Resettlement in England—Bright prospects for the future—Importance ofThe Cornhillconnection—Framley Parsonageand other novels of clerical life—Some novelists and their illustrators—Trollope’s debt to Millais—The social services of leading lights help him in his historical pictures of the day—Election to the Garrick and Athenæum Clubs—Anthony Trollope as he appeared in 1862—Leading Garrick figures—Thackeray’s social and literary mastery over Trollope—Thackeray, Dickens, and Yates in a Garrick squabble—A divided camp—Trollope on Yates and Yates on Trollope—The origin of the politico-diplomatic Cosmopolitan Club—Informal gatherings—Trollope becomes a member—Some famous “Cosmo†characters—The end of the club—Other clubs frequented by Trollope—The Fielding—The Arundel—The Arts—The Thatched House—The Turf.
Resettlement in England—Bright prospects for the future—Importance ofThe Cornhillconnection—Framley Parsonageand other novels of clerical life—Some novelists and their illustrators—Trollope’s debt to Millais—The social services of leading lights help him in his historical pictures of the day—Election to the Garrick and Athenæum Clubs—Anthony Trollope as he appeared in 1862—Leading Garrick figures—Thackeray’s social and literary mastery over Trollope—Thackeray, Dickens, and Yates in a Garrick squabble—A divided camp—Trollope on Yates and Yates on Trollope—The origin of the politico-diplomatic Cosmopolitan Club—Informal gatherings—Trollope becomes a member—Some famous “Cosmo†characters—The end of the club—Other clubs frequented by Trollope—The Fielding—The Arundel—The Arts—The Thatched House—The Turf.
THE first effect of Trollope’s connection withThe Cornhill Magazine, its editor, and its owners was to make his life more literary and less official than it had so far been. Naturally, therefore, he decided on leaving Ireland as soon as he could, and on establishing himself in London, the one place where he could satisfactorily pursue the career now brought within his reach. Not, indeed, that the prospect opening to him in 1860 included a sudden or a final severance of his connection with a country where he had passed nearly a score of eventful and prosperous years, where he had first discovered his real strength, and where by slow degrees the Post Office hack had transformed himself into the popular man of letters. From the St. Martin’s-le-Grand point of view, he was but exchanging a Post Office surveyorship in Ulster for a like position in the English eastern counties, where he could generally order his movements as suited his interests and tastes.
When in 1841, on his outward journey, he first crossed St. George’s Channel at the age of twenty-six, it was with a mind agitated by morbid discontent for the past, and charged with gloomy misgivings for the future. The process of improvement had indeed been slow and often painful, but it was now complete. The clouds which so long darkened his existence had finally lifted. He no longer brooded over the gloomy retrospect; the path that lay before him was brightened by the hope born of actual achievement. From the country to which, just a quarter of a century ago, he had brought a past of failure, he took back a present of success, and a future of assured fame. The long gallops with the Meath hounds and the Ward staghounds, or the several other packs with which he rode, by quickening his circulation, had strengthened his nerves, and generally placed him in the highest state of physical fitness. With the exhilarating sense of being at home in the saddle, there had come an inspiring confidence in his powers of thought and language. Moreover, his term of Irish and English service combined had been varied by the foreign missions which, as already described, trained his pen to versatility, and brought him fresh credit in new lines of literary performance. All this had helped him so much with his London chiefs as to ensure him the home appointment for which he now applied. The surveyorship of the eastern counties, secured by Trollope after some little difficulty and delay, gave him the chance of keeping up his favourite sport by settling him comfortably in Hertfordshire, at Waltham Cross. Here he was within easy reach of more than one East Anglian pack, as well as the social life of the metropolis in which he had been born, but of which, since his boyhood, he had seen little, and of whose social life he knew nothing.
He had scarcely settled down to the combined parts of State servant, Londonlittérateur, and eastern county fox-hunter, when he followed up his first success ofThe Wardenwith a book indicating the greatest stride in the direction of fame and fortune he had yet made. This wasFramley Parsonage. The appearance of its first instalment inTheCornhillhad 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 ofThe Warden. Even then the old Church and State polity was tottering to its fall. By the timeFramley Parsonagewas running throughThe Cornhill, it had been practically replaced by the newrégime.
The modernised picture of clerical life from the social point of view, taken inFramley 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 inAdam Bede(1859).The Cornhillproprietor 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 inFramley 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 inThe 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 Rugbyboys, for instance, described inTom 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 inThe Old Curiosity Shop, and from George Cruikshank inOliver 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. Betweenthe Court and the Parsonage the relations described reflected the union of the civil and the spiritual authority. WithFramley 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’sGreat Expectations, then running throughAll the Year Round, or of Thackeray’sLovel the WidowerandRoundabout Papers, then appearing in the same magazine pages as Trollope’s. Thackeray, indeed, had destined his ownLovelfor the chief fiction ofThe Cornhill. It did not seem to him quite strong enough for that honour. Hence the opening which he gave Trollope. Now, too, began Trollope’s introduction into the literary and general society of the capital in which he had been born, partly bred, and in which he had served his earliest apprenticeship to the Government service that formed the foundation of his fortunes. Of its real life, except from outside, he as yet knew nothing.
Such chance glimpses into society in London as Trollope had secured in his earliest days were due almost or entirely to the good offices of the old Harrow friend, William Gregory, who subsequently, as has been already described, did so much to make his Irish sojourn profitable as well as pleasant. Among the more prominent figures in the great world of their day occasionally visited by Trollope was Lord Clanricarde, who, in London as well as in Ireland, was fond of playing the part of Mæcenas to young men of promise. Together with Gregory, Trollope, a young man under thirty, dined with Clanricarde in Carlton House Terrace. On entering the drawing-room, they found its only occupant a fat elderly parson. He must, the new-comers whisperingly agreed, be the family chaplain. The conjecture had not been murmured in a tone low enough to prevent its being overheard by the divine, who in a moment began to convince them that he was not one of their host’s dependants by, in Trollope’s words, “chaffing them out of their lives†until they descended to the dining-room, and even after that. This incident forms Trollope’s introduction to Sydney Smith, without whom, in the early forties, no fashionable party was complete. The most useful entertainer and friend secured by Gregory to Trollope was, however, Henry Thoby Prinsep, whose acquaintanceship had proved of earlier value to Thackeray. This genial, opulent, and influential Indian official had three sons, the second, Trollope’s particular friend, being the clever and popular artist “Val†Prinsep; while the two others, still living, were respectively in the Indian Civil and Military Service. Prinsep kept open house for Trollope, as for many others, beneath his roof.
Anthony Trollope’s personal knowledge of Thackeray began to improve itself into friendship; at Thoby Prinsep’s, also, he heard many amusing stories about a gentleman’s adventures in quest of a parliamentary seat,[15]as well as met habitually the artist Millais, whom he first knew from George Smith, and who, in the manner already described, was so appreciably to promote the novelist’s advance towards a world-wide popularity. As Prinsep’s guest also, Trollope made another artistic friendship, that with the painter Watts, whom, it will be remembered, he had already seen at Florence. Among Prinsep’s other notable visitors were the reigning beauties of the time, Lady Somers, Miss Virginia Pattle, and the highly endowed daughters of a gallant officer in “John Company’s†army, now only recollected as “Old Blazer.†The same company was sometimes adorned by the great artistic and literary patron of that period, Lord Lansdowne, as well as an anecdotical Nestor of the polite world, who nearly saw the nineteenth century out, Alfred Montgomery. This gentleman humorously claimed, by his conversational reminiscences of cathedral towns, to have given Trollope some hints for his Barchester characters. Montgomery’s social services proved, indeed, scarcely less invaluable than Gregory’s, and opened to Trollope many doors on the higher levels.
At the houses now referred to, he heard all the gossip about the celebrities of the forties: how, notwithstanding his starched austerity in the House, Sir Robert Peel’s social playfulness in private life made him really delightful; how Lord Lincoln was quite the pleasantest of all Peel’s followers; how Lord George Bentinck, though private secretary to Canning, was quite uneducated, and only got into parliament by an accident, to become Tory leader by a fluke. He heard too, how, when not at a race, Lord George attended the House of Commons; how, going down to Westminster from White’s after dinner, he slept soundly all the evening on a back bench; and how, though in 1847 he had resigned over Russell’s Jew Bill, he wished all the Jews back in the Holy Land, because the Tories had become a No Popery and No Jew party. Thus Trollope was a looker-on at the game when, on the Tory side, the players were Lord Granby, as Bentinck’s successor, and Herries, who sportingly admitted that, though Bentinck had given the mount, it was Dizzy’s riding which won the race. Some of Anthony Trollope’s later novels take one to a resort called the Beargarden. In their author’s younger days a haunt that might have appropriately borne that name was the Hanover Rooms on one of their smartest gala nights. For about a century, from 1775 to 1875, these premises were used for concerts and balls, till, at the later of the dates just mentioned, they were utilised as the Hanover Square Club. When W. H. Gregory and Anthony Trollope were youths about town, these rooms were not only fashionable, but fast. In one of the vestibules or passages, the two friends witnessed a noticeable but, as it proved, a somewhat risky feat of strength by the Lord Methuen of the day, performed upon a baronet, who, from his immense estates in the principality, was known—like those who were before and after him in his title—as the King of Wales. Sir Watkin William Wynne weighed some fifteen stone. Methuen, to relieve the dullness of a waiting interval, lifted him by the trousers waist-band, and held him out at full length with one hand, only to drop him when the trousers material gave way.
In the sixties, indeed, few were left who had been fashionable figures in Trollope’s boyhood. Besides Gregory, however, when Trollope took up his eastern counties’ surveyorship, the most notable survivor, in addition to Alfred Montgomery, was Sir Henry Taylor, who had been at the Colonial Office before Trollope went to Ireland as a surveyor’s clerk. He was there still in the year that Trollope re-established himself in an English home at Waltham House. During the early sixties, Sir Henry Taylor’s literary fame and social influence, still at their height, had opened the best houses in England, both to himself and to any person of promise he might take up. No man was ever at any time less on the look out for a patron or an introduction to patrons than Anthony Trollope. Taylor himself owed his official career, as well as much of his commanding place in society, to the great physician of the time, Sir Henry Holland. That medical magnate, having in earlier years befriended Mrs. Trollope, now joined Taylor in advancing the interests of her son. The two had even hoped to secure Trollope’s election to the Athenæum by the committee, some years before that event actually took place—in 1864. Meanwhile, as Milnes’s guest at the Sterling Club, Trollope made intellectual acquaintances as distinguished as any whom he met afterwards at the Athenæum, and heard specimens of the conversation at a meal, which had been the speciality of some famous London sets, but then in the process of dying out. This was the dinner- or breakfast-table talk which, seldom or never becoming general, chiefly assumed the form of a monologue by a single brilliantly gifted performer. S. T. Coleridge in remote times had founded the school, with Sidney Smith for his successor, Macaulay and Carlyle for his subsequent followers. “It was, no doubt,†said Trollope to me, “a good discipline for an impatient and irritable listener, but it never seemed to teach one anything.†It was three years before his Athenæum membership that Thackeray’s good offices introduced Trollope to the Garrick Club, April 5, 1861, and so gave him a recognised place among the professional literary workers of his time.
His connection with this club was fraught with consequences of no small interest in themselves, as well as in their influence upon Trollope’s personal relations with some of his best-known contemporaries. The Athenæum, which some years later was to bear Trollope’s name on its books, had been founded in 1824, and stood upon the Pall Mall site once occupied by Carlton House. Its early, and indeed immediate success, was largely due to the personal efforts of John Wilson Croker, the Rigby of Disraeli’s novels, and the distinguished patronage secured by Croker for the enterprise. The name it now bears did not finally supersede the appellation first suggested, the “Society,†till 1830, when the present building, designed by Decimus Burton, opened to receive the members. The Mæcenas of his age, the great Lord Lansdowne, had deigned to become an original member. He attracted to the place not only some half-dozen of his political contemporaries or juniors in the front rank of politics, such as Sir James Mackintosh, Romilly, Macaulay and Brougham, but also the brightest lights in the firmament of literature or science at Bowood and Lansdowne House, Thomas Moore and Theodore Hook, Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday.
Trollope’s earliest club, the Garrick, was the Athenæum’s junior by some seven years. It originated in an idea thrown out at a meeting in Drury Lane Theatre, August 7, 1831. The proposal had no sooner taken definite shape than measures for translating it into existence were pushed promptly forward. By October 15, 1831, several members had been elected, the rules had been drawn up and approved, as well as the general committee appointed. The Duke of Sussex, the foremost, in all intellectual movements, of George III’s sons, had actively associated himself with the project from the first. He figured in the earliest members’ list as patron, and presided over the opening dinner, February 13, 1832, at Probat’s Hotel, 35 King’s Street, Covent Garden. Here the club was housed till, a full generation later, its establishment beneath its present roof in Garrick Street. The Garrick, therefore, known toTrollope 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 thesuaviter in modo, because they thought it likely to enervate thefortiter 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 juniorshis 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 ofVanity 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 takenthe 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. InBlack 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’sdoyen, 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 ofThe 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 theservants, and had theirdossiersby 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 wasLittle 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 ofLittle D.is d——d rot.’â€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 obscureas 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, inPendennisas 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’sCornhillstaff, and owing his warm reception at the club to his editor’s introduction, the author ofFramley Parsonagewas 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 therepresentative and disciple of a literary school essentially different from that to which the other belonged. Trained by Dickens onHousehold Words, Yates first showed what he could do as a novelist in his master’s line withBroken to Harness, so early as 1854, just a year before Trollope had made himself known to the public byThe 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. Themise-en-scène, and the persons ofhis stories furnished topics of table talk with his shrewd and highly-endowed wife first, afterwards with the clever women who were often in her drawing-room. To that number belonged Mrs. Hoey, who had worked with him on Dickens’ magazines, and who was a constant visitor at his house. To her in a special degree he unfolded the plot, incidents, and even portions of the dialogue in the novel he had in hand, inviting from her criticism, suggestions for improvement not only in single episodes, but in the structure of the book. Of course Mrs. Hoey often submitted in writing the notions for which she had been conversationally asked. Yates was not the person to underrate or even to be silent about his obligations to any literary adviser he valued, and might well have mentioned the matter to Trollope himself, had the two ever held any friendly conversation on literary matters.
As it was, Trollope erred in repeating a loose rumour as a statement of fact. That slip in judgment and tact naturally aggravated the soreness felt by Yates at his other Garrick troubles, and was deeply resented. The two men, indeed, for more than ten years remained strangers. Their oldest and kindest friend, Sir Richard, then simply Dr. Quain, expressed his pleased surprise to meet them both as guests at the same club dinner-table towards the close of the seventies, whispering in his pleasant Irish way to the host, “How did you manage to bring them two together?†Perhaps modern English literature might be searched in vain for men at once so eminent, so touchy, so ready to take offence with each other, and with all the world besides, as the four now mentioned:
“Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer.â€
“Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer.â€
“Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer.â€
It seems necessary to go back to Horace’s description of Achilles for a summary of the qualities personified by the literary quartet now referred to. And yet Yates appreciated Thackeray’s greatness as well as that of his chief, Dickens; while underrating none of his rival’s masterpieces, Thackeray was fond of telling the question often put to him by his children: “Why don’t you write books,real books, like Mr. Dickens?†Apart from their mutual compliments, paid on such occasions as the Theatrical Fund dinner,[16]there was no parade of exceptional cordiality between the two greatest novelists of their age.
High genius always appreciates genius, whatever its personal setting. Dickens and Thackeray were, therefore, above the pettiness of belittling each other. Between Anthony Trollope, however, and Edmund Yates, with all their cleverness, there always existed a good deal of mutual depreciation and jealousy. Especially was this the case in and after 1868; for in that year F. I. Scudamore, who had been made a G.P.O. Secretary over Trollope’s head, took Yates for his assistant in arranging the transfer of the telegraphs from a private company to the State. Yates, therefore, thought he had as good reason as Trollope for pride in his work as a Post Office servant; while, as for his social antecedents, if he had not been, like Trollope, at a public school, he had, before going to a German university, been in its best days under Dyne, at Highgate School. Neither man had many pretensions to real scholarship, but Yates had read and remembered the regulation Latin Classics well enough to quote them quite as aptly as Trollope. In facility and force of literary expression, he was at least Trollope’s equal; in ready wit and resourcefulness he was his superior. But of the English life that Trollope depicted he knew nothing. The success of Thackeray and of Dickens he could understand and admire. Both of them describe different aspects, and hit off certain angles of personal character connected with that existence which Yates knew and had studied. But as for Trollope, with his parsons, sporting or priggish, his insipid young ladies and the green, callow boys upon whom experience was wasted, and opportunities thrown away—in a word, these washed-out imitations of Thackeray, as to Yates they seemed—it passed Yates’s comprehension that the public should find any flavour to itstaste 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 asraconteur, 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 fromThe MacdermotsandThe 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 inThe 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 inbelles 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 intothe 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 havesettled 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 regularhabituésof 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 WindsorCastle. Perhaps the only cabinet negotiation of which Trollope knew something from behind the scenes was that pressed on Dr. Quin by Disraeli in 1868, with a view of detaching Lord Granville from his Liberal allegiance and inducing him to serve under Lord Derby. In the days now looked back upon, the Cosmopolitan Club was the paradise of the intelligent foreigner in London. Thither the French statesman Adolphe Thiers was repeatedly brought by Kinglake, and there Trollope gained an insight into political manœuvres, domestic or foreign, which he found highly useful for his later books.
The Cosmopolitan Club survived Trollope by exactly twenty-five years. Shortly after the twentieth century had completed its first decade, most of the Cosmopolitans whom Trollope knew had followed him to the grave. The younger men that now came on had their own resorts. Moreover, it must be remembered that, even until well into the nineteenth century’s second half, smoking after dinner was allowed in very few houses. Gradually the future King Edward VII’s influence removed the social prejudice against tobacco, with a result that the cigar or cigarette became not less universal than the coffee. At the same time, too, such of the old Cosmopolitans as were left felt less disposed than in their younger day to go out after dinner. The new generation also which had risen up did not appreciate the honour of membership as keenly as had been done by its predecessors. In 1902 the sanitary arrangements of the Charles Street premises were found to be in a parlous state. The house, in fact, which had not been overhauled for a century, was discovered to be literally afloat with sewage under the basement. The cost of the necessary repairs was prohibitive. Still struggling against dissolution, the club migrated to the Alpine Society’s rooms in Savile Row, and dragged on a maimed existence till 1907, in or after which it was formally wound up.
In 1862, then, Anthony Trollope’s club life began on the King’s Street, Covent Garden, premises, shortly before his day visited by the domestic convulsions already described.At the date now looked back upon, the Garrick, though by far the most distinguished of the number, was only one among several literary and theatrical societies which were not their own landlords. Among the other clubs of that class, the most notable was the Fielding, which found its home, first at Offley’s Hotel, afterwards at the Cider Cellars, and which was much frequented by Dickens and Yates, subsequently to the Garrick split. Here, after he had consulted with Trollope on the subject, an unsuccessful attempt was made by E. F. S. Pigott to bring Dickens and Thackeray amicably together. Trollope’s loyalty to Thackeray did not permit him actually to join the Fielding, but did not prevent his frequently visiting the place, chiefly as the guest of Pigott, who used, by-the-bye, to say that “Anthony’s†well-meant but impatient zeal had caused the miscarriage of the delicate personal negotiations that native kindness and tact fitted him above all men to conduct.
The Covent Garden district in Trollope’s earlier London days was honeycombed by more or less Bohemian societies, housed beneath various roofs, but all equally unfamiliar to Trollope. The Arundel Club, indeed, patronised into existence by the Talfourd family, was once visited by him, together with Charles Reade, long after it had established itself within walls of its own in Salisbury Street, Strand. But the Savage, then in its struggling infancy at Ashley’s, Henrietta Street, the Reunion in Maiden Lane, the Knights of the Round Table at Simpson’s in the Strand, he had never heard of till I myself mentioned these places to him. All these were journalistic haunts, with a certain vogue during the nineteenth century’s second half. The only advantage Trollope could have derived from entering any one of them might have been a little more first-hand knowledge than he ever possessed about newspaper writers, their manners, and their methods. An occasional glimpse of the resorts now named might have helped him to avoid the mistakes concerning newspaper life and men that, as it is, he generally commits when touching on the subject in his stories. Yet Trollope’s club experiences were far from being confined to the bodies already mentioned.
The interest in stage matters inherited by Trollope from his mother may have caused him some disappointment, but was not without its practical advantages. The exercise of attempting and failing to write a good play,The Noble Jilt, helped to produce a capital story,Can You Forgive Her?—presently to be mentioned—as well as helped him as a novelist by putting him on his guard against some of his literary defects. His admiration for hisCornhilleditor 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 therôleof 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 theArts 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 ofAll 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, hadbeen 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.