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

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

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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{viii} 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,{ix} 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.

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CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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ANTHONY TROLLOPE

HARTING GRANGE. NORTH FRONT.

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CHAPTER I

APPRENTICESHIP TO LIFE

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{4} 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{5} 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.{6}

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{7} 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{8} 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{9} 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{10} 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.{11} 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.

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{12} 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{13} 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 re{14}gained 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{15} 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,{16} 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{17} 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{18} 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{19} 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{20} 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.{21}

CHAPTER II

THE NOVELIST AND THE OFFICIAL IN THE MAKING

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 con{22}veyance 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{23} 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{24} 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.{25}

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{26} Office clerk he was free to lead was never better described than by Aytoun and Martin:

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 re{27}fined 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{28} 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{29} 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{30} 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{31} 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;{32} 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,{33} 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{34} 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.{35}

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{36} 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,{37} 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{38} 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.{39}

CHAPTER III

THE IRELAND THAT TROLLOPE KNEW

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 train{40}ing 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,{41} 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{42} 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{43} 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{44} 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{45} 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{46} 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{47} 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{48} 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,{49} 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 ordi{50}nary 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{51} 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{52} 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{53} 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{54} 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{55} 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.{56}

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{57} 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 trans{58}mitted 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.{59}

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.{60}”

CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST TWO IRISH NOVELS

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{61} 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{62} 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{63} 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,{64} 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{65} 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{66} 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,{67} 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.

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,{68} 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{69} 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{70} 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.{71}

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{72} 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. Rey{73}nolds 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 fabri{74}cating 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{75} 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{76} 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{77} 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{78} 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{79} 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{80} 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.{81}

CHAPTER V

COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE AND ITS LITERARY FRUITS

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{82} 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.{83} 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{84} 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{85} 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{86} 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 success{87}fully 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{88} 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{89} 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{90} 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{91} 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,{92} 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{93} 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{94} 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.{95}

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,{96} 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{97} 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{98} 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{99} 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{100} 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.{101}

CHAPTER VI

ON HER MAJESTY’S SERVICE AND HIS OWN

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{102} 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,{103} 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{104} 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.{105} 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{106} 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{107} “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{108} 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{109} 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.{110}

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{111} 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{112} 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{113} 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 through{114}out 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{115}-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{116} 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.{117}

CHAPTER VII

ON AND OFF DUTY ROUND THE WORLD

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{118} 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{119} 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{120} 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{121} 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{122} 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.{123}

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{124} 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{125}” 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 Edin{126}burgh 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 {127}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{128} 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{129} 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{130} 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{131} 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{132} 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.{133}

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.{134}

CHAPTER VIII

ESTABLISHMENT IN LONDON

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.{135}

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{136} 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{137} 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{138} 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{139} 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 Trollop{140}e’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.{141}

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.{142}

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.{143}

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{144} 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{145} 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{146} 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{147} 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{148} 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{149} 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{150} 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:

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,{151} 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{152} 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{153} 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{154} 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{155} 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.{156} 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 experi{157}ences 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{158} 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{159} 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.{160}

CHAPTER IX

IN PERIODICAL HARNESS

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{161} 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,{162} 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,{163} 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.{164}

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{165} 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{166} 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,{167} 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.{168} 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{169} 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{170} 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.{171}”

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:

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 inventive{172}ness 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{173} 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 dis{174}cussion 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{175} 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 charac{176}teristic 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{177} 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 there{178}fore 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,{179} 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{180} 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{181} 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.{182}

CHAPTER X

THE BROADENING OF THE LITERARY AND GEOGRAPHICAL HORIZON

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{183} 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{184} 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{185} 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{186} 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 Edgewort{187}h’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{188} 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{189} 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{190} 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{191} 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{192} 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{193} 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 attorne{194}y’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{195} 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.

The already-mentioned Sir Peregrine Orme belongs to the class of county preux chevaliers, of which one situation in a later novel—Phineas Finn—displays for a moment the Duke of Omnium as another specimen.

The trial had been fixed, but not begun, when Lady Mason finds herself at the house of the baronet whom she had first known years ago as a county neighbour, and one of her husband’s colleagues at the Quarter Sessions. More recently, the widow of Orley Farm and the daughter-in-law of the baronet who resides at The Cleeve have become close friends. Still fair, tall, graceful, and comely, Lady Mason retains enough of her original beauty to have won this fine{196} old gentleman’s heart. To his daughter-in-law he confides his intention of offering the widow his hand. For that purpose the call at The Cleeve has been arranged. To stand by her throughout the approaching ordeal, to defend her against the tongues of wicked men and against her own weakness, is the duty that the widow’s mature and knightly lover would now perform. All this is said while he gently strokes the silken hair of the lady who, having sunk to the ground, is kneeling at his feet. The agonised recipient of the old man’s chivalrous proposal mingles, with her murmured reply, some words deprecating the shame and trouble she might bring upon him and his. The offer, however, is not rejected, and the conversation ends by Lady Mason becoming Sir Peregrine Orme’s bride-elect. The next meeting between the pair is of a very different kind. Not that even this opens with any approach to self-incrimination on the lady’s part. Greetings, however, had been scarcely exchanged when she shows her desire to break off the engagement. “If,” pleads Sir Peregrine, “we were to be separated now, the world would say I had thought you guilty of this crime.” After this, no more of the sweet smiles, which have been so much admired, play over Lady Mason’s face. “Sir Peregrine,” she says, “I am guilty, guilty of all this with which they charge me.” That admission seals, of course, Lady Mason’s social fate, and withdraws her from any active part in the rest of the narrative. What remains, however, is saved from the reproach of mere supplementary padding by the really surprising skill and resourcefulness in which the rest of the story abounds. All that concerns Lady Mason herself has been, and remains to the end, of a uniformly depressing hue. But among the junior counsel for the defence is a young barrister, Felix Graham, enamoured of a judge’s daughter, Madeline Staveley. This young lady is much after the pattern of Trollope’s earlier heroines; while her lover prefigures a youthful variety of the sort to be met with in one, at least, of his later stories, but with more originality of character and view than had so far been shown by most of his young men. The clearness and freshness of Felix{197} Graham’s portrait stand out the more boldly by reason of the complete contrast to him forthcoming in Madeline Staveley’s other lover, old Sir Peregrine Orme’s grandson. In all moral and social qualities, he worthily reproduces the old baronet’s character, but reflects too truly the conventional young country squire to present the union between intellectual gifts and high principles forthcoming in his rival, the young barrister.

This is only one among several passages that by expedience, which might be described as Trollope’s speciality, sustain the novel’s interest to the end. “None but himself can be his parallel.” And really the dexterity with which Trollope winds up the characters and incidents of Can You Forgive Her? suggests a comparison with his equestrian perseverance in the hunting field. That quality records itself in Phineas Finn’s management of Lord Chiltern’s Bonebreaker. For a minute or two the horse has got manifestly out of control; the spectators think it is infallibly heading and leading its rider to irrecoverable grief, when the Irish Nimrod suddenly, not less than surely, recovering himself, regains authority over the beast, and sends him and his rider straight as a die over the brook with those impracticable sides. When riding among the first flight, side by side with Sir Evelyn Wood or Mr. E. N. Buxton, after the Essex, or with Mr. H. Petre’s staghounds, Trollope, we have seen, like others, sometimes found himself at the bottom of a Roothing ditch, only in a twinkling to pull himself together, reappear in the open, regain his saddle, and finish in the field that saw the end of the chase. The adroitness of the horseman, Phineas Finn, displayed by the novelist of Orley Farm, prevented what in less skilful hands would have been the evaporation of the story’s interest after the tragic dénoûment of Peregrine Orme’s courtship. But, by this time, the bluff, artless sportsman, which was all that many of his country neighbours and some of his London acquaintances saw in Trollope, had mastered every portion of the novelist’s technique as thoroughly as he had long since done all departments of Post Office business. To the spectators, Trollope’s Irish{198} Nimrod on Lord Chiltern’s Bonebreaker may have seemed doomed to mishap, but without, thanks to his skill and coolness, having been in actual peril. So with Trollope in Orley Farm. The apparently inevitable dullness of reaction from painfully exciting incidents threatened, as many a reader thought, to spoil a first-rate novel’s close. These had not estimated at its true value the author’s rare resourcefulness in his art.

Other fortunes than those of Madeline Staveley and her two lovers have to be advanced a stage. The finishing touches have not, so far, been given to Lady Mason’s loyal friend of her own sex, Sir Peregrine’s daughter-in-law. In person, if not altogether in experience, Mrs. Orme presents a picturesque contrast to her unhappy friend. Lady Mason, tall and stately, makes the journey every day to the Court in one of The Cleeve carriages. Seated by her side is Mrs. Orme, small in size, delicate in limb, with soft, blue wondering eyes and a dimpled cheek. Apart from the present calamity, a past sorrow has forged a sympathetic link between the two. The châtelaine of The Cleeve has suffered a blow only less terrible than that which has crushed her companion. After a year of happy wedlock, her husband, Sir Peregrine’s only child, the pride of all who knew him, the hope of his political party in the county, had fallen one day from his horse, and was brought home to The Cleeve a corpse. The delicacy and strength of genuine pathos make themselves felt throughout every page describing the intercourse between these two ladies, after Mrs. Orme knows her friend’s guilt, before or during the trial itself. Nor, even here, is it all untempered melancholy. The character sketches thrown off in a few sentences people the scene with figures all entertainingly appropriate to the judicial drama like that now begun. The witness, Bridget Bolster, we see preparing for action, with the perfect understanding of her claim to be well fed when brought out for work in her country’s service, to have everything she wanted to eat and drink at places of public entertainment, and then to have the{199} bills paid behind her back. “Something to your tea” is the promise she has received from Dockwrath, interpreted by Moulder as a steak, by Dockwrath himself as ham and eggs, and by Bridget, as an amendment, as kidneys. Close upon the bold witness, Bridget, comes the timid witness, Kenneby, whose utmost hope and prayer are that he may leave the box without swearing to a lie, who replies to Dockwrath’s suggestion of refreshment: “It is nothing to me; I have no appetite; I think I’ll take a little brandy and water.” By way of moral sustenance to the nervous Kenneby, Moulder relates a legal reminiscence of his youth: It was at Nottingham; there had been some sugars delivered, and the rats had got at it. “I’m blessed if they didn’t ask me backwards and forwards so often that I forgot whether they was seconds or thirds, though I had sold the goods myself. And then the lawyer said he’d have me prosecuted for perjury.” Mr. Moulder himself fancies something hot, toasted and buttered, to his tea, openly asserting, while refreshing himself, that Lady Mason has no better chance of escape than—“than that bit of muffin has,” with which words the savoury morsel in question disappeared from the fingers of the commercial traveller into his throat.

To turn from the doings of Trollope’s personæ to those of Trollope, himself. Before finishing Orley Farm he had arranged a trip across the Atlantic, which, as usual, was to combine industry with amusement. The first thing, therefore, had been to obtain a commission from his publishers, Chapman and Hall, for a book about his journey and experiences. The settlement of that business, on his own terms, was effected without a hitch. The other preliminary, involving a reference to his Post Office superiors, threatened recrudescence of the immemorial and inveterate feud with Rowland Hill, now the Post Office Secretary. Nine months leave of absence formed the application made by the surveyor of the eastern counties to the Postmaster-General, then Lord Stanley of Alderley, direct instead of through the active head of the department, his enemy Hill. “Is it,” rejoined the{200} Minister, with a look of bland cynicism as he eyed Trollope’s particularly vigorous form and country squire’s face, “on the plea of ill-health?” “No,” came the answer, “I want a holiday, and to write a book about it, and I think, my lord, my many years labour in the public service have earned it for me.” The forms on which the leave was granted were, at Hill’s instance, that it should be considered a full equivalent for any special services rendered by the surveyor to the department. To that condition, suggested, as he knew it had been, by the Post Office Secretary, Trollope demurred. It was therefore withdrawn at the Postmaster-General’s order.

Anthony Trollope’s first sojourn on the other side of the Atlantic began in the August of 1861, and lasted to the May of the following year. The occurrences between these dates included the earlier battles of the American Civil War, and to some extent decided his route. Travelling for recreation and rest as well as profit, he purposely avoided the dangers and discomforts of the seceding states, but, even thus, frequently found himself in the direct line of fire. For the time he allowed himself, he went too far and too fast. An atmosphere loaded with the din and smoke of conflicting armies did not promote the calm and close study of the nation’s social or political life and institutions. These, however, were surprisingly little interrupted by the conflict. The comparative regularity with which the routine of peace in the forum, in the Law Courts, in the State Assemblage, and beneath the private roof, preserved their continuity practically undisturbed by the shocks and convulsions of war, may have struck other English travellers at the time. By Trollope they were brought to bear with a force and freshness that imparted special interest and value to the book on North America, begun by him after his accustomed fashion, in the midst of his transatlantic travels, and carried some way towards completion before he had returned to England.

The work suffers from its author’s laborious attempts to impress the reader with a sense of its variety and{201} fullness. It is neither a record of travel nor history; Trollope, had he taken more time about it, would have seen the mistake of trying to make it both. His impressions of the country are wanting less in animation and accuracy than in literary methods and logical arrangement of ideas. Before landing from his outward voyage he had persuaded himself that the final victory would rest with the North. This belief had not been shaken by the news of the Confederate success at Bull Run (July 21, 1861); which had created among all sections of English society, and elicited from the English Press, much of the exultant enthusiasm for the Secessionists, of whom Gladstone himself said that Jefferson Davis had called into existence a new nation. “Nothing,” were Trollope’s words to the present writer, “impressed me more during this troublous time than the immensity of the strength in reserve at the Union’s command. Moreover,” he added, “I was kept well abreast with the latest political news from Europe.” The Southerners’ only chance, as none knew better than themselves, or rather, than their leading spirits, had always been European intervention on their behalf. Napoleon III might have moved in that direction, had Palmerston given the signal, but no one really doubted either that France had resolved to follow the English lead or that England, whatever her irresponsible personal sympathies here and there, would take no real part in the quarrel. One international incident belonging to the struggle first became known to Trollope when dining at the White House, November 1861. The Federal seizure of the Southern agents, Mason and Slidell, on board the British West Indian mail steamer, had caused the diplomatic crisis that made their Washington post first acquaint Trollope and his other guests with the possible necessity of all English subjects at short notice leaving the States.

Exactly a generation before her third son’s visit to the New World, Trollope’s mother was thought, by her son, to have wounded the national susceptibilities in her Domestic Manners of the Americans. As a fact, except in{202} Ohio, that book did not attract as much attention, even at the time of its publication (1832), as Anthony Trollope himself believed. It had been quite forgotten by, or rather had never been known to the generation that had welcomed her son as its guest. Indeed, by 1861-2 Dickens had long since received plenary forgiveness for offences in Martin Chuzzlewit and the American Notes much more serious than those of Mrs. Trollope. Nor did Anthony Trollope’s on the whole complimentary estimate of his American hosts, in his own forthcoming book, however pleasantly received at the moment, live much longer in the popular remembrance than his mother’s rather thin satire. Already the novels which had won him popularity in England were favourites in the United States. Then, as to-day, what the American public valued from him was the qualities which had endeared to the whole of the Anglo-Saxon race his Barchester books.

Trollope’s subsequent visits to the States may have left some mark on his writings, and have given him an occasional suggestion for stories like The American Senator, but had no influence upon the place filled by him in the New World as in the Old. On both sides of the Atlantic, the amiable motive of his North America was recognised, but its warmest welcome was not found in the land that it described. A subsequent chapter will contain specific facts and figures enabling the reader to form an accurate idea of Trollope’s progress to popularity with the United States Republic. Meanwhile we return to the novelist’s new departure in fiction, opened to some extent in Orley Farm, but beginning more decidedly with Can You Forgive Her?{203}

CHAPTER XI

AUTHOR, ARTIST, AND THEIR FEMININE SUBJECTS

DURING the years in which Trollope’s industry and fame both reached their height, J. E. Millais and Sir Henry James, afterwards Lord James of Hereford, were among the friends of whom he saw most, and who knew him best. About the former’s hospitalities something will be said presently. As regards his connection with the latter, Millais in my hearing once attributed his rare success as an illustrator of Trollope’s novels to the writer and the artist both setting about their different work in the same way. “As it proceeds,” he added, “each creative or inventive stroke is inspired and stimulated or corrected as the case may be, by mental reference to the unseen models of memory.” This was Millais’ way of putting it. Trollope’s own words on the subject were, “A right judgment in selection of personal traits or physical features will ensure life likeness in representation. Horace, as Englished by Conington, talks of ‘searching for wreaths the olive’s rifled bower.’ The art practised by Millais and myself is the effective combination of the details, which observation has collected for us from every {204}quarter, and their fusion into an harmonious unity.”

Politics and sport colour and dominate a large proportion of the novels belonging to the Can You Forgive Her? period. For the personal studies those works implied, author and artist alike found all they wanted during their summer visits to Millais’ Highland home, or in the autumn at the Kent or Wiltshire shooting-box of Henry James. Here they collected representatives of the polite world in all its aspects of pleasure or business, from the heir apparent to the latest Junior Lord of the Admiralty and the most recent importation in the way of popular sportsmen or reigning beauties from the other side of the Atlantic.

Later on, Trollope occasionally induced Millais to witness the hounds throw off in those East Anglian pastures where he had placed the Roebury Club’s headquarters, to which the author of Can You Forgive Her? had wished personally to introduce his illustrator. The similarity of Millais’ and Trollope’s methods now considered will be best understood from a concrete instance. Of the artist’s academy paintings in 1887, one was reproduced as a coloured supplement to The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News by the name of “Portia.” Without being exactly a portrait, the painting, like the coloured engraving after it, recalled to every one a well-known man’s pretty daughter who had then just come out. This young lady, indeed, had never sat to the artist; but she had given him unconsciously the central idea for his work, into which, during its progress, he introduced features or touches, whose suggestion came to him from other faces.

So was it exactly with the creations of Trollope’s pen in their companionship with those of Millais’ pencil. The literary period which, actually opening with Orley Farm, produced nothing so significant of Trollope’s advance in his craft and in his views of feminine character, as Can You Forgive Her? This was published in 1864. Much of it, however, had been written some years previously, even so far back as when the stories that first established him in favour with every class were the great attraction of The Cornhill. We have already seen how many manor{205} houses and parsonages disputed with each other in the alleged possession of the originals from whom the novelist had drawn Lily Dale, Lucy Robarts, and their belongings. Trollope’s creative power reached its height as he approached early middle age. His Post Office rounds, throughout the whole country south of the Trent, had acquainted him first-hand with every phase of womanhood, from sweet seventeen to full-blown and flirting forty. Were some readers beginning to talk about a satiety of bread and butter misses? Orley Farm had at least reminded such critics of its author’s capacity to be something more than the prose laureate of virginal varieties like those to be met with in every English village during the sixties beneath the manor or the parsonage roof. Can You Forgive Her? realised the higher expectations first raised by Orley Farm as to the literary results that might be produced by the bolder conceptions of the sex, the broader and deeper outlook upon the tragi-comedy of daily life that Trollope had begun to exhibit.

The Barchester series had been comedy narrative, pure and simple. The later stories with which we are now concerned belong more or less to melodrama. This progress of the novelist’s development possesses an interest biographical not less than literary. Not only were Trollope’s intellectual gifts largely inherited from his mother; to her also he was indebted for the circumstances that supplied them with the material on which they exercised themselves, as well as the experiences that gave them colour and discipline. Thus Archdeacon Grantly was his maternal grandfather, the Rev. William Milton, suave in manner, nice in person, always doing his duty according to his lights, a former Fellow of New College, vicar of Heckfield. As his youthful guest, the author of Barchester Towers had been introduced to clerical life on its social side, and had observed the personal germs that afterwards grew into the Warden, Mr. Harding, and Dean Arabin. Much also of his earliest interest in feminine character he owed to his generally affectionate reminiscences of his mother—her sustained courage in domestic{206} adversity, her cheery helpfulness to all around her, and the reserve fund of strength and resourcefulness, which never failed her for each fresh trial, as it came.

Trollope’s time in Ireland was the making of him, not only as a public servant and writer, but as a social student. His boyhood in Harrow Weald had familiarised him with the Orley Farm of his story, and with elements of his characters in it. But, at the same time that his experiences on the other side of the St. George’s Channel were shaping themselves in Castle Richmond, they were preparing him to people with suitable figures the pages not more of Orley Farm than Can You Forgive Her? Before Trollope was despatched from St. Martin’s-le-Grand on duty to Ireland, he knew, naturally enough, very little of men, women, and horses. In the second, at least, of those subjects, he had acquired proficiency at the date of his final return to England. His estimate of the sex, based on an extensive and careful generalisation, used to come out in conversational fragments which may now be pieced together. Thackeray and Bulwer-Lytton, here for once in agreement, and both, perhaps unconsciously, under the Byronic influence, might have professed a doubt whether women as a class could be considered reasonable creatures, in the same sense as men. Trollope never went so far as this. He did, however, admit that their ruling passion, a love of power, habitually neutralised the tact imputed to them as an instinct, and might obscure their intellectual perceptions, and impair their common sense. “Hence,” he would add, “the inquisitorial officiousness which makes my Mrs. Proudie not in the least a caricature, but, stripped of her Episcopal surroundings, the commonplace of most English households.”

Throughout the whole period of his literary activity, Trollope was a diligent reader of history, finding in its revelations of human character the best supplements to his own studies from life, as well as the most fruitful hints for the creation of the leading ladies in his own romance. He never pursued these historical studies more diligently, or with more definite result, than while engaged on the prepa{207}ration of Can You Forgive Her? They had brought him to the conclusion that in love affairs women are generally without discrimination. “If,” he said, “of royal rank, they almost invariably choose their favourites ill. Thus Elizabeth of England, Catherine II of Russia, Queen Christina of Spain, and her daughter Isabella had the pick of great, brave, wise, and witty men. So far from turning their opportunities to profit, they all took dunderheads for their rulers.” How wide, therefore, the mark was that paradoxical pundit who declared it better for a country to have a king than a queen as its nominal head, because a king always became the creature of women, while a queen had to put herself in the hands of men. To make the same true, we must assume that queens always chose their lovers well, which, being women, as a fact they seldom do.

The origin and cause of women’s troubles in nine cases out of ten are their constitutional indisposition to compromise, whose necessity they ought to have learnt, if not in the experience of life generally, yet from the special example of the politicians to whom they invariably incline. For nowadays all women are Conservatives, and Conservatism, as we know it to-day, having political surrender for its essence, is ever a compromise with Radicalism. In the seventeenth century they used to be Jacobites. And that, most properly; for the special foibles of the sex are identical with the traditional perversities of the Stuarts. “Mankind,” said Lord Palmerston, “are, for the most part, good fellows enough, but rather conceited.” So the Duc de Sully thought James II not a bad sort of man, but incurably given to doing the second thing before the first. And that is the invariable feminine tendency. We can all sing, or say:

But when and where did one ever find the woman who willingly acted on the precept?

This much by way of putting the reader in personal{208} touch with Trollope’s ideas when he set to work on Can You Forgive Her? That novel was the product of the same period as The Small House at Allington; its monthly parts began while The Cornhill was still unfolding the tale of the wrongs suffered at Crosbie’s hands by one of Trollope’s nicest and most guileless maidens. Except for the jilting common to both, Can You Forgive Her? presents a complete contrast to The Small House at Allington. Among the novels belonging to the earlier sixties, it has more of kinship to Orley Farm than to any other. Its comedy is quite as often and as suddenly changed for melodrama, or even tragedy. Indeed, throughout these stories of the period now under consideration, one of Trollope’s leading ideas is that the thinnest possible partition divides human contact in the most civilised society from primitive savagery, and that the withdrawal of certain artificial restraints may mean a relapse into the reign of crime.

It was of course a mere coincidence, but the interrogative title, Can You Forgive Her? reminds one that in 1859, five years earlier, there had appeared a novel by another author also propounding a question on its first page. This was Bulwer-Lytton’s What Will He do with It? The individuals about whom that inquiry is made equal in variety and multitude those whom Trollope’s readers are asked whether they can pardon. Both books, however, beyond this, resemble each other in the adroit connection of the central plot with the several underplots and the personal relations borne by the characters in the one to those in the other. It is an old story told by Trollope himself long before he put it into his autobiography how the movement of Can You Forgive Her? was originally designed for stage representation and put into a play, The Noble Jilt, never acted or accepted. More closely analytical of feminine motive, conduct, and ethics than anything he had yet written, Can You Forgive Her? forms a link uniting Trollope’s purely social stories with those which were political as well. Now, for the first time, the shadow of the august party chief as well as social{209} Grand Seignior, the Duke of Omnium, throws itself over the incidents and personages so far as these belong to politics. One of the reasons for their unfavourable comparison with the Barchester company is that they come after it. But of this presently. To-day Can You Forgive Her? acquires a new interest from the fact of its showing its author as the pioneer of the problem novel, the point of which generally comes to this—how to act in the conflict between passion or self-indulgence and the laws of good behaviour. Semiramis, an Uebermensch of the earlier world, solved it in one way, Libito felicito in sua legge. A gallant French dragoon officer, discussing the matter with a decadent, suggested another solution. “Je trouve ça tout simple, c’était son devoir.” Trollope’s way out of the difficulty is that, in the long run, fortune and fate show themselves on the side of good and true hearts. Consequently, these can afford to wait upon events. From representative English girls of the upper class and grass-widows, to stateswomen and potential duchesses, every one has more or less, and generally more, to be forgiven.

The various lady schemers had, according to Trollope the fashion of the sex, laid their plans with what they congratulated themselves must prove an infallible ingenuity. Alas! upon all such projects rests some blight of miscarriage. Time, place, opportunity, and character, all in turn, have been inaccurately judged. The organising faculty and providential power on which the leading ladies pique themselves would, but for certain happy accidents, have resulted in misadventure or downright disaster. Hence throughout this story, beneath a surface of feminine scheming or social frivolity, there runs a tragic undercurrent, and the novel, as a whole, formed a satire, in some passages of a very lurid kind, upon the shallowness of woman’s overrated wit and the hollowness of her worldly wisdom. The dramatis personæ of both sexes are perpetually heading for the precipice that means ruin. Will they, is the question the reader finds himself constantly asking, by some better influence be brought into the pathway of redemption?{210}

The she of the opening chapter, whom you are to forgive if you can (only one, by the way, of the many needing forgiveness), belonged to a family some of whose various members suggest more than an accidental resemblance to the ancestral Trollopes. So, at least, it is with Squire Vavasor, Vavasor Hall, Westmorland. This hot-headed, ignorant, honest old gentleman shuts himself up in his northern home because it is there alone that parliamentary reform has had no power to alter the old political arrangements. His younger son, John Vavasor, like Anthony Trollope’s father, came up to London as a barrister early in life, only to fail, or at best to make a bare livelihood. He differs, however, from his obvious prototype, the unsuccessful agriculturist of Harrow Weald, in finding a wife with a competence as well as rich in aristocratic connections. The relatives of this lady, née Alice Macleod, are still debating whether they shall or shall not condone her indiscretion, when she dies, leaving the widower with a little girl, her namesake, on whom exclusively her fortune is settled. This daughter grows into the heroine round whom the interest of the story centres.

John Vavasor and his daughter Alice have a comfortable house in Queen Anne Street; though the father, living much at the old university club, seldom dines at home, except when he entertains. Other stories produced during the Can You Forgive Her? period, and presently to be noticed, contained much satire upon the religious school whose manifestation Trollope disapproved, or whose sincerity he suspected. Even in Can You Forgive Her? there occur on an early page some words uncomplimentary to evangelicalism, as well as perhaps intended to suggest that Alice Vavasor might have less to be forgiven if she had been brought up in a different spiritual atmosphere, for her aunt, Lady Macleod, widow of Sir Archibald Macleod, K.C.B., suffered from two of the most serious drawbacks to goodness that afflict a lady. A Calvinistic Sabbatarian in religion, she was, in worldly matters a devout believer in the high rank of her noble relatives. She could worship a youthful marquis, though he lived a life that would dis{211}grace a heathen among heathens. She could condemn men and women to eternal torments for listening to profane music in the park on Sunday. Yet, as Trollope emphasises, she was a good woman, giving a great deal away, owing no man anything, and striving to love her neighbours. Then she bore much pain with calm unspeaking endurance, and lived in trust of a better world. In the case of her so-called niece, but in reality her cousin, she had been one of the family commission responsible for Alice’s nurture from her infancy.

Other circumstances were, or had been, equally little favourable, as Trollope would have one understand, to the formation of Alice Vavasor’s character. She had not long been out of the nursery before, notwithstanding Lady Macleod’s remonstrances, she was sent to a foreign boarding school. After that, she lived for a time with her strait-laced, narrow-minded aunt at Cheltenham. Her years there were passed in a chronic state of rebellion against her surroundings. When she could stand them no longer, she arranged with her father that the two should keep house together in London. That experiment had been going on so long that in the opening chapter Alice has passed her twenty-fourth birthday. Father and daughter, beneath the same roof, lived independently of each other. Alice’s absolute control of the fortune inherited from her mother makes her the mistress not only of the house but of herself. She does the honours of her father’s table on the understanding that when she sits at its head no guests connected with the peerage, on the one hand, or the Low Church party, on the other, are to be present. Had she further stipulated for a sprinkling of Anglican bishops and ambassadors, she would no doubt have had her way. In a word, this young lady’s will had never been crossed, nor had she any opportunity for consulting the preferences of others till the particular love affair with the suitor, pressed on her by the whole family, and indeed at the beginning favoured by herself, John Grey. He, though her first formally betrothed, was not her earliest declared lover; for her cousin George Vavasor had won her{212} temporary affections before John Grey’s turn came. From that entanglement, however, she was supposed to have freed herself some two years in advance of her introduction into these pages. Lady Macleod’s praises of the Cambridgeshire squire, now her husband-elect, set the bride that was to be on doubting whether he was suited to her. The young lady even asked herself whether she should not make the amende to George Vavasor for his dismissal by again taking him into favour.

To that end is working George Vavasor’s sister Kate, who finds it consistent with her sincere friendship for Alice to promote her unscrupulous and impecunious brother’s suit with all the unconscionable ingenuity of her sex. The latest device in that direction is a Swiss tour. On this George is to escort the two ladies, his sister Kate and his cousin Alice. From this event grow the chief incidents and complications, serious, or farcical or both together. Already the young lady, as masterful as she is capricious, has broken John Grey to harness by ignoring his reasonable feeling that if the two ladies need a cavalier for the conventional, perfectly safe and easy Swiss round, they would find one more appropriate in himself than in a possible rival. The nephew and destined heir of a wealthy Cumbrian squire, George Vavasor has expectations, but not the command of ready money necessary for his parliamentary ambitions and his general habits of life. Alice Vavasor’s inherited income would supply him with the requisite funds. The varying fortunes of the two lovers, played off by Alice against each other through most of the chapters, are diversified by sketches of George Vavasor’s doings in politics, or in the hunting-field. And these are alternated with various episodes testing or illustrating the unselfish devotion of John Grey.

While occupied with describing in his novel George Vavasor’s return to Chelsea, Trollope himself was looking out for a parliamentary seat. How it fared with him in that quest will presently be related with all due and new details. Meanwhile, it may be said in passing that the comic business between George Vavasor and the parlia{213}mentary agents, Scruby and Grimes, is taken literally from all that Trollope went through himself. Equally autobiographical are the Roebury Club passages, with the entire account of George Vavasor’s hunting arrangements and runs over the Midland and East Anglian pastures. A brewer or two, a banker, a would-be fast attorney, a sporting literary gentleman, and a young unmarried M.P., without any particular home of his own in the country, formed the Roebury Club, whose headquarters were at the King’s Head or Roebury Inn. There they had their own wine-closet, and led a jolly life. George Vavasor himself did not regularly belong to this society; he could not but see something of its members out of doors, while they, on their part, criticised him after no complimentary fashion. “He’s a bad sort of fellow,” said Grindley, “he’s so uncommonly dark. He was heir to some small property in the north, but he lost every shilling of that when he was in the wine trade.” “You’re wrong there,” commented Maxwell, “he made a pot of money in it, and had he stuck to it, he would have been a rich man.” Such is a fair specimen of Trollope’s efforts to lighten the dark shadows cast on his pages by George Vavasor’s forbidding personality and sinister career.

But these portions of the story are provided with a more sustained and effectively humorous contrast in Mrs. Greenow and her courtship by the military adventurer Captain Bellfield, and the well-to-do Norfolk farmer, Cheesacre. The widowed and well-dowered relative of the Vavasors shares her younger kinswoman’s contempt for the conventional advice about being off with the old love before being on with the new. Here and there, she suggests a family likeness to the widow Barnaby in the story of that name, written by Trollope’s mother. That does not prevent the husbandless lady and the two competitors for her hand being really original creations. How the rival pursuers of the widow’s purse and person, with laughter-moving ingenuity, try to outwit each other and to commend each his own unselfish devotion to the lady; how she in her turn sees through both, fools them{214} to her heart’s content, and, womanlike, finally takes the military scamp, is told by Trollope with a humour for which he owed little to his mother, and in which he was excelled by none of his contemporaries. Mrs. Greenow herself, like the others, may need forgiveness, but will be at once unanimously pardoned for her very innocent flirtations.

It is different with another lady, first introduced into this book, but in later volumes destined to be among the author’s most finished socio-political figures. Alice Vavasor is only removed at a safe distance from the abyss into which a morbid impulse, which she herself knew not to be love, periodically prompts her to throw herself, when she becomes Mrs. John Grey. Alice’s cousin-lover skirts much more closely than was ever done by Alice herself the slippery verge of the rocks looking down upon ruin, and, though saved from actual destruction, so far falls over as to disappear from the story.

The gradually progressive stages of Lady Glencora’s transformation from a drawing-room doll into an ambitious and masterful stateswoman will be traced in a subsequent chapter; without anticipating details, they may be said to exemplify and confirm the remarks already made about Trollope’s progress from the idyllic to the epic. Thus, during the decade that followed The Cornhill novels, Trollope showed himself scarcely less happy and effective in his sketches of mature and prosaic womanhood than in the innocence or sweet tormenting play[22] of the maidens peopling the British Arcadia in which he first displayed the powers afterwards to be exercised in the bolder and stronger flights now mentioned.

The gallery of fashionable culprits in Can You Forgive Her? contains none in greater need of pardon than Lady Glencora, here, together with her future husband, “Planty Pal,” first met with. Perhaps, however, the worst sinner of all is the unscrupulous match-maker, Lady Monk, who gives her nephew, Burgo Fitzgerald, enough ready{215} cash for his meditated elopement with Lady Glencora, now for some time the present “Planty Pal’s,” and so the future Duke of Omnium’s, wife. Burgo Fitzgerald, in his relation to Lady Glencora, forms a counterpart to George Vavasor in his doings with Alice. In each case the pair are connected by cousinship; while, at some former time, Burgo Fitzgerald has been Lady Glencora’s declared and favoured lover, just as Alice Vavasor had once, before the novel’s opening, not rejected the addresses of George. Mr. Palliser, too, finds an exact parallel in John Grey. Both men are of sterling worth, of unspotted honour, but neither likely to inspire a woman with a warmer sentiment than respect or tolerance. Both these admirable men have their most dangerous rivals in two different kinds of scamp: Grey in the unscrupulous, and, on the whole, ill-looking George; Palliser in the handsomest, but also the most worthless, of God’s creatures, Burgo Fitzgerald, whose faultless face, dark hair, and blue eyes no woman could see without being fascinated.

Again, both Alice and her noble kinswoman, Glencora, are similarly conjured by a chorus of family dowagers to let no sentimental infatuation betray them into the calamity of giving themselves to the wrong man. As a fact, the by no means highly emotional, or now even juvenile, but clear-headed and strong-willed Alice seems throughout more likely to fall into the snare than the drawing-room butterfly, still little more than a girl, Glencora. But the rich “daughter of a hundred earls”[23] in the peerage of Scotland, under an external charm of face of the apparently innocent and babyish kind known as la beauté de diable, together with an apparent warm impulsiveness of temperament, conceals a severely practical and business-like shrewdness, such as to ensure a wisely restraining prudence from being in the end overborne by any sudden temptation of the heart. She threw over Burgo Fitzgerald for Plantagenet Palliser without compunction or sigh. There is no reason to suppose her literary creator dreamed of making her do anything else than fool the lover of her youth by{216} not refusing point blank to leave her husband, or even that in his heart the soi-disant seducer believed he could prevail on her to do so. One need not, therefore, feel surprised at reading that Burgo Fitzgerald bore it like a man—never groaning openly or quivering once at any subsequent mention of Lady Glencora’s name. On the marriage morning he had hung about his club door in Pall Mall, listening to the bells, occasionally saying a word or two with admirable courage about the wedding. Then he went about again as usual, living the old reckless life in London, in country houses, and especially in the hunting field, where he always seems riding for something worse than a fall. He did, as a fact, in his maladroit tempting of Providence, occasionally kill a horse, much nobler and far more deserving of life than himself.

Kate Vavasor, George Vavasor’s sister, puts forth dauntless pertinacity and some cleverness in the attempt to oust John Grey from her cousin Alice’s heart and replace him by her brother. Unlike, however, that brother, she would stoop to no dishonourable devices. When George, in desperate straits for money to cover his election expenses and other calls, suggests requisitioning Alice, she plainly tells him it is an ungentlemanlike way of raising the wind, with which she will have nothing to do. Meanwhile, the strands of the central plot have been interwoven with personages and incidents that are preparatory to the political novels afterwards to appear, beginning with The Prime Minister, 1876, and ending with The Duke’s Children, 1880. The scandals that once seemed likely to grow out of Lady Monk’s ball have been nipped in the bud or altogether averted. Immediately afterwards, wisely considering change of scene to be best for all persons concerned, Mr. Palliser refuses the Chancellorship of the Exchequer that he may place his wife beyond reach of temptation by taking her abroad. The party includes Alice as her cousin Glencora’s companion, and it does its travels in the grand manner.

In its general results and special incidents, the journey succeeds beyond its organiser’s fondest hopes. At Baden-{217}Baden the good fortunes of the tour reach their terminating point. Mr. Palliser receives from his wife the smilingly whispered announcement that he may soon expect the long waited, earnestly desired heir to his estates, and to the ducal title that in the course of nature must soon be his. With such a prospect before him he can afford to be generous. He gratifies his lady by getting her old and worthless sweetheart, who has staked and lost his last sovereign on the roulette board at the Kursaal, out of some trouble with his hotel bill as well as in other ways standing between him and ruin. At Baden, too, he meets John Grey, who has now developed parliamentary ambitions, and who soon becomes intimate with Mr. and Lady Glencora Palliser; he also finds George Vavasor’s disappearance to have removed his last difficulty with Alice. Before the return to England had been accomplished, Palliser, now Chancellor of the Exchequer-elect, has settled to exchange his representation of Silverbridge for that of the county, and to get Grey, already his warm supporter, into the vacant seat. The son and heir fulfils the promise declared at Baden, of his expected coming. The birth is followed by John Grey’s marriage with Alice, by his entrance to the House of Commons, and by Mr. Palliser’s introduction of his first budget. The parliamentary maxims with which this story is sprinkled have from the present narrative’s point of view a certain biographical interest, because they suggest the attention already by Trollope to the career at St. Stephen’s, unsuccessfully essayed by him four years after Can You Forgive Her? had appeared. Amongst the pieces of advice to aspirants at Westminster is the sound, practical counsel not to be inaccurate, not to be long winded, and above all not to be eloquent, since of all faults eloquence is the most damnable.

Trollope’s original interest in The Fortnightly Review, about which enough has been said in an earlier chapter, was quickened by the opportunity thus possibly opened to him for the appearance of his own work in its pages. His few occasional articles for it have been already mentioned. The first novel written by him for the periodical, The Belton{218} Estate, ran its course in the Review soon after the last instalment of Can You Forgive Her? had appeared, and was followed some time later by The Eustace Diamonds. Not one of his longer novels, it recalls in its main theme the principal idea underlying the book which has just been analysed here. In The Belton Estate the heroine, Clara Amedroz, has, like more than one of the ladies in Can You Forgive Her?, two lovers, neither absolutely ineligible but greatly differing in their value, and one of them, as in Can You Forgive Her?, the lady’s cousin. The less desirable of the two comes upon the stage first, Captain Aylmer, a member of Parliament. His suit succeeds. After the usual Trollopian fashion the engagement is broken off; and there appears the cousin, Will Belton, who in due course yields to Clara’s charms, proposes, and is rejected. Then comes Aylmer’s temporary reinstatement and at last dismissal. Cousin Will proves eventually the lucky man; and upon him, as the heir to Clara’s father, and as Clara’s husband, the curtain falls. The display of minute feminine analysis, such as began with Orley Farm and was continued in Can You Forgive Her? characterises also The Belton Estate. The feminine idiosyncrasies examined with much precision and often great skill belonged to the same class as those of Can You Forgive Her? The action, however, is much quicker, and the swift succession of events is far less painful. The forsaken Captain Aylmer takes to no evil courses, is never in danger of coming to a bad end, but judiciously improves his worldly possessions by making up to and wedding a rich baronet’s daughter, who, according to the positive assertion of Miss Amedroz, might be pretty but for her very decided and remarkable squint.

This was by no means the last time of Trollope’s introducing this antenuptial situation. Something like half-a-dozen years were yet to pass before its exhibition again in The Golden Lion of Granpere (1872). This is a pretty little story of unsophisticated life in the province of Lorraine; Marie Bromar is the pretty niece and ward of Michel Voss, the popular, prosperous, and somewhat arbitrary proprietor of the well-supported Grandpere hostelry known as the{219} Lion d’Or. His son George, the inheritor of his father’s masterful disposition, falls in love with Marie, but, being driven from home by misunderstanding, leaves the ground clear for rivals. During his absence the girl is courted by a rich linen-buyer of a neighbouring town, whose addresses are favoured by Marie’s guardian uncle. Everything prospers the wooing of Adrian Urmand, the trader. The wedding eve has come: the pair are to meet in church to-morrow. At this juncture George Voss returns. All the confusion and doubts arising out of his long absence are cleared up. With the light heart, that, in the case of Trollope’s young ladies, no amatory perplexities or cares seem to depress, Marie throws over the new love for the old, and the slight series of episodes ends in happiness, not only for a family, but the entire neighbourhood, marred, however, by something more than misgivings that the niece and ward of my host of the Lion d’Or may yet have to pay the penalty for having played so fast and loose with two such blameless and desirable competitors for her hand. The short and slight story now noticed contains not a little to recall the third product of its author’s pen, more than twenty years earlier, La Vendée (1850). The later, like the earlier novel, exactly catches the simple old-world spirit and atmosphere of its subject and its scene. As a boy, by repeated if shortening sojourns abroad, Trollope had familiarised himself with the details and personages of the daily round in France and Germany. These experiences, instead of being dimmed by time, remained with him fresh and vivid throughout his life. In The Golden Lion of Granpere the absolute authority of Michael Voss as the family head, the primitive existence throughout controlled by him, the domestic economy of the entire district, the absence of class distinction, the universal horror at Marie’s violated troth, the appeal to the curé to remonstrate with her—all this is depicted with pleasant art. It is perhaps rendered the more effective by its contrast with the pictures of English fashionable society in Trollope’s other books belonging to the same period.

Before, however, resuming the consideration of those,{220} it would be an inconvenient departure from the chronological arrangement followed, so far as possible, in these pages not to complete our view of the domestic stories, for the most part entirely English as to place and personages, that followed the Barchester books. Of his Cornhill readers, Trollope took farewell, not as photographer of the Allington group, but in The Claverings (1867). Can You Forgive Her?, it has been seen, forms the link between the novels of home life and those of politics. The Claverings connects the novels that introduced us to Barchester Palace and close in its best-known prelate’s time with the great world outside of peers, cabinet ministers, party leaders, society queens, and princesses in which the Marchioness of Hartletop, née Griselda Grantly, was taking her part. The Rev. Henry Clavering of the family which gives its name to the book held a living in Bishop Proudie’s diocese. The grouping of events and characters not only discloses no trace of approach to repetition, but by the freshness and vigour of its effects shows throughout its author at his best. The plot is of the simple straightforward kind of which Trollope made himself a master.

The temptation to indulge in the Thackerayan vein, yielded to some years earlier, was responsible for Trollope’s poorest piece of work, Brown, Jones, and Robinson, already mentioned; it was successfully withstood in The Claverings, with the result that Trollope widened the circle of his believers by a combination of dramatis personæ and scenes scarcely below the mark of Dickens. The clash of rival love-making echoes throughout successive chapters, but with a ring altogether different from that heard in earlier variations on the same theme. The strongest personal force in the book is Julia Brabazon, who jilts a suitable lover of her own age and rank to marry a rich and senile profligate. The forsaken lover, Harry Clavering, clever, handsome, though somewhat weak, has crowned a brilliant college course with a Fellowship. He decides on becoming a civil engineer; and with that view enters the office of Beilby and Burton, the latter of these two being the real head of the firm. In that gentleman’s daughter,{221} Florence Burton, the new pupil finds consolation for his lost love, and even much relief, in the society of a quiet, clean girl, the exact antithesis of the brilliant, beautiful, and dashing Julia, now Lady Ongar. Soon after the conclusion of an engagement between Harry and Florence, there returns to England Lady Ongar, now a rich, still fascinating, and much-sought-after widow, bent on atoning for her former infidelity by giving herself and her fortune to the young man who had been her earlier conquest. About Florence or the Burton family she knows nothing. Harry therefore soon finds himself in the position of Ulysses when that hero had upon his hands at the same time his own true Penelope and the bright Circe. Only after a severe conflict of emotions does he decide on maintaining his fidelity with Florence. That determination had been no sooner acted on than it is splendidly rewarded; for the death at sea of his two uncles leaves him a wealthy baronet.

In this story, as in so many others of Trollope’s, the best scenes bring forward characters concerned only in a secondary way with the central narrative. Madame Gordeloup, the most enjoyable and essentially Dickensian portrait in the gallery, has made Lady Ongar’s acquaintance during her widowhood’s earliest days; small of stature, she acts in everything with quickness and decision, and flavours all her words with vehemence. Her character may be read in her eyes, whose watchful brightness makes them seem to emit sparks. At this point of the story Harry has not come into the title. Captain Archibald Clavering, Sir Hugh Clavering’s brother and heir presumptive, is in want of just such a wife as Lady Ongar might make him. Widows are proverbially wooed with more success through the good offices lent by a friend of their sex than directly. In Madame Gordeloup, with her clear brains, tactful manner, knowledge of her own sex generally, and of Lady Ongar in particular, Captain Clavering sees the exact agent for furthering his matrimonial designs. Before committing himself to Madame Gordeloup, he takes into his confidence a seasoned and resourceful club friend,{222} Captain Boodle. There now follows a delightful succession of scenes between the highly endowed little Polish lady and Clavering’s representative, the gallant Boodle. Their only practical upshot is Archibald Clavering’s parting with £70 to the quick-witted Madame Gordeloup. The one parallel of these passages is that portion of Dombey and Son that recalls the intervention on Captain Cuttle’s behalf with Mrs. MacStinger, his landlady.{223}

CHAPTER XII

RELIGIOUS ORTHODOXY AND OPINIONS

THE beginnings of Anthony Trollope’s religious sympathies came from his own home. The social and moral influences that he, as a boy, unconsciously imbibed here were altogether anti-evangelical. John Wesley died in 1791, leaving behind him the contemptuously called “Methodies.” Charles Simeon, whose Cambridge disciples were scornfully known as “Sims,” lived till 1836. Between those two dates, practically indeed up to 1850, weekday religion was only in vogue among distinctively evangelical surroundings, though in 1850 Charlotte Yonge’s writings began to exercise a sort of spiritual missionary force in High Anglican households. Into a Low Church environment Anthony Trollope had not been born. His grandfathers on both sides, clergymen of the orthodox, highly respectable, and not unamiable kind, were disposed, by ancestral or aristocratic tradition,{224} towards sacramental Anglicanism. Like the rest of Trollope’s clerical relatives, they boasted their doctrinal descent from the High Church divines of the Stuart period, and would have disapproved as much as was done by the lady who wrote The Heir of Redclyffe any violation of an habitual reserve on all religious subjects except upon devotional occasions.

With all the children of Thomas Anthony and Frances Trollope the Church catechism, with the epistles and gospels of the season, was included in the home lessons. Anything more than that would have been called evangelical or Low Church. As in other upper middle-class households of the time, so beneath the Trollope roof it became the rising generation’s fixed idea that Low-churchism must be a mark of vulgarity, a sort of spiritually parasitic growth, flourishing, alas, among the small tradesmen, whose sons were educated at some private venture schools, but happily unknown in the superior educational or social soil, which grew something better than English grammar and arithmetic. From the nursery, these notions had been confirmed in Anthony Trollope, not only by the pervading sentiments or table-talk of his elders, but by the official authority of his mother’s old friend and frequent visitor, Dr. Nott, one among the Winchester canons, whose spare figure, pale, delicate features, black gaiters reaching to the knee, spotlessly white neckcloth of many folds, and elegant Italian scholarship, suggested not a few touches for cultured and cosmopolitan Dr. Stanhope in the Barchester group. Dr. Nott, an exemplary priest of his period, had been one of the Princess Charlotte’s tutors, and had initiated the structural repairs that prevented Winchester Cathedral from falling into ruin. His periodical calls upon Mrs. Trollope became the occasion for an examining review of the children—were they good, obedient, truthful, and industrious? When answering, one day, these questions, Anthony and his elder brother Tom volunteered the statement that, if they were not quite everything which could be wished, it was because of their nurse Farmer being an Anabaptist. Such hetero{225}doxy, Dr. Nott admitted, might be deplorable, but did not, he added, absolve the children from the duty of subordination. This was resented by the two brothers as a snub, and intensified their disgust with schismatics, including Low Church of every degree.

In 1837 Mrs. Trollope’s bitter attack upon evangelicalism in The Vicar of Wrexhill deepened still further her children’s loathing of “Methodies” and all whose religious faith did not conform to a gentlemanlike Anglicanism. How these preferences and prejudices coloured Barchester Towers and the novels that followed, it has been already pointed out. Not that Trollope grew up into an irreligious or other than God-fearing man. It was indeed to some extent the intellectual man’s contempt for the crass, ignorant infidelity of the time that, as years went on, deepened his respect for genuine piety in all its manifestations, and made his strictures upon certain of its unseasonable and mischievous phases so different as to tone and spirit from the satire of Dickens upon the same phenomena. His turn of mind was not fervently devotional, but for spiritual as well as social reasons he disliked Churchmen of Mr. Slope’s variety. His great ground of quarrel with evangelicalism was its tendency to divorce conduct from religion. The Mosaic law and ritual were confessedly so exacting as to be suited only for the earliest stage of the Divine revelation. They were superseded entirely by Christianity, independent, in its pure and early form, of all externals, but progressively overloaded with superstitious ceremonies and doctrines, some of which the Protestant Reformation was said to have abrogated. Evangelicalism, however, with its ruthless insistence on a series of psychological experiences and of emotional developments, as the indispensable tests of genuine conversion and effectual deliverance from the wrath to come, instituted a kind of subjective ordeal, in comparison of which the yoke of Hebrew formalism was easy and the burden of Popish ritual light.

A man could know for certain whether he had{226} or had not performed the religious acts enjoined on him by his spiritual superiors; but could not, in the nature of things, be equally sure of having realised all the ghostly sensations, and of having exactly attained to that frame of mind necessary, as he was told, for salvation. The first stage in the process prescribed for all penitents by the evangelical doctors, the being brought under conviction of sin, might seem simple; but how long was that phase of agony to last, or, if the painful experience were not followed by a consciousness of peace and pardon, did it mean that the Divine wrath was not to be appeased? About this the evangelical teachers shrank from committing themselves, with the result, as it seemed to Trollope, that the newly wakened soul must be left indefinitely to torment itself with doubts whether its failure to pass, in the orthodox order, from distress and disturbance to peace and joy, might not imply guilt beyond all hope of pardon. At the best these disabling agitations could not fail, while inflicting torment on those who suffered them, to disqualify human beings for the performance of their daily duties to each other, as well as to make religion itself, not an invigorating inspiration, but a paralysing terror.

In a word, evangelicalism, as conceived of by Trollope, puzzled, perplexed, and irritated him. Of the evangelical teachers, with the shibboleths they parade as well as the stultifying inconsistencies these imply, he would say, “Your profession does not make you a Christian. For that, you must act like one. Yet,” he added, “we are told good works, though the test of religion, are also a snare, and certainly make for perdition if performed by those not in a state of grace or merely as moral duties.” “You tell me,” I once heard Trollope say to an evangelical monitor perhaps almost old enough to have sat under Grimshaw or Romaine, “that, in effect, virtue becomes vice if its practical pursuit be not sanctified by a mystical motive not within the understanding of all. Such a theory, I retort, can in its working have only one of two results—the immorality of antinomianism,{227} or a condition of perplexity and confusion which must drive men from religion in disgust and despair.”

Barchester Towers contained Trollope’s earliest embodiment of Low-churchmanship in Mr. Slope, with his baneful influence on Mrs. Proudie. Primarily the Barchester bishopess personified the tendency of her sex to mistake worry for work and fuss for energy. In simple truth, the Established Church was to Trollope, from his pervadingly official point of view, a branch of the Civil Service, which could not properly be carried on if irregular influences and emotions or imperfectly qualified persons were allowed to have a voice in it. Hence the famous caricature of the she ecclesiastic in 1857.

In the year now reached by this narrative, 1863, Trollope renewed his attack upon the religionists he detested, after a fashion and under circumstances that give to the book Rachel Ray a genuine biographical significance. The genesis of Rachel Ray is indeed throughout a revelation of its author’s idiosyncrasies, shown perhaps even more in the facts connected with its publication than in the unrelieved bitterness of its sectarian strictures. Trollope, at the time of its publication being arranged for, was in the full tide of his success and fame. He could make his own terms with editors or publishers. Good Words, when—from 1862 to 1872—conducted by a Presbyterian minister, Norman Macleod, though in no sense a denominational organ, could not afford to fly in the face of evangelical prejudices. Naturally Trollope understood this so well that when applied to by its editor for a story, he deprecated the offer on the ground of his not being a “goody-goody” writer, as well as of his inability or indisposition to suit his sentiments or his language to Macleod’s public. In reply to those objections, the novelist received from the editor the promise of a free hand and the assurance that no attempt to gag him should be made. Trollope therefore reluctantly accepted the engagement, and proceeded to fulfil it in a temper deeply resenting the pressure that had been placed upon{228} him. “Vous l’avez voulu, George Dandin;”[24] caveat emptor: on such principles Trollope made the bargain and set to work. For, if Good Words would not have the novel, a forfeit could be squeezed out and another publisher found. This is what actually happened. The author’s misgivings were fulfilled to the letter. The magazine manager sent back to the author the manuscript, accompanied by the fine, and the book found its publishers in Chapman and Hall.

How, after all these years, will the novel strike the reader to-day? Trollope affected to see the specific reasons of the rejection by Macleod in its praise of dancing as a healthy and innocent recreation. Nothing of the sort. Nor, it is certain, would any controversial passages, however little in harmony with Presbyterian ideas, have made Macleod pronounce it impossible. As it was, the story served Trollope as the vehicle, less of his own notions about spiritual truth and falsehood than of his inveterate and violent antipathies to certain manifestations of the religious spirit in individuals and in daily conduct. For the first time since the Slope episodes in Barchester Towers, he saw and used his opportunity for letting the evangelicals have it. All that they did or thought, and the most typical members of their class, were depicted with not less personal bitterness against their religious faith than was displayed, in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by the historian Gibbon towards the primitive Christians as the great disturbing and anti-social force of the second and third centuries. Wherever evangelicals are found or whithersoever these pietists go, they bring with them discomfort, suspicion, and ill-will. They may not be chargeable with those sins of the passions that are the infirmities of manlier natures. They therefore hold themselves entitled to unlimited indulgence in scandal-mongering, backbiting, and other social devices for gratifying their sense of power, by making all those about them uncomfortable.{229}

In the course of his sojourns at or near Bath, Cheltenham, and other West of England resorts, Trollope had personally experienced and resented the widespread ascendency, social and political, of the Low Church Party. For that reason the scene of Rachel Ray is laid in that South Devon district which, within Trollope’s recollection, had been torn by ecclesiastical feuds arising from differences about the costume proper to be worn during the conduct of divine service. This suggested to Thomas Hood his clever lines, less well-known now perhaps than they deserve to be:

The local quarrels thus satirised by the humorist, much and widely talked about at the time, long left the clerical atmosphere of the neighbourhood in a highly electrical state. While local animosities were at their height, Trollope had been on Post Office duty in the south-west of England. In the Baslehurst of the story, and in other Exeter suburbs, he describes the points at which, for the moment, evangelicalism had triumphed. Here, during the fifties, he had his veritable originals: the severe, imperious Puritan, Mrs. Prime, and the younger sister Rachel whom she bullies, living with their mother Mrs. Ray, a sweet-tempered, gentle, loving woman, endowed with a still attractive person, having much in common with her second born, Rachel, and, like her, somewhat tyrannised over by the elder of her two daughters. The husband survived by Mrs. Ray is a good specimen of Trollope’s terse character-sketching. He managed the property of dean and chapter, knew the rights and wrongs of prebendaries, minor canons, vicars choral, and even choristers. He had, however, passed away long before the story opens, and is only mentioned to point the{230} contrast of the widow’s earlier orthodox clerical surroundings with the irregular spiritual influences that now agitate her home.

When we make this lady’s acquaintance, there is in progress, beneath her roof, a pitiless attempt on the part of the elder sister, Dorothea, by rigorous evangelical discipline, to crush worldliness out of the younger, her mother’s favourite, who gives the title to the novel. A long course of Calvinistic bullying has almost broken Mrs. Ray’s spirit. To that tyranny of soul Miss Ray has never quite surrendered herself. Its shadows fall, however, heavily enough over her young life; the iron of its terrors and threats had begun to penetrate her inmost being, when Luke Rowan’s appearance flashes a ray of hope upon her overcast life. The new-comer to Baslehurst is the partner in the brewery, hitherto entirely in the hands of Mr. Tappitt. The Tappitts, at whose house Miss Ray first meets Rowan, fervently admire the Low Church clergyman Mr. Prong. This pastor resembles the Barchester Mr. Slope, not only in being generally objectionable, but in the same mercenary attachment whether to Mrs. Ray herself or to her widowed daughter, Mrs. Prime, as Slope conceived to Mrs. Bold.

The incidents of the story naturally grow out of Rachel Ray’s courtship by the latest addition to the brewery staff, less welcomed by the Tappitt circle than tolerated as a worldly intruder whose salvation is rather a matter of prayer than of belief. Doleful indeed are the prognostications of the results likely to follow their acquaintance called forth by Rowan’s earliest tête-à-tête with Miss Ray. This, really the opening scene in the action of the story, gives Trollope scope for the humour that alone redeems from failure a story as painful as The Kellys and the O’Kellys, without the pathetic power and witty relief that have made his second novel worthier of republication than Rachel Ray.

Before passing to another book with which Rachel Ray tempts comparison, something must be said about the new experiment of which Linda Tressel formed the second{231} product. Change of scene, of characters, and of interest, as well as anonymity of authorship, in the year of his departure from the Post Office, 1867, marked Trollope’s dual venture. Each owed something to the stimulating and instructive society in which Trollope found himself as the guest of the famous editor and publisher to whom he had been introduced years earlier by John Forster, but whom he scarcely knew well till the Scotch tours that Post Office duties or holiday recreation called him to make during the nineteenth century’s second half. In the case of both stories, also, the skill with which the local colour was laid on struck all critics, not less than the truth to life with which the essentially German characters, with their social and moral backgrounds, were depicted.

Nina Balatka came first of the two in 1867. Its scene is laid in Prague, the old Bohemian capital. Here there exists a large Jewish colony. Among its members, the distinction between Hebrew and Gentile is marked with such depth and bitterness that an intermarriage between the two races is considered degrading to each. The girl who gives her name to the story, a broken-down tradesman’s daughter, and the niece of a rich merchant Zamenoy, has given her heart to an Israelite engaged in commerce, Anton Trendellsohn. This suitor, in his many dealings with old Balatka, Nina’s father, has shown himself a considerate creditor. The roof beneath which Nina lives is legally due to him for her father’s debts. Trendellsohn, however, has not even pressed for the title deeds. These would establish his right to the property, but are now in other Jewish hands, those of Zamenoy. The lover’s generosity and self-sacrificing devotion to Nina are accompanied by all the suspicion of his race and by a characteristic resentment of the overreaching practised, as he considers, on him. The Zamenoys, representing the evil genius of the story, are only bent on breaking off the engagement of the two lovers. As the first step to that end they contrive to secrete the title deeds, now wanted by Trendellsohn, in his sweetheart’s desk. Next they tell Trendellsohn that the girl he loves has appropriated them. A search is made, the docu{232}ments are found in the place described by the Zamenoys, and Trendellsohn believes that he has been fooled. The lovers part. About the same time old Balatka dies. Deserted alike by the man to whom she has given her heart and by her rich relations, who have gone over to the Zamenoys, Nina resolves on suicide. With Trendellsohn at length, love proves a stronger motive than greed. A messenger from him arrives bidding Nina return to her place in his heart. Thus, happily, in marriage, ends the story, really remarkable for clever analysis of motive in the conflict with the essentially Hebraic Trendellsohn between the passion for a woman and for real estate.

The situation had the undoubted merit of originality as well as of being artistically presented in a singularly suitable environment immemorially associated with congenial traditions. The story’s success in magazine shape was afterwards heightened by its anonymity, and by the extent to which the studied air of secrecy enveloping the composition and all to do with it piqued curiosity. In London, at any rate, the first to solve the mystery was R. H. Hutton of The Spectator, not only the subtlest literary critic of his time, but an omnivorous reader of novels, with an instinct for discovering in their most commonplace occurrences and least likely characters a new revelation of their author’s personality and mental habit. He had already watched and commented on Trollope’s evolution from the domestic to the cosmopolitan stage. He knew Trollope’s turns of expression and leading ideas about the human combat of interest with feeling from his social conversation as well as his books. Dining at a table near Laurence Oliphant’s at the Athenæum, with no other companion than the last chapter of Nina Balatka, he received and soon afterwards uttered, the inspiration: “The ‘great unknown’ of the Blackwood story is Anthony Trollope.” Intimate with the Blackwoods though he was, Oliphant was not fully assured of the facts; “I believe,” he said oracularly, “they are satisfied with its reception.” Such proved to be the case. Although, as John Blackwood put it, not selling, it was telling. Blackwood’s London manager,{233} one of Trollope’s Garrick intimates, received orders from Edinburgh to encourage Trollope, with “the author of Nina Balatka” for his pen name, to let the Magazine have another novel from his pen.

This second book, by the title of Linda Tressel, began its course some five years after the publication of Rachel Ray, and introduced its readers to an interest, personal or spiritual, of much the same sort. The locality had changed from Exeter to Nuremberg. Here, at The Red House, lived the eponymous heroine in charge of her aunt. This relative, Frau Staubach, however well-meaning or conscientious, lacked the gentleness, the grace, and the feminine charm generally, of her English prototype, the mother with whom Rachel Ray passed her time. Yet, though in a less degree than the Devonshire widow, who sat under Mr. Prong, the petticoated pietist of Nuremberg is a kindly woman at heart. Only the iron creed, which makes her whole being so grievous a burden to herself and to those about her, constrains her to see wickedness in joy; in every form of pleasure a species of profligacy; in all love for children a pernicious indulgence endangering their eternal welfare; and, in every woman, Satan’s easy prey, until guarded by a middle-aged, respectable, unlovable and austere husband. Such a one she has found for her niece in her lodger, Peter Steinmarc. He has the recommendation of being small-minded, selfish, ugly, and so just the man destined to make unhappy for life a bright, handsome, high-spirited girl, such as her own young ward. In the English story, the destined victim, after a comparatively short captivity, escapes her doom, though not before her whole nature has suffered from the ordeal. The spirit of Rachel Ray’s Bavarian sister of misfortune is not easily worn out; but, eventually, her spirit is broken, and she is proclaimed the bride-elect of the odious consort selected by her aunt. At the psychological moment, however, Death, the deliverer, steps in; poor Linda dies before being called to put on her wedding dress. Her remorseless aunt watches her slow departure from life without pity or tears, but in a spirit{234} of half-vindictive satisfaction with the order of fate. After Linda Tressel has breathed her last, Frau Staubach, with all the self-complacency in the world, relapses into a chronic state of puritanical morosity, more dark and odious than that which had been so far her normal condition. In this novelette there are none of the humorous flashes constantly enlivening Rachel Ray. Its monotony of unrelieved sadness becomes fatal. One can scarcely, therefore, be surprised that Blackwood did not press its author for further anonymous ventures.

Before breaking the entirely new ground on which he had for some time set his thoughts, Trollope produced at the end of the sixties a little group of novels in his earlier and happiest vein. The first of these, Miss Mackenzie (1865), forms something of a link between the narrative attacks on the religionism that was his bugbear and some at least among the social novels which followed it. In Miss Mackenzie the only clergyman drawn at full length, Jeremiah Maguire, is one among the several candidates for the heroine’s hand. He would have fared better in his wooing with more of the gentleman about him and less of an unmistakable squint. His chief rivals are Mr. Rubb, the business partner of Miss Mackenzie’s surviving brother, socially poor Maguire’s inferior, and the lady’s cousin, a poor baronet’s son, John Ball, whose suit eventually succeeds. At her first appearance, the lady who thus becomes a bride is thirty years old, has an income of £800 a year, and, by the death of her elder brother, for whom she kept house, has been left alone in the world. The chief feature in the story is the Rev. Jeremiah Maguire’s pertinacity in the effort to secure the sufficiently well-dowered lady. In that endeavour he has the support of the religious set at Littlebath, whose leaders are the Rev. and Mrs. Stumfold, and in which Miss Todd and Miss Baker, first heard of in The Bertrams, reappear.

Much of this, at first amusing enough, is so spun out as soon to become monotonous and gradually to lose all its point. To begin with, the satire lacked the merit of originality, and lost all freshness long before Trollope served up{235} in Rachel Ray a réchauffé of the Slope passages from Barchester Towers. Dickens, indeed, had been the first (1836) to treat the public with its taste in the Stiggins of Pickwick, the predecessor of the Bleak House Chadband (1853). In Dickens’ hands it was good business enough, and served for a fresh spice to his fooling. Trollope, however, professed to delineate, not only the superficial humours associated with the graver subjects, but some at least among the spiritual or, at any rate, the deeper interests of the time. He ought not, then, to have been contented with reflecting the images, the ideas, and the jargon, which more than a quarter of a century earlier (1837) his mother, in The Vicar of Wrexhill, had echoed from the Stiggins of Pickwick, and which The Saturday Review had since hackneyed to death before Trollope unwillingly accepted his commission from the editor of Good Words. During the nineteenth century’s second half, the Prongs, whom Trollope hated, had ceased to be, to any marked degree, representative of provincial churchmanship. The commercial argument justifies, indeed, all this loose and spiteful vituperation of his pet religious aversions.

By 1860, however, Trollope had achieved a unique position as at once the founder and producer of fiction as a serious profession, which, followed a certain number of hours daily, cannot fail of yielding an annual income. The habit of, in his own phrase, exacting from himself so many words at a sitting could not but be unfavourable to excellence of execution, though it interfered marvellously little, if at all, with his variety and versatility. Those gifts, during 1867-8, he had exhibited in taking his readers from the familiar home scenes to the less known corners of continental Europe. Here his work, though passing muster sufficiently well with the public, did not promise the material success which he knew he could still command in other fields. Consequently, before venturing on the experiment to be recorded in the next chapter, he returned to the Barchester vein with the certainty, soon realised, of convincing publishers and public that it still contained ore not less valuable and pleasant than he had last drawn{236} from it a decade ago. The extracts given at the close of the present chapter will show that from reviewers’ and booksellers’ point of view Trollope might well applaud himself on the reception of Rachel Ray. Nevertheless it was a novelist’s business to create. In Rachel Ray, he soon became conscious, to quote his own words to the present writer, of having set up certain religious or quasi-religious images chiefly, he admitted, for the purpose of belabouring them with verbal blows even as in The Old Curiosity Shop Quilp vents his hatred on Christopher Nubbles in attacks on the wooden figure to which he gives Kit’s name.

Nearly half a generation has passed since, during the eventful ramble, already described in its proper place, round Salisbury Close, there had occurred to him the earliest of those ecclesiastical varieties whose portraiture amid their domestic or social surroundings soon brought him fortune and fame. Before closing the gallery of these sketches, he would draw one more clergyman of the same honest, manly English type as Mark Robarts, and would show his readiness to recognise elevation of character and purity of soul when, if possible, existing in an ordained minister of the gospel of views as decidedly Low Church as the detested Mr. Prong himself. This latter purpose was accomplished by The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). Nothing could be more dramatically complete than the contrast presented to the sleek, luxurious divines, or the well-fed, well-clothed, muscular officials of the church militant, in whom the novelist delighted, than the austere, gaunt, ill-nourished, poverty-stricken perpetual curate of Hogglestock in the marsh. The chronic gloom of his constitutional melancholy is deepened and saddened by the sombre Calvinism of a creed that admits or asks no ray of relief for the hardship of a lot still representing, with not less of faithful cruelty than when Trollope wrote, the hard lives of so many among the most spiritually-minded, most industrious, and not the least well-educated of the country clergy. The Rev. Josiah Crawley’s great qualities, his concealed accomplishments, and his shrinking silent heroism, have won the admiration{237} of the academic, highly-cultivated, and well-to-do Dean Arabin, who has married Mr. Harding’s favourite, youngest daughter Eleanor. This friendship of the prosperous Anglican official for the half-starved incumbent gives rise to the chief and only sensational episode of the book, at once revealing, as well as altogether caused by, Crawley’s utter lack of all business methods, forgetfulness of facts, and heedlessness of consequences. Nor, in these respects, is the daughter of Crawley’s old friend, the Warden, formerly the rich widow, Mrs. Bold, and now Mrs. Arabin, in all matters having to do with money much better.

The crisis of the novel has been brought about in this way. Lord Lufton’s agent has lost a cheque for £20 made payable to bearer, and afterwards found to have been used by Crawley in settling a butcher’s bill. Asked how he got the draft, he hesitatingly answered that no doubt it formed part of the sum paid to him by the agent as tithes. That, it soon appeared, was impossible, for the tithe payment some time since actually made had been, as was always the case, in bank notes. Then, after reconsidering the matter, Crawley revised his account; surely the cheque must have been part of a loan made by Dean Arabin. To him, now absent from his deanery on an Italian tour, inquiries were telegraphed, bringing the statement on the sum having been advanced by bank notes. Crawley’s continued inability satisfactorily to explain the matter now coincides with the agent’s declaration that he must have dropped the cheque while visiting Crawley’s house. Appearances, therefore, at every point are dead against the wretched perpetual curate, who had naturally excited or confirmed suspicions by the lame, and, as they have so far proved, baseless versions of the matter, stammered out by him in his agony. Crawley is known throughout the district for an upright, conscientious, as well as confused and muddle-headed man. His parishioners’ conversation on the subject, and, at last, their reluctant belief in his guilt are not only in Trollope’s best manner, dashed with humour and knowledge of nature, but echo with Shakespearean fidelity the words and thoughts sure to have been{238} forthcoming in local gossip about such an incident. Briefly they are to this effect—“Well, we believe he’s a good man, and we think he wouldn’t have done it, but for being so dreadful poor.”

At last comes the explanation. When, overcome with the terrors of necessity and shame, Crawley accepted the Dean’s offer of money help, Mrs. Arabin left the room to get the cash. While absent, without her husband’s knowledge, she slipped into the envelope containing the notes an additional £20 in the form of a cheque. Crawley himself showed his usual negligence by not examining the contents of the envelope. With equally little wisdom, Mrs. Arabin never considered how her generosity might compromise the poor clergyman. Even these facts, however, do not fully clear up the mystery, for how did the cheque get into Mrs. Arabin’s hands? But that too proves to be quite a simple matter. Womanlike, as Trollope would have said, without the slightest aptitude for such affairs, she piqued herself on her ability to manage business concerns. She kept her own private banking account: by way of improving its figures she dabbled now and then in a few small speculations. In this way she had made the local inn her own property. The landlord and landlady whom she had put in, like the rest of their relatives, were always in difficulties. Lord Lufton’s agent, on going his rounds, had entered the small hostelry. Here he had dropped the cheque, which was promptly found by the innkeeper’s brother and used by him in paying certain arrears of rent. Thus the real thieves were the licensed victuallers, the tenants whom, without the Dean’s knowledge, Mrs. Arabin possessed. The excellence of women within their own department, their foredoomed and demonstrable blunders whenever they step out of it, were ideas tragically set forth in Orley Farm, and, with the accompaniments of less disaster, in Can You Forgive Her? The Last Chronicle of Barset gave the novelist not only the chance of reverting to them in a first-rate plot, but of doing some justice to the evangelical parson while, after an amusingly characteristic fashion, dealing a covert stroke of feminine satire.{239}

The second of the two stories marking, for the present, Trollope’s farewell to the church, was The Vicar of Bullhampton. This was published in 1870, but mostly written a good deal earlier. Some of the incidents connected with its publication too truthfully exhibit its author’s temper in dealing with his publishers not less significantly than the recital of Mrs. Arabin’s blunders in disposing of the cheque which got poor Mr. Crawley into such trouble, recalling the view of feminine limitations that he never modified. Trollope, as usual, had been punctual to the day with the Bullhampton manuscript, for Bradbury and Evans’ Once a Week. He had scarcely delivered it when, to his indignant disgust, he received from the publishers a request that his “vicar” might be held over to make way for an English version of Victor Hugo’s L’homme qui rit. The want of patriotism implied in the new proposal roused Trollope’s resentment, he wished it to be understood, quite as much as did the disregard of his own convenience. A pretentious French Radical’s “grinning man” was, in an English magazine, to be reckoned of more account than a carefully prepared story of national life by an English gentleman, who, however liberal and advanced some of his views, had, in and out of print, always been the champion of English institutions. Worse even than this, it soon turned out that Trollope’s clergyman was not to see the light in Once a Week at all, but in another property of the same owners, The Gentleman’s Magazine. That closed the transaction in this quarter. The story, issued at once by Chapman and Hall, strengthened the ties already connecting his literary progress with the fortunes of that House.

At each successive stage of the novelist’s course, Trollope has already been shown to have gained in breadth and depth of outlook upon life, in power and certainty of character analysis, as well as in a dramatic perception of the potential tragedies belonging to everyday existence. He now habitually used the most ordinary conjunctures as agencies for disturbing, with their grave or grim issues, the decorous surface of conventionally monotonous and serene lives. In The Vicar of Bullhampton all this was{240} exemplified after a fashion scarcely less striking than in Orley Farm or Can You Forgive Her?

Picture Trollope himself as having, at the age of twenty-three, found his way into Holy Orders, instead of the General Post Office, and Frank Fenwick, the before-mentioned clergyman, might well pass for a study of the author. Broad-shouldered and broad-minded, the young Bullhampton priest keeps all his powers of mind and body at the highest point of fitness. Just, generous, upright, and kind-hearted, he is ever ready to speak his mind, out of season perhaps as well as in it, and has all a healthy Briton’s determination not to let a mean advantage be taken of him, especially by those whose social ideas and antecedents differ from his own, or who offend any of his John Bull notions about honour and manliness. He finds in his wife a congenial, not too assertive, and sympathetic helpmate. Her great friend Mary Lowther, the heroine of the piece, is staying with them at the vicarage when the story opens; she has already a lover, favoured by the hospitable Fenwicks, a neighbouring young squire, Harry Gilmore.

Here, in passing, it may be pointed out that the locality, as the names used will suggest, has much to identify it with the midland counties and the north of England, to both of which Trollope, as a boy, had been taken more than once by his mother. On the other hand, both the Barchester local colour and nomenclature are throughout conspicuous by their absence. To resume our plot: while away from the vicarage on a visit to Miss Marrable, a maiden aunt, Mary meets and becomes engaged to a cousin, Walter Marrable, a wealthy baronet’s nephew, but himself without any visible means of subsistence. In that respect he resembles the young lady he loves. These money difficulties bring everything between the two young people to an end. Soon after what is supposed to be their final separation, Mary hears of her old lover’s engagement to his uncle’s ward, Edith Brownlow. In despair herself, and overcome by the persistent importunities of her friends, Mary Lowther accepts Harry Gilmore, only, however, to throw{241} him over when Marrable, unexpectedly coming into his uncle’s property, renews his marriage proposals. Such, it will be recognised, is the regulation course run by true love throughout the whole extent of Trollopian fiction, making, in all that concerns affections, the last clerical story uniform with the books that had immediately or, at some distance of time, preceded it.

Round this main episode is clustered another series of events, connecting the vicar with his parish. These furnish some of the best scenes in the book as well as serve to introduce the same kind of melodramatic element, first noticeable in Dr. Thorne, afterwards receiving greater prominence in Orley Farm. Thus did Trollope practically acknowledge the influence upon the novel-reading public now firmly exercised by experts in sensational effects like Mrs. Henry Wood, Wilkie Collins, and Miss Braddon. Among the Bullhampton vicar’s parishioners are an unbending old miller, his daughter Carry, who has gone wrong, and his ne’er-do-well son, Sam Brattle, now under suspicion for a murder committed in the village. The Brattles are therefore an undesirable family. So thinks the Marquis of Trowbridge, the landlord of the murdered man. They happen to be tenants of Gilmore, who, meeting one day at the vicarage Lord Trowbridge, is asked point blank to clear his property of them. Here the vicar himself intervenes, turning on the Marquis with sharp words for his uncharitable and inexcusable demand. Lord Trowbridge, a pompous brainless peer, puffed up with the sense of his extreme importance, is for the moment too much overwhelmed by the parson’s audacity to say anything.

Presently, however, his feeling of offended dignity takes practical shape and prepares vengeance in giving a plot of ground, exactly opposite the parsonage gates, as the site for a Primitive Methodist Chapel, to the local minister of that sect, one Puddleham. This territorial donation soon proves to be not Trowbridge property at all. As a part of the glebe land it is at the vicar’s exclusive disposal. The Marquis, therefore, now suffers the further{242} mortification of being compelled to make a full apology to Fenwick for the infringement of his rights, as well as to pull down so much of the chapel as has been already built. All of this conclusively proves, to Trollope’s naïvely undisguised satisfaction, that Providence is on the side of the State Church. The sooner, therefore, Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters is literally adopted, the better for the peace, purity, and morals of the community. The same retributive poetical justice that deals so sharply with the Puddlehamites, with all poachers on the establishment’s preserves, and with their patron who wears the Trowbridge title, now befriends the Brattles. Sam turns out to be innocent; poor Carry, if she cannot regain her innocence, displays qualities which at least secure sympathy, and is prevented from falling over the rock of ruin to the lowest depth of degradation. The sturdy, hot-tempered old atheist, her father does not recant his theological heresies, but at least compares favourably with an evangelical Nonconformist.

Q.E.D. The favourable reception in store for the book is to be explained by other circumstances than the skill in the novelist’s technique running through its successive parts and the humour generally redeeming it from dullness. Low Churchmanship was becoming unpopular. Readers of the mid-Victorian epoch saw telling hits and lifelike portraits in what may to-day seem not much removed above the level of caricature. At the time, therefore, Rachel Ray won, not only a popular, but a literary success. The welcome given generally to it by the reviewers formed as great a compliment as Trollope had yet received from the Press. Among the religious papers, indeed, The Guardian and The English Churchman left Rachel Ray and its companion stories severely alone, The Times reviewer, however, recognised in it a new proof of Trollope’s insight into human nature and a fresh justification of the immense favour enjoyed by him with the most intelligent class of novel readers. “A delightful tale,” enthusiastically exclaims this critic, placing its author with Defoe and Richardson. “If,” it was added, “Trollope,{243} like Defoe, has little imagination, what he possesses is so clear that we do not feel the want of suggestion; while his detailed knowledge of conventional custom is unsurpassed by the author of Clarissa.”

“O happy art of fiction,” gushes this enthusiast, “which can thus adjust the balance of fortune, raising the humble and weak to an equality in our hearts with the proud and great!” The eulogistic note thus sounded by the Choragus of the daily Press was at once taken up, prolonged, and swelled in the weekly journals. To The Athenæum, Rachel Ray seemed a book sure to do more than any critical protests to correct existing vices of public taste. The women of the tale were admirable, being treated with skill which must surprise even those to whom the author’s strength is most familiar. To The Spectator, Rachel Ray demonstrated that, as a censor, Trollope had gifts far above sarcasm, and that he had made good his place between Thackeray the satirist and Dickens the caricaturist. The Spectator subsequently hedges by admitting that the author of Rachel Ray leant rather in the direction of Dickens than of Thackeray, and that his powers fitted him less for satire than for caricature. The Saturday Review closed an outburst of panegyric with a declaration that Trollope’s tact, discretion, and gentlemanly taste, combined with his literary power and his faculty of devising imaginary characters, made him eminently successful in describing the inner life of young women.

The Saturday alone, in the Press, weekly as well as daily, noticed the attacks on evangelicalism as follows: “Mr. Prong is not an unfair representation of the lower clerical order in provincial towns; but the accuracy of the portrait does not make it a pleasant study, the foolish language, the pert fanaticism and the petty tricks of the worst evangelical class are not agreeable reading. Whatever of comic there is in them is soon exhausted unless the author glaringly exaggerates every symptom to spice his description.” The compliments forthcoming by the famous weekly then under Douglas Cook’s absolute editorial control, but owned by Beresford Hope and generally{244} reflecting its proprietor’s antipathies to all forms and expression of faith not distinctly Anglo-Catholic, admit of another explanation than its natural benediction on the religious portraits drawn by a writer who was then so much in its own way of thinking as Trollope. In 1864 Anthony Trollope’s North America had received such sharp treatment in The Saturday Review that his friends, G. H. Lewes and the famous lady bearing his name, were concerned to find some way of counteracting what they called the nasty notice. Eventually, some time later, Lewes himself did justice to Trollope’s transatlantic experiences in The Fortnightly Review.

Before that he had succeeded in influencing an important section of the political Press in Trollope’s favour. Trollope’s next experiment in fiction, as well as certain events in his life connected with it, will form the subject of the next chapter.{245}

CHAPTER XIII

PEN AND PLATFORM POLITICS

“ANTHONY’S ambition to become a candidate for Beverley is inscrutable to me. Still, it is the ambition of many men, and the honester the man who entertains it, the better for us, I suppose.” So wrote Charles Dickens to Thomas Adolphus Trollope in the December of 1868. Exactly twenty-seven years before that date, the literary pre-eminence of Dickens, together with his championship, with pen and on platform, of social and administrative reform had, in 1841, brought the author of Oliver Twist the offer of a seat for Reading. During the pre-Victorian age the future Lord Beaconsfield’s adventures in search of a constituency had begun in 1832, some five years after the completion of Vivian Grey. Disraeli’s contemporary in letters, and so a novelist older in point of years and fame than Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton came before the electors of St. Ives as the writer of Pelham, not to mention a novel and the prose or poetical miscellanies which had preceded it. Sixteen years after Dickens declined standing for the Berkshire capital, Thackeray (1857) unsuccessfully contested the city of Oxford. The political{246} tradition had therefore been sufficiently confirmed and adorned by the leading fellow-craftsmen in his art by 1868. This was the year in which, at the General Election, Trollope tried his chance at Beverley. The illustrious precedents thus followed by him, though numerous, were not altogether encouraging. Benjamin Disraeli himself, in 1837, had owed his success at Maidstone not to his brilliant romance, or even to his effective Runnymede Letters and telling pamphlets, but to his adoption by the sitting member, Wyndham Lewis, who held the place in his pocket.

At that date the popular tide had begun decidedly to turn against the Whigs. Even the famous and eloquent man of letters, then worth many votes to the Whigs on a division, T. B. Macaulay, had owed the opportunity of his memorable displays in defence of the Grey Reform Bill to his having been brought into the House by Lord Lansdowne for the family borough of Calne. Macaulay’s partner in the primacy of English letters, W. M. Thackeray, did not, in 1857, make much of a fight against Cardwell at Oxford. Yet in that contest Thackeray had enjoyed advantages entirely denied Trollope at Beverley. In the first place, Thackeray, as a member, of whom naturally it was proud, had the influence of the Reform Club at his back. Further, he had originally presented himself to the Oxford electors at the suggestion of a universally as well as an altogether exceptionally popular resident, Charles Neate, a Fellow of Oriel; with him Thackeray had long lived in affectionate intimacy. Under Neate’s personal guidance, and with him for prompter as well as introducer, the novelist canvassed the place and spoke from the hustings. Neate too, though unseated on petition, had carried the seat against Cardwell during the previous March. His own reputation was therefore concerned in seeing that his recently vanquished rival did not retrieve his discomfiture. Nevertheless, on the declaration of the poll, July 21 (1857), the author of Vanity Fair was shown not only to have lost the day, but to have failed in favourably impressing any large body of the electors. “It is,” was Thackeray’s comment, “what I{247} expected, and I take it as the British schoolboy takes his floggings, sullenly and in silence.” He had indeed scarcely reached his constituency before writing to Dickens. “Not more than 4 per cent of the people here, I have found out, have ever heard of my writings. Perhaps as many as 6 per cent know yours, so it will be a great help to me if you will come and speak for me.”

At Beverley Trollope had no person of commanding authority to speak for him at all; unlike Thackeray, he was not a member of the Reform. The managers at the Liberal headquarters gave him his first introduction to the place, where he found himself at least as well received as he could have expected. Some ten or fifteen years later the thought and reading involved in the preparation of his political stories and his Lord Palmerston (1882) had more or less familiarised him with the temper, the issues, and the personages of public controversy. It was without any of even that preparation that he began to canvass the Minster town of the East Riding. Can You Forgive Her? indeed (1864), like Rachel Ray of the same period, had contained passages casually mentioning rather than attempting to describe the war of parties at Westminster, or the appeals of the rival chiefs to the country. At the General Election, therefore, that made Gladstone for the first time Prime Minister, and brought our novelist as his supporter, Trollope knew little more of politics than average newspaper readers and a good deal less than the newspaper writers.

By his failure at Oxford in 1857, Thackeray, according to Trollope, was saved from a situation in which he could not have shone. Probably the same thing might have been said eleven years later of Trollope himself after the Beverley misadventure of 1868. As parliamentary candidates both men, indeed, belonged to the same description. Proud of being English gentlemen first and popular writers afterwards, they looked, in Trollope’s own words, upon a place at St. Stephen’s as the birthright of a well-born, well-bred, and well-to-do Briton.[25] Like others of the social{248} order with which they identified themselves, their Westminster ambitions implied no more idea of being useful than does entrance into any first-class club. The real and serious difference between the two candidatures was this. At Oxford Charles Neate had long been watching for a vacancy which might suit Thackeray; the single reason that took Trollope to Beverley was its allotment to him in return for a contribution to the Liberal election fund. Beverley then possessed two members. The Conservative candidates were stronger than any likely to be found on the other side. Sir Henry Edwards had not only held the borough for the Conservatives before coming into the baronetcy, but afterwards had contributed to its institutions of all kinds so munificently as almost to have made its representation his own and his friends’ appanage. He had now chosen for his colleague Captain Kennard, who had already secured a good start of Trollope, and had spared neither labour nor money in locally ingratiating himself. On the other hand, Trollope soon made many friends who, in some cases, already knew his writings and were gratified to find in their author a gentleman with every mark of good breeding, as well as a shrewd, genial, and often delightful companion.

Trollope’s comrade in the fight, then Marmaduke Maxwell of Everingham, became subsequently Lord Herries and the Duke of Norfolk’s father-in-law; for him Trollope had all the personal charm which he had long found in his writings. The two representatives of Liberalism were thus well assorted, and each in his own way did yeoman service to the other. From his father, however, Trollope inherited an irritable intolerance of fools and bores; he found several of both among his Beverley friends. The business of electioneering degenerated into drudgery before it was half done. The hunting season was in full swing; Trollope felt that he should go out of his mind in disgust if he missed a few days off with the hounds. The recreation was not indeed enjoyed at the cost of the seat, because the Conservative success could never have been for a moment in doubt. It did, however, make the novelist play a worse{249} second to Maxwell and so leave him even further behind the two Tory victors than might otherwise have been the case. Though Trollope fell short of success at Beverley, the invitation of his local friends to try again and the pressure of official Liberalism not to withdraw his name from the candidates’ list are enough to show that his failure had its redeeming points. His Post Office experience and his power, improved by the practice, of getting up and expressing himself on any subject would have helped him to make at least a respectable figure had he ever been returned. As a speaker, he not only exemplified his own counsel, already quoted, to those ambitious of addressing parliament, but he delighted without exception, and on both sides, his Beverley audiences by the sonorous delivery of virile periods, clothing in clear and terse phrase thoughts that were the condensed essence of practical wisdom and shrewd insight.

A few years after the election I happened to be visiting, at Brantingham Thorp, Mr. Christopher Sykes. He had himself between 1865 and 1868 filled the seat contested by Trollope in the latter year. Beverley lay within an easy drive. In my host’s old constituency there still flourished the local gentlemen who had vigorously worked with head, heart, and hand for Trollope. They included Mr. Charles Langdale, Mr. Alfred Crosskill, Mr. Daniel Bayes, Mr. Hawkshaw, the famous civil engineer—a connection by marriage of the great Josiah Wedgwood—Mr. Charles Elwell, and Mr. F. Hall of The Yorkshire Post, the oldest member of that newspaper’s staff, which indeed, before the journal actually started, he did much to get together. Both these last-named gentlemen, still, I am happy to know, alive and well, have themselves supplied me with some details and put me in the way of getting others. These authorities have made me independent of my own memory and even Trollope’s own reminiscences in the matter.

The county families of course threw their influence into the scale of Trollope’s Conservative opponent. The balance of speaking talent was undoubtedly on Trollope’s side; on the platform he derived his chief assistance from{250} Mr. James Stewart, of Hull, from Colonel Hodgson, a very large employer of Beverley labour, and especially from Mr. William Carey Upton, a Baptist minister. During the struggle, the Conservatives paid our novelist a compliment he much appreciated by undertaking on their side to withdraw Kennard, if their opponents would scratch Trollope. This would have meant Sir Henry Edward’s and Mr. Marmaduke Maxwell’s uncontested return. The official Liberals might have accepted the suggestion, but the working men, deeply impressed by Trollope’s unconventional treatment of familiar subjects and the sense of intellectual power of all he said, would not for a moment hear of it, and this though Trollope almost ostentatiously failed to do himself and his supporters justice.

His sportsmanship formed a real point in his favour, for the Beverley electors, like other Yorkshiremen, love a horse, and are instinctively attracted to a bold rider to hounds. Trollope therefore did himself no harm by letting the householders see him in his top boots and pink riding through the streets on the way to a famous meet. His mistake was the selection for sport of a time at which his committee were working for him night and day, and his own presence could ill be dispensed with at public meetings or private conclaves. Liberalism’s association with Home Rule placed Trollope, in his later years, among the Conservatives. Had they enlisted his distinction, ability, and energy on their side at the first dissolution after the Derby-Disraeli Household Franchise Bill, he would undoubtedly have been found Sir Henry Edward’s colleague on the declaration of the poll. But in 1868 the Conservative educators, by their discovery of the Conservative working man, rode on a wave of popularity, rising in many places to enthusiasm. As for the “another attempt” mentioned by Trollope to his Beverley friends, that was never to be made, because, before the next general election, Beverley had lost its independent political existence, less, however, in consequence of its political corruption than by reason of certain municipal irregularities. As the judges who disfranchised the place themselves said, it was the “double{251} event” which secured the political extinction of the place. “I did not,” was Trollope’s characteristic comment on the whole affair, “get in, yet I was in at the death; for the effort of my defeat involved Beverley’s own parliamentary demise, under circumstances less tantalising than those of our friend Kinglake’s parliamentary extinction; for, unlike me, he got in only to be kicked out, while I at least had the satisfaction of seeing those who had walked over me faring worse than myself, inasmuch as they not only lost their seats but their money too.”[26]

Every incident, personage, or issue connected with Trollope’s electioneering errand to Yorkshire was, after his usual fashion, turned into “copy.” The novel thus inspired did not appear till 1871. It forms a well-written record of its author’s personal partialities or prejudices during the adventure already described. More than any of his books belonging to this period, it recalls, by the loaded colour of its lampoons and the unwonted bitterness of its satire, his mother’s way of dealing with the persons and things she had found disagreeable. For the rest, the humorous notes, whether in the way of local description or personal caricature, have, more frequently than is found in any other novel, a Dickensian ring. If occasionally laboured, as well as, for the most part, not below the average in writing, it is as regards plot almost as complicated and confusing as those parts of the Scriptural narrative dealing with the kings of Israel and Judah called by the same name. Not less baffling than to the Biblical student the rival Jehorams and Ahaziahs, are, in Ralph the Heir, the two prominent personages named Ralph Newton. The story unfolds itself on these lines: Old Squire Newton of Newton Priory, a rich country gentleman, has only one child, Ralph, an illegitimate son, on whom all his love and hopes are fixed. His estates, however, are entailed on his nephew, another Ralph Newton, distinguished from his namesake{252} as Ralph the Heir. This young man, a spendthrift, equally weak and handsome, is universally admitted to be the best fellow in the world. His only enemy is the uncle whom the law compels to leave him the estate. His chief friend, formerly his guardian, is Sir Thomas Underwood—a former Solicitor-General—a widower living at Popham Villa, Fulham, with his two daughters. To this household is presently added a niece, Mary Bonner, from abroad. Ralph the Heir, now more than usually in debt, has his heaviest creditor in Neefit the tailor, whose hunting breeches—his speciality—are of world-wide fame.

Some critics have scented in Trollope’s Neefit a likeness to the Mr. Bond Sharp of Disraeli’s Henrietta Temple. The resemblance, however, is but imaginary, because Mr. Bond Sharp, though professionally a maker of clothes, is the idealised usurer of Disraeli and romance, while Neefit has nothing to do with professional money-lending, and only supplies Ralph with cash in the character of his future son-in-law, the husband-elect of his daughter and heiress, Polly. Hence his indignation when Ralph backs out of the match, although the would-be father-in-law gets his money back with interest, for the tailor’s daughter is not the only matrimonial string to his bow. Reflection and delay increase Ralph the Heir’s objection to entire pecuniary dependence on the tailor’s daughter and heiress as his wife. He has hit upon what may prove a more excellent way. True, his uncle, the present owner and occupant of Newton Priory, is strong and well enough to have many years of life before him. Still, some day, in the course of nature, the place must be Ralph’s. It’s money worth could never be such an object to him as now, when he knows not where to turn for funds. Why not, therefore, exhaust every possible means for converting his reversionary interest into ready cash. Rather than sell himself to father-in-law Neefit, with Polly for his bride, why not sell outright to his uncle for a good round sum, say £50,000, his Newton rights? Horace’s Ulysses, rent by the Circean and Penelopeian rivalries, and Captain MacHeath, divided betwixt Polly and Lucy, personify the failing of indecision as familiarly as{253} Buridan’s ass itself. Both are almost outdone by the average Trollopian youth or maiden’s perplexity in the final selection of a lover from three or four candidates for the place. Most pre-eminently is Ralph the Heir, Ralph the wobbler. Having loved or talked about loving Polly Neefit, and ridden away, he goes through the farcical process of giving what he is pleased to call his heart first to Clarissa Underwood, next to Mary Bonner, and then to Clarissa again. At this point, however, that young lady has something to say, with the result of finding that not Ralph the Heir, but his younger brother, the Rev. Gregory Newton, is the right man for her husband. At the same time Mary Bonner similarly gives his congé to Ralph the Heir, and her hand to Ralph who is not the Heir.

So it had befallen one of Trollope’s Three Clerks who loved the barmaid. So it was now to befall Ralph the Heir.

At the point now reached Polly’s reappearance effects a complete change in the situation. When he had formerly, as he thought for ever, bidden her farewell, Polly’s affection for him by its vulgar exuberance had jarred on the hard-up, but fastidious Heir. Now the young lady keeps him at a distance, repulsing him with piquant prettiness, only to attract him. The old flame of a mercenary passion is rekindled. After all there is no reason, Ralph the Heir admits, against Polly’s becoming a gentleman’s wife. So it is all arranged; even the happy day is provisionally mentioned. The nuptial settlements have been drawn up, but are still unsigned when, hey presto! fresh surprises all round, and instead of flirting, jilting, and all the rest of it, we are in the thick of a political fight, reflecting in each detail Trollope’s Beverley conflict. There is, however more than that. Ralph the Heir’s namesake, Squire Newton’s illegitimate son, falls out of favour with his father; Squire Newton himself breaks his neck out hunting. Thus by several undeserved strokes of luck the Heir enters upon{254} his heritage. By this time, however, Sir Thomas Underwood has decided on re-entering public life. He has, he hopes, found the necessary seat in the borough of Percycross, alias that Beverley contested by Trollope himself, and now satirised in Ralph the Heir. Underwood’s colleague in the fight is Mr. Griffenbottom; his opponents are Westmacott in the Liberal and Ontario Moggs in the Radical interest. The Tory triumph is followed by the unseating on petition of both those who have won it; the disfranchisement of the borough completes the barrenness of their victory.

Quite the best drawn figure amid the electioneering crush is the Radical candidate. Ontario Moggs belongs to a class of idealised Industrials brought into fashion by George Eliot, attempted also by Mrs. Lynn Linton, raised to their highest perfection in Adam Bede, and brought down to a more familiar level in Felix Holt. With that Radical, Ontario Moggs can at least hold his own. He is, it is true, something of a prig, with a solemnity of manner and a pompous pithiness of artificial phrase making him a little absurd. His real cleverness, however, is not below his conceit; his readiness of speech, quickness at the detection of fallacy and power of argument, justly entitle him to his high reputation at the Cheshire Cheese and other debating Clubs. During Trollope’s time the Labour member had still to win the vogue and power brought in by the twentieth century. Still the Moggs of Ralph the Heir forms a creditable study of those captains of Northumbrian industry, some among whom were to win their way to the Treasury bench. By this time Ralph the Heir’s rejected love, Miss Neefit, has shed all her vulgarity. Realising the folly and danger of aspiring to the affection of her father’s trying and impecunious customers, she has the good sense to invest her fortune, hand, and heart in a life-partnership with a born gentleman, if of inferior station, like Ontario Moggs.

Trollope’s hard common sense, detective vigilance, refusal to be imposed upon, and absolute pitilessness for transgressors, when discharging his Post Office duties,{255} represented only one side of his character. From another point of view his judgment and intellect were subordinate to his emotions. This sentimentalism showed itself equally in his politics and in his estimate of the personages to whom he introduced the public in his books; with those personal creations he lived, as he often said, so intimately as to be really hurt by his readers not taking the same interest in them as he did himself. Hence his mortification at the indifference largely manifested to the dramatis personæ of the political novels that followed Phineas Finn. For those stories, now about to be considered, Trollope had prepared himself, not only by the ordinary experiences of London life, but by those of his Beverley campaign. He had also gone through a course of political reading, one of whose literary results was to be his book on Palmerston. This, though published subsequently to the political novels, had been written before them, and may be, for other reasons, appropriately mentioned now.

One Disraelian phrase, and one only, was sometimes quoted approvingly by Trollope. “The free patrician life” of England produced, he always held, the nation’s best rulers. Of that dispensation, in his patriotism, his sympathies, at once popular and aristocratic, in home affairs, and in his championship of oppressed nationalities abroad, Palmerston struck him as the best type of the time. For Trollope, too, there was something of natural congeniality in Palmerston’s schoolboy delight at those political doings which he loved to describe as “capital strokes, and all off my own bat,” in his brushes with the Court, and in his tit-for-tat with John Russell. When putting his Palmerston monograph together, he received useful hints and help from Sir Alexander Cockburn, whose friendship he owed to Sir Richard Quain. In this way, he found himself able to appreciate the value to Palmerston of the services rendered him by Sir Henry Bulwer during his Paris residence at serious continental conjunctures. Hence, too, Trollope could rate at its true worth Palmerston’s diplomacy, first, as shown by the quadruple treaty of 1834, secondly, by the quadrilateral treaty of six years{256} later leading up to the London conference of 1840. Finally, Bulwer and Cockburn enabled him to correct the popular impression of English statesmanship abroad being overruled by the Queen and the Prince Consort, and to show that, throughout the Austro-Italian questions then in progress, the principles consistently held and carried out by our Foreign Office were not those embodying the regard for the Austrian Empire held at the palace, but of the zeal for Italian unity at that time animating the English people.

Some reference to current politics entered, as has been seen, into Rachel Ray (1863). The subject was first made a prominent feature in Can You Forgive Her? (1864). Here we are first formally introduced to more or less public personages with whom our acquaintance is now to be improved. Trollope had not been impelled to his Beverley candidature by any active share in the Gladstonian enthusiasm, then beginning to show itself throughout the country, nor can the Gladstonian lineaments be clearly traced in any of the parliamentary portraits whose gallery opens with Phineas Finn (1869). The sorrows, the disappointment, the labours, and the other varieties of penance awaiting the average borough candidate, form the autobiographical element in the novel that marked the new period in Trollope’s life beginning with his retirement from the Post Office. After Ralph the Heir, Phineas Finn takes the reader into the heart of the political system, at St. Stephen’s, in Whitehall, in Pall Mall, and in the country-houses, where leaders of parties, whether peers or commoners, Cabinet Ministers and all their hangers on, congregate. The electioneering reminiscences that give life and colour to Ralph the Heir make it therefore a fit introduction to Trollope’s efforts in the new literary vein which, while a paid servant of the State, he did not think desirable to work.

That was not the only fresh test applied by him in this, his fifty-third year, to the loyalty of his readers. The example of famous or successful contemporaries always excited a spirit of emulation in Trollope. Not only had Dickens{257} and Thackeray added to their reputation and wealth as magazine editors, but, in the same capacity, men of whom he thought so meanly as G. A. Sala and Edmund Yates had done well. The ex-Post Office surveyor, therefore, resolved to spend part of his freedom from official harness in the same rôle. The Virtues of City Road had just started a monthly, The St. Paul’s Magazine. Anthony Trollope, with Mr. Edward Dicey for his assistant, readily took the helm. He led off with an instalment of fiction different from anything else he had yet attempted. Had this not come after the Barchester series and therefore been judged by that earlier standard, it might have had as many readers if not admirers as the other pen and ink pictures of English life of which The Warden, in 1855, had been the first. Phineas Finn, that first showed Trollope as a political novelist, after having run through The St. Paul’s, was republished in two volumes octavo (Virtue and Co.), 1869. It was continued five years later with Phineas Redux. This originally appeared in The Graphic and was republished (Chapman and Hall) in two volumes, 1874. The group of novels now referred to contained other works, to be mentioned in their proper place, and only ended with The Duke’s Children (1880) two years before Trollope’s death. All these books are traversed by a slight connecting thread of name, incident, or character. As to this, however, it will be best to let these stories speak for themselves, beginning with the earliest of the number, Phineas Finn.

The personage giving his name to this book is the son of an Irish doctor, Malachi Finn, living at Killaloe, county Clare, well-known throughout the province of Connaught, possessing no private fortune, but a good practice and an expensive family. The household idolatry lavished upon the son is thus commented on by the shrewd, sensible father. “So far he seems as good as any other man’s goose, but much more evidence is wanted for establishing his claim to any qualities of the swan.” Phineas, however, is no sooner seen in London than he begins to be a success. Mr. Low, in whose chambers he reads law, who{258} on his own account entertains but checks certain parliamentary ambitions, is a steady-going preceptor, social and legal, of the old school, who admonishes his pupil to beware of distractions from his professional training. Phineas, however, has already joined the Reform Club and found many good houses open to him. Among the earliest of his Pall Mall and Mayfair acquaintances Laurence Fitzgibbon, a happy-go-lucky Irishman, cleverly sketched after the manner of Charles Lever, is already in the House, and easily persuades Phineas that it is the only career worth pursuing. An opportunity soon comes; the Loughshane constituency wants a progressive candidate at the General Election; the Reform Club committee promises a liberal contribution to his expenses if Phineas will stand. Even thus Phineas’ allowance from his father must of course be increased. The Killaloe doctor, talked over by the ladies of his family, will do his very utmost to help his son in maintaining the new position. Phineas, accordingly, is returned to Parliament, and is still in his first session when, by sheer good luck, he gets an Under-Secretaryship. Then comes the first check; Phineas kicks over the traces on an Irish question. Mr. Monk may at some points vaguely reflect Gladstone. It is at least Finn’s loyalty to Monk which involves the loss of his Ministerial office, and, with it, of his seat for Loughshane, which, out of office, he cannot support in a style agreeable to his enlarged views of an M.P.’s social consequence.

Nothing therefore is to be done but to resettle himself in the land of his birth. Even after his retirement there come signs of returning luck in the shape of a Government post worth £1000 a year. That enables him to settle modestly in Dublin with his youthful sweetheart, Mary Flood Jones, for his wife. The heart which he can offer this excellent lady is no longer a virgin one, for during his London years he has had two or three serious love affairs. One of these, in its sequel rather tragic, has been with Lady Laura Standish, the impoverished Earl of Brentford’s daughter. That has been really a case of love at first{259} sight on both sides, for Lady Laura, having given Phineas her affection at the beginning, does not conceal that he has it to the end. She only refuses him because her father’s poverty compels her to marry a rich plebeian, Mr. Kennedy, M.P., like Phineas himself, a political supporter of Plantagenet Palliser, who eventually becomes the Duke of Omnium. The handsome person and the shallow purse of the young Irish member have also appealed warmly to Madame Max Goesler, a rich widow; she has indeed, it having been apparently Leap Year, hinted to Phineas at the acceptance of her hand and fortune as the best way out of his money difficulties. This good-hearted, fascinating, and refreshingly straightforward lady, whom he, after becoming a widower, marries, had been suspected of angling for Planty Pal’s uncle, the reigning Duke of Omnium. At least the duke’s infatuation for “Mrs. Max” had filled Lady Glencora Palliser with a droll horror, lest the great man should actually make her his wife and become the father of an heir who would disinherit Planty Pal himself. Madame Goesler, however, has never any thought of aiming at anyone above her own social level. The gracious but decisive dismissal of her noble suitor converts Lady Glencora into her fast friend. Throughout the rest of the story and indeed afterwards, among all Lady Glencora’s intimates, none ranked so high in her regard and confidence as the sensible and kindly lady who had been wise enough to refuse a duke.

Out of Phineas Finn’s attachment to Lady Laura arises an entirely fresh entanglement of heart actually attended by results serious enough, and at one time threatening to change the whole current of the narrative. In Lady Laura’s drawing-room Phineas meets a beautiful heiress, Violet Effingham, the bride-elect of Lady Laura’s brother, the red-haired, red-faced, shaggy, and untamable Lord Chiltern, who bears something of a family likeness to the St. Aldegonde of Disraeli’s Lothair, but who really represents Trollope’s snapshot at the Lord Hartington of his own day, who died eighth Duke of Devonshire. The fact of Miss Effingham being thus bespoke does not warn off{260} the philandering Phineas. Lady Laura has the mortification of seeing her own devotion to him requited by his deliberate attempt to cut out Chiltern, and so prevent the marriage that she had set her heart on for her brother. Still, she sits by, agonised at heart, but uncomplaining. Nor does the spectacle of Finn’s fickleness and shallowness lose him the love which, in spite of herself, he had won.

Her brother views matters less passively. He has rather liked Phineas, shown him much attention in London, mounted him on his most intractable hunter, Bonebreaker, in the eastern counties, and admired the success with which the doctor’s son from Killaloe has conquered that self-willed steed. He is not, however, prepared to tolerate Phin’s poaching on his manor. He will maintain the right to his sweetheart even at the price of blood. Eventually the two agree to settle it at the pistol’s point. Blankenberg in Belgium becomes the scene of a combat in which Phineas receives a not very serious wrist wound. This encounter has been called an anachronism; it disposes, the critics have said, if nothing else did, of the one merit, that of absolute truth to life in all details, specially claimed by Trollope for the novel. How stand the facts? Prince Albert, indeed, made duelling unfashionable; but there were several cases of duels fought in Victoria’s reign. Certainly, during the period of the Blankenberg encounter in Phineas Finn, hostile meetings at Boulogne were often the talk of the town. Only a generation and a half have passed since there still flourished at St. Stephen’s, and occasionally dined with Mr. Gladstone, the wonderful Ogorman Mahoon who, if report spoke truly, had once at least “killed his man.” In 1852 a Canterbury election dispute caused a duel between George Smythe, Coningsby’s original, and Colonel Frederick Romilly. About this time, too, is nearly the date at which an ordeal of the same kind was gone through by Reginald Russell in Paris.

Phineas Finn’s Irish exile was short. He had recently lost his wife in Dublin, when a letter from his old friend,{261} Lady Laura Standish’s cousin, Barrington Erle, told him of just the thing to suit him in the shape of a parliamentary investment for a little legacy into which he had come. This was the vacant seat in Lord Brentford’s borough of Tankerville. To London therefore he hurries. In the solitude of his Jermyn Street Hotel he is surprised and gladdened by a letter from the former Violet Effingham, now Lady Chiltern, conveying a particularly cordial invitation to their country house, Harrington Hall. So he feels himself really on the way back to the old life formerly so much enjoyed and, as it seemed, but a few months since withdrawn from him for ever. But his welcome is not absolutely unanimous. Among those who, as a personal offence to themselves, resent his reappearance after having made up their minds that he was finally out of their way, Finn’s most malevolent ill-wisher is Mr. Bonteen. Phineas has just got back to St. Stephen’s as member for Tankerville; shortly afterwards goes into the Reform Club; here, stung by Bonteen’s remarks, he almost comes to blows with Bonteen; a little later he is seen walking home Mr. Bonteen’s way. The next morning Bonteen is found dead in a Mayfair alley with his skull broken, manifestly by such a pocket bludgeon as Finn is known to be in the habit of carrying for protection against garrotters. The Irish member’s arrest follows; it might have gone hard with him in court but for Madame Goesler’s resourcefulness, devotion, and ready wit. The tide of circumstantial evidence, so far flowing strongly against Phineas, now turns, and, thanks entirely to Madame Goesler’s vigilance and skill, gives Trollope the chance of a hit at his old enemies, the evangelicals, by setting in conclusively against a dissenting minister who now replaces Phineas in the dock, but just contrives to cheat the gallows. Phineas, of course, finds a rising statesman’s ideal wife in Madame Goesler, and is henceforth known as the prosperous middle-aged M.P.

Here, it will be seen, is the same blending as in Orley Farm and Can You Forgive Her? of tears with laughter, of the terrible with the ludicrous, and of more than{262} melodrama with downright farce. The darker background to the social or political scenes is supplied chiefly by the relations between Mr. Kennedy and his wife, to whom might be added Phineas Finn himself. To begin with, Lady Laura Standish probably would never have become Lady Laura Kennedy if the handsome young Irishman who won her heart directly she saw him had pressed his suit with the audacity she perhaps looked for against that of the priggish and insipid Kennedy. As it is, loving him from the first, she nurses a steadily deepening passion for him till her widowhood, where Trollope with artistic delicacy leaves her, feeling no doubt that all the proprieties of fiction would be violated if married happiness were awarded to the two parties in a flirtation that, innocent throughout in itself, had been associated with such domestic discomfort and havoc. Take her for what the novelist meant her to be, Lady Laura, well thought out, firmly, not less than, at each point, consistently drawn, is a good specimen of the mid-nineteenth century society woman of the better sort. She had, indeed, her exact parallel in at least one commanding ornament of Mayfair drawing-rooms concerning whom Lord Beaconsfield said, “She needs only a husband of the right sort to be a statesman’s helpmate.” On both sides the Laura and Phineas friendship is pure throughout; it is only not absolutely without reproach because the lady refuses to give it up after her husband’s disapproval and jealousy have been plainly and, for success, too peremptorily signified. Kennedy commits that and other mistakes because he does not quite come up to the idea of Trollope’s perfect gentleman and man of the world. To begin with he is a devout Presbyterian; this defect alone was almost as fatal in Trollope’s eyes as it would have been with Charles II himself. When they are staying at Loughlinter Lady Laura complains of her headache and begs to be excused kirk. Kennedy delivers a little discourse on the malady of headache generally and his wife’s headache in particular. The ailment, he lays down, proceeds from either the stomach or nerves. In the former case the walk to church should{263} prove beneficial; in the latter, the malady, he plainly intimates, comes from Phineas Finn. This insinuation acts as a last straw. Lady Laura Kennedy leaves her husband’s house and settles with her father abroad at Dresden. There Phineas is about to visit her when, before starting, he adds insult to injury by asking Kennedy whether he can take any message to his wife. This naturally leads to an angry scene between the two men shortly afterwards, with fresh violence on both sides.

Trollope loved newspaper writers even a little less than he did evangelicals; in The Warden he had dealt some rather clumsy thrusts at them. In his later novels, including that now considered, he personifies them in the vulgar, unscrupulous Quintus Slide of The People’s Banner. This ruffian of the Press embitters and complicates the Finn-Kennedy embroglio for personal spite against Phineas and for the enlivenment of his own columns with some spicy personalities obtained from the now half-maddened Kennedy himself. Infuriated with jealousy because, not unnaturally, incredulous of the really Platonic conditions of his wife’s friendship with Phineas, Kennedy has one more personal passage with the Irish Member, noticeable only because it contains a repetition of the attempt at murder with a pistol that had already, when the quarrel lay between John Grey and George Vavasor, done duty in Can You Forgive Her? As for Lady Laura, she lives out a faded life in attendance on her father, Lord Brentford, and only reappears in England to hear from her old lover of his intention to secure himself against pecuniary troubles in the future by persuading Madame Goesler to become Mrs. Finn. This is the second announcement of the same kind which poor Lady Laura has had to face; for some years earlier it was to her also he confided his intention of trying his chance with Violet Effingham. This is a little too much even for so fond and blind an admirer of Phineas as the widowed Lady Laura Kennedy. “Why,” she exclaims, “to me of all persons in the world do you come with the story of your intentions? I could bear{264} it when you came to me about Violet, because I loved her even though she robbed me, but how am I to bear it now in the case of a woman I loathe?”

The curtain falls upon poor Lady Laura, sobbing her heart out upon the false one’s breast in Saulsby Park with self-reproaches for having worshipped him instead of her God; upon Phineas flourishing as Madame Goesler’s husband, a prosperous middle-aged M.P., refusing the offer of a place in Mr. Gresham’s Government because, as the newly made Mrs. Phineas Finn puts it, a rich wife’s husband can afford to prefer freedom to responsibility. The only figures of the Phineas group prominently reappearing in the subsequent political stories are Planty Pal transformed into the Duke of Omnium and his Duchess, formerly Lady Glencora. The new duke presides over no Cabinet, but takes a paternal interest in public affairs generally, and is specially delighted at the improved prospects of his old fiscal fad, decimal coinage. The duchess, having sown all her wild oats, settles down into a great political lady of the most aspiring and imperious kind. Her mistakes in that part illustrate Trollope’s favourite moral that the feminine ambition “which o’erleaps itself” spoils instead of adorns whatever it may touch.

There is little, as has been already said, in Trollope’s first two political novels to fix the parliamentary period to which they belong. As regards good looks, Phineas may have had something in common with Colonel King-Harman, whom the novelist occasionally met at the Arts Club, but at all other points Trollope’s Irish Member, by his fine presence, winning manners, and his return to St. Stephen’s after an interval of absence, suggests Sir John Pope Hennessy rather than any other representative of the Emerald Isle during the pre-Household Suffrage portion of the Victorian age. For the rest, Prime Minister Gladstone and Prime Minister Gresham only resemble each other in the first letter of their names. The future Lord Beaconsfield, however, is clearly meant by Daubeny. Disraeli is the subject of a verbal photograph as the brilliant and unscrupulous charlatan who dishes the Whigs, not over{265} parliamentary reform but over Church Disestablishment. But the politician pitted against Daubeny bears scarcely a remote resemblance to Disraeli’s arch antagonist. Among those who resist Daubeny’s designs, the foremost, the already-mentioned Gresham, universally respected, admired, is too reserved and self-contained for popularity. He therefore recalls Sir Robert Peel rather than the most famous of Peel’s disciples or successors. Trollope’s Turnbull as the angular, inflexibly upright, middle-class M.P. shows no trace of the Cobden, John Bright, or any of that school reflected in the Job Thornberry of Disraeli’s Endymion. The fact of the publication of Endymion being later, by some ten years, than that of Phineas Finn does away with the suggestion that Trollope’s Turnbull was modelled from Disraeli’s Thornberry. In like manner Monk, Trollope’s ideal parliament man, is evolved entirely from his creator’s inner consciousness. So too Plantagenet Palliser had no original among the well-born, scientific financiers of the House of Commons in Trollope’s time, but merely personifies his creator’s notion of the pattern gentleman, the soul of honour and of chivalrous consideration in his treatment equally of Lady Glencora’s flirtations when his bride-elect and of her ill-devised socio-political strategies after she has become Duchess of Omnium. At each stage of his development from the Planty Pal of Can You Forgive Her? to the inheritance of the ducal title in Phineas Redux, these aspects of his character are consistently, logically, as well as at every point effectively, sustained. When, in Phineas Finn, his uncle’s death sends him to the Upper House, to be known henceforth as the duke, while not holding office he becomes the oracle, the good genius and presiding potentate of his party.

The Prime Minister (1876) shows him as the First Lord of the Treasury, always gracious, calm, and strong, though often harassed by his wife’s intermeddling in public affairs, and, as in the case of Ferdinand Lopez, by her patronage of discreditable supporters. For, if the duke be the ornament of his order and his vocation, Lady Glencora, since becoming Her Grace, has transformed{266} herself into a satire upon feminine aspiration when untempered by true womanly feeling and good sense. The Duchess of Omnium was, I fancy, felt by Trollope himself to be, as he put it to me, une grande dame manquée. Trollope’s lifelong Harrow contemporary and loyal friend, Sir William Gregory, so often mentioned in these pages, called his Irish member a libel upon the Irish gentleman. The relations in which Phineas Finn stood to his own sex were those of Trollope’s duchess to the genuine great lady of existing political drawing-rooms. Of moral fibre, harder and coarser than when first introduced as the girlish but even then sufficiently shrewd Lady Glencora, she provokes, when seen in The Prime Minister, disadvantageous comparison with another politician’s wife, her equal in fortune, whom she once called an adventuress, but has since promoted to the first place in her friendship. Mrs. Max Goesler, now Mrs. Phineas Finn, who herself might have been a duchess had she liked, is a rising statesman’s model wife, knowing exactly when to help her husband by appearing in the foreground, and how to advance his interests by unadvertised activity behind the scenes. But then Mrs. Max was a real figure in the society of Trollope’s day, and the Duchess of Omnium was an abstraction.

The characters, however, in The Prime Minister, on which Trollope relied to popularise the book, by relieving the strain of the demand that the purely political portions made on the reader’s attention are those of Emily Wharton, whose life is marred by her marriage with the aspiring incarnation of city scampdom, Lopez, and of Arthur Fletcher, Emily’s blameless lover, who eventually becomes her husband. Trollope himself was never seen to greater advantage than in the best professional society. Especially did he shine when talking with doctors like his particular friend, Sir Richard Quain, or with lawyers of the old school such as he had first known from his father. Nothing, therefore, in The Prime Minister is better than Emily’s father, the shrewd old-world barrister, reminiscent of the bygone legal celebrities, Jockey Bell, the first conveyancer of his time, or{267} Leech, Master of the Rolls.[27] The snobbish and pretentious knave, Lopez, has entrapped into partnership in his commercial infamies a city drudge as low as personally he is harmless, named Parker. Not unworthy of Dickens, is the praise deserved by the simple and graphic drollery of Trollope’s description of Sexty Parker amid the mean surroundings of his suburban home, with his poor wife’s affrighted protests at the dangerous degree to which he is being made the tool of Lopez, or Parker’s picture on his seaside holiday, smoking his pipe and drinking his gin and water in the shabby villa’s porch, while his ill-clad and ill-nourished children make mischief of every kind in the stony and almost flowerless garden. An effective contrast to these scenes of squalid domesticity is forthcoming in the varied company at Gatherum Castle, now inhabited by Planty Pal as Duke of Omnium, and despotically managed by Lady Glencora as duchess, who, by way of forming a party of her own, has invited some rather shady guests. Among these is Lopez; how the duke sees through him, soon showing him the door, and how His Grace, beset by an uncongenial house-party, platonically consoles himself with Lady Rosina De Courcy as well as follows her advice to take care of his health by wearing cork soles, is told in Trollope’s best manner.

With this social by-play are mingled the Silverbridge parliamentary contests; here Beverley is drawn upon once more, and the election agents, Sprugeon and Sprout, are pen and ink photographs of Trollope’s Yorkshire friends. The Prime Minister ends with the hideous suicide of the villain of the piece, Ferdinand Lopez. All the incidents leading up to that catastrophe make very unpleasant reading indeed.{268}

Infinitely superior to The Prime Minister is The Duke’s Children. Here our author regains his old and happier cunning in the portrait of Isabel Boncassen. This American beauty combines high intellectual power with absolute perfection of face and figure. Still more arresting is her English counterpart, Lady Mabel Grex. That heroine, an impoverished and profligate nobleman’s daughter, had passed scathless through the trying ordeal of her earlier days. Neither the keenness of her insight nor the strength of her will is impaired; her capacity of entire devotion where her heart is really touched has not suffered from any hardening experiences of life’s seamy side. Yet some time has to pass before she can do justice to these great qualities, though from the first she makes herself felt as the good genius of the story. Meanwhile, the widowed Duke of Omnium has had trouble both with his sons and daughter. These vexations to some degree involve Lady Mabel Grex. His eldest son, Lord Silverbridge, a good deal both of the scapegrace and the spendthrift, has managed to drop £70,000 on a single race. The duke’s only daughter, Lady Mary Palliser, is scarcely less unsatisfactory. With the pick of the peerage as well as the plutocracy to choose from, she perversely refuses to marry anyone but Frank Tregear, a Cornish squire’s penniless younger son. Frank, however, and Lady Mabel Grex are already the subjects of a reciprocal passion. This attachment is doomed for money reasons never to end in marriage. Even after she has convinced herself that this love is hopeless, Mabel Grex only becomes resigned to the inevitable after a long and agonised struggle with herself. It ends, however, in her accepting an offer from the duke’s heir, Silverbridge. At the same time Frank Tregear breaks off with Mabel and transfers his affections to the Duke of Omnium’s daughter, the already mentioned Lady Mary. Defeated at every point, as well as crushed under the burden of a hopeless love, Mabel Grex passively accepts the doom of aimless poverty and absolute desolation for the rest of her days.{269}

CHAPTER XIV

AMERICAN MISSIONS AND COLONIAL TOURS

SO far, it has been practicable to follow Trollope’s productions almost exactly in the order in which they came from his pen. The political novels, as has been seen, constitute a series whose successive parts are even more closely connected than the various instalments of the Barchester novels. Thus, Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux form a single story; The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children contain the underplots or afterplots of what has gone before. The Beverley adventure and its reflection in Ralph the Heir, three years afterwards (1871), formed the biographical prelude to the little group of stories in which Phineas Finn came first. The examination of these in the preceding chapter, once begun, had to be completed, or their unity would have been lost. Hence, some unavoidable little interruption of strict chronological sequence and the momentary neglect, now to be repaired, of Trollope’s other doings in the Beverley year. The value set by the Government on{270} Trollope’s Post Office work was shown immediately after he had resigned his post at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Nothing could be more complimentary than the request that he would make a third journey to the United States for the conclusion of a new postal treaty at Washington.[28] That task occupied exactly three months and three weeks; it was begun April 8th and ended July 27th. Then he brought back to England a success more complete than, from the uncongenial variety of the American representatives with whom he had to deal, he had at times feared might prove possible.

The visit also had its literary usefulness. While occupied with the Washington officials he studied the traits subsequently bodied forth in his American Senator, and before he went home he made advantageous arrangements with the publishers in New York. During the fourteen years of life, however, which still remained for him he crossed and recrossed the Atlantic twice more; altogether therefore he made no less than five different appearances in the great Republic. Each of them was turned by him to good account not more in business matters than in observing the American-Irish developments described elaborately in The Land Leaguers. The United States public and publishers also did Trollope a particularly good turn by appreciating the political novels, less warmly, indeed, than the Barchester books, but far more cordially than had been done by home consumers of these products. The one work that New York readers would not have was The Cornhill reprint, Brown, Jones and Robinson, pronounced, not perhaps unjustly, by the first American critic of the day, Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie, the most stupid story ever coming{271} from the same pen. With that exception Trollope’s magazine pieces suited the taste of New York better than they did that of London; during 1860 Harper’s pleased all its friends by publishing his short stories, The Courtship of Susan Bell, The O’Conors of Castle Conor, and Relics of General Chassé. These were produced here in the three volumes entitled Tales of All Countries. Trollope’s style, both in his earlier and later days, was occasionally apt to be much influenced by his friend Charles Lever. Of the compositions just enumerated, The O’Conors, a transcript of his own early Irish observations, had a remarkable American success, perhaps because a certain adventurous breeziness of movement as of style exactly suited a public whose passing taste had for the moment been more or less formed, not only by Charles Lever, but by those who had been before him, as Fenimore Cooper and Captain Marryat. Harper’s did also more for Trollope than show him as a short story writer at his best; it introduced its readers to The Small House at Allington, Orley Farm, as well as to several of his less known efforts, such as Lady Anna.

Generally, the transatlantic verdict confirmed that of the old country and gave the palm to the pen and ink photographs of provincial home life. In one respect, however, America strikingly showed its independence of English estimates by unanimously crediting the political series from Phineas Finn to The Duke’s Children with a vividness of portraiture, an experience of and an insight into the leading personages, forces, and incidents of British public life such as Trollope’s own countrymen had not then discovered. Why this should have been so it is not difficult to see. In England, those who cared for the political novel were still under the Disraelian spell when Trollope put forth his impressions of public life as he had observed it in the stories that opened with Phineas Finn (1869), and only closed with The Duke’s Children (1880). During all those years the intellectual fascination possessed by Disraeli, whether as writer or politician, for the English public, so far from diminishing, had, upon the whole,{272} deepened. The sustained brilliancy of Lothair (1868), and Endymion (1881), sent readers back to Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred. Of that literary enchantment the United States knew comparatively little. As a political novelist, Trollope was judged on his own merits, without, as in England, any reference to the dazzling and unapproachable genius who had preceded him. Before Disraeli, Plumer Ward had portrayed statesmen in romances, which were generally forgotten by Englishmen, while Bulwer-Lytton had given something of a political flavour to his best-known novels. By the standard of Ward and Lytton, rather than, as was the case in England, of Disraeli, the Americans judged Trollope. They accordingly found in him an actuality and naturalness at once instructive and refreshing; nor did they miss the verbal fireworks for which the Coningsby novels had accustomed the English reader to look.

It has already been shown how, on other subjects, Trollope stood with the American public; before following him in his overseas movements, some details may here be given of his practical relations with the American publisher. From English publishers, Trollope, according to his own estimate, received in all a little under £70,000. His American receipts were rather more than £3000.[29] Beside his{273} Post Office Commission, Trollope, during his American visit of 1868, also acted as the Foreign Office representative on the subject of International Copyright. That, however, is a question scarcely suitable for treatment here. As regards the primary and Postal errand, he accomplished the purpose for which he had been sent, and obtained the terms asked by the English Government. By the Convention which he negotiated, the postage on a half ounce letter between England and the United States was fixed at sixpence. With respect to the literary relations of the two countries, Trollope brought back no equally definite result, but only failed to do so because, in the nature of things, success was then impossible. In the diplomacy of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Trollope essayed nothing which he did not carry through. The literary monument of his Egyptian journey in 1858 had been no work descriptive of the country, but a novel, The Bertrams. For, unless he had found himself so far on his way as Cairo, he would never have pilgrimaged to Jerusalem, or collected the material in local colour for the Syrian scenes and incidents in that novel. His official work had then been a Postal Convention with the Egyptian authorities for our Australian and Indian mails across the Delta.{274} The same kind of duty he had performed so well ten years earlier was repeated after the same fashion in 1868.

Trollope’s various transatlantic trips were the prelude to more extended tours on that other side of the world where his postal rather than literary labours had already made him a name. These Antipodean experiences were, during the last eight years of his life, to give him as a novelist something like a new lease of vigour and freshness. Trollope’s instinctive sympathy with the temper and tendencies of his time, whatever the movement in progress might be, had, as the reader already knows, during his earliest youth, showed itself in the readiness with which he came under the influence of Anglican leaders. A little later the perennial Irish question, in its social as well as political, its sentimental not less than its practical aspects, filled the air, and gave both direction and colour to his initial experiment as a novelist, The Macdermots (1847). Active interest in politics was delayed till the season of youth and enthusiasm had been outlived. But, when a little over fifty, he could not resist the temptation to take a combatant’s part in the battle, then at its height between the two great party leaders of the time. Beaten at Beverley, and so debarred from delivering himself about men and measures at St. Stephen’s, Trollope turned to account the experiences he had gathered and the opinions he had formed, in the Phineas Finn stories.

Meanwhile, however, a new interest in the Greater Britain beyond the seas had deeply stirred the popular imagination, and reflected itself in the writings of his best known contemporaries. Trollope accordingly realised that he had been wasting on party energies meant for the Empire. Natural affection and the conscious need of securing imaginative freshness by entire change of scene and thought were other motives operating in the same direction. Within two or three years of recrossing the Atlantic homewards, Trollope planned a yet more extensive tour with the set purpose of bringing back from the Antipodes materials, not only for history, but for fiction. The earliest writer of Trollope’s day to feel and express the transoceanic{275} inspiration of the new epoch was Bulwer-Lytton, some eight years before he became Colonial Secretary in the Derby Government. The example of The Caxtons soon proved contagious. In 1856 Trollope’s exact contemporary, Charles Reade, published It’s Never too Late to Mend, whose dramatised form, in 1866, not only revived the original story’s interest, but infused fresh force into the agitation against transporting English criminals to Australasian colonies. In 1859 Henry Kingsley suffused his spirited romances, Geoffrey Hamlyn and The Hillyars and the Burtons with the local colour he had collected during a short residence under the Southern Cross; thus as a colonial novelist he differed from Reade, and resembled Trollope,[30] in describing, from personal knowledge, the scenes and incidents whose word-pictures bear in every detail the stamp of fidelity to life. The original and chief motive of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Trollope’s expedition, in the May of 1871, to the other side of the world, was that they might see once more a son then sheep-farming in the Australian Bush. Trollope himself would have felt uncomfortable if he had embarked without feeling that, while making holiday in a far country, he was also collecting impressions for at least one new book.

Before actually setting sail, therefore, he had contracted with Chapman and Hall for the Australian volumes published in 1873, and had also found a newspaper opening for certain travel letters, to be incorporated afterwards in the book. This, on coming out in 1873, was pronounced, by The Times, “the most agreeable, just, and acute work ever written on the subject.” On the other hand, The Athenæum and The Saturday Review dwelt on the length, the diffuseness, and the want of method of the ponderous volumes, “as dull as they are big.” Perplexity of arrangement, and occasional obscurity of diction, were other charges made by these critics against the work. Good taste in dealing with all personal matters was the chief merit compensating for decline in literary power, which{276} even these censors allowed. The shrewdness of insight with which The Times credited Trollope was praise abundantly justified by events. Indeed Trollope’s one mistake in judgment was his prophecy about the annexation of Tasmania by Victoria. Any movement of this kind he might, with a little more carefulness of enquiry and accuracy of observation, have convinced himself was purely local in its origin, never, in its growth, exceeded the narrowest limits, and was repudiated, even in his day, by responsible Tasmanian as well as Victorian statesmen. It never consequently entered into the regions of practical politics.

His faith in the certainty of Australasian federation rested on much stronger ground. Its fulfilment he did not live to witness. That took place sixteen years after his death when, in the March of 1898, the Australian Commonwealth bill became law. The book, written in his cabin during the homeward voyage, succeeded beyond the author’s or publisher’s expectations. This was due, first, to its happily-timed appearance; secondly, to the convenient compass within which it brought together the best that had been said by other writers, and all, indeed, which the average reader could wish to know about the history, the politics, the society, the resemblances to or differences from the Mother Country noticed by Trollope during his eighteen months’ stay in Melbourne, New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, and New Zealand. The book contained few of the carefully prepared literary effects investing the account of the West Indies with a thoroughly popular charm. But, whenever in his Australasian volumes Trollope dealt with what had struck him as really noteworthy, he showed himself once more nearly at his best; especially in his comparison between sheep-farming and ostrich-farming as careers, in his few mining scenes, and, above all, in his most graphic and informing account of the road system, which he had minutely studied. The first novel resulting from the Australian jaunt had in it many more touches of personal and domestic autobiography than the travel volumes. Like Phineas Redux, it first came out{277} in The Graphic, and showed the intellectual benefit received by the novelist from his wanderings under the Southern Cross.

Harry Heathcote of Gangoill (1874), marked by no signs of imaginative exhaustion, as well as written throughout in the old picturesque fashion, is based on the industrial fortunes of Trollope’s Australian son, chequered by climatic caprices and ill-minded neighbours, but in spite of all this, by unflagging perseverance, steadily advancing. Most of the Trollopian qualities, the imperious prejudices, and the autocratic independence, combined with more amiable features appear in the hero. He had been one of the original settlers, who acquired their land by the simple process of “claiming” it. After he had made a good start with his work a fresh Government scheme allowed newcomers to buy whatever land they liked, even though it were already bespoke by the earlier settlers. The sole condition of purchase was that the land thus bought must exceed a certain minimum value. Of course the right of compulsory purchase given to the “free selectors,” as they were called, made them at loggerheads with such as had already established themselves before they came.

Heathcote naturally saw in his nearest neighbour, a free selector, Giles Medlicot, a man fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, and of affections dark as Erebus.[31] Soon there comes a great and dangerous drought. The sheep farmers are on the watch day and night against one of those prairie fires that would, in a few minutes, destroy all their flocks’ food. Heathcote, ready to think all evil of the detested interloper, without any reason suspects the free selector, Medlicot, of a design to burn his farm and stock. Of course he is wrong; and no flames, by whomsoever kindled, burst out on his property, at least for the present. Eventually, however, there comes on him the fiery foe, more dreaded by the pastoral squatter than pestilence or famine. Then the gratuitously accused Medlicot proves Heathcote’s true friend; and by his own courage and skill keeps the outbreak within narrower limits than Heathcote had ever{278} hoped. A large portion of the farm buildings and plant is thus saved. The story ends with the reconciliation of the two men so long and irrationally kept apart by mutual mistrust. Medlicot’s marriage to Heathcote’s sister-in-law is the seal and fruit of a new friendship.

The plot is too slight and the narrative too short to afford room for much character creation. To those who follow, as is being done in these pages, Trollope’s industrial course, the book has an interest quite independent of its actual contents. It was written by Trollope in his sixtieth year. Of the other colonial novelists already mentioned, Charles Reade had not long turned forty when he published It’s Never Too Late To Mend, and Henry Kingsley was under thirty at the time of writing Geoffrey Hamlyn. This is the book whose glowing wealth of local colour, scenic word-painting, and keen appreciation of Antipodean character won for it the praise of an Australian epic. Kingsley’s and Reade’s romances of life on the other side of the world were followed in 1866 by Hugh Nisbet’s Australian stories. These three writers present a spirited and complete panorama of colonial existence, character, and manner. All wrote in the very prime of their powers, but none enlivened his subjects with a stronger glow of fancy or handled them with more sureness and strength than, at the age of three-score, was shown by Trollope in describing the fight with the flames in his Harry Heathcote of Gangoil. This novel, like its colonial successor five years later, John Caldigate, shows, better than could be done by pages of biographical detail, that, after more than half a century of exacting and incessant work, its author’s power of accurately observing and mastering in their full significance new facts or ideas remained practically unimpaired.

The home and the life to which Trollope returned in England during December, 1872, were not the same as he had left behind him when embarking a year and a half earlier on the Great Britain for his colonial voyage. The pleasant house at Waltham Cross, with its roomy and always well-filled stables, its many hospitalities and its comparative nearness to the meets of the Essex Hounds, was exchanged{279} for the abode in Montagu Square. Here Trollope passed the later portion of his London life. Here too, on settling himself, he began to live with the personages of the Australian goldfields story that was to appear in 1879. Long before then, however, he had become sufficiently intimate with other creations of his fancy to put them into print. An old friend, Lizzie, (Lady Eustace), received his first attention; in 1873 came The Eustace Diamonds. This novel, like The Belton Estate, had first been written for The Fortnightly Review. Its leading figure casually reappears in later works, especially in The Prime Minister, where Ferdinand Lopez shows at once his scoundrelism and ignorance of the world in making certain absurd proposals to an attractive, vivacious, but particularly wide-awake lady. What Lizzie Eustace is in The Prime Minister, she had shown herself before in The Eustace Diamonds.

This rich, personable, and clever heroine labours under one weakness: she can never speak the truth. As Lizzie Greystock, she made a brilliant marriage with an elderly and opulent baronet. She had not passed her first youth when she was left a widow more than comfortably provided for. Amongst her husband’s personal estate is a magnificent diamond necklace worth £20,000, an heirloom which, at his express wish, the lady used to wear. To this precious ornament the dead baronet’s nearest relations disputed her claim, on the ground that as a family possession it was not his to give. “But,” replied her ladyship, “he gave it to me for my very own, telling me that my appearance with it would be the best of all tributes to his memory.” Lady Eustace no more expected this account of the matter to be believed than she believed it herself. To one thing, however, she had made up her mind: no one should take the costly trinket out of her hands. Consequently wherever she goes it accompanies her.

During one journey she believes she has lost it and gives the alarm. Soon, however, she recovers her treasure, but does not impart the fact to the police, whom she has caused to raise a hue and cry. One day the necklace is really stolen, and the constables, having obtained a clue,{280} succeed in placing themselves on its track. Restoration is followed by exposure; Lizzie Eustace’s marriage connections persevere with their purpose of regaining for themselves the late baronet’s alleged gift to his wife. Lady Eustace’s besetting weaknesses do not prevent her good looks and captivating manners from attracting suitors for her hand. Amongst these are Frank Greystock, one of Trollope’s most conventional and least interesting specimens of gilded youth; Lord Fawn, a titled booby, afterwards promoted to a place among the lay figures in the parliamentary sketches; and another sprig of nobility, Lord George de Bruce Carruthers, of doubtful reputation and of a bold, bad, buccaneer appearance. Each of these, however, when it comes to the point, fights off; Lizzie Eustace, to her chagrin, is left without one of the trousered sex in tow. At this extremity, there appears on the scene an ecclesiastical candidate for what she is pleased to call her heart. This white-chokered adventurer is the Rev. Joseph Emilius, partly Jew, partly Pole, and wholly scamp, being, in fact, the popular preacher who in Phineas Redux commits the murder of Mr. Bonteen, on suspicion of which Phineas is arrested. But by that time Emilius, having served his turn, has ceased to be Lady Eustace’s second husband in anything but name.

Unlike Gladstone, Disraeli did not consume much contemporary fiction, parrying any questions on the subject with, “when I want to read a novel, I write one.” Nor, except to Matthew Arnold, did he often talk to authors about their works. But soon after the appearance of The Eustace Diamonds, meeting Trollope at Lord Stanhope’s dinner-table, the great man said to our novelist, “I have long known, Mr. Trollope, your churchmen and churchwomen; may I congratulate you on the same happy lightness of touch in the portrait of your new adventuress?” By 1879, some five years after Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, there had been completed the process of incubation, resulting in the second of the two colonial stories, John Caldigate.

That novel, chiefly written during the voyage to South{281} Africa, presently to be mentioned, had for its scene the Australian gold-diggings. We have long since seen how, during his Harrow days, Anthony Trollope, as a day boy, lived with his father at Julians. Of that there is some reminiscence in the intercourse under the old family roof between the actual owner of the Cambridgeshire estate called Folking and his heir. The two have hot words; the quarrel ends in John’s selling the right of entail to his father for a lump sum in hard cash. With this he pays his debts. Together with an old college friend, Dick Shand, he sets off for the Australian goldfields.

The girl he loves has been left behind him, but on his way out he is ensnared by Mrs. Smith, a mysterious lady with a past, fascinating by her manner rather than her beauty, and now provided by her relatives with a passage out that she may not get into mischief nearer home. Some time after their arrival at the diggings, Dick Shand, whose weakness has always been drink, breaks out and disappears, leaving no trace behind. Caldigate perseveres, finds first one nugget, then another. At this rate he by and by comes back a rich man. The first thing done by the masterful and newly-fledged young Crœsus is to seek and obtain reconciliation with his equally masterful father. Next, having borne down her mother’s fierce opposition, he marries his boyhood’s flame, Hester Bolton, the daughter of his father’s banker.

The young couple’s wedded happiness is interrupted by the appearance of Mrs. Smith, together with John Caldigate’s old goldfield pals, Tom Crinkett and Mick Maggott. These have bought Caldigate’s claim for a large sum, only to find the gold suddenly give out. Hence their demand for half the purchase-money’s (£20,000) return, under threat of a charge of bigamy for having married Hester while an earlier wife, Mrs. Smith, was yet alive. Thoroughly scared, Caldigate places his affairs in a solicitor’s hands, but commits the fatal mistake of paying as hush-money the £20,000 demanded by the conspirators. This, of course, tells heavily against him at the trial, and he has to face other evidence, at least as damning. The{282} charge of bigamy, on which the trial takes place, is supported by an envelope addressed in John Caldigate’s writing to Mrs. John Caldigate. As to this, Caldigate admits having once written the words in jest, but denies having sent the envelope, which, it must be added, bears the Post Office stamp. In the face of such evidence the jury could do nothing but convict. After the verdict, Hester finds herself a wife without a husband; her refusal to return home is followed by her capture, and forcible detention beneath the parental roof. But now there begins a sequence of events, all combining to establish John Caldigate’s innocence and to promise liberation from prison.

In manipulating the official details that are to make John Caldigate a free man, Trollope shows the same painstaking ingenuity as he had done during his term of Irish duty in bringing to light the frauds of the Connemara postmaster. An amusingly acute Post Office clerk proves the stamp on the envelope to have been manufactured after the date recorded in the stamp. It was, therefore, a clear case of fake. Next, Dick Shand surprises everyone by coming home to depose on oath that the alleged marriage could not by any possibility have taken place at the time alleged. Finally, the conspirators quarrel over their respective shares in the £20,000, whose payment so disastrously incriminated Caldigate. One of the gang turns Queen’s evidence; doing so, he secures the release of the prisoner, who returns to his faithful wife.

It is as unpleasant as it is a powerful story; at not a few points equal in graphic vigour and in harrowing multiplicity of incident to the strong but revoltingly painful descriptions which mark another of Charles Reade’s novels of colonial as well as maritime adventure, Hard Cash. The pictures of goldfield life are suggestive enough as far as they go, but would certainly have been better had not Trollope felt himself under the necessity of having the book finished on his arrival at Cape Town.

Noticeable for the rapidity of its movement, as well as the freshness of its description, this second and last{283} colonial novel contains a study of character, executed with as much power and care as is to be found in any of the later stories. Mrs. Bolton, Hester’s mother, is an object-lesson of evangelicalism, seen, not in the actual teaching, but in its results. Bromley, the Vicar of Folking, Caldigate’s native place, is a typical easy-going clergyman, a favourite with the squire, and, as we are left to conclude, with all his right-thinking parishioners. Mrs. Bolton, unfortunately, has taken her theology from those less genial, and, indeed, Calvinistic teachers, at whom, though no fresh representative of the class is mentioned by name, Trollope deals a farewell blow. Mrs. Bolton, a strong-minded woman, is not in herself bad-hearted. But for the downright inhumanity of her religious principles, she would have been a good and wise parent instead of a bitter Low Churchwoman. It is of course a painful, but an effective picture, because brought out under its author’s pervading and deep conviction in these matters. The increasing bitterness of Trollope’s anti-evangelical temper was not merely an inheritance of the spirit of his mother’s Vicar of Wrexhill, or his early association with F. W. Faber and other Oxford Anglicans already mentioned; it came also from his own disappointing experience of what he considered evangelicalism’s effects on the happiness and character of those he loved. Not later than July 21, 1877, had been the date fixed by the author for sending in the complete manuscript. On that day he had no sooner landed in South Africa than he dropped his packet into the Cape Town Post Office; for at least half the novel was written during Trollope’s voyage to South Africa.

“A poor, niggery, yellow-faced, half-bred sort of place, with an ugly Dutch flavour about it,” was the visitor’s earliest impression of the region in which he had just set foot. It improved a little on acquaintance; but never interested or impressed him in the same way as Australia. He found it, however, equally favourable to pedestrianism and penmanship. “I am,” he said in one of his home letters, “on my legs every day among the hills for four hours, and every day, too, I do my four hours writing{284} about what I have seen and heard, after the fashion of our friend Froude.[32] I then sleep eight hours without stirring. The other eight hours are divided between reading and eating, with preponderance to the latter.” “The one person,” wrote Trollope to a Scotch friend in 1878, “who has most struck me here, is a certain young compatriot of yours, Leander Starr Jameson, who has just started in medical practice at Kimberley, and in whom I see qualities that will go to the making of events in this country.” When free from the influence of personal feeling, Trollope was seldom far out in his estimates of character. This acute presage concerning the then little known future leader of the famous raid was first confided, if I mistake not, to John Blackwood, the sole recipient of many of Trollope’s best sayings, and the friend whom he valued more highly than he did any other member of his own generation. After a really touching and unique fashion, Trollope, nine years earlier, had shown his attachment to the famous Scotch publisher; for, in 1870, he had contributed Cæsar to the Ancient Classics series, the copyright being a free present to “my old friend John Blackwood.”

On the other hand, Blackwood found in Trollope none of the obstinacy about which he had heard from others, but a most pleasant and docile readiness to profit in his work by a publisher’s hints. In his quite affectionate acknowledgment of the Cæsar, he said, “I value it the more because I have looked this gift-horse in the mouth.” “Your new classical venture,” said Blackwood to Trollope, “was in a line so different from anything else you had done, that I scanned it closely; I can, therefore, speak of its merits.”

Long before this, indeed, Trollope had been cited by Blackwood as a model contributor. Charles Reade resented some of Blackwood’s proposed emendations, especially in the case of some interminably diffuse love-{285}making scenes or conversations. “I have,” mildly rejoined the publisher, “but ventured on submitting to you considerations, which other authors of great experience in such feminine matters, for instance, Trollope, willingly received.” Relations between the two novelists were already a little strained because of Trollope’s complaint that Reade had taken the notion of the play The Wandering Heir from his own story Ralph the Heir. Blackwood’s compliments to Trollope must have rankled in Reade’s heart; for about this time Reade alluded to Trollope as a literary knobstick, a publisher’s rat, and other pleasant terms including, I think, his favourite reproach of Homunculus. But peace-making friends intervened, and the matter settled itself almost as amicably as at Bob Sawyer’s supper table in Lant Street borough.

The volumes on South Africa, begun the very day John Caldigate left Cape Town for Edinburgh, were issued by Chapman and Hall. The subject had at least for some time been full of topical interest. In the May of 1875 the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, had proposed to Sir Henry Berkeley, the Cape Town Governor, to confederate the three British colonies, Cape Town, Natal, Griqua Land West, and the two Dutch republics, The Orange River Free State, and The Transvaal Republic. J. A. Froude, the historian, then travelling for his health’s sake after his wife’s death, had, at the Minister’s wish, surveyed the possibilities of the federation on the spot. Local jealousies prevented the scheme from being carried through, or rather reduced a great imperial project to a mere enabling measure in the South African Act of August 1877. During 1874 the popular concern for South African affairs culminated in the Langalibalele rising and the shortly following Zulu War with Cetewayo. Then came Sir Theophilus Shepstone’s annexation of The Orange River Free State diamond-fields, and Sir Bartle Frere’s Cape Governorship and South African High Commissionership followed in 1877.

No two nineteenth century men of letters were personally more unlike each other than James Anthony Froude{286} and Anthony Trollope. “Old Trollope, after banging about the world so long, now treading in my footsteps, and, like an intellectual bluebottle, buzzing about at Cape Town” was the historian’s characteristic comment, made in his softest and silkiest tones on the novelist’s voyage to the country, visited by himself some seven years earlier. Trollope secured his object by getting out his South African book some two years before Froude, in 1880, had published a line on the subject. In the Kimberley district, Trollope, we have already seen, had discovered the historic “Dr. Jim.” He next made the acquaintance and sounded the praises of the clever young lady Miss Olive Schreiner, author of The Story of an African Farm, published on Trollope’s instance by Chapman and Hall.

In 1878, however, no really popular work about the southern parts of the dark continent had appeared before Trollope’s volumes. These drew the Cape provinces, Natal, The Transvaal, and the diamond fields in The Orange River Free State exactly as at the time they were, and liberally relieved their purely historical or descriptive contents with touches often as instructive as they were humorous, revealing scenery and character by the flashlight of a representative anecdote or well-turned phrase. The Transvaal annexation, accomplished before his visit, is called, in a rather Carlylean phrase, one of the “highest-handed acts in history”: “It was,” said Trollope, “a typical instance of the beneficent injustice of the British.” For the rest, diamond-fields and goldmines alike struck him as a “meretricious means of attracting population to the country.” The Boer farmers are very fine fellows of their kind, most unhandsomely treated by all English writers except himself. As for the proposed withdrawal from The Transvaal, it is an idea only worthy of a pusillanimous dunderhead. The reception given to the South African book by the critics and public markedly indicated a recovery of the popularity which a year or two earlier had seemed for the moment on the wane. The Times declared it had not a page uninstructive or dull. The Athenæum found that, coming in the nick of time, it{287} admirably supplied a public want. “Full of freshness and individuality in all its presentations, social and political,” said The Academy. “Always judicious, often very entertaining, and only from sometimes excessive zeal a trifle diffuse,” chimed in The Spectator.

More satisfactory and important to Trollope than the book’s mere success was the attention it secured from colonial readers, both at home and abroad, more particularly with the South African department of the Colonial Office in Whitehall. Lord Carnarvon was then responsible for the government of Greater Britain. Before his retirement from the Beaconsfield administration on the advance of the British fleet to Constantinople early in 1878, he had read or heard enough of the work to find its views of South African federation of more value to a responsible statesman than the details, bearing on that subject, already brought back to him by Froude from the Cape. This fact soon developed into intimacy what had hitherto been only a casual acquaintance. There then lived, at the age of seventy-six, the third Earl Grey; he had been the singularly able and unsympathetic Colonial Minister in the Russell administration of 1846. Trollope and Lord Carnarvon chanced, one day, to come out together from a room in the Athenæum where Lord Grey was. “His mistake,” said Trollope, referring to Russell’s ex-Colonial Secretary, “always seemed to be his domination by the idea of its being possible to give representative institutions and to stop short of responsible government, after the English fashion under Elizabeth and the Stuarts.” It was a casual remark, but associated itself with an episode in Trollope’s life about which something must be said in the next chapter.{288}

CHAPTER XV

CLOSING ACQUAINTANCES, SCENES, AND BOOKS

THE intimacy with the fourth Lord Carnarvon, and the warm welcome awaiting him, on his frequent visits to Highclere in or after 1878, were the direct social results of Trollope’s colonial travels and books, especially of his South African experiences. “My own Post Office work,” Trollope once said to me, “together with my own ideas of colonial administration, naturally attracted me to a colonial Minister who, before becoming the head of the department, had a hand in abolishing the old Australian mail service, in creating the Encumbered States Act for the West Indies, in improving England’s African relations with France by the exchange of Albuda for Portendic, in terminating the Hudson Bay monopoly, and of creating British Columbia as an imperial dependency. I could not but contrast Lord Grey’s colonial policy between 1846 and 1852 with Lord Carnarvon’s, which immediately followed. To do this was to see that Carnarvon understood what Grey had always missed, {289}

HARTING GRANGE. SOUTH ENTRANCE.

the vigorous aspiration for self-government natural to an Anglo-Saxon community side by side with the weakness that must beset an executive representing a democracy.” Like other colonial observers, Trollope had been struck by certain resemblances between the condition of New Zealand and the Cape, in that they both required English protection from the natives. “In New Zealand,” continued Trollope, “I saw enough to be sure that there could never have been any chance of quiet for ourselves or safety for the natives until our troops were recalled, and the colonists, forced to rely on their own resources, tried mild and just measures instead of violent ones.” In due time the last regiment was withdrawn, and the trouble with the Maoris ceased. “Generally,” maintained Trollope, “a colony soon becomes a nation, and a spirited nation will not tolerate the control of its internal affairs by a distant Government.” Admitting this in the course of their many conversations on the subject, Carnarvon accepted Trollope’s view that the first business of the Colonial Office was to secure a maximum of profit from the connection. This, the Minister and the novelist agreed, must constitute a moral guarantee that separation, when it comes, will be on mutually amicable terms.

The fourth Lord Carnarvon’s Hampshire hospitalities during the nineteenth century’s last quarter were the social expression of an intellectual idea. Without any parade of preparatory effort, they seemed naturally to reproduce something that was characteristic of Cicero’s country-house parties at his Tusculum and much more that reminded many, Matthew Arnold included, of Falkland’s week-end feast of reason and flow of soul at Great Tew. At Highclere, Trollope frequently met not only the leading colonial politicians of the period, but scholars, lay or clerical, as J. R. Green, J. R. Seeley, Charles Kingsley, H. P. Liddon, as well as representatives of the rising talent and the new learning from Oxford and Cambridge, and sometimes from the foreign Universities. On these occasions he took an innocent boyish pleasure in displaying the Wykehamist hall-mark, liked to feel,{290} and quietly letting it be known that he could read at least Roman authors otherwise than after Colonel Newcome’s manner—in a translation, you know, in a translation. It was in the Highclere smoking-room that, capping one of Trollope’s familiar quotations, Robert Browning added, “My dear Trollope, this display of classical lore really reminds one of Thackeray’s scholar who had earned fame and the promise of a bishopric by his masterly translation of Cornelius Nepos.” Trollope’s earliest magazine work—for the Dublin University—had given him the opportunity of rubbing up and trotting out his juvenile acquaintance with Cæsar. This afterwards expanded itself into the volume gratuitously contributed, as already described, to Blackwood’s series. Rather less than ten years later, some classical small talk with his host, Robert Herbert, Robert Browning, and an Eton master, Mr. Everard, at Highclere recalled to him his early interest in Cicero, as well as of certain notes made from much miscellaneous reading on the subject. These Ciceronian studies furnished forth the two volumes issued by Chapman and Hall in 1880.

“An unconventional attempt to clothe an ancient Roman with modern interest,” were the words aptly used by Sir William Gregory, Trollope’s old Harrow contemporary, himself a Ciceronian student, to characterise this book. Approaching his subject, not as a scholar or historian, Trollope treats it in a style lively and amusing throughout. The sympathy with Cicero, especially in exile, is as delightful and refreshingly genuine as if Trollope were describing the difficulties of Phineas Finn or the troubles, during his wife’s absence, of Mr. Furnival in Orley Farm. There are the same enlightening good sense and shrewdness in the description of Roman political parties and their leaders as form the best portion of the novels describing the rivalries of Daubeny and Gresham, and analysing the personal or political situations so severely testing the wisdom and the patience of Mr. Palliser and the Duke of Omnium. Of course, Cicero brought criticisms from a few experts.{291} T. A. Trollope, Anthony’s elder brother, as well as severe disciplinarian in their Winchester days, had been a classical master under Jeune at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. He had therefore cultivated a more exact kind of learning than Anthony. “You ought,” he said after Cicero came out, “to have let me correct the Latin words in your proof. As it is, having, in your first volume, tried successively Quintillian and Quintilian, in your second you finally relapse into Quintillian. In another error you are at least consistent; for Pætus is always given for Pœtus. Indeed,” he continued, “these diphthongs have been among your worst enemies, because œdile is your standing version for ædile, while by Œschilus I know—what others could only guess—that you mean Æschylus.” More sympathetic censors ignored these literal slips, but could not be blind to so serious an error as occurs in vol. ii. 20, placing the Rostra in the Senate instead of the Forum. It was to be expected also that so keen a censor as Trollope’s Winchester contemporary, Robert Lowe, Lord Sherbrooke, would have had something to say about the proprætor Verres being loosely described as invested with prætorian or consular powers.

Whatever its merits or defects, Cicero at least resembled most of Trollope’s books in being the literary expression of his personality. From The Warden in 1855 to Cicero in 1880 nearly everything in Trollope’s work—character, incident, description, dialogue—was a natural emanation from the man himself, fresh, spontaneous, and unforced. If, by comparison with those which preceded them, there seems something artificial in the stories still to be mentioned, the reason is that he had never lived in the same intimacy, as he himself put it, with his new personages as he had done with the old. He had set himself to describe no longer friends, but strangers. Since he began with The Macdermots in 1847, he had seen many changes in the popular taste for fiction. He had himself encountered successfully many rivals. Wilkie Collins, Whyte-Melville, Miss Braddon, and Shirley Brooks had successively come on. Against all he{292} held his own; he did not even suffer from Charles Lever’s competition. The creator of Harry Lorrequer and Charles O’Malley began writing books that took ground, and were in a vein, which Trollope had already made his own. The later Leverian novels, beginning with The Daltons and continuing with Sir Brook Fossbrooke, seemed to many, if actually they were not, bids against Trollope’s The Claverings, Orley Farm, and Can You Forgive Her? They did not diminish the demand for those of Trollope’s books that were variations upon the Barchester series.

Meanwhile, the social conditions of the time had changed as well as the writers. The old exclusive régime in which Trollope had been born and bred was already doomed. The time-honoured class and caste barriers were broken down. The new social fusion was all but complete. The Stock Exchange and Lombard Street had overflowed into St. James’s. The new wealth had possessed itself of the same acres, and the typical country-house was a glorified edition of the Piccadilly palace. At the same time domestic and social scandals, to be particularised hereafter, semi-detached couples, elderly bucks, being also professional lady-killers, and loveless marriages with all their tragic results, became so common as no longer to attract notice.

As Bacon took all nature for his province, so Trollope had no sooner overpassed the limits of country-house and rectory than he began to make his novel a complete mirror of English life on all levels up-to-date. He may have been occasionally mortified by a passing decline in the demand for Christmas stories and for magazine serials from his pen. He never thought much about the posthumous vitality of his works; although nineteenth-century pictures, clerical or secular, of town or country, of club or drawing-room, of the covert side, of the Government office, of barrister’s chambers, and of the law courts, could not but have, at some future time, the same value for the historian as Fielding and Smollett possessed for Macaulay and Lecky. He realised the necessity, above all things, of guarding himself against{293} the charge of literary old-fogeydom. Before completing his sixtieth year he had been continually at work during more than a generation. He must therefore show that he had moved with the times by modernising his themes and their treatment. The anxiety to convince the public that he had as keen an eye as ever for the very newest actualities of the time is especially noticeable in He Knew He Was Right (1869)[33] and The Way We Live Now (1875).[34]

The former of these first came out in sixpenny parts during 1867. As originally designed by Trollope it was intended, on something the same scale as had been done by Dickens in the Steerforth episode of David Copperfield, to illustrate the tragical results, to social life and personal character, of unbridled and obstinate self-will—a quality, be it noted, equally characteristic of both novelists. Dickens, however, pointed his moral by the single case of Steerforth. In Trollope’s story, each of the chief personages is opinionated and dictatorial to the same degree; in other words, all go wrong simply because all in turn know they are right. So, it has been seen, in Can You Forgive Her? the heroine’s need of pardon was shared by more than one other lady, as well as by at least two men.

In He Knew He Was Right, Colonel Osborne, the wealthy, middle-aged rather than elderly, Conservative M.P. and professional lady-killer, has known Mrs. Trevelyan from girlhood. He therefore thinks it the correct thing to laugh at old Lady Milborough’s description of him as a serpent, a hyena, or a kite, and, by his attentions to attractive young maidens, to provoke, in Lady Milborough’s phrase, such domestic break-ups as he brings about under the Trevelyans’ roof. On the other hand, Mr. Trevelyan feels convinced beyond a doubt that, while wronging his wife by no suspicions of the worst kind, it is his duty to warn her strongly against the Colonel, and risk one of Lady Milborough’s break-ups, rather than allow Osborne’s visits.{294}

The best piece of character drawing is Colonel Osborne. After this the neatest touches come in the Devonshire scenes describing Mrs. Trevelyan’s movements after the flight from Curzon Street. The pictures of the quiet home life, in or near Exeter, reproduce as regards places and persons the same originals which were used in Rachel Ray. In the later, as well as in the earlier novel, are reflected the same central figure, the old-world maiden lady, and some of the same young people whom in real life she gathered about her. The hostess, known by Trollope from his childhood, was Miss Fanny Bent. Her youthful visitors were Rachel Hutchinson, the doctor’s daughter, and Lucy Bowring, with perhaps one or two schoolfellows brought by her from the neighbouring paternal roof known as Claremont. Here Sir John Bowring passed his closing years. Here, too, Anthony Trollope first studied the feminine types who afterwards grew into Lily Dale, Lucy Robarts, Grace Crawley, Florence Burton, and Julia Brabazon. The last of these characters, as she appeared in the first chapter of The Claverings, was, indeed, no other than Lucy Bowring herself, photographed from life. Without exception probably, the portraits of English girls that have made half Trollope’s fame are from Devonian or other West of England models. Stiffness and wrong-headedness were infirmities to which Trollope himself frankly confessed. Of those defects he has entirely compacted the brilliant, wealthy, but suicidally perverse and obstinate Oxonian, Louis Trevelyan. The gloomy and painful plot derives no pleasant relief from the comic or lighter business, centred round the irritatingly vulgar detective, Bozzle. This debased descendant of Inspector Bucket in Bleak House fools the miserable and infatuated husband to the top of his bent; at times he shows off his sharpness by insinuations so fanciful and odious against the runaway wife, that, without the novelist saying so, one knows it is as much as Trevelyan can do to keep from knocking him down.

Like one or two other of Trollope’s feminine characters, who show their independence by sailing dangerously close{295} to the wind, Mrs. Trevelyan is thoroughly equal to taking care of herself, and, from the ethical point of view, never comes near reproach. With a little more tact, patience and wisdom, on her husband’s part, she would never have been piqued into allowing Osborne’s attentions. She has been exasperated by Trevelyan’s unreasonable exactions. So too, in Phineas Finn, Kennedy’s conjugal accusations make Lady Laura return to her father; but Emily Trevelyan has not been really compromised by her mature admirer. Had her lord and master been less self-conscious and more a man of the world than he is, he would not have fallen a victim to his own groundless jealousy.

When treating feminine subjects, Dickens and Trollope are equally given to represent their subordinate heroines as playing with fire, or forced by circumstances into situations calculated to soil virtue itself or to set malicious tongues wagging against purity incarnate. Sometimes, as with Sir Leicester Dedlock’s wife, and Sir Joseph Mason’s widow, the case is that of a lady with a past. Punishment when due is not escaped entirely, but the wind is generally tempered to the shorn lamb, while both novelists upon occasion invoke special providences for mitigating, if not averting the penalty due to the actually fallen. Thus, in David Copperfield, ruin comes indifferently to little Em’ly and Martha; but it seems only in accordance with the fitness of things that the catastrophe should not be equally full of horror in both cases. Poetical justice, therefore, and the kindlier influences of her early nurture ordain Em’ly’s partial rescue from the hideous blackness of poor Martha’s fate. Trollope’s later and less known novels contain no better character than Lady Mabel Grex in The Duke’s Children. But for her own fine nature and great qualities she would assuredly have been doomed to the irreparable ruin, her deliverance from which comes equally from superhuman guidance and her own heroic self-discipline. Edith Dombey cannot be said to have been allowed by Dickens a narrow escape, because she was never in any real danger. Her mother’s training could not but make her an adventuress; her husband’s short-{296}sighted pride had to be humbled by an elopement which would indeed disgrace his name, but whose circumstances could bring no stain on her. In chastising, by their flight, their respective husbands, Dickens’ second Mrs. Dombey and the Mrs. Trevelyan of He Knew He Was Right, to some extent, resemble each other; while in both cases the wifely vengeance recoils with nearly equal severity upon the lady. Generally, however, Trollope lets off more easily than does Dickens his fair triflers with the hearts of men. Thus, in Great Expectations, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, Estella, is punished as she deserves for trifling with Pip’s affections by being paired off with the surly and ill-conditioned Bentley Drummle. The arch-jilt of Can You Forgive Her?, Alice Vavasor, issuing scatheless from all her escapades, is not punished at all, but may well thank her stars in becoming the mistress of a comfortable Cambridgeshire country-house as the talented, well-to-do and long-suffering John Grey’s wife.[35]

Trollope’s next attempt at satirising the most malignant social tendencies of the time exposed the idolatry of the golden calf, and in its conception owed something to the pregnant remarks of one of the most influential among his contemporaries. During the season of 1875, Trollope’s hitherto slight acquaintance with Delane of The Times matured into intimacy. At this time the great editor was much impressed by the growth of extravagance and the increase of reckless speculation in the overgrown and mischievously mixed conglomerate of London society. The subject was one on which he and Trollope thought exactly alike. With equal disgust and indignation both observed the acceptance of mere wealth as a passport to the company of men and women who were social leaders by right of birth. In their many talks about these subjects originated both Trollope’s The Way We Live Now and a certain Times article presently to be mentioned. On resettling in London after his colonial expeditions, Trollope had established himself in Montagu Square. The first piece of work he did here was the novel in whose most{297} prominent figure, Melmotte, a grotesque and nauseating monstrosity, he personified the commercial corruptions of the time with all their brutalising effects upon character, as in private, so in public life.

Grouped round, and more or less associated with the over-coloured financier, Melmotte, were many smaller personages representing or suggesting other vicious propensities of the period. The bloated and ferocious plutocrat has a vulgar but otherwise unobjectionable daughter whom, when she dares any details to cross his will or stand in the way of his villainies, he cuts into pieces—in plain English, horsewhips within an inch of her life. There are other young ladies as unattractive as Marie Melmotte, but less inoffensive. These are the girls who expend their energies and innocence in intrigues to get husbands, not for love, but for the enjoyment of greater freedom and more pocket-money. Melmotte himself carries about him a certain suggestion of Baron Albert Grant in the past, and of Whitaker Wright in the days that were then yet to come. The deterioration of Club life is shown by the blackguard interior of the Beargarden, where stripling debauchees, who sponge on their polite paupers of mothers, and venal and pretentious newspaper hacks eat, drink, and rampage at unholy hours.

Chronology might deny the statement that the Printing House Square manifesto already referred to supplied Trollope with a brief for this book; but both the novel and the article came out in the same year. Each, in its different way, was a commentary on a state of things in which the editor and the novelist would have willingly co-operated in bringing to an end. Trollope’s Melmotte was an exaggerated type of the French, German, and American adventurers who, in Delane’s words, gorge like vultures on the country. These, said the editor, were the men whom English gentlemen of family and station competed with each other in helping to fleece society. These, too, were the qualities concentrated by the novelist in the mammoth speculator of Grosvenor Square, who, before the crash, made himself the demi-god of the season by his splendid{298} hospitalities to no less a person than the “Emperor of China.”

One of the incidents which had chiefly moved Delane, breaking through his editorial custom to pen with his own hand his lay sermon, was this. During the early seventies an English nobleman of ancient title and descent, but of diminished territorial wealth, partly by games of chance in which there seemed some suspicion of foul play, and partly by City speculation into which he was enticed, had lost something like £10,000 to a Californian colonel, long since kicked out of all decent company. This swindling Midas, who had winged Delane’s pen, gave Trollope more than a hint for Melmotte in The Way We Live Now. Any resemblance borne by Melmotte to another fraudulent and glorified capitalist, the Merdle of Little Dorrit, is purely fortuitous. Trollope’s intimate friend Sir Henry James once, in my hearing, mentioned the matter to him, to be told “The Way We Live Now appeared in 1875; I only read Little Dorrit for the first time on my way to Germany in 1878.”

During their founder’s and original editor’s life, Trollope wrote for none of Dickens’ magazines. After 1870 All the Year Round was carried on by Charles Dickens the second; his very capable manager G. Holsworth urged him to secure a novel from Trollope. This was written and published; and Mr. Scarborough’s Family[36] was the most deliberately and elaborately satirical of all Trollope’s stories. Mr. Scarborough has conceived and nursed, till it becomes something like a monomania, a detestation of legal restrictions generally and of those imposed by the law of entail in particular. He has therefore, with an ingenuity which highly delights him, contrived his own independence of primogeniture by going through two marriage ceremonies with the mother of his eldest son. One of these rites has been celebrated before that son’s birth, and one after. There are also of course two marriage certificates, each relating to the same nuptials, but each bearing a different date.{299}

According therefore to the document he displays, he can at will prove his eldest son legitimate or illegitimate. This son, Mountjoy, a reckless but amiable spendthrift, has a heartless, calculating and mercenary younger brother, Augustus. Mountjoy, by post-obits and things of that sort, has pledged the paternal property to the Jews. At any cost Scarborough resolves that his fine estate, Tretton Park, shall be kept from the money-lenders. He therefore declares Mountjoy a bastard, and so disqualifies him for inheriting. Thus the younger of the two brothers, Augustus, feels no doubt of soon possessing the acres that, but for the blot on his scutcheon, would have gone to Mountjoy. Meanwhile Mr. Scarborough says nothing, but buys up all Mountjoy’s apparently valueless post-obits. He thus, at comparatively slight expense, gives his alleged natural son a pecuniarily clean slate.

This done he dashes to the ground the hopes of his younger son Augustus by suddenly displaying his first marriage certificate as proof of Mountjoy’s birth in wedlock. Having thus tricked successively all whom it suited his humour to deceive, Mr. Scarborough has no more to do than quietly breathe his last.

The irony and Mephistophelian fun of the story are not confined to the situations now described, but overflow very effectively into the amusingly drawn scenes with the duped and furious money-lenders.

The life at Waltham Cross had been more that of an Essex squire with sporting tastes than of a hard-working author or a busy official. It was an existence whose charm, as years went on, Trollope found himself bent on tasting once more. While casting about for a suitable place, he heard of what seemed as near perfection as possible, in West Sussex. North End, or, as it is to-day known, The Grange, lies in Harting parish, some twelve miles from Chichester and four from Petersfield. At one time two farmhouses, but now joined together, it is among the best and prettiest buildings in the district. Surrounded by an estate of nearly seventy acres, its long line of windows and doors opens on a delightful lawn, with a background of{300} copse, studded with Scotch firs and larches. Under these a long walk, worthy of Windsor or Kensington, starting from the garden gate, leads through fields up to a South Down hill. On the lawn itself might have been seen, even since Trollope’s day, at one end, the greenhouse, whose flowers he used to tend. Nor were his North End days passed less industriously than those in Montagu Square, where he had pitched his tent on his return from Australia. His hours were, nominally, almost the same as in the strenuous days when he first cultivated the habit of very early rising, so as to get through the daily task of authorship before being due either at Post Office inspection or a meet of hounds, as the case may be. A cup of hot coffee and milk carried him on till a solid breakfast at about nine; when he sat down to that meal the day’s literary labours had generally been altogether finished.

Only some time after leaving the Post Office, in 1868, did he extensively use dictation for his novels. Good fortune gave him, while still at Montagu Square, for his amanuensis a niece, Miss Bland. Apropos of her sympathetic co-operation, he once said to me: “However early the hour, however dull and depressing the dawn, we soon warm to our work and get so excited with those we are writing about, that I don’t know whether she or I are most surprised when the time comes to leave off for breakfast.”

Trollope seemed in excellent health on settling at North End, Harting, as well as throughout his stay there. But gradually he left his bed later than formerly, and often reduced the number of words forming the diurnal task. Together with this he increased his local hospitalities, as well as enlarged his active interest in all parish concerns whether of business or pleasure. Penny Readings were in those days still popular. Trollope not only patronised and assisted at them, but delighted his rural neighbours by securing on the platform, or in the body of the room, some of his well-known London visitors, notably Sir Henry James and J. E. Millais; while the picturesque surroundings of his Sussex home inspired another guest, the Poet Laureate, Mr. Alfred Austin, with one among the most{301} charming of his later works, The Garden that I Love. Not once during his stay at Harting did Trollope see the Goodwood or Hambledon foxhounds “throw off”; and he did not spend more time in the saddle on the South Downs than he would have done during his equestrian constitutionals in Hyde Park.

Ireland first had, in 1847, made Anthony Trollope a novelist. His pen was being exercised on an Irish subject when death took it from his fingers. Before, however, beginning The Land Leaguers, he had, in 1879, published a short story, An Eye for an Eye, whose scene is laid in county Clare.

Mrs. O’Hara’s life had been ruined by a marriage with a drunken and cruel husband, from whom she has fled. To avoid him, she lives with her daughter Kate in an obscure corner of the Clare coast. To the barracks at the neighbouring town, Ennis, comes Fred Neville, heir to the Scroope earldom, a handsome, charming, morally weak, but altogether irresistible scamp. His acquaintance with Kate leads to an engagement, the declared prelude of an early marriage. Neville’s English relatives succeed in preventing this, but not before Kate’s personal surrender to her lover. The hateful husband now renews his persecutions of the lady who has the misfortune to be his wife. Mrs. O’Hara, maddened by these fresh troubles and by her daughter’s ruin, contrives with her own hand Neville’s fatal fall over a cliff. After this Kate goes abroad to take care of her father, now a broken invalid. Mrs. O’Hara loses her wits and passes the rest of her days in a mad-house. This unpleasant and painful story has no other interest than that of mere horror. It is as depressing and sombre as The Kellys and the O’Kellys without any of the humorous sidelights which in parts relieve the earlier work.

The other Irish novel was written almost concurrently with a very slight sketch, An Old Man’s Love—his last completed story—a year after The Land Leaguers. The writing of The Land Leaguers had been prepared for by his final stay, during some weeks, on the other side of St. George’s Channel, in the spring of 1882. To that period{302} belongs his decisive separation from Gladstonian Liberalism. His warm friendship with W. E. Forster had made him reluctant to leave the Liberals even after he had begun to distrust their policy; but during his stay on the other side of St. George’s Channel in the spring of 1882, he had penetrated the artificial, purely American, and Anti-British origin of Irish Nationalism. The professional agitation-monger against the British connection, as described in The Land Leaguers, was a Yankee, perhaps with some Hibernian strain in his blood, but, from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear, equally ignorant of and indifferent to the welfare and the wants of the population whether from a national or local point of view. Jack-of-all-trades, master of none, he appeared one day as the plausible and patriotic champion of oppressed Erin on the platform; the next, as the promoter of a bogus land company at a Galway market; and then, by a complete change of part, as the insinuating concert or theatrical impresario, who philanthropically puts young ladies with pretty faces, good figures, and voices in the way of making their fortunes and enriching their families. The literary contrasts thus suggested are worked up in The Land Leaguers with pathos and power, as well as old humour.[37]

Trollope’s two greatest contemporaries, Thackeray and Dickens, did not live to finish their last novels, Denis Duval and Edwin Drood respectively. So, too, it was with Trollope himself. After a journey to Italy about a year before his death he prepared himself for writing The Land Leaguers by two tours in Ireland. This was one of the only two books—Framley Parsonage having been the other—whose publication began before the closing chapter had been written; it was therefore destined to remain a fragment.

Of the practically unknown stories belonging to this period, the only one which it would be fair, however briefly, to recall is Dr. Worth’s School (1881). That contains a last addition to the long clerical portrait gallery—a pedagogue in holy orders, in whom, to judge from his temperament, the artist must have taken an autobio{303}graphical interest. For Dr. Wortle has the same reputation as Trollope himself for blustering amiability, an imperious manner and a good heart. With the rectory of Bowick he combines schoolmastering of a very select and remunerative kind. Of course Dr. Wortle himself is too busy, and his wife too preoccupied with parochial or social duties to bestow much personal attention upon the boys. All this is therefore left to the assistant master, Mr. Peacocke, and his wife.

Peacocke, an ex-Fellow of Trinity, has spent much time in America. Here he first met Mrs. Peacocke, a young and beautiful woman, married while a mere girl to a worthless and cruel profligate, Ferdinand Lefroy, who soon afterwards disappears, killed, it is said, in a drunken brawl. The first husband, as will at once be guessed, is not dead but, as he soon shows, very much alive. Peacocke has thus to choose between deserting the defenceless woman, whom, however vainly, he has done all he could to make his wife, or brazening it out, risk the consequences, and refuse to give her up. Adopting that latter course, he makes much trouble for himself, even in such a paradise of matrimonial laxity as the United States. He therefore recrosses the Atlantic with the hope of beginning a new life in his native land. At Dr. Wortle’s, Peacocke is doing well when the story of his own and his wife’s past becomes known. Pressure is now placed on Dr. Wortle to dismiss his immoral usher. His generous refusal to do so loses him nearly all his pupils, and determines Peacocke to search America for evidence that, by conclusively establishing Lefroy’s death, will clear both Dr. Wortle and himself. His errand succeeds. Peacocke brings back with him proof of his having violated neither the marriage law nor the decalogue. The way is therefore open for an indisputably legal union with Mrs. Peacocke. That is followed by the return of prosperity to all persons concerned. The parents who have withdrawn their sons rally round Peacocke’s loyal chief. The curtain falls on the entrance upon the new lease of prosperity of Dr. Wortle’s school and all connected with it.

Few novelists have beat out their gold leaf so thin as{304} was systematically done by Trollope. None but himself have persisted in the practice for years without encountering signs of weariness in their public that have caused them to change their ways. Trollope never felt, or, at least, practically acknowledged such a compulsion. Dr. Wortle’s School only attained to the dimensions of a book, because the story that gives the title to the volume receives the addition of incidents and characters, organically quite unconnected with the central personages and plot. Trollope, therefore, consistently and to the last, in the structure of his novels persevered with a method somewhat apt to try his readers’ patience. In other words, by distracting attention from the creatures of his imagination originally placed in the foreground, he weakens their hold upon the mind. The legitimate or the most serviceable purpose of an underplot is to illustrate from another part of the stage, or on a stage entirely different, those evolutions of character or course of action belonging to the maiden narrative. This was almost as entirely ignored by Trollope as it was thoroughly understood by Dickens.

In Dombey and Son the gipsy underplot is a close parallel to, as well as an apposite commentary on, the principal theme of Mr. Dombey and his second wife. Like Edith Skewton, Alice Brown is a tall, handsome girl, out of whose beauty a grasping and worthless mother makes what capital she can. Alice’s outlook on life is in every particular Edith’s also; one of scorn for herself and her mother, and a weary defiance to the world. Alice, too, resembles Edith in being a much less strong-willed mother’s passive instrument, not from any sympathy with her, but from an utter indifference to good or ill. Further, the personal likeness between the two is explained by the fact of Alice Brown’s being Edith Dombey’s illegitimate sister. Again, it is through Alice’s mother, Mrs. Brown, that Dombey discovers the continental whereabouts of the defaulting Carker and of his own wife. The analogy appears still closer when one remembers that, after the mother’s death, Alice rises above the level to which she had been degraded, without knowing what{305} happiness means. With Dickens, the whole episode is not the less significant because it is shadowy, and its vagueness at no point interferes with the central narrative.

Another quality distinguishing Trollope from most other novelists is a literary style, shown from the first and retained to the last, exactly suited to his subject-matter, appealing at once to the cultivated and the general reader. Writing not for a limited circle—like his junior in years, but, in work, almost his contemporary, Meredith, or his avowed master and idol, Thackeray—with his pen, as in his pursuits, habits, and tastes, he was, after the English manner, essentially masculine. Yet he knew more of the feminine mind and nature than any author of his generation. His descriptions of mixed society in drawing-room or Club may occasionally lack lightness in handling, polish and point. His scenes, humorous or pathetic, serious or trivial, between women alone in seaside lodgings or in country houses, unite with a vividness of presentation a fineness of touch, unique in English fiction. That was the quality apropos of which a London hostess once said to him, “Mr. Trollope, how do you know what we women say to each other when we get alone in our room?” A few hours before this question, being at the Athenæum, he had heard a member of the Club complain that in The Last Chronicle of Barset Mrs. Proudie was still allowed to live. “Feeling sure,” said Trollope, “from this, that the bishopess was beginning to pall on the public, I went home and killed her.” Add to this width, depth, and variety of the interest he excited the fact that he never risked being dull in the affectation or effort of being profound and that, from first to last, his bold, clear, if sometimes diffuse style was tainted by no symptoms of the modern euphuism known as preciosity, Trollope’s claim to the description of a national novelist cannot be denied.

The advance of the story, prose or verse, narrative or dramatic, from the Attic stage to Samuel Richardson, as from the creator of Clarissa to the creator of Hetty Sorrel, has been from incident to character. Character analysis{306} and character casuistry naturally go together. Hence, to some degree it has been already possible to see in Trollope the progenitor of the twentieth-century problem novel. From that point of view, the man, whose development has been traced in these pages, was the typical product, not of a great creative, but of a reflective and critical age. Thus he illustrated, in however different form, the same influences of his age as showed themselves, among prose writers, not only in Meredith, but in Matthew Arnold or Carlyle, in A. W. Kinglake or in Laurence Oliphant; and among poets, in Browning.

The turn for psychological puzzles together with the dissection of human motive and action common to the two men made Trollope Browning’s favourite among contemporary writers. Socially, during the last half of their careers the novelist and the poet led much the same lives, visiting at the same houses and most easily unbending in the same company. One of the latest occasions on which the two met each other was in the grounds of Lambeth Palace in 1882. Their host upon that occasion was Archibald Campbell Tait. By something of a coincidence, before the year was out both the archbishop and that literary guest who was more closely associated by his writings than any English author with the higher and lower orders of the Anglican clergy were dead. Tait died on December 3rd, Trollope on December 6th.

During the two years passed by him at Harting there had been no great decline in his health. After leaving his Sussex home, he saw little again of Montagu Square. With that place, however, those who knew him best always most pleasantly connected his name. There the book-room or study, the scene of nearly all his literary toils, with Miss Bland for his amanuensis, was on the ground-floor behind the dining-room. Above that his books had overflowed into a double drawing-room; one of its chief features was a capacious recess at the north end, fitted with some book-shelves, but chiefly used by him for visitors with whom he wished some special talk. The contents of the shelves now mentioned had a history highly char{307}acteristic of their owner. Robert Bell, the once universally known book-lover, critic, and author, had left to his widow a smaller estate than was expected. His library was announced for sale at Willis and Sotheran’s. “This,” said Trollope, “must not be. We all know the difference in value between buying and selling of books.” He at once saw the executors; the auction arrangements were cancelled. Trollope bought all the volumes at a price, fixed by himself, much above their market worth.

This was only one instance of the kindly and unselfish actions unostentatiously performed by one among the broadest-minded, kindest-hearted of men. Not unreservedly a man of peace himself, he more than once acted as peacemaker, in reconciling to each other friends of his long at variance. Thus a difference originating in the newspaper office (The Daily News) with which they both had to do, kept apart for nearly a generation two of his intimates, Edward Pigott and Edward Dicey. Neither would probably have spoken again to the other but for Trollope’s genial and tactful intervention. This happened during the last eighteen months of his life. His manner in doing it reminded both men of a sixth-form boy who, separating two juniors engaged in fisticuffs, bids them, with a gentle kick, go about their business.

When, in 1873, Trollope had taken the Montagu Square house, it was for the purpose of ending both his days and his work there and there only. The fates, however, had decided against that. In the late autumn of 1882 Trollope reappeared in London, but took up his abode at Garland’s Hotel, Suffolk Street, Pall Mall. On the 3rd of November, while dining at the house of his brother-in-law, Sir John Tilley, he had a paralytic seizure. He was removed to a nursing home at 34 Welbeck Street, and attended by Dr. Murrell with Sir William Jenner in consultation. For a fortnight his condition improved; then came a relapse. Death followed after an illness which had lasted about a month. On the following Saturday, December 9th, he was laid to rest, not far from Thackeray’s grave, in Kensal Green. Among those present at his funeral{308} were: the most famous survivor of his literary generation, Robert Browning; J. E. Millais, his artistic colleague in so many novels; Mr. Alfred Austin; Frederick Chapman, the head of the publishing firm Chapman and Hall, with which during many years previously he chiefly had to do, his own small interest in which he bequeathed to his family; and an Australian friend, Mr. Rusden, as the representative of those colonies where he had long found some of his most loyal readers.

On the same day that Trollope died there died also, at Cannes, the French socialistic writer Louis Blanc, known to Trollope during the years of his London exile, and, it might have been thought, long forgotten by his English acquaintances. Nevertheless the London papers of December 7th, 1882, devoted a larger space to their comments on the French Radical’s career than to the English novelist’s works. The newspaper verdict was generally represented by The Times, which, after a passing reference to his miscellaneous literary activities, correctly enough reflected the public estimate by emphasising Trollope’s sustained hold on his readers and the uniform level of merit during thirty-five years of unceasing work.

His death was immediately followed by some fall in the demand for his writing. Since then, however, time has redressed the balance after so marked a fashion that, among the leading literary features of the twentieth century, a permanent revival of popular interest in the novels and in the man who wrote them will have a place.{309}

A BIBLIOGRAPHY

OF THE

FIRST EDITIONS OF THE WORKS

OF

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

COMPILED BY MARGARET LAVINGTON

WITH NOTES DRAWN CHIEFLY FROM HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
AND FROM INFORMATION KINDLY GIVEN BY HIS SON,
HENRY M. TROLLOPE

{310} 

{311} 

1847

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. 345; Vol. II., pp. 382; Vol. III., pp. 743 (sic). [This figure is plainly a misprint for 437, as the preceding page is numbered 436.]

The plot, which Trollope considered to be as good as any he ever made, of this book, was conceived during a walk with his friend, John Merivale, around the village of Drumsna, Co. Leitrim, in the course of which they came upon the modern ruins of a country-house, as described in Chapter I. It was begun in September 1843, and finished a year after his marriage, which took place in June 1844. His mother, Mrs. Frances Trollope the novelist, arranged for its publication with Mr. Newby, who neither paid the author anything nor rendered an account of the sales which were presumably very small. The sum of £48, 6s. 9d. mentioned in the Autobiography as received for this book was probably therefore in respect of the new edition of 1859. Mr. Henry Merivale Trollope kindly informs me that another copy of the first edition in his possession contains a new and different title-page, as though the publisher, seeing that another novel had been issued, hoped to help the sale of his remaining copies by the additional words, “Author of The Kellys and the O’Kellys.” The book is in all other respects the same. This later title-page reads as follows:

1848

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. 298; Vol. II., pp. 298; Vol. III., pp. 285.

For this book Colburn agreed to pay the author half profits,{312} but actually incurred a loss which amounted to £63, 10s. 1½d. Only 375 copies were printed, and 140 sold. The sum of £123, 19s. 5d., recorded as received for this work, was therefore probably in respect of later editions. The influence of a friend obtained a short notice in the Times to the effect that the book was like a leg of mutton, substantial, but a little coarse, but before this notice appeared Trollope had made up his mind never to ask for, or deplore, criticism; never to thank a critic for praise, or quarrel with him for censure. To this rule he adhered with absolute strictness, and recommended it to all young authors.

1850

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. iv (preface pp. iii-iv), 320; Vol. II., pp. 330; Vol. III., pp. 313.

According to the agreement for this book Trollope was to receive £20 down; £30 when Colburn had sold 350 copies; and £50 more should he sell 450 within six months. The £20 was received, but no more, so that the sales were presumably no larger than before. No reviews of it seem ever to have met Trollope’s eye.

1855

Small 8vo. In One Volume: pp. iv, 336.

Conceived while wandering around Salisbury Cathedral during his work in establishing rural posts, The Warden was begun by Trollope at Tenbury in Worcestershire on July 29, 1852, and finished in Ireland in the autumn of the following year. This was the first book of the series of novels of which Barchester was the central site. He received a cheque for £9, 8s. 8d. at the end of 1855, and £10, 15s. 1d. a year later. A thousand copies were printed, and of these about 300 were converted into another form five or six years later, and sold as belonging to a cheap edition.

A review in the Times rebuked the author for indulging in personalities in the matter of one Tom Towers, introduced by him as a contributor to the Jupiter. But though Trollope had certainly thus alluded to the Times, he was at that period entirely ignorant of the personnel of its staff.{313}

1857

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. 305; Vol. II., p. 299; Vol. III., pp. iv, 321.

Written chiefly in railway trains while investigating the rural postal system of England, Barchester Towers was the second of the series dealing with the bishops, deans, and archdeacon of Barchester. It was published by Longman, after a refusal on the author’s part to curtail the work, on the half-profit system, with the payment of £100 in advance from the half-profits. Writing in 1876, Trollope records a small yearly income from this and the preceding book, The Warden, making together at that date a total of £727, 11s. 3d.

1858

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. iv, 340; Vol. II., pp. iv, 322; Vol. III., pp. iv, 334.

An autobiographical interest marks this book, for the story of how Trollope was admitted into the Secretary’s office of the General Post Office in 1834 by Henry and Clayton Freeling, the sons of Sir Francis, is told in the opening chapters under the guise of Charley Tudor’s admittance into the Internal Navigation Office. The whole scheme of competitive examination is deplored, and its supporters, Sir Charles Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote (afterwards Lord Iddesleigh) appear respectively as Sir Gregory Hardlines and Sir Warwick West End. The book gave official offence.

As Longman was not prepared to buy it outright, Trollope took it to Bentley, who paid him £250 for all rights.

1858

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. iv, 305; Vol. II. pp. iv, 323; Vol. III., pp. iv, 340.

The plot of this book was sketched for Trollope by his brother, Thomas Adolphus, whom he was visiting in Florence in 1857. This was the only occasion on which he had recourse to other brains for{314} the thread of a story. While writing it in Dublin early in 1858, he was asked to go to Egypt to arrange a postal treaty with the Pasha. He sold his book, when passing through London, to Chapman and Hall for £400, Bentley refusing to give more than £300; and finished it in Egypt, writing his allotted number of pages every day, even during sea-sickness on the terribly rough voyage to Alexandria.

By the sales, he judged this to be his most popular book.

1859

8vo. In One Volume: pp. iv, 395. With coloured map.

When Trollope was asked to go to the West Indies to reconstruct the whole of its postal system, he proposed this book to Chapman and Hall, asking £250 for the single volume. The contract was made without difficulty, and he returned with the completed work. His view of the relative position of white men and black was upheld by three articles in the Times, which made the fortune of the book. Trollope regarded it as the best he had ever written.

1859

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. iv. 335; Vol. II., pp. iv. 344; Vol. III., pp. iv. 331.

Begun the day after finishing Doctor Thorne, this book was written under very vagrant circumstances at Alexandria, Malta, Gibraltar, Glasgow, at sea, and finished in Jamaica. It was sold to Chapman and Hall for £400, but never attained the popularity of Doctor Thorne.

Trollope says that he never heard it well spoken of.

1860

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. vi, 303; Vol. II., pp. iv, 300; Vol. III., pp. vi, 289.

Declined by George Smith in November 1859 for the Cornhill{315} Magazine, which was to appear for the first time some eight weeks hence, on the ground that it was an Irish story, this book was published later by Chapman & Hall, as originally intended, after Framley Parsonage had been running in the Cornhill. This was the only occasion on which Trollope had two different novels in his mind at the same time. He asked and obtained £600 for it on the success of The West Indies.

1861

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. 333; Vol. II., pp. 318; Vol. III., pp. 330.

There are two illustrations in each volume, the list being on page iv. (unnumbered) of Vol. I.

Messrs. Smith & Elder, having offered Trollope £1000 for the copyright of a three-volume novel to appear serially in their new venture, the Cornhill, declined Castle Richmond on account of its Irish character, but begged him to frame some other story, suggesting the Church as a theme peculiar to his powers. He thereupon fell back on his old Barchester friends and wrote a tale that became increasingly popular as it proceeded. Framley Parsonage appeared in the Cornhill from January 1860 to April 1861. The author himself doubted the possibility of making a character more life-like than Lucy Robarts.

1861

Small 8vo. In One Volume: pp. 312.

This is the First Series; for the Second, see under 1863.

Contents

La Mère Bauche. Republished from Harper’s New York Magazine.
The O’Conors of Castle Conor. From the same.
John Bull on the Guadalquivir. From Cassell’s Family Paper.
Miss Sarah Jack, of Spanish Town, Jamaica. From the same.
{316}The Courtship of Susan Bell. From Harper’s New York Magazine.
Relics of General Chassé. From the same.
An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids. From Cassell’s Family Paper.
The Château of Prince Polignac. From the same.

Some of these stories reflect Trollope’s own adventures. The second is based on his early days in Ireland, and the third on the chief incident in a journey to Seville.

1862

8vo. Vol. I., pp. viii, 320; Vol. II., pp. viii, 320. Each volume contains twenty illustrations.

Completed before he started for America in 1861, this appeared in twenty shilling numbers, and Trollope obtained £3135. While rating the plot highly he thought it declared itself too soon. Of the illustrations by Millais he wrote: “I have never known a set of illustrations so carefully true, as are these, to the conceptions of the writer of the book illustrated. I say that as a writer. As a lover of art I will add that I know no book graced with more exquisite pictures.” The drawing of Orley Farm itself, in the frontispiece, depicts in reality the farmhouse at Harrow in which the Trollope family lived during the author’s boyhood.

1862

8vo. Vol. I., pp. viii.; folding map, 467; Vol. II., pp. viii, 494 (Appendices A, B, and C, pp. 467-494.)

On the outbreak of the War of Secession in 1861 Trollope applied for nine months’ leave of absence from the Post Office and visited America, writing as he went from State to State. It is interesting to note that, contrary to the very strong feeling in England in favour of the South, he felt with and prophesied the victory of the North. The book met the demand of the moment; second and third editions were published in the same year, and Trollope received £1250.{317}

1863

Small 8vo. In One Volume: pp. 371.

Contents.

1. Aaron Trow.
2. Mrs. General Talboys.
3. The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Colne.
4. George Walker at Suez.
5. The Mistletoe Bough.
6. Returning Home.
7. A Ride Across Palestine.
8. The House of Heine Brothers in Munich.
9. The Man who kept his Money in a Box.

Republished from various periodicals.

For the first of this series see under 1861. For these two books and (probably) for Lotta Schmidt, virtually one of the same series, though the title was discontinued, Trollope received a total sum of £1830. The tales reflect much of his own experiences.

1863

Small 8vo. Vol I., pp. iv, 319; Vol. II., pp. iv, 310.

Written at the request of Dr. Norman Macleod for Good Words, Rachel Ray was partly printed by him, and then returned with profuse apologies as unsuitable—as Trollope had predicted it would be. It therefore appeared in ordinary volume form. A later and cheaper edition contained one illustration by Millais. Trollope received a total of £1645.

1864

Octavo. Vol. I., pp. 312; Vol. II., pp. 316.

Vol. I. contains ten illustrations; Vol. II., eight.

On the conclusion of The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson,{318} this far more popular work appeared serially in the Cornhill from September 1862 to April 1864. Published in book form in 1864, it ran into a third edition within the year, and Trollope received a sum of £3000. Sir Raffle Buffle, a hero of the Civil Service, was intended to represent a type, not a man; but the man for the picture was soon chosen. Trollope, however, had never seen, and never did see, the supposed prototype.

1864

8vo. Vol. I., pp. vi, 320; Vol. II., pp. vi, 320.

This story was partly formed on a comedy, The Noble Jilt, written by Trollope in 1850 and refused by George Bartley, the actor-manager. It became very dear to the author as the first of a series that continued with Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister. Can You Forgive Her? appeared in twenty shilling numbers from August 1863, and Trollope received £3525.

Each volume contains twenty illustrations. Those in the first volume were by “Phiz” (Hablot K. Browne), but Frederick Chapman, the publisher, considered them so bad and incongruous that the remainder were made by a Miss Taylor.

1865

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. vi, 312; Vol. II., pp. vi, 313.

Issued in ordinary volume form in the early spring of 1865, Miss Mackenzie was written with the desire to prove love an unessential element in a novel, but the attempt broke down before the conclusion. It brought the author £1300.

1865

Small 8vo. In One Volume: pp. 115.

{319}

Contents.

The Man who Hunts and doesn’t Like it.
The Man who Hunts and does Like it.
The Lady who Rides to Hounds.
The Hunting Farmer.
The Man who Hunts and never Jumps.
The Hunting Parson.
The Master of Hounds.
How to Ride to Hounds.

1866

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. iv, 284; Vol. II., pp. iv, 308; Vol. III., pp. iv, 276.

This was the first serial to appear in the new Fortnightly Review, established by Trollope and others in May 1865, under the editorship of G. H. Lewes. It brought in a sum of £1757.

1866

Small 8vo. In One Volume: pp. 112.

Contents

The Family that Goes Abroad because it’s the Thing to Do.
The Man who Travels Alone.
The Unprotected Female Tourist.
The United Englishmen who Travel for Fun.
The Art Tourist.
The Tourist in Search of Knowledge.
The Alpine Club Man.
Tourists who Don’t Like their Travels.

1866

Small 8vo. In One Volume: pp. 130.

Contents

These sketches incurred the wrath of a great dean, and were the subject of a hostile review in the Contemporary Review.

1867

8vo. Vol. I., pp. vi, 313; Vol. II., pp. vi, 309.

This was the last book written for the Cornhill in which it appeared serially from February 1866 to May 1867. The total sum received was £2800, being the highest rate of pay ever accorded to Trollope. It was offered by George Smith, the proprietor of the magazine, and paid in a single cheque.

1867

8vo. Vol. I., pp. 384; Vol. II., pp. 384.

The shilling magazines having interfered greatly with the success of novels published in numbers without other accompanying matter, George Smith made the experiment of bringing this book out in monthly parts at sixpence each. The enterprise was not entirely successful, but the author received £3000 for the use of the MS.

He killed off “Mrs. Proudie” in consequence of a conversation he could not help overhearing between two clergymen at the Athenæum Club.{321}

1867

8vo. In One Volume: pp. 403.

The half-fly-leaf bears the words, “Reprinted from ‘Good Words’ and other Magazines.” There is no list of contents, but the titles of the tales are as follows:

Trollope himself appears to have regarded this as the third of the series of Tales of All Countries, though the actual title had been abandoned. The stories reflect in some degree his own adventures, and for the three books he received a total of £1830. An edition, dated 1870, contains slight bibliographical variations.

1867

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. 228; Vol. II, pp. 215.

Begun in 1865, and published anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1866, the authorship was discovered by Hutton of the Spectator from the repetition of some special phrase peculiar to Trollope. The total sum received for this book was £450.

1868

Small 8vo. In One Volume, pp. 322.

{322}

Contents

Of these eight papers, which appeared in St. Paul’s Magazine, only the second, “On Hunting,” pp. 70-129 inclusive, is by Trollope, though the Preface, pp. 1-7 inclusive, is also his.

1868

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. 216; Vol. II., pp. 215.

Page v. (unnumbered) of Vol. I. contains a list of the persons of the story.

Written in June and July 1867 for Blackwood’s Magazine, in which it appeared anonymously. Neither this nor Nina Balatka was a success, and Blackwood declined the third such tale which was ready for him. (See The Golden Lion of Granpère, 1872, below.) Trollope received £450, which was probably not more than half the sum he would have obtained had he allowed his name to appear.

1869

8vo. Vol. I., pp. vi, 320; Vol. II., pp. vi, 328.

The total sum received for this book was £3200. Completed in May 1867, it appeared in the following October in the new St. Paul’s Magazine, founded by James Virtue, and edited by Trollope for three and a half years at a salary of £1000 a year. He attended the gallery of the House of Commons for two months in order to describe correctly the ways and doings of a Parliamentary member. It ran till May 1869. See also note to Can You Forgive Her? above.{323}

1869

8vo. In Two Volumes. Vol. I., pp. ix, 384; Vol. II., pp. ix, 384.

First appeared in thirty-two weekly parts (the first four parts being sewed in one); from November 7, 1867 to May 22, 1868.... Price Sixpence each. The paper cover had an illustration by Marcus Stone, and the publishers were Virtue & Company, 294 City Road, and 26 Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row; New York: 12 Dey Street, the proprietors of the St. Paul’s Magazine. The total sum received for this book was £3200. It was finished during the negotiations for a postal treaty undertaken by Trollope at Washington.

1870

Small 8vo. In One Volume. With frontispiece and vignette title page before title page as given above; pp. iv, 254.

This ran serially in the Cornhill from August 1861 to March 1862. It was Trollope’s only—and unsuccessful—attempt at a humorous work. He received £600 for it.

The illustrations were by

1870

Small 8vo. In One Volume: pp. vi, 182.

John Blackwood having started a series of Ancient Classics for English Readers under the editorship of the Rev. William Lucas Collins, he invited Trollope to write the fourth book of the new venture. Trollope chose his subject and finished the book in three months, giving it as a present to his friend the publisher. It was outside his usual line of work and was coldly received.{324}

1870

8vo. In One Volume, pp. xvi (Preface vii-ix inclusive), 481.

Begun at Washington in 1868 during the negotiations for a postal treaty, the day after finishing He knew He was Right, this book was intended for publication in Once a Week in 1869. Owing, however, to the dilatoriness of Victor Hugo, The Vicar of Bullhampton, and the translation of L’Homme qui Rit would thus have appeared together, and this the proprietors, Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, naturally deemed unsuitable. They offered Trollope publication in the Gentleman’s Magazine, but he refused with some heat, and they then issued the work in eight parts, paying him the sum of £2500.

This book was written with the intention of exciting pity and sympathy for a fallen woman, and the author so far departed from his usual principle as to affix a preface, which he reprinted in his Autobiography (Vol. II., 177), in support of his subject.

1870

8vo. One Volume: pp. 375.

Contents

Republished from the St. Paul’s Magazine, of which he was editor, these stories reflect in an indirect manner Trollope’s own experiences. He himself considered The Spotted Dog the best of them. The total sum received for this book was £378.

1871

Small 8vo. In One Volume: pp. vii, 323.

Begun in November 1868 on the conclusion of The Vicar of Bullhampton, and written on the same plan as Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel, this story was sold to Macmillan’s Magazine for £750, in which it appeared serially without any marked success. It was then sold by the proprietors to Messrs. Hurst & Blackett, who proposed bringing it out in two volume form. Trollope, however, had his own ideas as to the proper length of a volume, and persuaded them to print it in one.

A new edition was published by Macmillan & Co., London and New York, in the same year.

1871

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. 342; Vol. II., pp. 338; Vol. III., pp. 347.

This ran serially through the St. Paul’s Magazine. Trollope thought it one of the worst novels he had ever written, but the plot of it was afterwards used by Charles Reade for his play, Shilly-Shally.

The total sum received for this book was £2500, and it was re-issued in the same year by another firm, as follows:

8vo. In One Volume: pp. iv, 434.

1872

8vo. In One Volume: pp. 353.

Written in September and October 1867, this story was intended for anonymous publication in Blackwood’s Magazine, but as Blackwood had not found this arrangement profitable in the cases of Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel, it lay by until it appeared in Good Words and the author received £550.{326}

1873

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. viii, 354; Vol. II., pp. viii, 363; Vol. III., pp. viii, 354.

This appeared in the Fortnightly from July 1871 during Trollope’s absence in Australia. The legal opinion as to heirlooms which it contains was written by Charles Merewether, afterwards M.P. for Northampton, and Trollope was told that it became the ruling authority on the subject. As regarded sales, this was the most successful book since The Small House at Allington. The author received £2500.

1873

1874

Small 8vo. In One Volume, pp. 313.

Written in 1873 by request of the proprietors of the Graphic, who paid him £450, Harry Heathcote reflects many of the experiences of Trollope’s second son, who was a sheep farmer in Australia.{327}

1874

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. viii, 317; Vol. II., pp. viii, 314.

This story was written on the voyage to Australia in 1871, at the rate of sixty-six pages of MS. a week for eight weeks, each page containing 250 words. Trollope records that he missed one day’s work through illness. It appeared in the Fortnightly in 1873 on the conclusion of The Eustace Diamonds.

The total sum received for this book was £1200.

1874

1875

8vo. Vol. I., pp. vi, 320; Vol. II., pp. vi, 319.

The illustrations are by L. G. F.

This was a vigorous piece of satire, written in Trollope’s new home, 39 Montagu Square, in 1873. It appeared in shilling numbers from February 1874 to September 1875.

The total sum received for this book was £3000.

1876

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. vi, 337; Vol. II., pp. iv, 342; Vol. III., vi, 346; Vol. IV., pp. vi, 347.

This book appeared in eight parts at five shillings each, with an{328} illustration in medallion on the paper covers, which were engraved by Dalziel. It was in most respects a failure, worse reviewed than any novel Trollope had written. He was especially hurt by a criticism in the Spectator. The total sum received for this work was £2500.

See also note under Can You Forgive Her? above.

1877

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. viii, 293; Vol. II., pp. viii, 293; Vol. III., pp. vii, 284.

First appeared in Temple Bar in 1875, while Trollope was engaged upon his Autobiography. The total sum received for this book was £1800.

The author himself regarded it as inferior to The Prime Minister, but it was more favourably received.

1878

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. vii, 301; Vol. II., pp. vii, 297; Vol. III., pp. vii, 319.

First appeared in All the Year Round in 1877.

The total sum received for this book was £1600. It was written immediately after The Prime Minister.

1878

1879

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. vi, 290; Vol. II., pp. vi, 296; Vol. III., pp. vi, 302.

The total sum received for this book was £1800. It appeared first in Blackwood’s Magazine.{329}

1879

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. vi, 215; Vol. II., pp. vi, 208.

This was written before the visit to Australia in 1871-2.

1879

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. viii, 219; Vol. II., pp. viii, 222.

1879

Small 8vo. In one Volume: pp. vi, 210.

This was one of the English Men of Letters Series, edited by John Morley.

1880

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. viii, 320; Vol. II., pp. viii, 327; Vol. III., pp. viii, 312.

First published in volume form.

1880

8vo. Vol. I., pp. vii, 419, with Introduction, pp. 1 to 40 inclusive; and Appendices A, B, C, D, E, pp. 401-419 inclusive; Vol. II., pp. vii, 423, with Appendix, pp. 405-410 inclusive; and Index, pp. 411-423 inclusive.

1881

Published in volume form only.{330}

1881

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. vi, 237; Vol. II., pp. vi, 246.

Published in volume form only.

1882

Small 8vo. In One Volume: pp. vi, 416.

Contents.

This was also issued in two volume form, with the same pagination, Vol. I. containing pp. vi, 1-197; Vol. II. pp. 201-416.

1882

Small 8vo. In One Volume; pp. 220 (index, pp. 215-220).

1882

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. 200; Vol. II., pp. 203.

Originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine.

1882

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. 253; Vol. II., pp. 239.

{331}

1882

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. viii, 303; Vol. II., pp. viii, 282; Vol. III., pp. viii, 271.

1883

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. vii, 308; Vol. II., pp. vii, 326; Vol. III., pp. vii, 325.

First appeared in All the Year Round.

1883

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. xiv, 259; with a portrait frontispiece and Preface, pp. v-xi, by Henry Merivale Trollope, dated September 1883. Vol. II., pp. 227.

Trollope died on December 6, 1882. His Autobiography, which had been written about 1876, was published by his son in 1883. It is on this authoritative work that most of the notes in this Bibliography are based.

1883

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. vii, 280; Vol. II., pp. vii, 296; Vol. III., pp. vii, 291.

The following note by Henry M. Trollope appears in the first volume:

“This novel was to have contained sixty chapters. My father had written as much as is now published before his last illness. It will be seen that he had not finished the forty-ninth chapter; and the fragmentary portion of that chapter stands now just as he left it. He left no materials from which the tale could be completed, and no attempt at completion will be made. At the end of the{332} third volume I have stated what were his intentions with regard to certain people in the story; but beyond what is there said I know nothing.”

In the preface to the Autobiography Mr. Trollope further states this to have been the only book, beside Framley Parsonage, of which his father published even the first number before completing the whole tale, and its unfinished condition weighed heavily upon his mind. It appeared in a weekly paper called Life, beginning in the autumn of 1882.

1884

Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. 226; Vol. II., pp. 219.

Vol. I. contains the following note by Henry M. Trollope: “This story, An Old Man’s Love, is the last of my father’s novels. As I have stated in the preface to his Autobiography, The Landleaguers was written after this book, but was never fully completed.”

THE BARSETSHIRE NOVELS

The combined republication of the novels dealing with the fictitious county of Barsetshire was undertaken by Chapman and Hall in 1879, under the collective title of The Chronicles of Barsetshire. This includes—

They filled eight volumes, large crown 8vo.

There is a short introduction in the first volume, and an illustration to each novel, but to The Last Chronicles there are two. Most of these are signed F. A. F(raser). Trollope told his son that he did not really think The Small House belonged to the series, but he was pressed by Frederick Chapman to include the book and therefore he consented.

FUGITIVE ARTICLES

Although this is a Bibliography of First Editions only, some brief indication of Trollope’s more fugitive work may be given.

In 1848-9 he wrote a series of letters to the Examiner, under the editorship of John Forster, on the condition of Ireland and in{333} defence of the policy of the Government. No remuneration for these was ever offered him.

In 1855-6, or thereabouts, he wrote several articles for the Dublin University Magazine, one on Julius Cæsar, one on Augustus Cæsar, and another, savage in its denunciation, on Competitive Examinations.

Shortly after Thackeray’s death, Trollope wrote an appreciative sketch of his late edition for the Cornhill, and this was reprinted, together with an “In Memoriam” article by Charles Dickens, in Thackeray, the Humourist, and the Man of Letters, by Theodore Taylor, published by D. Appleton, New York, 1864.

On the establishment of the Fortnightly Review in 1865 he contributed numerous articles, among them one advocating the signature of the authors to periodical writing; another in defence of fox-hunting, in answer to Freeman the historian; and two on Cicero. Many of the reviews are also from his pen.

The Pall Mall Gazette having been founded in the same year (1865), Trollope was for some time a frequent contributor, his Hunting and Clerical Sketches being afterwards reprinted in book form. He wrote on the American War, and reviewed new publications, one of which involved him in a quarrel with a friend. He was also requested to attend the May Meetings at Exeter Hall and give a graphic description of the proceedings. This resulted in only one article, A Zulu in Search of a Religion, for Trollope flatly refused to go again.

From 1859 to 1871 he records that he “wrote political articles, critical, social, and sporting articles, for periodicals, without number,” and during the journey to Australia, in 1871-2, he supplied a series of articles to the Daily Telegraph. These sundries, when he wrote his Autobiography, had brought him a sum of £7800.

UNPUBLISHED AND PROJECTED WORKS

In 1850 Trollope wrote a comedy, partly in blank verse and partly in prose, called The Noble Jilt, which was declined by George Bartley, the actor-manager. He afterwards made use of the plot in Can You Forgive Her? Nor was this his only attempt at work for the stage, for in 1869 he dramatised a scene from The Last Chronicle of Barsetshire under the title of Did He Steal It?—a comedy in three acts. This, too, was declined by the manager of the Gaiety Theatre, George Hollingshead, who had asked for it. It was, however, printed but not published.

He proposed a handbook on Ireland to John Murray, worked hard on it for some weeks, and submitted nearly a quarter of the supposed length, which was returned, nine months later, without a word. This was about 1850.

Trollope read widely with a view to writing a history of English{334} prose fiction, beginning with Robinson Crusoe, but when Dickens and Bulwer Lytton died, his spirit flagged, and the project was abandoned. Early English drama, too, interested him greatly, and he left very many criticisms of plots and characterisation written at the end of each play.

In the summer of 1878, at the invitation of John Burns, afterwards first Lord Inverclyde, he joined a party of friends on board The Mastiff, one of Burns’ steamships, for a sixteen days’ cruise to Iceland. He was asked by his host to write an account of the trip, and did so, the book being issued, for private circulation only, in quarto form, to admit of the illustrations (the illustrator was also one of the party) and a map. Its title-page reads as follows:

Trollope at different times gave a few lectures, which he had printed but never published. The subjects of these included, among others:

(With regard to the last it may be noted that he was always opposed to female suffrage.)

AMERICAN ROYALTIES

As Trollope was commissioned by the Foreign Office when in America in 1861 to make an effort on behalf of international copyright, it is worthy of note that he himself was pirated widely. One book (perhaps Is He Popenjoy?), for which he received £1600 in England, was sold by his publishers here to an American firm for £20, the highest price they would give, considering the chance of piration by other houses. In the American form it was published at 7½d. For a list of actual sums received, see p. 272.{335}

ARTICLES OF BIOGRAPHICAL INTEREST GIVEN IN POOLE’S INDEX

{337}

INDEX

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Y, Z

[The names of characters in Trollope’s novels are distinguished by an asterisk]

Academy, The, on South Africa, 287
Addison, Joseph, 162
Ainsworth, Harrison, illustrated by Cruikshank, 138
Albany, literary associations of the, 174-6
Albert, Prince, influence of, 256, 260
Albuda, 288
Alexandria, 124
Alison’s History of Europe, account of French Revolution in, 87, 88, 98
All the Year Round, 139
—— Mr. Scarborough’s Family, 298
Alpine Society, the, 155
Althorp, Lord, in the Albany, 176
*Amedroz, Clara, 218
American Civil War, the, Trollope’s impressions of, 200-202
American receipts, Trollope’s, 272
American Senator, The, material for, 202, 270
Ancient Classics Series, Cæsar, 284, 290
Anderson, James, actor, 146
Anglo-Egyptian postal treaty, Trollope arranges, 122-4
Anne, Queen, 162
Antwerp, 13
*Arabin, Dean, and Mrs., 105, 205, 237-9
*Aram, Solomon, 195
Archdeckne, caricatured by Thackeray, 148
Arlington Club, the, 159
*Armstrong, George, 80
Arnold, Matthew, analytical psychology of, 306
—— at Highclere, 289
Artists’ Rifle Corps, the, 157, 158
Arts Club, the, foundation of, 157, 158
Arundel Club, the, 156
Ashley, Lord. See Shaftesbury
Ashley’s Hotel, 156
Astley’s Circus, 125
Athenæum, The, on Australia, 275
—— on Rachel Ray, 243
—— on South Africa, 286
—— on The Warden, 111
Athenæum Club, Trollope as member of, 142, 143, 153, 159, 232, 287, 305
Austen, Jane, born at Steventon, 6
—— Pride and Prejudice, 25, 53
—— Trollope compared with, 112, 128, 137, 138, 186
Austin, Alfred, attends Trollope’s funeral, 308
—— his politics, 177
—— supports the Fortnightly, 174
—— The Garden that I Love, 301
Australia and New Zealand, estimates of, 275, 276
Australian mail-service, the, 288
Austro-Italian War, the, 256
Autobiography, Trollope’s, 4;
quoted, 60
*Aylmer, Captain, 218
Aytoun and Martin, quoted, 26

Bacon, Francis, 292
Baden-Baden, 216
*Baker, Miss, 234
*Balatka, Nina, 231
*Ball, John, 234
*Ballandine, Lord, 78, 79
Ballantine, advocate, 194
Barcelona, Hannay at, 163
Barchester novels, the, clerical portraiture in, 102
—— regarded collectively, 205, 220, 269, 292
Barchester Towers, clerical portraiture in, 103, 105, 225-8, 235
—— genesis of, 205
—— publication of, 114
Barclay, Captain, pedestrian, 125
Barère, Bertrand, Macaulay on, 95, 96
Barrington, Lord, 154
Barrington, Sir Jonah, Memoirs of, 49
*Barton, Rev. Amos, 133
Bath, Trollope at, 229
Bathe, Sir Henry de, at the Garrick, 145
Bayes, Daniel, 249
Baylis, Judge, on Trollope at Harrow, 17
Beaconsfield, Lord. See Disraeli
Bedford, Duke of, commissions Hayter, 9
Beesly, E. S., at George Eliot’s, 183
—— supports the Fortnightly, 174
*Beilby and Burton, 220
Bell, Jockey, 266
Bell, Robert, library of, 307
*Bellfield, Captain, 213
Belton Estate, The, publication of, 179, 217, 218, 279
*Belton, Will, 218
{338}Bent, Miss Fanny, 294
Bentinck, Lord George, his revolt against Peel, 5
—— reputation of, 141
Bentley, Richard, loses Trollope as a client, 122
Berkeley, Sir Henry, Governor of Cape Town, 285
Berlin, Trollope in, 173
Bertrams, The, 234
—— written in Egypt, 124, 273
Berwick-on-Tweed, Earle, M.P. for, 175
Beverley, Trollope contests, 105, 213, 217, 245-254, 267, 269, 274
Bianconi, Charles, his Irish cars, 44, 45
Birmingham, King Edward’s School, 20, 291
Birmingham League, the, 178
Blackburn, Morley contests, 180
Blackie, Professor, Trollope visits, 126
Blackwood’s Magazine, Scenes of Clerical Life, 183
Blackwood, John, publishes Trollope’s anonymous work, 231-4
—— Trollope’s relations with, 132, 284, 285, 290
*Blake, Dot, 76-80
Blanc, Louis, death of, 308
Bland, Miss, amanuensis, 300, 306
Blankenberghe, 260
Blessington, Countess of, 127;
her retort to Napoleon III, 34
Bloomer, Amelia Jenks, 11
Boccaccio, 129
Bohemian societies in London, 156
*Bold, John, 107
*Bold, Mrs., 105, 230, 237
*Bolster, Bridget, 193, 198
*Bolton, Hester, 281-3
*Boncassen, Isabel, 268
Bon Gaultier Ballads, quoted, 26
*Bonner, Mary, 252-4
*Bonteen, Mr., 261, 280
*Boodle, Captain, 222
Borthwick, Algernon, in Florence, 121
Boulogne, duels at, 260
*Bourbotte, 97
Bowood, 143
Bowring, Lucy, original of Julia Brabazon, 294
Bowring, Sir John, 294
*Bozzle, 294
*Brabazon, Julia, 220, 294
Bradbury & Evans, Messrs., printers, 184
—— issue Once a Week, 239
Braddon, Amelia, influence of, 188, 241, 291
*Brady, Pat, 71-5
Brantingham Thorp, 249
*Brattle, Sam, 241, 242
*Brentford, Earl of, 258-263
Bridgwater, disfranchisement of, 251 note
Bright, John, in fiction, 265
Bristol, port of, 6
British Columbia, independence of, 288
British Guiana, Trollope in, 127
Broadhead, at Sheffield, 178
*Bromar, Marie, 218, 219
*Bromley, Rev. Mr., 283
Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 132
Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights, 62
Brooks, Shirley, influence of, 291
Brougham, Lord, as member of the Athenæum, 143
Broughton, Rhoda, Not Wisely, but Too Well, 167
*Brown, Jonas, Fred and George, 76, 77
Brown, Jones, and Robinson, critical estimate of, 160, 161, 220
—— its reception in America, 270
Browne, Hablot K., illustrations by, 138, 139
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 119;
her preference for The Three Clerks, 185
Browning, Robert, at George Eliot’s, 183
—— attends Trollope’s funeral, 308
—— his home in Florence, 119
—— on The Three Clerks, 37
—— on Trollope, 290, 306
*Brownlow, Edith, 240
Bruges, Trollope family at, 14, 17, 20, 28
Brussels, 56
Bryce, James, at Washington, 163
Budleigh Salterton, Trollope at, 113
Bull Run, battle of, 201
Bulwer, Sir Henry, in Paris, 34, 255, 256
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, contests St. Ives, 245
—— his opinion of women, 206
—— international sympathy of, 173
—— political element in novels of, 272
—— Thackeray on, 148
—— The Caxtons, 275
—— The Last of the Barons, 94
—— What Will He do with It?, 208
—— Zanoni, 88
*Bunce, 107
Burke, Edmund, 86
Burke, Sir John and Lady, 57
Burrell, Sir Charles, 5
Burton, Decimus, architect of the Athenæum, 143
*Burton, Florence, 221, 294
Burton, Sir R. F., as diplomatist, 163
—— supports the Fortnightly, 174
Butler, George, headmaster of Harrow, 15
Butt, Isaac, 57
—— cross-examines Trollope, 58-60
Buxton, Charles, as a hunting man, 168
Buxton, E. N., on Trollope in the hunting field, 169, 197
Byron, Lord, his influence, 206
—— his rebellion against Dr. Butler, 15
—— on Don Juan, 110
—— Trelawny’s Reminiscences of, 119

Cadiz, 49
{339}Cæsar, a gift to John Blackwood, 284, 290
Cæsar, Julius and Augustus, Trollope’s articles on, 165
Cahir, 45
Cairns, advocate, 194
Cairo, Trollope in, 123, 273
Calcraft, Granby, 57
*Caldigate, John, 280-283
Calne, Macaulay, M.P. for, 246
Cambridge, Trollope visits, 84
Cannes, 308
Canning, George, Bentinck secretary to, 141
Canterbury, election at, 260
Can You Forgive Her? critical estimate of, 33, 176, 185, 197, 202, 204-220, 238, 240, 261, 292, 293, 296
—— founded on The Noble Jilt, 157, 208
—— illustrations of, 204
—— political element of, 247, 256, 265
Cape Town, Trollope at, 282-7, 289
Cardwell, at Winchester, 17
—— M.P. for Oxford, 164, 246
Carleton, William, his Irish novels, 53, 54
Carlton House, site of, 143
Carlyle, Thomas, 306
—— as a conversationalist, 142
—— his French Revolution, 88, 97-100
—— Macaulay on, 121
—— on Trollope, 115, 127
—— Trollope on, 127
Carnarvon, Lord, his South African policy, 285, 287-9
—— Trollope’s friendship with, 288
*Carruthers, Lord George de Bruce, 280
Casewick, Lincolnshire, 28
*Cashel, Earl of, 78-80
Castle Richmond, plot of, discussed, 83, 128-131, 206
*Cathelineau, 97
Catherine II of Russia, 207
Cattermole, George, illustrates The Old Curiosity Shop, 138
Central America, Trollope in, 127
Cetewayo, war with, 285
*Chadwick, Mr., 107
*Chaffanbrass, 194
Chamberlain, Joseph, secular educationalist, 178
Chapman, Edward, accepts Doctor Thorne, 122
Chapman, Frederick, attends Trollope’s funeral, 308
—— supports the Fortnightly, 177, 179
Chapman & Hall, Messrs., Trollope’s connection with, 122, 173, 179, 199, 228, 239, 257, 275, 285, 286, 308
Charles II, King, 262
Charles X, exile of, 86
Charlotte, Princess, 224
Chartists, the, 38
*Cheesacre, farmer, 213
Cheltenham, Trollope at, 211, 229
Chichester, 299
*Chilton, Lord, 170, 197, 198, 259, 260
Chouans, rising of the, 94
*Chouardin, 97
Christian Examiner, The, 53
Christie, James, at the Garrick, 146
Christina of Spain, Queen, 207
Churchill, Lord Randolph, 270 note
Cicero, analysis of, 290, 291
Cider Cellars, the, 156
Cincinnati, 13
Civil Service, Trollope on the, 166
Civil Service Club, the, 158
Clancarty, Lord, of Garbally, 56
Clanricarde, Lord, his relations with Thackeray, 161
—— his relations with Trollope, 131, 139
Clarendon, Lord, 163
Clarke, Miss, salon of, 34
*Clavering, Captain Archibald, 221, 222
*Clavering, Rev. Henry, 220
Claverings, The, critical estimate of, 220-222
—— Julia Brabazon, 294
—— publication of, 165, 220
Clerical portraiture, by Trollope, 101-116, 136, 205, 224-244
Clonmel, Trollope at, 45, 60
Cobden, Richard, in fiction, 265
Cockburn, Sir Alexander, assists Trollope in his Life of Palmerston, 255, 256
Colchester, Lord, as Postmaster-General, 118, 222
Coleridge, Lord, 194
Coleridge, S. T., as a Tory, 86
—— as a conversationalist, 142
—— Thomas Anthony Trollope on, 8
Colleen Bawn, The, 54
*Colligan, Doctor, 80
Collins, Wilkie, popularity of, 188, 241, 291
—— Trollope compared with, 128, 129, 291
—— withdraws from the Garrick, 149
Cologne, 173
Columbia, Trollope in, 127
Competitive examinations, Trollope on, 166
Congreve, his clergymen, 104
Conington’s translation of Horace, 150, 171, 203, 214
Connemara, 82
Constantinople, British fleet at, 287
Cook, Douglas, 267 note
—— editor of the Saturday, 176, 243
Coole Park, Trollope at, 49, 54-7, 63
Cooper, Fenimore, influence of, 271
—— The Last of the Mohicans, 53
Cork, 48
Cornhill Magazine, The, Trollope’s connection with, 129, 131-4, 136, 160, 164, 186, 188, 204, 208, 220, 270
Cosmopolitan Club, the, membership of, 153-5, 172, 173
Cottereau, Jean, 94
{340}Cottery St. Mary, Herts, 28
Courtship of Susan Bell, The, publication of, 271
*Cox & Cummins, 107
*Crawley, Grace, 105, 294
*Crawley, Rev. Josiah, 105, 236
*Crinkett, Tom, 281
Croker, John Wilson, as member of the Athenæum, 143
—— original of Rigby, 87
*Crook, 193
*Crosbie, Adolphus, 160, 208
Crosskill, Alfred, 249
Crowe, a Wykehamist poet, 8
Cruikshank, George, illustrates Oliver Twist, 138
Crystal Palace, the, 183
Cunningham, J. W., incumbent of Harrow, 30, 54, 83

Daily News, The, 307
*Dale, Lily, 137, 160, 187, 205, 294
Dale, R. W., educational policy of, 178
*Daubeny, Premier, 264, 265, 290
Davis, Jefferson, Gladstone on, 201
Davy, Sir Humphry, at the Athenæum, 143
Day, Thomas, educational system of, 6, 30
*De Courcy, Lady Rosina, 267
Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, 129
—— The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 242
Delane, J. T., on foreign adventurers, 296-8
—— Trollope’s intimacy with, 126, 296
*Denot, Adolphe, 92
Denys, Sir George, 174
Derby, Lord, his ministry, 118, 155, 250, 275
*Desmond, Lady Clara, 130, 131
Devonshire, eighth Duke of, 259
Dicey, Edward, reconciled to Pigott, 307
—— sub-edits the St. Paul’s, 257
Dickens, Charles, All the Year Round, 158, 298
—— American Notes, 202
—— as member of the Garrick, 145, 147-149
—— Bleak House, 119, 235, 294
—— character of, 171
—— David Copperfield, 8, 12, 20, 293, 295
—— Dombey & Son, 222, 295, 296, 304
—— Edwin Drood, 302
—— Great Expectations, 139, 296
—— Household Words, 149
—— Little Dorrit, 147, 298
—— Martin Chuzzlewit, 202
—— Nicholas Nickleby, 101
—— Old Curiosity Shop, 138, 236
—— Oliver Twist, 71, 76, 138
—— on Dissent, 112, 225, 235
—— on George Eliot, 183, 184
—— on Thackeray, 151 note
—— on Trollope, 76
—— Our Mutual Friend, 110
—— Pickwick Papers, 26, 137, 138, 235
—— refuses to contest Reading, 245
—— Tale of Two Cities, 88, 194
—— Thackeray invites to Oxford, 247
—— Thackeray on, 147, 150, 151
—— Trollope compared with, and influenced by, 32, 37, 110, 128, 220, 243, 251, 256, 257, 295
—— Trollope’s relations with, 182, 192
Disraeli, Benjamin, at Gore House, 128
—— Coningsby, 17, 87, 143, 172, 260
—— Earle, secretary to, 174
—— Endymion, 172, 265
—— Henrietta Temple, 252
—— his maiden speech, 61
—— Lothair, 259
—— ministry of, 250, 287
—— M.P. for Maidstone, 246
—— on a statesman’s wife, 262
—— on The Eustace Diamonds, 280
—— on the revolt against Peel, 5
—— policy of, 155
—— political novels of, 110, 271, 272
—— portrayed as Daubeny, 264, 265
—— reputation of, 141
—— Vivian Grey, 245
*Dockwrath, 190-199
Doctor Thorne, 105
—— composition of, 124
—— publication of, 122, 173, 241
Domestic Manners of the Americans, The, 102
—— Louis Philippe on, 34
D’Orsay, Count, 127
Draycote, Yorkshire, 174
Dresden, 263
Drummond, Thomas, his dictum on property, 43
Drummond-Wolff, Henry, 154
Drury family, the, 29
—— their school at Sunbury, 17
Drury, Joseph, headmaster of Harrow, 15
Drury, Mark, master at Harrow, 15
Drury Lane Theatre, 143
Dr. Wortle’s School, analysis of, 302-4
Dublin, Archbishop of. See Trench
Dublin, decay of society in, 65, 67, 82
—— Trollope in, 40
Dublin University Magazine, 53
—— Trollope’s articles in, 165, 166
Ducrow, at Astley’s, 125
Duelling, decay of, 260
Duff, Grant, 154
Duffy, Gavan, influence of, 69
Duke’s Children, The, publication of, 216
—— Lady Mabel Grex, 295
—— political element of, 257, 268, 269, 271
*Dumouriez, General, 97
Dunkellin, Lord, 82
*Dunstable, Miss, 105
*Duplay, Eleanor, 99, 100
{341} Dyne, headmaster of Highgate, 151

Eames, John, 160
Earle, Ralph, career of, 174, 175
Edgeworth, Maria, fiction of, 6, 53, 61-3, 138, 186
Edgeworth, Richard, his educational system, 30
Edinburgh, 285
—— Trollope in, 126
Edinburgh Courant, The, Hannay of, 126
Edinburgh Review, The, 95, 121
Edward IV, King, 94
Edward VII, King, 155
Edwards, H. S., on Paris, 89
Edwards, Sir Henry, M.P. for Beverley, 248, 250
*Effingham, Violet, 259-264
Egypt, Trollope in, 273
Eldon, Lord, 118
Elementary Schools Bill, the, 178
Eliot, George, 244
—— Adam Bede, 106, 136, 184, 254
—— her influence on Trollope, 183-5, 187, 305
—— Middlemarch, 110, 185
—— Romola, 183, 184
—— Scenes of Clerical Life, 183
Eliot, Lord, as Irish Secretary, 42, 57
Elizabeth, Queen, 207, 287
Elwell, Charles, 249
Ely, Archdeacon of. See Charles Merivale
*Emilius, Rev. Joseph, 280
Encumbered Estates Act, the, 50, 51, 288
English Churchman, The, 242
English Men of Letters Series, Thackeray, 164
*Erle, Barrington, 261
Escott, T. H. S., acquaintance with Trollope, 113, 115
—— Masters of English Journalism, 168 note
Essex hunt, the, 168, 197, 278
Eton, 16
*Eustace, Lizzie, Lady, 279
Eustace Diamonds, The, analysis of, 279
—— publication of, 218
Evangelicalism, Mrs. Trollope’s attack on, 30, 31, 84, 101
—— Trollope’s dislike of, 101, 210, 223-244, 261, 283
Evans, Marian. See George Eliot
Everard, Mr., at Highclere, 290
Everingham, 248
Examiner, The, Trollope’s letters in, 37, 81-3, 128, 182
Exeter, portrayed by Trollope, 229, 233, 294
Eye for an Eye, An, analysis of, 301

Faber, F. W., his influence on Trollope, 83-5, 283
Fane, Julian, 172
Faraday, Michael, at the Athenæum, 143
Farmer, George, 147
Farmer, Nurse, 224
*Father John, 75, 76
*Fawn, Lord, 280
Feminist views, Trollope’s, 206-210
*Fenwick, Frank, 240
Fielding, Henry, novels of, 104, 137, 293
—— Tom Jones, 25
Fielding Club, the, 156
Fiesole, Landor at, 119
*Finn, Malachi and Phineas, 257
*Fitzgerald, Burgo, 214-17
*Fitzgerald, Owen, 130
*Fitzgerald, Misses, 131
*Fitzgibbon, Laurence, 258
Fladgate, Counsel for Harrow, 15
Fladgate, Mr., at the Garrick, 146
*Flannelly, for, 68, 73
*Fletcher, Arthur, 266
Florence, George Eliot in, 184
—— Mrs. Trollope in, 55, 83
—— Santa Croce, 83
—— T. A. Trollope in, 184
—— Trollope in, 83, 118-122, 140, 184
*Folking, 281
Forman, Buxton, 152
Forster, John, editor of the Examiner, 37, 81, 128, 182
—— his friendship with the Trollopes, 27, 37
—— introduces Trollope to Blackwood, 231
—— on Trollope and Thackeray, 164
Forster, W. E., as educationalist, 178
—— his friendship with Trollope, 302
Fortnightly Review, The, foundation and policy of, 174-181, 204
—— Trollope’s novels appear in, 217, 218, 279
Fox, Charles James, 86
Framley Parsonage, 302
—— clerical element of, 136
—— Lucy Robarts, 131, 138
—— publication of, 135, 137, 186
Frankfort, 173
Fraser, Sir W. A., on Trollope and Thackeray, 165
Fraser’s Magazine, 161
Freeling, Mrs. Clayton, her influence on behalf of Trollope, 18, 19, 27
Freeling, Sir Francis, as Secretary to the Post Office, 18, 21, 23, 39
Freeman, E. A., on hunting, 179
—— supports the Fortnightly, 174
Freiburg, 173
French Revolution, the, Trollope’s knowledge of, 85-100
Frere, Sir Bartle, 285
Froude, James Anthony, in South Africa, 284-7
—— on Trollope, 48, 49, 133
—— The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, 48, 49
*Furnival, Mr., 191, 290

Garbally, 56
Garland’s Hotel, Trollope at, 307
{342}Garrick Club, the, 15, 116, 233
Garrick Club, history of, 143
—— Thackeray as member of, 142, 144, 147-9, 156
—— Trollope as member of, 142-153, 156, 170, 172
Gasquet, Father Thomas, his Black Deaths, 129
*Gayner, Bob, 75, 76
Gentleman’s Magazine, The, 239
George I, King, 163
George III, King, 143
George V, King, 146
Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 228
Gibraltar, siege of, 18
—— Trollope at, 124
*Gilfil, Mr., 133
*Gilmore, Harry, 240
Gladstone, W. E., as a novel-reader, 280
—— if portrayed by Trollope, 256, 258, 264
—— ministry of, 177, 180, 247
—— on Jefferson Davis, 201
—— Trollope separates from his Liberalism, 302
—— Trollope’s energy compared with, 125
Glasgow, Trollope in, 125
*Glencora, Lady, 214-216, 259, 264
Glenesk, Lord, at the Garrick, 146
—— in Florence, 121
*Goesler, Madame Max, 259-266
Golden Lion of Granpère, The, analysis of, 218, 219
Goodwood hunt, the, 301
Good Words, returns Rachel Ray, 227, 228, 235
*Gordeloup, Madame, 221, 222
Gort, 49
Graham, supports Lord de Grey, 42
*Graham, Felix, 196
Granby, Lord, 141
Grange, the, Harting, 299
Grant, Baron Albert, 297
Grant family, the, 29
Grant, Sir William, Master of the Rolls, 16
Grantham, 115
*Grantly, Archdeacon, 104-9, 205
*Grantly, Griselda, 220
Granville, Lord, 120, 154
—— induced to serve under Derby, 155
Graphic, The, Phineas Redux, 257
—— Harry Heathcote, 277
Great Britain, S.S., 278
Great Exhibition, 1851, 112
Green, J. R., at Highclere, 289
*Greenow, Mrs., 213, 214
Greenwood, Frederick, founder and editor of the P.M.G., 168, 171, 172
Greg, William Rathbone, 172
Gregg, Tresham, 57
Gregory, Sir William, his friendship for Trollope, 49, 53, 55-7, 61, 139, 141
—— in Florence, 121
Gregory, Sir William, on Cicero, 290
—— on Phineas Finn, 266
*Gresham, Mr., 264, 265, 290
Gresley family, the, 15, 27, 35
*Grex, Lady Mabel, 268, 295
*Grey, John, 211-217, 263, 296
Grey, Lord, colonial policy of, 288
—— his Reform Bill, 246
—— ministry of, 176
—— Trollope on, 287, 288
Grey, Lord de, as Viceroy of Ireland, 41, 57
*Greystock, Frank, 280
*Greystock, Lizzie, 279
*Griffenbottom, Mr., 254
Griffin, Gerald, The Collegians, 54
*Grimes, 213
Grimshaw, Rev. Mr., 226
*Grindley, 213
Griqualand West, 285
Guadet, 90
Guardian, The, 242

Hadley, Barnet, 28
Hague, the, 56
Hall, F., journalist, 249
Hall, Mrs. S. C., her Irish novels, 53
Hambledon foxhounds, the, 301
*Handy, Abel, 107, 108
Hannay, James, at Barcelona, 163
—— his influence, 172
—— in Edinburgh, 126
Hanover Rooms, the, 141
*Haphazard, Sir Abraham, 107
Harcourt, William Vernon, on the Saturday, 172
*Harding, Septimus, 104, 106, 109, 205, 237
*Hardlines, Sir Gregory, 118
Hargrave, the Man of Fashion, 33
Harlow, 168
Harper, J. Henry, 272 note
Harper’s Magazine, Trollope’s work issued in, 271
Harrison, Frederick, supports the Fortnightly, 174, 178
Harrow, Trollope at school at, 3, 15-17, 23, 50, 111, 281, 290
—— Trollope family at, 8, 9, 43, 45, 188, 206, 210
Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, analysis of, 275 note, 276-8
Hart, Mr., 267 note
Harting, Trollope’s home at, 299-301, 306
Hartington, Lord, as portrayed by Trollope, 259
*Hartletop, Marchioness of, 220
Harwich, Prinsep contests, 140 note
Hawkshaw, Mr., 249
Hawthorn, Nathaniel, as Consul, 163
Hayter, his picture of Lord W. Russell’s trial, 9
Hayward, Abraham, 154
{343}Heckfield Vicarage, Hants, 6, 8, 205
He Knew He Was Right, analysis of, 293-6
—— West Indian scenes in, 126
Hellicar family, the, 27
Hennessy, Sir John Pope, as Phineas Finn, 264
Henry of Navarre, King, 94
Herbert, Sidney, his friendship with Trollope, 3, 17
Herbert, Sir Robert G. W., 270 note
—— at Highclere, 290
—— at the Cosmopolitan, 154
Hereford, 108
Herries, Lord, 141, 248
Hervieu, Auguste, his friendship with the Trollopes, 13
Heseltine, Mr., of Rotherham, 54
Highclere, Trollope visits, 288-290
Highgate School, 151
Hill, Rowland, Trollope’s relations with, 24, 25, 36, 117, 118, 131, 161, 199, 200
Hirsch, Baron de, 175
Hodgson, Colonel, 250
Hoey, Mrs. Cashel, co-operates with Yates, 149, 150
Holcroft, Thomas, novelist, 187
Holland, Lord, Carlyle introduced to, 127
Holland, Sir Henry, his friendship for Taylor and Trollope, 142
—— influence of, 18
Höllenthal, 173
Holsworth, G., manager of All the Year Round, 298
Home Rule, Trollope’s attitude to, 250
Hood, Thomas, on Exeter quarrels, 229
Hook, Theodore, at the Athenæum, 143
Hope, Beresford, owner of the Saturday, 243
Hope family, the, 176
Hope’s Anastasius, 119
Horace, quoted, 150, 171, 203, 214, 252
Houghton, Lord, 103
—— at the Cosmopolitan, 154
—— his social services to Trollope, 142
—— on Landor, 119
—— supports the Fortnightly, 174
Household Franchise Bill, the, 250
Hudson Bay monopoly, the, 288
Hugo, Victor, L’homme qui rit, 239
Hull, 250
Hunting, Trollope’s love of, 135, 168-171, 179, 204, 213, 248, 250
Hutchinson, Rachel, 294
Hutton, R. H., detects authorship of Nina Balatka, 232
Huxley, Professor, supports the Fortnightly, 174

Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 204
Indiana, Communistic colony in, 11
International Copyright, Trollope’s negotiations for, 273
Ireland, abuses of English administration of, 40-45, 51, 69, 74
—— famine and distress in 1848, 81-3, 128-133
—— novels on, 48, 52-4, 61
—— postal system of, 58
—— sport in, 45, 46, 49, 56, 135
Irish Constabulary, the, 69-74
Irish Nationalism, origin of, 302
Irish people, the, character of, 52, 87
Irving, Washington, in London, 163
Isabella of Spain, Queen, 207
Is He Popenjoy? publication of, 298
Italy, Unity of, 256
Ivry, battle of, 94

Jamaica, Trollope in, 126
James II, King, 207
James, Edwin, original of Stryver, 194
James, Sir Henry. See James of Hereford
James of Hereford, Lord, his friendship with Trollope, 203, 204, 298, 300
Jameson, Leander Starr, Trollope on, 284
Jenner, Sir William, 307
Jeremiah, quoted, 105
Jerusalem, Trollope in, 124, 273
Jeune, Dr., headmaster of King Edward’s School, 20, 291
Jew Bill, the, 141
John Bull, 124
John Caldigate, 285
—— analysis of, 275 note, 278, 280-283
*Johnson family, the, 189
Johnstone, Sir Frederick, 179
Joliffe, Sir William, 5
Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, publication of, 31
Jones, a Wykehamist poet, 8
*Jones, Mary Flood, 258
Jones, Owen, at George Eliot’s, 183
Journalism, Trollope’s portrayal of, 263
Jowett, Benjamin, father of, 38
“Judex,” his contributions to the Fortnightly, 180
Julians, Harrow, Trollope family at, 9, 12, 16, 188

Kauffmann, Angelica, 158
Kean, Charles, 146
*Keegan, 73
*Kelly, Martin, 78, 79
Kellys and the O’Kellys, The, plot of, discussed, 76-80, 230, 301
—— publication of, 81, 86
Kemble, John, 146
Kennard, Captain, contests Beverley, 248, 250
*Kenneby, 199
Kennedy, Mr., M.P., 259-263, 295
Kensal Green, Trollope’s grave in, 307
Kesteven, Lord, political standing of, 5
Kickham, Charles Joseph, his Irish novels, 34
{344}Kimberley, Jameson at, 284
King Edward’s School, Birmingham, 20, 291
King-Harman, Colonel, 264
Kinglake, A. W., 306
—— at the Cosmopolitan, 155
—— unseated for Bridgwater, 251
Kingsley, Charles, at Highclere, 289
Kingsley, Henry, colonial novels of, 275, 278
Kingston, Jamaica, 126
Knightley, Sir Charles, 5
Knights of the Round Table, the, 156
Knockbane, 82

Lacy, Walter, actor, 146
Lady Anna, publication of, 271
Lafayette, General, his friendship with the Trollopes, 12, 27, 88
La Grange, 27
Lambeth Palace, Trollope at, 306
Langalibalele rising, the, 285
Langdale, Charles, 249
Lancet, The, 129
Land Leaguers, The, 51
—— analysis of, 270, 301, 302
Landor, Walter Savage, as Boythorn, 119
Lane, John, his Trollope reprints, 60 note
Lansdowne, Lord, as member of the Athenæum, 143
—— Carlyle introduced to, 127
—— his acquaintance with Trollope, 140
—— his support of Macaulay, 246
Lardner, Dionysius, Thackeray on, 148
*Larochejaquelin, Henri de, 91-4
Last Chronicle of Barset, The, 105, 110, 112, 305
—— analysis of, 236-8
La Vendée, analysis of, 85-100, 219
—— publication of, 102, 103, 105
Layard, Sir A. H., founds the Cosmopolitan, 153
*Leatherham, Sir Richard, 194
Lecky, W. E. H., his eighteenth-century studies, 104, 137, 292
Leech, Master of the Rolls, 267
Leeds, Bull Inn, 192
Le Fanu, J. S., Trollope’s acquaintance with, 167
*Lefroy, Ferdinand, 303
Leighton, Sir Frederick, illustrates Romola, 183
—— in Florence, 120
*Lescure, 91-3
Lever, Charles, as Consul, 163
—— avoids Mrs. Trollope, 55
—— Charles O’Malley, 48, 53
—— Harry Lorrequer, 53
—— his friendship with Trollope, 48, 50, 166, 167
—— his influence on Trollope, 258, 271, 292
—— illustrated by Cruikshank, 138
—— in Florence, 119, 121
—— Sir Brook Fossbrooke, 79
Leveson-Gower, Hon. Frederick, at the Cosmopolitan, 154
—— in Florence, 120
Lewes, George Henry, as a critic, 132
—— edits the Fortnightly, 176
—— his influence on Trollope, 172, 182
See also George Eliot
—— on North America, 244
Lewis, thrashed by Trollope, 17
Lewis, Mrs. Arthur, 157
Lewis, Wyndham, supports Disraeli at Maidstone, 246
Liddon, H. P., at Highclere, 289
Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, 38
Life of Palmerston, publication of, 247, 255
Lincoln, Lord, 141
Lincolnshire, wheat produce of, 5
Linda Tressel, analysis of, 233, 234
—— publication of, 230, 233
Linton, Mrs. Lynn, influence of, 185, 254
Lisbon, Embassy at, 172
Liverpool, Hawthorne, Consul at, 163
Liverpool, Lord, his Irish policy, 69
London University, 183
Longley, headmaster of Harrow, 17
Longman, William, as publisher to Trollope, 110, 114, 132
Lonsdale, Lord, his kindness to Trollope, 36
*Lopez, Ferdinand, 265-7, 279
Loti, Pierre, at the Cosmopolitan Club, 173
Lottery of Marriage, The, 33
Louis XVI, fall of, 88, 90
Louis Napoleon, Prince, at Gore House, 128
Louis Philippe, Mrs. Trollope’s interview with, 34, 35, 86
Lover, Samuel, Handy Andy, 52
*Low, Mr., 257
Lowe, Robert, at Winchester, 17
*Lowther, Mary, 240
Lowther Castle, Trollope at, 36
*Lufton, Lord, 137, 138, 237, 238
*Lynch, Anastatia, 79, 80
*Lynch, Barry, 78-80
*Lynch, Simeon, 78-80
Lytton, Lord, 172
—— in Paris, 34
Lytton, second Lord, Trollope’s acquaintance with, 182

Maberley, Colonel, his opinion of Trollope, 23-25, 36, 39, 40, 144
Macaulay, Lord, 104, 137, 292
—— as a conversationalist, 142
—— as member of the Athenæum, 143
—— M.P. for Calne, 246
—— on Bertrand Barère, 95, 96
—— on Carlyle, 121
*Macdermot, Feemy, 64-77
{345}*Macdermot, Larry, 63-78
Macdermot, Thady, 64-77
Macdermots of Ballycloran, The, autobiographical element in, 56
—— plot of, discussed, 61-78, 95, 130, 152, 191, 274, 291
—— publication of, 60, 81, 168
Mackenzie, Dr. R. Shelton, on Brown, Jones, and Robinson, 270
Mackintosh, Sir James, 143
*Macleod, Alice, 210
Macleod, Rev. Norman, returns Rachel Ray, 227, 228
*Macleod, Sir Archibald and Lady, 210
Madrid, 49
*Maggott, Mick, 281
Magpie, The, 29, 32
*Maguire, Jeremiah, 234
Mahoon, Ogorman, duellist, 260
Maidstone, Disraeli M.P. for, 246
Maine, H. S., 172
Malta, Trollope at, 124
Manchester, See of, 114
Manners-Sutton, Archbishop, votes for Dr. Butler, 15
Marie-Antoinette, Queen, death of, 96
*Marrable, Walter, 240, 241
Marryat, Captain, influence of, 271
Marylebone Cricket Club, 145
Mason, seizure of, 201
*Mason, Lucius, 189-198
*Mason, Sir Joseph, 189-198, 295
Maurice, F. D., 167
*Maxwell, 213
Maxwell, Marmaduke, contests Beverley, 248, 250
Maxwell, Sir W. Stirling, founds the Cosmopolitan, 153
Mayenne, Duke of, 94
*M‘Keon, Mrs., 76
Meade, Hon. Robert, 154, 270 note
Meath hounds, the, 135
*Medlicot, Giles, 277
Meetkerke family, the, 27, 36
Meetkerke, Penelope, 28
Melbourne, Trollope in, 276
Melbourne, Lord, his Irish policy, 41
—— promises post to T. Anthony Trollope, 19
*Melmotte, 297, 298
Melville, Whyte, influence of, 291
—— Taylor on, 145, 146
Meredith, George, school of, 305, 306
Merivale, Charles, John, and Herman, their friendship with Trollope, 17
Merivale, History of the Romans under the Empire, 165
Methodists, the, 223
Methuen, Lord, strength of, 141
*Milborough, Lady, 293
Millais, Sir J. E., his friendship with Trollope, 128, 170, 203, 300, 308
—— illustrates Trollope’s books, 137, 138, 140, 203, 204
—— in Florence, 120
Milnes, Monckton. See Lord Houghton
Milton family, the, 27, 36
Milton, Henry, career of, 7
Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 186
Milton, Rev. William, 205
—— as an unsuccessful inventor, 6
—— his wife, 15
Mirabeau, on Robespierre, 98
Miss Mackenzie, analysis of, 234
*Moggs, Ontario, 254
Mohl, Madame, salon of, 34
Moliere, quoted, 228
*Monk, Lady, 214-216
*Monk, Mr., 258
Montagu Square, London, Trollope’s home in, 279, 296, 300, 306, 307
Montgomery, Alfred, his social services to Trollope, 140, 142
Moore, A. W., 270 note
Moore, Thomas, at the Athenæum, 143
—— on Crowe, 8
Morgan, Lady, her Irish novels, 54
Morier, Sir Robert, founds the Cosmopolitan, 153
Morland, George, 75, 104
Morley of Blackburn, Lord, on the Fortnightly, 173, 176, 180
Morning Post, The, Stuart, correspondent of, 121
*Moulder, 192-9
Moyville Vandeleur family, the, 121
Mr. Scarborough’s Family, analysis of, 298
Mudie’s Library, 113, 137
Murray, Grenville, as diplomatist, 163
—— enters the Foreign Office, 19
—— in Florence, 119
Murray, John, 107
—— on Don Juan, 110
Murray, John, the second, his influence on behalf of Trollope, 18
—— Milton, reader for, 7 note
Murrell, Dr., 307
Musset, Alfred de, quoted, 130
Mysterious Assassin, The, 68

Napoleon I, Whig enthusiasm for, 87, 98
Napoleon III, 34
—— policy of, 201
Nashoba, 13
Natal, government of, 285
Nation, The, 68
Neate, Charles, supports Thackeray at Oxford, 246-8
*Neefit, Polly, 253, 254
*Neefit, tailor, 252
*Neville, Fred, 301
Newby, publisher of The Macdermots, 61
Newcastle-on-Tyne, Morley, M.P. for, 180
New College, Oxford, Fellowships of, 7, 8, 10, 107, 205
New Forest, the, 3
New Harmony, Indiana, 11
{346}Newman, Cardinal, his influence on Trollope, 84, 85
Newton, Ralph, 251-4
*Newton, Rev. Gregory, 253
New York, Trollope in, 127, 270
New Zealand, Trollope in, 276, 289
Nina Balatka, analysis of, 231
—— anonymity of, 232
Nisbet, Hugh, Australian stories of, 278
Noble Jilt, The, germ of Can You Forgive Her? 157, 208
Nolan, “Tom the Devil,” 57
Nore, mutiny at the, 19
Norfolk, Duke of, 248
North America, critical estimate of, 200-202, 244
North End, Harting, 299, 300
Northwick, Lord, landlord of Julians, Harrow, 10, 14
Nott, Dr., 224, 225
Nottingham Assizes, 199
Nubar Bey, on Trollope, 123, 124
Nuremberg, 233

O’Brien, Sir Patrick, M.P., on The Macdermots, 61
O’Brien, Smith, influence of, 66
O’Connell, Daniel, ascendency of, 41, 78
O’Conors of Castle Conor, The, publication of, 271
Offley’s Hotel, 156
O’Flaherty, Edmund, 82
*O’Hara, Mrs., 301
Old Man’s Love, An, 301
Oliphant, Laurence, 306
—— on Nina Balatka, 232
*Omnium, Duke of, 105, 195, 209, 259, 264-8, 290
Once a Week, Vicar of Bullhampton, written for, 239
*Ongar, Lady, 221
Orange River Free State, 285
Orley Farm, analysis of, 188-199, 202, 204-8, 238, 261, 290
—— popularity of, 185, 188
—— publication of, 271
—— quoted, 45
*Orme, Mrs., 198
*Orme, Sir Peregrine, 195-8
*Osborne, Colonel, 293
Ouida, on the Fortnightly, 179
Owen, Robert, his land in Indiana, 11
Oxford, contested by Thackeray, 164, 245-8
—— Trollope visits, 84

Page, Robert, Hermsprang, 187
*Palliser, Lady Mary, 268
*Palliser, Plantagenet, 214-217, 259, 264, 265, 290
Pall Mall Gazette, The, foundation of, 168, 171
Palmer, Roundell, at Winchester, 17
Palmerston, Lord, ministry of, 175, 177
—— on mankind, 207
—— policy of, 42, 201
Palmerston, Lord, Trollope’s monograph on. See Life of Palmerston
Paris, Mrs. Trollope in, 28, 33-5, 53
—— social character of, 89
—— Trollope in, 255
*Parker, Sexty, 267
Parnell, C. S., 58
Pattle, Virginia, 140
*Peacocke, Mr., 303
Peel, Sir Robert, as Premier, 166
—— bestows laureateship on Tennyson, 154
—— his Irish policy, 41, 42, 69, 82
—— recalled by Gresham, 265
—— sociability of, 141
—— Tory revolt against, 5
Pelham family, the, 176
Peninsular & Oriental Company, the, 124
Penny Readings, Trollope’s interest in, 300
Petersfield, 299
Petre, H., his staghounds, 169, 197
Petticoat Government, 33
Phineas Finn, autobiographical element in, 37, 56
—— Duke of Omnium, 195
—— hunting element in, 170, 197
—— political element in, 176, 255-265, 269, 271, 290
—— publication of, 257, 295
Phineas Redux, analysis of, 265, 269
—— publication of, 257, 276
“Phiz,” illustrations by, 137
Pigott, E. F. S., at George Eliot’s, 183
—— in Florence, 120, 121
—— on Landor, 119
—— on Trollope and Thackeray, 156, 165
—— reconciled to Dicey, 307
—— supports the Fortnightly, 174
Pliny, on plague, 129
Poole, Waring, M.P. for, 174, 175
Poor Law in Ireland, the, 43
Pope, Alexander, Pastorals, 186
—— quoted, 67
Portendic, 288
Portrush, 82
Post Office, the, history of, 22
—— its literary lights, 152
—— pillar-boxes introduced by Trollope, 114
—— reorganised by Freeling, 21
—— Trollope as an official at, 21-6, 36, 39, 106, 117, 131, 249, 254, 282
—— Trollope as surveyor of, 57-9, 113, 134, 205, 229
—— Trollope becomes a junior clerk in, 18-20
—— Trollope lectures at, 118
—— Trollope retires from, 231, 256, 257, 270, 300
—— Yates as an official at, 148, 151
Postal Treaty with America, arranged by Trollope, 270, 273
{347}Postal Treaty with Egypt, arranged by Trollope, 122-4, 273
Prague, 231
Preston, 115
*Prime, Mrs., 229
Prime Minister, The, analysis of, 265-9, 279
—— publication of, 216
Prinsep, Henry Thoby, his kindness to Trollope, 140
Prinsep, Val, his friendship with Trollope, 140
Prior, Matthew, 163
Probat’s Hotel, 143
*Prong, Mr., 230, 233, 235, 243
*Proudie, Bishop, 220
*Proudie, Mrs., 206, 227
—— Trollope on, 111, 114, 305
Publisher and his Friends, A, 18
*Puddleham, Rev. Mr., 241
Punch, Bloomerism in, 12
—— The Naggletons, 111
Pycroft, Rev. James, on Trollope, 110, 114

Quain, Sir Richard, at the Cosmopolitan, 154
—— at the Garrick, 146, 150
—— his friendship with Trollope, 255, 266
—— on Trollope, 171
Quin, Dr., his friendship with Trollope, 154, 155
*Quiverful family, the, 105

Ralph the Heir, analysis of, 251-6, 269
Ramsay, Dean, his Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character, 54
*Ray, Mrs., 229
Rachel Ray, critical analysis of, 227-230, 234, 294
—— political element of, 247, 256
—— publication of, 227, 228, 236, 294
Reade, Charles, at the Arundel Club, 156
—— Hard Cash, 282
—— his relations with Trollope and Blackwood, 284, 285
—— It’s Never Too Late to Mend, 275, 278
—— Trollope compared with, 128, 129
Reading, Dickens refuses to contest, 245
Récamier, Madame, salon of, 34
Reform Bill, the, 246
Reform Club, influence of the, 246, 247
—— in Trollope’s political novels, 258, 261
Relics of General Chassé, publication of, 271
Reunion Club, the, 156
Revue des Deux Mondes, La, 173
*Reynolds, Joe, 72-5
Richardson, Samuel, his analysis of feminine character, 187
—— Trollope compared with, 110, 242, 305
Richmond, Duke of, as Postmaster-General, 21
Ripon, See of, 114
Rivers-Wilson, Sir Charles, at the Garrick, 146
*Robarts, Lucy, 131, 137, 138, 187, 205, 294
*Robarts, Mark, 137, 236
Robespierre, Carlyle and Trollope on, 89, 96-100
Rodney, Admiral Lord, 18
Rogers, Samuel, on Crowe, 8
Roland, 90
Romaine, Rev. Mr., 226
Roman Catholicism, Trollope’s attitude to, 84-7
Romilly, Colonel Frederick, as duellist, 260
Romilly, Samuel, 143
Roothings, the, 169, 197
Rotherham, 54
*Round, 193
Rousseau, J. J., 92
*Rowan, Luke, 230
*Rowley, Sir Marmaduke, 126
*Rubb, Mr., 234
Rusden, Mr., 308
Russel, Alexander, Trollope meets, 126
Russell, Lord John, 30
—— his Irish policy, 82
—— his Jew Bill, 141
—— ministry of, 255
Russell, Lord William, trial of, 9
Russell, Reginald, as duellist, 260
Russell, William Howard, at the Garrick, 146, 149
—— in Dublin, 167

Sala, G. A., as editor, 257
—— on Thackeray, 165
Salisbury, depicted in The Warden, 103, 108, 111, 236
Sand, George, Mrs. Trollope on, 14
*Santerre, 96
Saturday Review, The, on Australia, 275
—— on Rachel Ray, 243
—— on North America, 244
—— writers for, 172, 176, 235
Savage Club, the, 156
*Scarborough, Augustus and Mountjoy, 299
*Scatcherd family, the, 105
Schreiner, Olive, The Story of an African Farm, 286
Scotsman, The, Russel of, 126
Scott, Sir Walter, 53
—— his loose historical method, 94
—— Ivanhoe, 25
—— Waverley, 62
*Scroope, Earl, 301
*Scruby, 213
Scudamore, F. I., at the Post Office, 151
—— on Trollope, 125
Seeley, J. R., at Highclere, 289
Semiramis, Queen, 209
{348}Seton, Sir Bruce, at the Garrick, 146
Sewell, Elizabeth Missing, novels of, 30, 102
Sewell family, the, 107
Seymour, Alfred, career of, 175
Seymour, Danby, supports the Fortnightly, 174, 175
Shaftesbury, Seymour, M.P. for, 175
Shaftesbury, Earl of, his friendship with the Trollopes, 37, 38, 83
Shakespeare, William, George Eliot compared with, 185
—— Hamlet, 62, 76
—— his art of contrast, 62, 74, 237
—— Merchant of Venice, quoted, 277
—— Midsummer Night’s Dream, 104
—— Othello, 71
*Shand, Dick, 281-2
Sheehan, Remy, 57
Sheffield, 54
—— Broadhead at, 178
Shelley, P. B., Trelawny’s Reminiscences of, 119
Shepstone, Sir Theophilus, 285
Sherbrooke, Robert Lowe, Lord, on Cicero, 291
Sherwood, Mrs., novels of, 102
*Silverbridge, Lord, 268
Simeon, Charles, 223
Simpson’s, Strand, 156
Skerrett, Henrietta, 30
*Skulpit family, the, 108
*Slide, Quintus, 263
Slidell, seizure of, 201
Sloane, Mr., his acquaintance with the Trollopes, 83
*Slope, Mr., 112, 114, 225, 227, 228, 230, 235
Small House at Allington, The, autobiographical element in, 26
—— Lily Dale, 137, 187
—— publication of, 160, 184, 186, 208, 271
Smith, Albert, 26
—— influence of, 152
Smith, George, finances the P.M.G., 172
—— his friendship with Trollope, 140, 161, 168, 172
—— reads Jane Eyre, 132
Smith & Elder, Messrs., Trollope’s relations with, 128, 131, 132
*Smith, Mrs., 281
Smith, Sydney, his acquaintance with Trollope, 140
—— on Ireland, 40
—— quotes The Vicar of Wrexhill, 30
—— succeeds Coleridge as talker, 142
Smollett, Tobias, novels of, 137, 292
Smythe, George, his duel in 1852, 260
Society Club, the, 143
Somers, Lady, 140
Sotheran, Messrs., 307
South Africa, reception of, 286, 287
Southey, Robert, as a Tory, 86
Spain, Trollope in, 124
Spectator, The, Hutton of, 232
—— on Rachel Ray, 243
—— on South Africa, 287
Speeches of Charles Dickens, 151 note.
Spencer, Herbert, at George Eliot’s, 183
Spenser, Edmund, 25
Spezzia, Lever at, 119, 121
*Sprout, 267
*Sprugeon, 267
Stamford, Trollopes at, 5
Standard, The, Tom Austin on, 177
*Standish, Lady Laura, 258-264
*Stanhope, Dr., 224
*Stanhope family, the, 105
Stanhope, Lord, Trollope meets Disraeli at, 280
Stanley of Alderley, Lord, grants Trollope leave of absence, 199
—— supports Lord de Grey, 42
Stapleton, near Bristol, 6
*Staubach, Frau, 233, 234
*Staveley, Madeline, 196-8
*Steinmarc, Peter, 233
Stephen, Fitzjames, 172
Sterling Club, the, Trollope at, 142
Steventon, Hampshire, 6
Stewart, James, 250
St. Helier’s, Jersey, first pillar-box erected at, 114
St. Ives, contested by Bulwer-Lytton, 245
St. Just, denounced by Barrère, 96
St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Trollope at, 21, 39, 55
Stone, Marcus, at the Arts Club, 158
St. Paul’s Magazine, The, edited by Trollope, 257
Strangford, George, 7th Viscount, 172
Strangford, Percy, 8th Viscount, 172
Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, The, critical estimate of, 160, 161, 220
— its reception in America, 270
Stuart, James Montgomery, in Florence, 121
*Stumfold, Rev. and Mrs., 234
Suez, postal arrangements at, 124
Suez Canal, the, 125
Sully, Duc de, 207
Summer in Western France, A, publication of, 32
Sunbury, Trollope at, 17
Surtees, novels of, 133
Sussex, Duke of, supports the Garrick Club, 143
Sutherland, Sir Thomas, 124 note
Sykes, Christopher, M.P. for Beverley, 249

Tait, Archbishop, entertains Trollope, 306
Tales of All Countries, analysis of, 85, 124
—— offered to the Cornhill, 132
—— publication of, 271
{349}Talfourd family, the, 156
Tallyhosier, a Norman, 3
*Tappitt, Mr., 230
Tasmania, Trollope in, 276
Taylor, Sir Charles, at the Garrick, 145
Taylor, Sir Henry, career of, 18
—— his friendship with the Trollopes, 27, 142
—— in Paris, 34
—— introduces Carlyle to Lord Holland, 127
Taylor, Tom, on Thackeray, 165
Tennyson, Lord, at the Cosmopolitan, 154
—— at George Eliot’s, 183
—— popularity of, 186
—— quoted, 215
Terry, Kate, 157
Tewfik, Khedive, 123
Thackeray, W. M., as a member of the Garrick, 142, 144, 147-9, 156
—— as editor of the Cornhill, 164, 257
—— contests Oxford, 164, 245-8
—— death of, 165, 182, 307
—— Denis Duval, 302
—— Dickens on, 151 note
—— Henry Esmond, 120
—— his appreciation of Trollope, 117, 133, 183
—— his attempts to enter official life, 131, 161-3
—— his opinion of women, 206
—— his portrait of Trelawny, 119
—— his title used for the P.M.G., 168
—— in America, 163
—— Lovel the Widower, 139
—— on Dickens, 150, 151, 187
—— Pendennis, 148, 172
—— Roundabout Papers, 139, 161
—— satirises Calcraft, 57
—— Trollope compared with, and influenced by, 110, 128, 130, 145, 157, 160, 220, 243, 305
—— Trollope’s estimate of, 161-5, 170, 171
—— Trollope’s relations with, 128-136, 139
Thackeray, Men of Letters Series, written by Trollope, 164
—— quoted, 247
Thatched House Club, the, 158
Theocritus, 186
Thiers, Adolphe, at the Cosmopolitan, 155
*Thorne, Mary, 105
*Thorne, Squire, 105
Thorold, Algar, editor of Trollope reprints, 60
Three Clerks, The, autobiographical element in, 25, 31, 37
—— incurs official displeasure, 117
—— Katie Woodward, 131, 133
—— popularity of, 183, 185
Thucydides, 129
Tilley, Sir John and Lady, 28, 46, 307
*Tim, 73
Time, article on Trollope in, 152
Times, The, correspondence in, 103
—— Delane of, 126, 296
—— on Australia, 275, 276
—— on Rachel Ray, 242
—— on South Africa, 286
—— Russell of, 146
—— Trollope’s obituary in, 308
*Todd, Miss, 234
Tom Brown, 138
Trades Unionism, Trollope on, 178
Tralee Assizes, the, Trollope attends, 58, 60
Transvaal, the, 285
*Tregear, Frank, 268
Trelawny, literary works of, 119
Trench, R. C., his acquaintance with Trollope, 120
*Trendellsohn, Anton, 231, 232
*Trevelyan, Louis, 294
*Trevelyan, Mr. and Mrs., 293-6
Trevelyan, Mrs., father of, 126
Trevelyan, Sir Charles, as Sir Gregory Hardlines, 118
—— his friendship with Trollope, 166
—— his method of work, 116
Trieste, Lever at, 119
Trollope family, the, origin of their name, 3
Trollope, Admiral Sir Henry, 18
Trollope, Anthony [his literary works will be found under their own titles]
—— his birth, 7
—— his boyhood and education, 12-20
—— enters the Post Office, 18, 21
—— his independence of character, 23, 32
—— his relations with Rowland Hill, 23, 39, 117, 118, 199
—— his classical attainments, 24, 284, 290
—— his literary tastes, 25, 112
—— his mother’s influence, 28-39, 52, 54, 83, 101, 223
—— in Paris, 34
—— his life in Ireland, 37, 40-60, 84, 128, 134, 206
—— his letters in the Examiner, 37, 81, 128
—— his love of hunting, 45, 46, 56, 168, 197, 250
—— his officialism, 49, 55, 117, 132, 161, 166, 254
—— his marriage, 54
—— his Post Office inspectorship, 57-9, 73, 81, 113, 137
—— his first novel, 60
—— in Florence, 83, 118-122
—— his religious tendencies, 83-88, 106, 233-244
—— his position as a Victorian novelist, 88, 128, 161, 187, 291, 306
—— his method of work, 101-4, 115, 116, 125, 235
—— his conservatism, 106
{350}—— his clerical portraiture, 106, 111, 114
—— his literary style, 107, 185, 191, 197
—— his postal work in Egypt, 122-5, 273
—— visits Scotland, 125, 126
—— visits the West Indies, 126, 127
—— his friendship with Millais, 128, 140, 203-5
—— his connection with the Cornhill, 128-137, 160
—— his home at Waltham Cross, 135, 168, 278, 299
—— his entry into London Society, 139-142, 167, 182
—— as a club-man, 143-159
—— his connection with the P.M.G., 168-172
—— his pessimism, 170, 171
—— his continental visits, 173
—— his connection with Messrs. Chapman & Hall, 173, 177, 179, 199, 228, 275
—— his connection with the Fortnightly, 174-181, 217
—— his physical appearance, 191
—— his visits to America, 199-202, 270
—— his attitude on feminine subjects, 205-211, 238
—— his work for Messrs. Blackwood, 232-4, 284, 290
—— contests Beverley, 245-251, 267
—— his sentimentalism, 255
—— retires from the Post Office, 256, 270
—— his political novels, 255-7, 264
—— on journalism, 263
—— concludes a postal treaty in Washington, 270
—— his reception in America, 270-273
—— visits Australia and New Zealand, 274-8, 280
—— settles in Montagu Square, 279, 306
—— visits South Africa, 282-9
—— visits Highclere, 289
—— his satirical work, 293, 296
—— life at the Grange, 299
—— his death and burial, 307, 308
—— his kindliness, 307
Trollope, Cecilia, 28
Trollope, Emily, death of, 14
Trollope, Frances, befriended by Taylor, 142
—— Fashionable Life, 14
—— girlhood of, 6, 7, 15
—— her attack on Evangelicalism, 223-225, 235, 251, 283
—— her influence on her son Anthony, 25, 27-38, 62, 78, 101, 205, 223, 224, 251
—— in Florence, 55
—— literary career of, 14, 27-38, 54
—— marriage of, 8, 27
—— visits America and writes The Domestic Manners of the Americans, 13, 14, 201, 202
Trollope, Henry, death of, 14
—— edits the Magpie, 32
Trollope, Henry, travels of, 12, 13
Trollope, Sir Andrew, 3
Trollope, Sir John, 166
—— his interest in his cousins, 27, 28
—— See Lord Kesteven
Trollope, Sir Thomas, 4th Baronet, 5, 18
Trollope, Thomas Adolphus, as a school-master, 20, 291
—— as a conversationalist, 153
—— career of, 9
—— early promise of, 28, 32
—— his influence on Anthony, 45, 113, 188, 245
—— in Florence, 184
—— on Cicero, 291
Trollope, Thomas Anthony, as a barrister, 7-10
—— death of, 14, 28, 33
—— failure of, 10-14, 28, 210
—— his Encyclopœdia Ecclesiastica, 107
—— his wife. See Frances Trollope
—— Lord Melbourne’s promise to, 19
—— portrait of, 9
*Trowbridge, Marquis of, 241
Turf Club, the, 158, 159
Turnbull, M.P., 267
Twickenham, Pope at, 186
Twyford, 106
Tyndall, John, at George Eliot’s, 183

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 31
*Underwood, Clarissa, 253
*Underwood, Sir Thomas, 252, 254
Upton, William Carey, 250
*Urmand, Adrian, 219
*Usbech, Jonathan, 189
*Usbech, Miriam, 189
*Ussher, Myles, 69-77

*Vavasor, Alice, 210-217, 296
*Vavasor, George, 211-217, 263
*Vavasor, John, 210
*Vavasor, Kate, 212
*Vavasor, Squire, 210
Venables, G. S., on the Saturday, 172
Vendean rising, the, 93-9
Vergniaud, 90
Versailles, 92
Viaud, L. M. J., 173
Vicar of Bullhampton, The, analysis of, 239-242
—— publication of, 239
—— reception of, 242-4
Vicar of Wrexhill, The, attack on Evangelicalism in, 29, 30, 54, 84, 86, 101, 225, 235, 283
Victoria, Queen, 69, 256
—— buys Leighton’s “Cimabue’s Madonna,” 120
Vienna, Mrs. Trollope in, 35
—— Congress, the, 57, 85
Vinerian Scholarship, the, 10
Virtue, Messrs., publish the St. Paul’s Magazine, 257
{351}Voltaire, quoted, 92
Voss, Michel and George, 218, 219
Vyner, Sir Robert, 21

Wabash River, 11
Walkley, A. B., 152
Waltham Cross, Trollope’s home at, 135, 142, 168, 278, 299
Ward, Plumer, novels of, 110, 272
Ward hunt, the, 135
Warden, The, clerical portraiture in, 102-112
—— journalists in, 263
—— Mrs. Trollope on, 32
—— popularity of, 257, 291
—— publication of, 29, 102, 103, 114, 132, 135, 136, 149, 152, 160, 168
Waring, Captain Walter, 174
Waring, Charles, supports the Fortnightly, 174-6
Warwick, the king-maker, 94
Washington, British Embassy at, 163
—— Trollope in, 127, 201, 270, 273
Waterford, 82
Watts, G. F., at the Cosmopolitan, 154
—— in Florence, 120
—— Trollope’s acquaintance with, 140
Way We Live Now, The, analysis of, 293, 296-8
*Webb, Mr., 76
Wedgwood, Josiah, 249
Wellington, Duke of, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 69, 83
—— at Cork, 48
—— ministry of, 176
Wesley, John, 223
*Westerman, 97
West Indies, postal treaty with, 127, 288
West Indies and the Spanish Main, The, publication of, 127
*Westmacott, Mr., 254
Westminster, Morley contests, 180
Westminster Hall, Watts’ cartoon in, 120
*Wharton, Emily, 266
White’s Club, 141
Widow Barnaby, The, 33, 213
Widow Wedded, The, 33
William the Conqueror, names the Trollope family, 3
Willis & Sotheran, Messrs., 307
Willis, W. H., rejected from the Garrick, 149
Winchester Cathedral, 224
—— College, Trollope family at, 7, 12, 16, 17, 50, 84, 86
—— St. Cross Hospital, 106
Wood, Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn, in the hunting field, 169, 197
Wood, Mrs. Henry, influence of, 188, 241
*Woodward, Kate, 117, 131
Wordsworth, William, 154
—— Thomas Anthony Trollope on, 8
World, The, Celebrities at Home, 152
*Wortle, Dr., 303
Wright, Frances, her friendship with the Trollopes, 11
Wright, Whitaker, 297
*Wyndham, Fanny, 78-80
Wyndham, Percy, his Wiltshire estates, 175
Wynne, Sir Watkin William, Methuen’s feat on, 141

Yates, Edmund, as a Post Office official, 148, 151
—— as editor, 257
—— Black Sheep, 146
—— Broken to Harness, 149
—— coolness between Trollope and, 149-152
—— his feud with Thackeray, 147-9
—— literary method of, 149, 150
Yonge, Charlotte Mary, her fiction, 6, 30, 102, 187, 223, 224
Yorkshire Post, The, 249
Young, Arthur, Tour in Ireland, 52

*Zamenoy, 231
Zulu War, the, 285