeray—Philippics against open competition in the Civil Service—A Liberal by profession, but a Tory at heart—Anthony’s bon mot—The Pall Mall Gazette—Hunting life in Essex—Sir Evelyn Wood to the rescue—Trollope’s cosmopolitanism—The Fortnightly Review, an English Revue des Deux Mondes—Its later developments.

TROLLOPE’s London course, literary and social, began, as has been already shown, under Thackeray’s ægis. To the first editor of The Cornhill he owed his place in the set with which he soon became, and always remained, a favourite, as well as his earliest profitable connection with periodical letters. Naturally and properly Trollope repaid this debt to the utmost of his power, not only by every possible acknowledgment of lasting gratitude, but by the occasional compliment of literary imitation. The novels of English country life contributed by him to The Cornhill—Framley Parsonage in 1860, and The Small House at Allington that began to follow it in 1862, the year before Thackeray’s death—showed no sign of Thackeray’s influence. These were the two books that completed the process, begun by The Warden in 1855, of placing permanently the public he by this time understood beneath the spell of his pen. Before, however, the introduction of The Cornhill readers to Lily Dale, John Eames, and Adolphus Crosbie, Trollope had contributed to the same magazine a loosely written, satirical sketch, Brown, Jones, and Robinson, which a hostile critic might be excused for describing as Thackeray-and-water. With a congenial subject, Trollope could always be depended on for abundant humour and irony. Both these qualities in Brown, Jones, and Robinson lack the spontaneity or ease without which the charm of Trollope’s writing disappears. So, in fact, thought Trollope himself; so too, however courteously he softened the expression of his opinion, did the polite and amiable Mr. George Smith. Yet even so, Brown, Jones, and Robinson is not at all poorer than Thackeray’s own mark as seen in many of his earlier pieces for Fraser, and in many of the Roundabout Papers which he hurried through for The Cornhill while the printers were waiting for copy. It was Trollope’s single unqualified failure. Never again was he betrayed by his Thackeray homage into the mistake of mimicry.

As a fact, too, no one knew better than did Trollope, not only his own limitations and deficiencies, but Thackeray’s as well. The plums of the Postmaster-General’s department should in every case fall to men already at work in the office. That feeling of esprit de corps had in 1846 made Trollope oppose Rowland Hill’s introductions from outside to St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Two years later, or twelve years before Trollope’s connection with him began, Thackeray himself had, equally to Trollope’s disgust, contemplated an act of intrusion like Rowland Hill’s in the Postal Service. In 1848 the assistant-secretaryship fell vacant. The then Postmaster-General, Lord Clanricarde, the staunchest friend possessed by the novelist among those in high place, let Thackeray know he would do his best to secure him the billet. Lord Clanricarde’s second in command plainly told his chief that the thing was impossible. The Minister at once gave way, and accepted the official nominee, of course not a little to Thackeray’s chagrin.

On this transaction Trollope’s remark was that, had Thackeray succeeded in his attempt, he would surely have ruined himself. No man, he added, could be fit for the management and performance of special work who had learned nothing of it before his thirty-seventh year, Thackeray’s then age. No man, he further insisted, could be more signally unfit for it than Thackeray. The achievement of his ambition in this matter would have summoned him to duties impossible of performance except after a long course of expert training. In some cases, Trollope admitted, an “untried, elderly tyro” might have put himself into harness and discharged after a fashion the first duty of maintaining discipline over a large body of men; but of all men in the world Thackeray was the most egregiously and fatally disqualified for anything of the sort. The whole subject was one on which Trollope felt some difficulty in expressing himself. On the one hand, his grateful admiration of Thackeray made him anxious not to do that great man any injustice in the matter. On the other hand, his loyalty to his brethren of the Civil Service made him resent his idol’s apparent belief that a man may be a Government secretary with a generous salary and have nothing to do. Nor, he adds, did Thackeray consider how inexpressibly wearisome he would have found the details of his work, or in effect how impossible to a man of his habits and intolerance of all ties would have been attendance in the city every day from eleven to five. The conclusion, therefore, however reluctantly reached, is that Thackeray so underrated the intellectual demands made by their employments on the servants of the State as to see no difficulty in combining the mechanical drudgery of a public office with the creative labour of novel-writing and his other literary work. Yes, not without a touch of bitterness Trollope sums it all up: he might have done it had he risen at five, and sat at his private desk for three hours before beginning the day’s grind at the G.P.O. On this subject Trollope could speak with the practical experience of one who had gone through the exhausting monotony of the official mill, and who had taxed almost to breaking point his exceptional strength by combining with it his unceasing commissions for publishers.

Thackeray’s official aspirations were the fond dreams of a literary man who would fain have recalled in the nineteenth century that Augustan age in which, under Queen Anne, Joseph Addison was a Secretary of State, and, under George I, Matthew Prior became British Ambassador in Paris. Again, since the State is still accustomed to reward with money, titles of honour, garters, or stars, Thackeray wanted to know why men of letters should not have their turn as well as politicians and soldiers. Even in our own evil times the great Anglo-Saxon State on the other side of the Atlantic delighted to honour the pen in this way. The United States had sent Washington Irving (1830) as Minister to London; more than twenty years later (1853), it had made Nathaniel Hawthorne its consul at Liverpool. Fired by these precedents, six years after the miscarriage of his Post Office design, Thackeray (November 1854) had applied for the vacant secretaryship of our Washington Legation, with the result that Lord Clarendon, who then controlled the Foreign Office, replied: first, that the place was already filled; secondly, that it would be unfair to appoint out of the service; thirdly, that being a great novelist would not necessarily ensure a man’s being a good Minister.

When, therefore, Thackeray visited the United States, he did so in his own coat, as he himself put it, and not in the Queen’s. Nor, is Trollope’s comment, is there anyone on whom the Queen’s coat would have sat so ill. However that may be, there are few modern cases which could be cited in support of a literary man’s claim to employment in the English service abroad. During the years following Thackeray’s unsuccessful suit the official prospect for English literature somewhat brightened. Grenville Murray had combined diplomacy and authorship before Thackeray applied for Washington. Trollope’s own friend, Charles Lever, was first introduced to the consular service in 1852. Burton’s experiences of the same department date from 1861. In 1868 James Hannay was not too generously rewarded with the Barcelona consulship for his newspaper services to the Conservative cause. Since then Mr. James Bryce’s success at our Washington Embassy has brought us further in the direction of the great novelist’s dream than would have looked possible in Thackeray’s day.

These are not the only manifestations of the candour that blended itself with the warmth of Trollope’s appreciative friendship for Thackeray. His literary master’s defeat by Cardwell in the Oxford election in 1857 suggests a remark on “his foredoomed failure in the House of Commons, had he ever entered it, a failure rendered inevitable by his intolerance of tedium, his impatience of slow work, and his want of definite or accurate political convictions.”[17] More even than this, when Trollope comes to think about it, he feels by no means sure of Thackeray as Cornhill editor having been the right man in the right place. Did not, he implies, Thackeray’s own often-cited article in his magazine about the editorial position, Thorns in the Cushion, justify that misgiving? The great man was too perfunctory, could not bring himself personally to deal with all the manuscripts which poured in; he was obliged, in fact, as all editors are, to entrust some of the supervisory work to his subordinates. Worse than that, however, Thackeray actually rejected one of Trollope’s proffered contributions in the shape of a short story, on the ground that it might bring a blush to the cheek of the young person. Nothing could be more curiously characteristic of the man who gives it than the opinion formed by the author of Framley Parsonage of the first editor of The Cornhill. Trollope was compounded in nearly equal parts of an enthusiastic impulsiveness that came to him by nature, and of a shrewdly judicial man-of-the-world temper, largely formed and strengthened by his experiences of life in general, and, in a greater degree, of his Post Office experiences in particular. His twofold estimate of Thackeray signally illustrates this balance of opposite tendencies.

John Forster, who, after the fashion already described, had given Trollope his first chance of appearing in print, was one among the latest survivors of those who knew Thackeray intimately. Told in the year of his death, 1876, of Thackeray in the Men of Letters series being allotted to Trollope, he remarked with surprise, “Why, Trollope only knew him as editor of The Cornhill.” These things were before my time. Neither to me nor, I think, to any of my day, did Trollope volunteer any remarks about the extent to which circumstances had carried his personal knowledge of Thackeray. That the literary acquaintance of the two men eventually ripened into something like social intimacy was the opinion of Thackeray’s own familiars, such as the already mentioned E. F. S. Pigott and Tom Taylor who, though six years the great man’s junior, had been with him at Cambridge, and whose friendship with him to the day of his death was as unbroken as it was close. The same view on this point was taken also by G. A. Sala, who personally disliked Trollope, and had formerly resented his approaches to Thackeray, as well as by the accomplished and socially omniscient Sir W. A. Fraser, who, from his own independent experience, circumstantially confirmed to me the accuracy shown by Trollope in his rendering of all Thackerayan details. Both these henchmen of the great novelist were book and, incidentally, autograph collectors. Shortly before his death, Fraser and Trollope, each on a separate occasion going to dine with Thackeray at Palace Gate, brought with him a specially bound set of Thackeray’s works that the author might write his name therein. To both men Thackeray excused himself from doing so at the time, promised that he would see to the matter next day, and return the volumes. Meanwhile, the fatal Christmas had come and gone; the great man was no more. The books were punctually sent back to their owners. In neither set had Thackeray’s name been written.

Trollope’s Cornhill experiences, under Thackeray first and, in the case of The Claverings, under his successor, marked by far the most important and profitable connection with periodical literature. As a journalist, however, he had begun on the weekly press in 1848, while he was doing Post Office duty in Ireland. In 1859 or 1860 Merivale’s History of the Romans under the Empire excited in him a wish to combat the views expressed in that work about the Cæsars. The result was two articles on the subject, one dealing with Julius, the other with Augustus, in the Dublin University Magazine. By that time Charles Lever’s editorship of this periodical had ceased; but his good word helped Trollope with his successor. The articles then written, and just noticed, formed the germ of a future book hereafter to be mentioned. But, at the date of these Dublin University opportunities, Trollope was so entirely overcome with indignant disgust at the prospect of the Civil Service being thrown open to competitive examination, that he could write or think about little else. The Dublin University Magazine allowed him to relieve his overwrought feelings by discharging several pages of furious invective at the proposed change and its authors.

Whatever at different periods Trollope might think and call himself, his natural prejudices were always those of aristocratic and reactionary Toryism. Upon whatever grade, and whatever the work, provided it was not of an essentially plebeian kind, the public offices of this country must be reserved for gentlemen. Examinations might in some degree test brains; they could not ensure breeding. Without the ideas, the antecedents, and the social training which must remain the privilege of birth, mere book knowledge, diligence, and aptitude for drudgery would not of themselves guarantee the State the higher qualities it had a right to expect in its servants. Here spoke the same spirit as that which had impelled Anthony Trollope’s kinsman, the great Conservative squire, Sir John Trollope, in 1846 to place loyalty to his Protectionist principles before loyalty to his leader, Sir Robert Peel. Asseverations of this kind were much in request as arguments with those bent on retaining State employment for the exclusive profit of the privileged classes. Nor beyond these rhetorical commonplaces, with their conventional appeals to a pseudo-aristocratic feeling, did Anthony Trollope’s case against competitive examinations go. He lived long enough, if not cordially to acquiesce in the new system, yet, becoming Sir Charles Trevelyan’s personal friend, to agree with him that competition did not in its working involve more evils than patronage.

While on one of his visits to the Irish capital, about his contributions to the academic periodical, he first made, through the social offices of Charles Lever, one of the friendships that he renewed with special appreciation in his later life. J. S. Le Fanu had succeeded Lever as the editor of the Dublin University Magazine; to Le Fanu’s house in Merrion Square Trollope, accordingly, was taken by Lever. Here in the course of the evening a young lady—his host’s niece—asked whether she should read something to them she had written. The budding authoress became celebrated a little later as Miss Rhoda Broughton, and the manuscript in hand was that of a story that established her as a novelist in 1867, Not Wisely, but Too Well. Recalling this incident many years afterwards, Lever said: “Never before or since did I see Anthony Trollope so agreeable or so witty as on the evening he listened to the extracts Miss Broughton recited from her earliest book. In fact, the only mot with which I can ever credit him was flashed out on that occasion. The talk, I think, had been brought by W. H. Russell, who was of the party, to some one specially disliked by Trollope. ‘But,’ said Trollope, dismissing the subject, ‘let us hope better things of him in the future, as the old lady said when she heard that F. D. Maurice had preached the eventual salvation of all mankind.’”

Trollope took his place in the social and literary life of London under conditions and at an age that ensured his enjoying these new experiences with a greater zest than had they come earlier, and because they were the deferred, and occasionally the despaired of reward for toil, endurance, exile, equal to the picturing of his fondest dream. At the age of forty-five, with powers of enjoyment, as of work, yet unimpaired, he had in advance guaranteed himself against inconvenience from any possible check in his literary course by the eastern district surveyorship. This raised him above the dependence of a publisher’s hack, and enabled him to make better terms for his books. Its social as well as official experiences might, as he shrewdly foresaw, be trusted to ensure his imagination such a constant supply of fresh material as would preserve freshness and guard him against the sin of self-repetition. Thus, in little more than ten years after his earliest and unsuccessful novel, The Macdermots, and in five years after his first success with The Warden, he had won a position which rendered it tolerably certain that no new literary enterprise would be floated by men like George Smith, without the invitation of his services and goodwill. In another work[18] I have stated so fully the origin of The Pall Mall Gazette that any references to it here must be confined to the few points of contact between that newspaper and Trollope, whom it did not concern, in his impressions of this journalistic incident, circumstantially to bring out the fact that, beyond its name, The Pall Mall Gazette of real life owed nothing to Thackeray, and, as regards all its details, was the exclusive device of its first owner and its first editor. The announcement of the historical paper, prepared by Frederick Greenwood, who alone planned and who long conducted it, said nothing about a journal written “by gentlemen for gentlemen,” but only that a few men of letters had decided upon starting on a new venture which they thought would be found different from anything then before the public. Contributions of course were invited from Trollope upon any social events or humours of the hour that interested him. By this time he was as well known in certain parts of England as he had begun to be nearly a quarter of a century earlier, on the other side of St. George’s Channel, for an enthusiastic and intrepid rider to hounds.

At Waltham House, where his Post Office duties had made it convenient to settle, he was within practicable distance of several different meets. At Harlow, some ten miles from Waltham, were the kennels of the Essex pack, and with these he soon became a familiar figure. His earliest hunting friend, Charles Buxton, between 1865 and 1871 Member for East Surrey, on Trollope’s re-establishment in the home counties, was himself still a keen rider to hounds; Buxton’s friendship and introduction proved of special service to Trollope in connection with his favourite pastime. During Trollope’s experience of the Essex country, the district opened to him by his friends of the Buxton family was that known as the Roothings, chiefly hunted by the staghounds, but occasionally also the scene of a fox hunt. Famous for its stiff riding, it abounded in formidable fences and in deep ditches. In the sixties Trollope was a very heavy weight, and therefore frequently in difficulties; of these he made light, pulling himself together with surprising speed after a series of spills, and seldom failing to hold a good place at the end of a run. Of his fellow-Nimrods in the East Anglian region, there are still left Sir Evelyn Wood and Mr. E. N. Buxton, from personal experience to testify to the undaunted alacrity with which, after having been lost to view in the field, Trollope scaled the sides of a Roothing dyke, reappeared in the saddle, and pushed on with unabated vigour.

In addition to his weight, fatal, of course, to anything like equestrian elegance, Trollope had to contend against a defect of vision which no artificial relief entirely obviated. Hence some of the difficulties that used to beset him with the Essex pack and with H. Petre’s staghounds. His popularity in the field generally brought him timely relief in answer to his call for help. Such proved the case when, on one occasion, he had been making up lost ground after a fall in the middle of a ploughed field. The fellow-sportsman who then answered to his cry was no less a person than the present Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. “For heaven’s sake,” exclaimed Trollope, “be careful; I am afraid to move lest I should trample on my spectacles which have just fallen off my nose.” Quick as thought, the future Field-Marshal alighted from his horse, and retrieved the glasses. Having fitted them to his nose, Trollope rejoined the hunt with as much serene sturdiness as if the little contretemps had never occurred. Trollope’s sporting performances in the eastern home counties had also a social side he found highly useful for the purposes of his novels. Many of the sportsmen lived at London or elsewhere, renting at local inns a certain amount of stabling for their horses, together with suites of rooms for themselves during the season. They thus formed a club whose members, as often as convenient, dined together, and of which Trollope soon became free. It was a pleasant, cheery life that exactly suited the eminently clubbable Trollope. Glimpses of it are given in those passages of Phineas Finn describing the performances of that novel’s hero on Lord Chiltern’s Bonebreaker.

As Trollope wrote, so did he ride, confident that the animal he bestrode, equally the novelist’s Pegasus as his Irish mare, would in each case carry him successfully from point to point. Whether with the pen or on horseback, he took his own line. Neither checks nor even falls prevented his finishing at the spot and the hour he had from the first fixed. As much as he could desire of the sport he loved, in a good country, and with social accessories just suited to him; a constitution, naturally of iron, as yet practically untouched by years, and revealing no unsound spot; a sense of official importance gratified by the authority delegated to him from St. Martin’s-le-Grand; the inheritance at the London club he most frequented, the Garrick, of something like Thackeray’s own position; ascendency firmly established and wide popularity permanently won in the calling of novelist; freedom from all present anxiety as to his circumstances, and every year bringing a solid addition to his funded savings—all this surely formed a combination, such as might have made him who commanded it the happiest, as he was certainly the most fortunate, of men. And yet Trollope’s life was chronically saddened by recurrent moods of indefinable dejection and gloom. A sardonic melancholy he had himself imputed to Thackeray. In his own case the sardonic element was wanting, but the melancholy was habitually there, darkening his outlook alike upon the present and the future. “It is, I suppose,” he said, addressing the friend to whom, more than to any other, he unbosomed himself, Sir J. E. Millais, “some weakness of temperament that makes me, without intelligible cause, such a pessimist at heart.”

These seizures of despondency generally overtook him as he was riding home from a day with the hounds. They began with the reflection that he rode heavier in each successive season, and that in the course of nature the hunting, repeatedly prolonged beyond what he had fixed as its term, would have to be given up. The vague presentiment of impending calamity, as he himself put it, came, no doubt, from nothing more than an increasingly practical discovery of the Horatian truth:

“Singula de nobis anni prædantur euntes.”[19]

Against the depressing influences thus engendered, Trollope lacked the natural resources of his two most famous contemporaries. Thackeray, if he had not always at his command spirits as high as Dickens, by an effort of purely intellectual strength could generally secure the enjoyment of life against the intrusion of unwelcome fancies and gloomy thoughts. Anthony Trollope was without Dickens’ perennially boyish zest of existence or Thackeray’s stubborn opposition to the first approach of the “blue devils.” His manner, habitually abrupt and sometimes imperious, concealed an almost feminine sensibility to the opinions of others, a self-consciousness altogether abnormal in a seasoned and practical man of the world, as well as a strong love of approbation, whether from stranger or friend. The inevitable disappointment of these instincts and desires at once pained and ruffled him beyond his power to conceal, and so produced what his physician and friend, Sir Richard Quain, once happily called “Trollope’s genial air of grievance against the world in general, and those who personally valued him in particular.”

The founding of The Pall Mall Gazette and other literary events belonging to the year 1865 were landmarks in Trollope’s progress for social rather than literary reasons. Some very slight sketches, exclusively or for the most part on hunting, were contributed by him to the evening paper which Frederick Greenwood’s experience and inventiveness had been helped by George Smith’s capital to create.[20] In those days more dining than is the habit to-day was considered essential to journalistic enterprise. George Smith’s earliest Pall Mall dinners soon became famous, and found Anthony Trollope a frequent guest. At these hospitalities he greatly extended the literary and political acquaintanceship which he had begun to make at the Garrick and at the Cosmopolitan, as well as added to it specimens of intellectual power, culture, and cosmopolitan knowledge hitherto seldom collected beneath the same London roof. Such were the three survivors among the chief original writers for The Saturday Review: H. S. Maine, his former Cambridge pupil and subsequently Saturday colleague, William Vernon Harcourt, and G. S. Venables, about whom it was then, as it still remains, uncertain whether he did or did not sit to Thackeray for the Warrington of Pendennis.

The second Lord Lytton, then attached to our Lisbon embassy, Julian Fane, and the eighth Viscount Strangford represented various branches of belles lettres, as well as of diplomacy and cosmopolitanism, in the company among which Trollope now found himself. Not the elder alone, but both the two brothers who were successively the seventh and eighth Lords Strangford are reflected, even to their personal appearance, in the Waldershare of Disraeli’s Endymion—fair with short, curly, brown hair and blue eyes, not exactly handsome, but with a countenance full of expression, and the index of quick emotions, whether of joy or sorrow. George Smythe, the seventh of the Strangford Viscounts, the reputed original of Coningsby, was no longer alive at the time of these Pall Mall dinners. His brother and successor, Percy, figured among Greenwood’s most important contributors from the first. None of the group now mentioned had the same vivid interest for Trollope as Strangford; but the most distinguished of the others, notably Fitzjames Stephen, William Rathbone Greg, George Henry Lewes, and James Hannay, exercised upon him something of the same educational influence that they did upon Greenwood himself. Many years subsequently to this, Trollope met as a guest at the Cosmopolitan Club the ex-officer of the French Navy, L. M. J. Viaud, who, as Pierre Loti, became famous in 1880. “I could not,” was Trollope’s comment, “amid the many personal dissimilarities of the two, but be struck by a certain resemblance between James Hannay’s breezy picturesqueness in stating his views of history or politics, and the touches, as graphic as they were delicate, that made Viaud’s descriptions, whether in conversation or writing, living things.”

The period now reached was to present Trollope with another new connection in periodical literature, not less noticeable in itself, and more far-reaching in some of its consequences than any of those already mentioned. His first dealings with the publishers Chapman and Hall, while still settled at 193 Piccadilly, were, as has been already said, over Dr. Thorne in 1858. Pre-eminent among the nineteenth century writers as the novelist of English home-life, Trollope possessed, and on occasion showed, as much of international sympathy as Bulwer-Lytton himself, and, by original observation as well as by English and foreign reading, took real pains to keep himself in touch with the higher European thought of his time. Occasionally he took his summer holiday at a pretty little hamlet in the Black Forest, Höllenthal, near Freiburg. Here he sometimes received visits from well-placed continental friends who, in a few hours’ talk, took him effectively behind the scenes of European society letters, politics, or finance. From Höllenthal, too, were made those excursions that not only acquainted him with the most-desired hospitalities of Cologne, Frankfort, and Berlin, but that also brought him into the heart of the Fatherland’s inner life as seen, now in obscure towns or obscurer villages, now in the studies and lecture-rooms of thinkers and writers. Such were the experiences that suggested to Trollope’s active mind the possibility of founding a magazine which should be for England what the Revue des deux Mondes was for France; that periodical, as was happily said by Lord Morley of Blackburn, had “brought down abstract discussion from the library to the man in the street.” Why should not, Trollope asked himself, the like of this be done here. The same idea had occurred almost simultaneously to others of light and learning in contemporary literature. Huxley, E. A. Freeman, Sir R. F. Burton, E. S. Beesly, Mr. Frederick Harrison, and the present poet laureate, Mr. Alfred Austin, promised the enterprise their “vote and interest”; Lord Houghton, without whose counsel and goodwill no undertaking of the sort could then have been carried out, forwarded it not only with his blessing but his purse.

Among others less well known but not less active co-operating to the same end were Danby Seymour, Charles Waring, a shrewd, genial Yorkshireman of intellectual tastes and parliamentary ambitions, whose interest in the project had been secured by one already mentioned more than once in these pages, E. F. S. Pigott. Waring, who subsequently married a daughter of Sir George Denys of Draycote, Yorkshire, and was from 1865 to 1868 M.P. for Poole, became the father of Captain Walter Waring, returned in 1907 for Banffshire. In the sixties, however, he was a man about town, living in The Albany, as generous and eclectic in his bachelor hospitalities as, after his marriage, in the cosmopolitan banquets which during the eighties gave his house, 3 Grosvenor Square, a place of its own in the chronicle of the London season. During that subsequent period Waring once thought of buying back from its possessors, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, the periodical to founding which he had contributed. Then, however, Trollope, at whose instance Pigott’s influence had originally prevailed on Charles Waring to co-operate in bringing The Fortnightly Review to the birth, was dead against the parting of the property to any new purchaser.

At the date now looked back upon, Waring’s Albany Chambers were frequented by other clever and notable men, all of them, in their different ways, highly useful at its beginnings to the literary enterprise. Such were Ralph Earle, who, as Benjamin Disraeli’s private secretary during part of 1859, sat for Berwick-on-Tweed. Soon after this Earle gave up politics, as he had before given up diplomacy. He had the Italian or Spanish genius for statecraft, but no special qualifications for a deliberative assembly. The knowledge of international policy and finance, picked up in the course of his European wanderings, he employed congenially and successfully in negotiating concessions from foreign sovereigns and statesmen for great capitalists engaged in railways and other public works, especially Baron de Hirsch. Earle’s House of Commons contemporary, Danby Seymour, Waring’s predecessor in the representation of Poole, was without the rare intellectual power and subtlety that marked Disraeli’s former secretary. He was, however, a typical specimen of the intellectual and political man about town, with an altogether extraordinary knowledge of high-class periodicals in every European country and language. Be sure, was his advice, to cultivate as an entirely new feature, the best account that can be written for each number of all contemporary movements, foreign as well as domestic, with their tendency and value, whether in the region of politics, letters, science, or economics. Seymour’s suggested article at once became a feature, and received from Trollope himself the title, “Home and Foreign Affairs.” The little conferences in the Piccadilly precinct that preceded the appearance of The Fortnightly proved a valuable experience to Trollope. They took him for the first time in his life behind the political scenes, and brought him into close quarters with men from whom he afterwards drew the political figures that flit through his later novels.

Danby Seymour had held subordinate office in Lord Palmerston’s second administration. His brother Alfred, often with him on these occasions, had been member for Shaftesbury. They both had fine estates in Wiltshire—subsequently disposed of to Mr. Percy Wyndham—as well as Mayfair houses, one in Curzon Street, the other near it, and each possessed a fine collection of pictures. In a word, the Seymour kinsmen, to whom The Fortnightly Review operations alone introduced Trollope, were thoroughly characteristic of the class and period that he introduced in Can You Forgive Her? (1864), and which afterwards he was to describe more minutely in the political novels that began with Phineas Finn.

Trollope showed his knowledge of recent and remote history by reminding his company that leading out of the same corridor as Waring’s rooms were those in which Douglas Cook, creator and first editor of The Saturday Review, saw, of a Tuesday morning, his contributors, and later in the day dined his great friends or wealthy patrons of the Hope and Pelham name. A generation earlier Trollope discovered, in the same Piccadilly precinct, Lord Althorp had rallied his followers for the attack upon the Conservatives under the Duke of Wellington that was to establish the reform ministry of Grey. Such formed the associations of the four walls within which were completed the arrangements that resulted in the appearance, on the 15th of May, 1865, of the first number of The Fortnightly Review, with the cry, “No party but a free platform.” At the same time, the choice of George Henry Lewes as first editor, on the then Mr. John Morley’s recommendation, seemed to promise that the champions of progress were not likely to have the worst of it in any discussions which might enliven the pages of The Fortnightly. The title explains itself; the Review was to appear on the first and fifteenth of each month, at a price of two shillings. In 1866 Mr. Morley succeeded Lewes as editor. The October issue of that year announced the suspension for the present of the mid-monthly number. Thus, among the three Fortnightly editors during Trollope’s time, the earliest, George Lewes, was the only one who conducted a magazine literally true to its title. With the number of January, 1867, the present series began; at the same time the price was raised from a florin to half a crown.

Trollope always felt a paternal interest, and sometimes exercised a paternal power, in the periodical that thus at its different stages associated itself with so many well-known names, and that, without any loss of position, had in infancy dropped any etymological claim to the name given it by Trollope himself. When The Fortnightly funds, raised in the manner already described, had been spent, the copyright passed to the publishers. Of these, Frederick Chapman, by his energy and zeal for the enterprise, had already made himself a part of the Review, uniformly co-operating, then and afterwards, in all matters that pertained to it, with Trollope. Thus far, Trollope sympathised with, or did not reprobate, the advanced opinions advocated by its chief writers. He remained, indeed, for many years afterwards, enough of a Liberal to remonstrate with Mr. Alfred Austin on securing for his elder brother, Tom, the Italian correspondence of The Standard, at the price, he feared, of his conversion to Conservatism. For though, as has already been seen, Trollope’s inborn prejudices, social training, and personal antipathies were all strongly Conservative, the accidents of later experience, operating on his actively controversial temper; made him pass for a Liberal during those Palmerstonian and early Gladstonian eras when Liberalism took its principles from the reactionary moderates rather than the progressives. He wished to see in power men whose administrative abilities would secure prosperity and a fair distribution of material comforts, as well as civil or political rights at home, and the exercise of English influence to redress international grievances, and to put down oppression abroad. But this was coupled always with the condition of the country being ruled and represented by the privileged classes, to whom no one was more proud of belonging than himself. So long as they were in the hands of gentlemen, he really cared little about the political label borne by those responsible for the conduct of affairs. The demagogue and leveller, whether on the platform or in print, were always the same abominations to his earlier manhood that the professional agitator and the foreign fomenters of Irish disaffection became to his later years.

His favourite intellectual progeny, as he regarded The Fortnightly Review, might be trusted, he thought, to reflect his own ideas, and to avoid the falsehood of extremes, at least as much in one direction as in the others. He therefore felt something of a Lear’s paternal pain and indignation when the editor and his self-willed contributors seemed bent on converting the periodical from a platform for the discussion of all questions by the light of pure reason, on lines agreeable to impartial intellect alone, into a pulpit, as it struck Trollope, for maintaining the most audacious and subversive neologies, social or political, civil or religious. His misgivings were exchanged for certainty during the course of 1867. In that year the war between labour and capital reached its height. The public had not recovered from the horror and disgust it had received from the trades union excesses which Broadhead had instigated at Sheffield, when Mr. Frederick Harrison came out with his famous defence of strikes and unions in The Fortnightly Review. Nor was it the industrial question only on which The Fortnightly articles excited Trollope’s apprehension. To the end of the sixties and to the first year of the next decade belonged the acutest phase of the perennial dispute whether national elementary teaching should rest on a purely secular, on a chiefly religious basis, or should be supported on the result of a compromise between the two. That last was the ministerial view which, in his pending Elementary Schools Bill, W. E. Forster, as vice-President of the Council, and practically Education Minister, aimed at establishing. He thus, of course, satisfied neither side. The religious educationalists of the National Union, with Manchester for its headquarters, charged the author of the 1870 Bill with indifference whether the rising generation was brought up in the Christianity of its forefathers, or victimised to the heathenish fads and godless crotchets of the secularist and agnostic education-mongers, looked upon with the same horror by Trollope as all other radicals or revolutionaries. On the other hand, the Birmingham League, with Mr. Joseph Chamberlain for its political champion, and the unimpeachably Christian Congregational minister, R. W. Dale, for its prophet and guide, held that, in the long run, both learning and religion would fare best if in State schools religion formed no part of the official curriculum. So, too, thought, or as Trollope fancied, seemed to think, the leading spirits of The Fortnightly Review. Against these Anthony Trollope was up in arms. The articles advocating the League’s policy suggested a deliberate plot to suppress the Holy Scriptures in the National schools.

His disapproval of the political school whose ascendency The Fortnightly confessed did not prevent him from being one of its contributors. In addition to the novel he ran through it, The Belton Estate, presently to be dwelt on, he made the Review an arena for a struggle with E. A. Freeman about the morality of field sports in general, and of his own greatly enjoyed hunting in particular. This controversy, marked on both sides by prejudice rather than argument, and by vigour instead of subtlety, was, as might have been expected, no better than a waste of time, temper, and space. Had it been possible to bring forward any new pros or cons, neither Freeman nor Trollope was the man to do it. Ouida and her friend, Sir Frederick Johnstone, talking over the matter at one of her Langham Hotel causeries intimes, “where cigarettes and even cigars were permitted,” said: “I think if these two pundits had handed the matter over to us, we could have put a little more life into it, and perhaps sent up by a few copies the periodical which is the pasture-ground of professors and prigs.” Trollope was as far from being a prig as from being a philosopher. But he had equally few qualifications for a controversialist likely to freshen up an ancient theme, and in this disability he was well matched with Freeman.

Meanwhile, he had invested capital in the house of Chapman and Hall; after the publishing business had been turned into a limited company he remained one of the shareholders, and transmitted his interest in it to those in whose favour he drew his will. He was, from its foundation to the end of his life, a director of the company, but besides this, his intimacy with the manager of its publishing business, Frederick Chapman, as well as with that gentleman’s well-to-do relatives with a large share in the concern, gave, and kept for Trollope to the day of his death, the position of an amicus curiæ, whose literary advice was asked and taken on important matters. But the sensational stage of the development of The Fortnightly was not fully reached during his life. He survived, however, to witness the first signs of its advent in an article which, under the signature “Judex,” appeared in the spring of 1880, after Beaconsfield’s final overthrow, and the formation of Gladstone’s second Cabinet. “It was,” said the writer of the article now recalled, “an extraordinary victory won by the nation against an extraordinary man, in some of his powers never surpassed, whose life was the most astonishing of all careers in the annals of parliament, and who, though decisively vanquished, would not, it was to be hoped, retire, because a Liberal Government, more than any other, imperatively needs a strong Opposition for the due and sane performance of its work.” This composition was at once discovered to have the importance of a State paper. The editor, Mr. John Morley, had not then entered parliament as member for Newcastle-on-Tyne. Previously, however, to that he had fought not only Blackburn but Westminster under the Gladstonian flag. He was known to stand high in the Liberal leader’s confidence. It was generally asserted, without contradiction then or since, that the pseudonym at the end of the piece veiled the identity of no less a person than W. E. Gladstone himself. Trollope, at the most, did not think much of it, and drily remarked that fictitious pen names violated one of the principles of the Review. He had consistently protested, and indeed actively struggled against, the conversion of an impartial and philosophical magazine into the mouthpiece of men to whose opinions he could not reconcile himself, though their expression was judiciously revised by an editor not only as able, but as fair-minded as any periodical was fortunate enough to possess. Having retired from practical opposition, and accepted what he thought was the inevitable, he remarked: “The whirligig of time brings its own revenges, and wisdom is justified of her children. I shall not live to see it, but a generation or so hence The Fortnightly, recovering from these its earlier excesses, will revert to its original mission, and give the world the best which can be written for or against any school of politics and philosophy in Church or State.” This characteristic prediction has at least, in the twentieth century, fulfilled itself to the letter. Under its present accomplished editor, as under his latest predecessors, irrespectively of party position or personal proclivities, the periodical has been opened to all competent writers with a message to deliver.

CHAPTER X
THE BROADENING OF THE LITERARY AND GEOGRAPHICAL HORIZON

Trollope as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. G. H. Lewes among the lions of literature and science at The Priory, Regent’s Park—Charles Dickens present in the spirit, not in the flesh, thinks Adam Bede is by Bradbury or Evans, and doesn’t fancy it is Bradbury—Was there any exchange of literary influence between George Eliot and Trollope?—Trollope’s new departure illustrates the progress from the idyllic to the epic—Orley Farm—Its plot—Trollope’s first visit to the United States, in 1860.

THACKERAY’s death in 1863 had left Trollope without any special intimate among his fellow-craftsmen. Several years later, indeed, his success as a novelist brought him, after the manner to be duly mentioned in its proper place, into business relations with Dickens, his mother’s rather than his own old friend. John Forster, it has been seen, may be said first to have brought him out in print. With that ex-editor of The Examiner, Trollope always maintained some social intimacy, visiting him first in the Lincoln’s Inn Chambers, where he so long lived, and afterwards more frequently at his house in Queen’s Gate. Here the chief new literary acquaintance formed by Trollope was with the second Lord Lytton, who snatched from his diplomatic employments abroad enough time for constant reappearance in literary circles at home. Between 1865 and 1875, however, the most interesting and eventful visits paid by Trollope to any host among contemporary writers were those to Mr. and Mrs. G. H. Lewes at The Priory, North Bank, Regent’s Park. At these well-known Sunday afternoon receptions, Trollope first found himself at the social heart of the highest nineteenth century culture. G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope were all nearly of an age. How far Lewes and his scientific tastes affected George Eliot’s literary style may be an open question. There is no doubt that George Eliot in her turn influenced Trollope’s views of life and character. In Trollope’s time, the regular Sunday habitués of the double drawing-room at The Priory, for the most part men, seldom failed to number among them Frederick Leighton, whose drawings for Romola decorated the walls; E. S. Beesly, History Professor at London University College; Robert Browning always; sometimes, on his rare visits to London, Alfred Tennyson; the philosophers Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, E. F. S. Pigott invariably; occasionally Owen Jones, to whose decorative art The Priory owed scarcely less than the Crystal Palace itself; some men of note from the Universities; and generally one or two foreigners of distinction in letters, science, or art.

Of all this company, none more frequently than Trollope obtained a seat near Mrs. Lewes’ armchair on the left of the fire-place. The two novelists never talked publicly about themselves, but among the guests there were some who noticed a kind of parallel in George Eliot’s and Anthony Trollope’s literary courses. The earliest successes of both with the general public won the favour also of their most famous fellow-authors. Thackeray pleasantly complained if, after the day’s work was done, he could not at once refresh himself with The Three Clerks. George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life had no sooner appeared in Blackwood’s than Dickens conjured all those about him to read them, saying, “They are the best things I have seen since I began my course.” A little later, Miss Marian Evans, to recall for a moment the name which never, by the by, appeared on the title-page of any of her books, set the literary world speculating about the identity veiled by the George Eliot pseudonym. Dickens alone penetrated the mystery, after reading the description of Hetty Sorrel doing her back hair. Only a woman, and one of first-rate genius, could have written that, he said. Hence his oracular reply, through his daughter, to a letter asking his opinion on the subject: “Papa wishes me to say he feels sure Adam Bede is either by Bradbury or Evans, and he doesn’t think it’s Bradbury.”[21]

George Eliot, like many other great writers, avoided, so far as possible, reading the periodical reviews of her books. Love of approbation was with her a phrenological organ strongly developed; as all writers cannot but do, she found sweetness in the appreciation of her work by other labourers in the same literary field as her own. During the later fifties she made more than one visit to Florence and its neighbourhood in quest of materials and local colour for Romola, published in 1863. On those occasions she saw much of Anthony Trollope’s elder brother, Thomas Adolphus, who had made the Tuscan capital his home, and who never left it save on a short and rare visit to England. Anthony Trollope’s familiarity with the place dated, as has been seen, from the visit paid by him to his mother during her residence there. Those early reminiscences naturally increased Anthony Trollope’s interest in Romola. “A delightful generous letter from Mr. Anthony Trollope about Romola” brightened and encouraged the authoress in one of those moods of passing depression that sometimes beset the most intellectual toilers. “The heartiest, most genuine, moral and generous of men.” Such, at an earlier state of their acquaintance, had been the impression given by the author of The Small House at Allington to the hostess of The Priory at those Sunday afternoon receptions. In common with his fellow-guests Trollope felt to the full the austere charm of George Eliot’s grave urbanity, and of her conversation—brightened indeed by no flashes of humour, but occasionally seasoned with utterances of penetrating sagacity condensed into epigram. With this woman of genius Trollope became a personal favourite. More than that, the two novelists appreciably, to some extent, influenced each other. “I am not at all sure,” George Eliot told Mrs. Lynn Linton, “that, but for Anthony Trollope, I should ever have planned my studies on so extensive a scale for Middlemarch, or that I should, through all its episodes, have persevered with it to the close.”

Trollope’s progress as a novelist owed something to his acquaintance with the two chief literary women of his age. Mention has already been made of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s preference over all his earlier stories for The Three Clerks. Nothing else of his, she said, had thus far combined so happily pure romance with realistic incident. This praise, he told the present writer, had the effect of doubling his care with the labour of plot-weaving in connection with character-drawing. This was in 1858. In 1862 Orley Farm produced nearly the same compliment to him from the author of Adam Bede. Ten years after Mrs. Browning’s hints came the inspiring and instructive intercourse with George Eliot. Fresh from that association Trollope began to deal less superficially than his earlier stories had required with feminine problems. Into his comedy narrative of manners were now introduced questions of social casuistry, involving moral issues of a graver kind than those which so far had charged his atmosphere. Among the most marked of Trollope’s mental features was his receptivity. This had been already shown by the literary account to which he successively turned his Post Office experiences at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, in Ireland, and again after that in England, provincial as well as metropolitan. His admiration of George Eliot’s art generally, particularly of those qualities in her work that secured her the compliment of comparison with Shakespeare, did without affecting his literary style and method to some degree influence, as he himself felt, his views of character and life.

Can You Forgive Her? (1864), as will presently be shown, marked a fresh stage in the novelist’s evolution. In the manifestation of poetic gifts the natural order of advance has always been from the idyllic to the epic. Whether with the founder of pastoral poetry this may have been the case we do not know, since from Theocritus there have come down to us from him no strains more militant than those in which he celebrated the rivalries, the loves, the alternate fears and hopes, not of a purely ideal Arcadia, but as those sentiments existed in everyday life among the Syracusan swains and shepherds whom in real life he knew. The Virgilian Bucolics were in wide circulation before, at the wish of Augustus, the Æneid was begun. So with English poets. Milton’s shorter and gentler compositions preceded Paradise Lost by the best part of a generation. Alexander Pope’s Pastorals soothed pleasantly the popular ear while their author still meditated in his Twickenham grotto the English presentation of the Greek and Latin heroic masterpieces. So too with Trollope. The broader canvas, the greater variety of personages, and the swifter sequence of stirring incident exemplified a progress corresponding with that just explained.

Something of the same sort had already happened, or was about to take place with a literary ornament of the Victorian age, of an order more illustrious than Anthony Trollope. The greatest, probably, of modern English poets who have ever filled the office of laureate made his first successful appeal to the public with compositions that were in metre much what Trollope’s Cornhill stories were in prose. Six years older than Anthony Trollope, Alfred Tennyson had first caught the English ear with his rural lays and lyrics of English home life. The taste thus gratified, as well as to some extent created, demanded prose fiction possessing domestic interest of the same kind. The public had delighted in The Miller’s Daughter, The Sisters, The Gardener’s Daughter, Dora, Audley Court, and Edwin Morris from the poet. It, therefore, found what exactly suited its mood in Framley Parsonage, and The Small House at Allington from the novelist. The way for Trollope’s popularity had also been prepared, not only by writers of his own period, but by the gradual evolution of the English novels at the hand of its earlier masters. His stories of everyday life began to appear while Jane Austen’s novels were still in the highest favour and Maria Edgeworth’s still retained much of their original vogue. Charlotte Yonge had first extended her fame from the High Church circles to the general public a little later, and retained her position well into the nineteenth century’s second half. But the well-to-do and more or less cultivated English households that read and discussed The Heir of Redclyffe had by no means ceased to care for the analysis of feminine character as illustrated by English fiction’s earliest master of that art, Samuel Richardson. There were, too, Richardson’s less famous or now almost forgotten successors; these numbered not only Thomas Holcroft, but Robert Page, whose Hermsprang contains studies of girlhood and womanhood as effective, and, in their day as much admired, as any of the portraits in “those large, still books,” to apply to them Tennyson’s description. The welcome given to those heroines on their first appearance before the public presaged in its warmth and universality the reception awaiting the latter-day descendants of the men, the matrons, and widows whom Richardson’s example had encouraged Trollope to think no labour of observation or of pen too great, if, as he had seen them, he could in his stories, to the life, reproduce, not only them, but their social atmosphere and surroundings. This Trollope did, and an older generation, which knew Richardson first-hand, encouraged its juniors to see in Lily Dale and Lucy Robarts most of what an earlier age had found in Clarissa Harlowe and Pamela.

Such were the earlier among the literary labourers in something like his own path of industry who undoubtedly, as no one saw more clearly than he did himself, acted as the pioneers of Trollope’s particular industry. In what relation did he stand to his own contemporaries? More than any other of these George Eliot disciplined and developed personages in themselves often commonplace, by means of abnormal experiences and exceptionally dramatic situations. Trollope, on the other hand, before the season of his personal intercourse with George Eliot during the early sixties and thereafter, found the familiar conjunctures of everyday life abundantly rich in all the opportunities he needed for the evolution of those characters—daughters, mothers, and sweethearts—to whom his readers had no sooner been introduced than they began to share Trollope’s own love for these, the novelist’s own creations. It was during 1862, the year of his first visit to America, that Trollope first acquainted his readers with feminine types whose display and development required another set of surroundings as well as incidents somewhat outside the common routine. The earliest of the fresh ventures belongs to 1862. The monthly parts in which Orley Farm then appeared, as several of Dickens’ and Thackeray’s novels had already been issued, were not the only detail wherein Trollope conformed to the great examples of his time. During the early sixties the popularity of the sensational novel, introduced by Mrs. Henry Wood, was confirmed by Wilkie Collins and was still further increased and extended by Miss Braddon. No one, as will be more fully seen on a later page, mirrored more promptly and faithfully than Trollope the literary tendencies of this time. Always quick to take a hint, Trollope therefore introduced the sensational element into the novel Orley Farm, and, by its successful appeal to interests, which it had not yet fallen within his scope to touch, completely justified the new experiment.

The seeds of the plot for the story now to be considered had been long sown in Anthony Trollope’s mind. He himself partly attributed their promise of fruitfulness to conversations on the subject with his brother Thomas Adolphus. When their father removed his household gods from Bloomsbury to Harrow Weald he became, it may be remembered, successively the occupant of two houses. The first, a convenient and even handsome building, had been raised by himself under the name of Julians. The second roof that sheltered him and his family was a farmhouse he had found standing on the ground he rented. This formed the original of the structure in which Trollope laid the scene of a novel that had engaged him earlier than his Cornhill stories. Some of the most stirring incidents in Orley Farm grow out of events which took place several years before the opening of the narrative.

The Johnsons were a family that had done well in the hardware business. They had, indeed, almost attained the dignity of county standing. Suddenly they fell upon evil times. As a result, Mr. Johnson’s name appeared in The Gazette. He had, however, one valuable asset in the person of his handsome daughter Mary. This young lady’s calm and dignified beauty eventually attracted, among her father’s north-country acquaintances, old Sir Joseph Mason, a desolate widower of Groby Park, Yorkshire, whose ambition it had always been to become the founder of a territorial line. His three daughters had all married well; each of them, together with their husbands, shared their father’s social aspirations. Such were some of the ready-made relatives by whom Mary Johnson, on giving her hand in marriage to Sir Joseph Mason, was to find herself surrounded. Though Sir Joseph Mason’s chief estate and principal country house lay to the north of the Trent, his favourite residence had long been the modest building in one of the home counties known as Orley Farm situated between twenty and thirty miles from London. At the time of his settlement at Orley Farm, Sir Joseph Mason’s son and heir by his first marriage, Joseph Mason junior, had almost reached the age of forty, when, to his chagrin and his nearest kith and kin’s disgust, his father’s second marriage bore fruit in the birth of a brother, Lucius Mason. The undoubted inheritor of the chief Mason property, Groby Park, Joseph Mason had always counted on possessing, on his father’s death, Orley Farm as well. When, however, old Sir Joseph’s will came to be read, it disclosed a codicil bequeathing Orley Farm to his infant son, Lucius. Another testamentary disposition equally unexpected was that of £2000 to Miriam Usbech, the daughter of that attorney, Jonathan Usbech, employed by Sir Joseph Mason to draft the Will with the codicil, round which the interest of the story centres. The provisions of that document, contested by the eldest son, had formed the subject of an action which he brought against Lady Mason before the novel begins. That had been decided in Lady Mason’s favour. The curtain thus rises on the late Sir Joseph’s eldest son, baffled by his step-mother in the effort legally to assert his ownership of the entire Mason property, and, by this failure, more keenly even than his sisters embittered against her. His half-brother, Lucius, now between twenty and twenty-five, having finished his education in a German university, has brought home with him scientific ideas of farming, and of land improvement generally, which are greatly to increase the value of the Orley Farm, whose master, on attaining his majority, he became. Meanwhile his half-brother, settled at the Yorkshire headquarters of the family, Groby, has held no intercourse with him. Sir Joseph Mason’s two sons have indeed always been strangers to each other.

By this time also, Miriam Usbech, a beneficiary, as has been already mentioned, under Sir Joseph’s Will to the extent of £2000, has become the wife of a local solicitor, Dockwrath, whose practice lies near Orley Farm. This man had received from Lady Mason, during the minority of her son Lucius, a grant of land on the understanding that it should remain in his hands until it might be wanted by her son, as possessor of the farm. Lucius has no sooner arrived at his majority than the contingency thus forecast is realised. The ground in question has become, he finds, essential for the improvement he is bent on introducing into the estate. Dockwrath, therefore, has, in the earlier chapters of the book, conceived a grudge against Lucius Mason, as well as a strong suspicion of his mother. A search among the papers of his father-in-law, Jonathan Usbech, discloses the fact that the alleged witnesses to old Sir Joseph Mason’s signature of a codicil devising Orley Farm to Lucius must, on the same day, have witnessed also the execution of another legal instrument. That strikes Dockwrath as, to say the least of it, odd; he therefore hunts up these witnesses and puts to them the question: Did they, on the date of certifying Sir Joseph Mason’s signature of the codicil, certify also in a like capacity his signature of the other paper? So far from thinking she did anything of the sort, the interrogated witness felt quite certain that she had only seen Sir Joseph writing his name once.

The results of this inquiry are communicated by Dockwrath to the master of Groby Park, who forthwith commences a second suit against his step-mother on the charge of perjury committed at the first trial. At this point begins the real action of the novel under conditions so sombre, and in an atmosphere loaded so depressingly with a sense of coming evil, that considerations of art and nature imperatively demand some relief. This lighter element is supplied by expedients resembling those which, for a similar purpose, were adopted so skilfully in Trollope’s first book, The Macdermots. The humorous passages, now following in brisk and varied succession, without actually advancing the movement of the story are no mere excrescences upon it. They give life and reality to the figures in the central episode, and in their place are perfectly natural as being Dockwrath’s experiences on his momentous journey to Groby Park. Their drollery relaxes the nerve tension at a painful point, but deepens, by the force of contrast, the dark presentiment of the tragic catastrophe to which the freakish fun of the commercial-room visited by Dockwrath forms a comic prelude. Humorous criticism or witty dialogue, seasoned with incisive repartee, was not Trollope’s strongest point. He is, however, seen at his best in these laughter-moving descriptions of bagmen’s buffoonery or in the sketches of platitude-mongering vulgarity, which his fresh and vigorous seizure of slight personal distinctions redeems from commonplace.

Samuel Dockwrath was a little man with sandy hair, a pale face, and stone-blue eyes. Those who knew Anthony Trollope in the flesh saw in him one who, at his prime, had stood some six feet in his socks, with the other parts of his person on a corresponding scale. It was not, however, his goodly proportions of body that so much impressed the judicious observer as the penetrating fire of the quick blue eyes. This was intensified rather than concealed by the large, heavy spectacles which so entirely remedied any natural infirmity of vision that, after he had taken to wearing them, his eyes never missed a single characteristic feature of his fellow-creatures, or failed accurately and at once to stamp the impression they received on the retentive brain. Those were the eyes that had themselves seen on his Post Office doors—for the most part those in England—each one of Dockwrath’s companions in the commercial-room of the Bull Inn at Leeds. Dickens himself, unsurpassed in sketching the humours of the road as well as the outer and inner life of its travellers’ houses of call, paid Trollope a special compliment on the rapid successions of life-like touches with which he draws a contrast between the arrival at an inn of regular habitués and strangers—the former loud, jocular, assured, or, in case of deficient accommodation, loud, angry, and full of threats; the strangers shy, diffident, doubtful, anxious to propitiate the chambermaid by great courtesy. To the latter belonged Dockwrath. To the former belonged another arrival by the same train, called Moulder, whose salutation to the girl at the bar, “Well, Mary, my dear, what’s the time of day with you?” is met with the reply, “Time to look alive and keep moving.” This has been introduced by a living picture of Dockwrath’s effort to make himself as much at home as the freest and easiest frequenters of the place by calling for a pair of public slippers, while solacing himself with a glass of mahogany-coloured brandy and water and a cigar. Here end the comic preliminaries.

The tragic realities that have brought Dockwrath from London to Yorkshire are opened by the solicitor’s call on Joseph Mason at Groby Park. The £2000, it must be remembered, which old Sir Joseph had left to Dockwrath’s wife were devised to her in the codicil that it is the real object of Dockwrath’s interview with Lady Mason’s stepson to upset. Ostensibly, therefore, as Dockwrath reminds the squire of Groby, the solicitor’s own interest lies in maintaining, not invalidating the supplementary bequests. Duty, however, has first claim upon the man of law, who begins his conversation by hinting that Joseph Mason’s representatives, Round and Crook, have been slack in guarding their clients’ interest. Will not Mr. Dockwrath, Mr. Mason suggests, see Round and Crook themselves, and so save time and trouble by imparting to them his tale of misgivings and suspicions? No, Dockwrath will do nothing of the sort. His message is for Joseph Mason alone. Then comes the decisive conversation in which Dockwrath’s shrewdness tells him that his cue is only to begin with piquing Mason’s curiosity and emphasising by a significant reserve the imputations against his stepmother. At last, he sees reason to fear he may be irritating and offending rather than interesting the squire of Groby by his prolix exordium. He therefore concentrates all his damning suggestions into the one word, forgery. Even this only elicits from Joseph Mason the remark: “I always felt sure my father never intended to sign such a codicil as that.” The question about the line of action to be now taken is the more difficult because the children of Sir Joseph Mason’s first marriage have already disputed the will with the result that a Court of Justice has given its award in Lady Mason’s favour. Before deciding on further litigation, Joseph Mason must consult his men of business in London. Meanwhile, what is likely to be said by the undoubted witnesses to the will and the alleged witnesses to the codicil—did they or did they not upon the same day attest the signatures to separate documents?

When the conference arranged between Mason and Dockwrath takes place, Bridget Bolster, who is known to have been a witness to the Will, and alleged to have witnessed also a codicil, in an interview with Messrs. Round and Crook has most positively declared her certainty that she never attested more than one document on the same day. Still, Messrs. Round and Crook are against prosecuting Lady Mason. Joseph Mason’s emphatic rejoinder, “I will never drop the prosecution,” encourages for a moment Dockwrath’s hope of getting the business. On that point Mason is as obstinate as on the other. The case, therefore, goes forward under the London attorney’s management. Trollope justly prided himself on the accuracy with which, thanks to the experts he consulted, are presented the legal details in the trial and in all the business connected with it. The entire episode is, like the characters that figure in it, a piece of skilfully contrived realism. The Old Bailey barrister, Chaffanbrass, who rises to his work so meekly, smiling gently while he fidgets about with his papers as though he were not at first quite master of the situation; Sir Richard Leatherham, the Solicitor-General and the leading counsel for the prosecution, are none of them full-length sketches from life. Each is a composite of many originals. Nor is there a single member of the group who does not recall, by some trick of manner, of voice, or by some other distinctive peculiarity, the qualities of advocates well known in the era during which Cairns, Coleridge, and Ballantine were in the full flush of their forensic fame.

Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities, notoriously found his model for Darnay’s counsel, Stryver, in Edwin James. Of James I can recall Trollope’s remark: “I had scarcely ever seen him, out of court or in it, but I have been told he had Chaffanbrass’s habit of constantly arranging and re-arranging his wig, and of sometimes, for effect, dropping his voice so low that it could scarcely be heard.” The other court scenes form a little series of artistically disposed photographs. More skilful even than these clever descriptions is the manner in which a few simple and well-chosen words, remarkable for their power, less of expression than suggestion, bring Lady Mason’s anguish and agony home to the reader as vividly as could be done by any minute and harrowing details of her countenance and carriage. Even so, the suspense caused by these Acts in the drama called for mitigation by Trollope’s favourite device of entertaining interlude. The by-play of the under-plot now introduced shows throughout the true mastery of his art here reached by Trollope.

Lady Mason’s good looks, noble bearing, and painful position, have deeply interested her leading counsel, Furnival, her acquaintance in society long before he became her advocate in Court. Hence, the one deviation from exact verisimilitude in this part of the book. The commencement of the proceedings finds Lady Mason without a solicitor of her own, and anxious above all things to dispense with one. After the service of the writ upon her, she consults her admiring neighbour, the chivalrous Sir Peregrine Orme, who naturally pronounces the solicitor a necessary evil. To that, her objection still remains. Assured that she has a warm friend in Furnival, a barrister of high repute, she visits him at his chambers, Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn. On his advice she places her affairs in the hands of a solicitor he recommends, Solomon Aram, as the cleverest criminal solicitor known to Furnival. Meanwhile, the presence at her husband’s business rooms of so attractive a client excites Mrs. Furnival’s suspicions in such a degree that a series of domestic scenes is only closed by the lady leaving the family roof in Harley Street. The immediate sequel is given with Trollope’s happiest humour. The housekeeper predicts misery for the barrister if his wife remains inexorable, but is at once told by the butler that their master would live twice as jolly without her, and that it would only be “the first rumpus of the thing.” Is it not, reflectively asks the novelist, the fear of the “first rumpus” which keeps together many a couple. Even the special and manifest pains taken with them do not, as Trollope himself felt, entirely redeem the trial chapter from the charge of anti-climax.