“He that will not when he may,When he will he shall have nay.”
“He that will not when he may,When he will he shall have nay.”
“He that will not when he may,When he will he shall have nay.”
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 uponhis 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,aliasthat Beverley contested by Trollope himself, and now satirised inRalph 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 inAdam Bede, and brought down to a more familiar level inFelix 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 ofRalph the Heirforms 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,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 thedramatis personæof the political novels that followedPhineas 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 yearslater 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, intoRachel Ray(1863). The subject was first made a prominent feature inCan 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 withPhineas 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. AfterRalph the Heir,Phineas Finntakes 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 toRalph the Heirmake 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 Dickensand 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 samerôle. 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 whichThe Warden, in 1855, had been the first.Phineas Finn, that first showed Trollope as a political novelist, after having run throughThe St. Paul’s, was republished in two volumes octavo (Virtue and Co.), 1869. It was continued five years later withPhineas Redux. This originally appeared inThe Graphicand 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 withThe 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, whoon 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 firstsight 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’sLothair, 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 offthe 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 inPhineas 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,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 inOrley FarmandCan You Forgive Her?of tears with laughter, of the terrible with the ludicrous, and of more thanmelodrama 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 shouldprove 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; inThe Wardenhe 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 ofThe 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 inCan 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 bearit 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 overparliamentary 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’sEndymion. The fact of the publication ofEndymionbeing later, by some ten years, than that ofPhineas Finndoes 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 ofCan You Forgive Her?to the inheritance of the ducal title inPhineas Redux, these aspects of his character are consistently, logically, as well as at every point effectively, sustained. When, inPhineas 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 transformedherself 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 inThe 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, inThe 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, inThe Prime Ministeris better than Emily’s father, the shrewd old-world barrister, reminiscent of the bygone legal celebrities, Jockey Bell, the first conveyancer of his time, orLeech, 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 Ministerends 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.
Infinitely superior toThe Prime MinisterisThe 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.
Trollope’s third visit to America—That of 1868 about the Postal Treaty and Copyright Commission—Mr. and Mrs. Trollope’s Australian visit (1871) to their sheep-farming son—Family or personal features and influences in the colonial novels suggested by this journey—Trollope as colonial novelist compared with Charles Reade and Henry Kingsley—Why the colonial novels were preceded byThe Eustace Diamonds—Rival South African travellers—Trollope follows Froude to the Cape—What he thought about the country’s present and future—How he found out Dr. Jameson and Miss Schreiner—John Blackwood, Trollope’s particular friend among publishers—Trollope, Blackwood’s pattern writer—Julius Cæsar—Anthony’s birthday present to John—The South African book—What the critics said—Well-timed and sells accordingly.
Trollope’s third visit to America—That of 1868 about the Postal Treaty and Copyright Commission—Mr. and Mrs. Trollope’s Australian visit (1871) to their sheep-farming son—Family or personal features and influences in the colonial novels suggested by this journey—Trollope as colonial novelist compared with Charles Reade and Henry Kingsley—Why the colonial novels were preceded byThe Eustace Diamonds—Rival South African travellers—Trollope follows Froude to the Cape—What he thought about the country’s present and future—How he found out Dr. Jameson and Miss Schreiner—John Blackwood, Trollope’s particular friend among publishers—Trollope, Blackwood’s pattern writer—Julius Cæsar—Anthony’s birthday present to John—The South African book—What the critics said—Well-timed and sells accordingly.
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 FinnandPhineas Reduxform a single story;The Prime MinisterandThe Duke’s Childrencontain the underplots or afterplots of what has gone before. The Beverley adventure and its reflection inRalph the Heir, three years afterwards (1871), formed the biographical prelude to the little group of stories in whichPhineas Finncame 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 onTrollope’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 hisAmerican 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 inThe 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 wasThe Cornhillreprint,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 comingfrom the same pen. With that exception Trollope’s magazine pieces suited the taste of New York better than they did that of London; during 1860Harper’spleased all its friends by publishing his short stories,The Courtship of Susan Bell,The O’Conors of Castle Conor, andRelics of General Chassé. These were produced here in the three volumes entitledTales 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’sdid also more for Trollope than show him as a short story writer at his best; it introduced its readers toThe Small House at Allington,Orley Farm, as well as to several of his less known efforts, such asLady 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 fromPhineas FinntoThe Duke’s Childrenwith 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 withPhineas Finn(1869), and only closed withThe 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,deepened. The sustained brilliancy ofLothair(1868), andEndymion(1881), sent readers back toConingsby,Sybil, andTancred. 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 theConingsbynovels 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 hisPost 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.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 thePhineas Finnstories.
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 transoceanicinspiration of the new epoch was Bulwer-Lytton, some eight years before he became Colonial Secretary in the Derby Government. The example ofThe Caxtonssoon proved contagious. In 1856 Trollope’s exact contemporary, Charles Reade, publishedIt’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 HamlynandThe Hillyars and the Burtonswith 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, byThe Times, “the most agreeable, just, and acute work ever written on the subject.” On the other hand,The AthenæumandThe Saturday Reviewdwelt 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, whicheven these censors allowed. The shrewdness of insight with whichThe Timescredited 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. LikePhineas Redux, it first came outinThe 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 everhoped. 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 publishedIt’s Never Too Late To Mend, and Henry Kingsley was under thirty at the time of writingGeoffrey 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 hisHarry 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 theGreat Britainfor 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 exchangedfor 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 cameThe Eustace Diamonds. This novel, likeThe Belton Estate, had first been written forThe Fortnightly Review. Its leading figure casually reappears in later works, especially inThe 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 inThe Prime Minister, she had shown herself before inThe 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,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 inPhineas Reduxcommits 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 ofThe 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 afterHarry 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 SouthAfrica, 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. Thecharge 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 lastcolonial 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’sVicar 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 writingabout 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 contributedCæsarto 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 theCæsar, 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-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 playThe Wandering Heirfrom his own storyRalph 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 dayJohn Caldigateleft 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 Froudeand 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 ofThe 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 Timesdeclared it had not a page uninstructive or dull.The Athenæumfound that, coming in the nick of time, itadmirably supplied a public want. “Full of freshness and individuality in all its presentations, social and political,” saidThe Academy. “Always judicious, often very entertaining, and only from sometimes excessive zeal a trifle diffuse,” chimed inThe 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.