Trollope on the third Earl Grey, the fourth Earl of Carnarvon and the Colonies—Intimacy at Highclere and its literary consequences—Trollope andCicero1879—Fraternally criticised by T. A. Trollope and others—Fear of literary fogeydom produces later up-to-date novels beginning withHe Knew He was Right—A similarity between Trollope and Dickens—Trollope and Delane—The editor’s article and novelist’s book about social and financial scandals of the time—Mr. Scarborough’s Family, Trollope’s first novel for a Dickens magazine—Retirement from Montagu Square to North End, Harting—Last Irish novels,An Eye for an Eye(1879),The Land Leaguers(1883),Dr. Wortle’s School—General estimate—Last London Residence—Seizure at Sir John Tilley’s—Death in Welbeck Street—Funeral at Kensal Green.
Trollope on the third Earl Grey, the fourth Earl of Carnarvon and the Colonies—Intimacy at Highclere and its literary consequences—Trollope andCicero1879—Fraternally criticised by T. A. Trollope and others—Fear of literary fogeydom produces later up-to-date novels beginning withHe Knew He was Right—A similarity between Trollope and Dickens—Trollope and Delane—The editor’s article and novelist’s book about social and financial scandals of the time—Mr. Scarborough’s Family, Trollope’s first novel for a Dickens magazine—Retirement from Montagu Square to North End, Harting—Last Irish novels,An Eye for an Eye(1879),The Land Leaguers(1883),Dr. Wortle’s School—General estimate—Last London Residence—Seizure at Sir John Tilley’s—Death in Welbeck Street—Funeral at Kensal Green.
THE intimacy with the fourth Lord Carnarvon, and the warm welcome awaiting him, on his frequent visits to Highclere in or after 1878, were the direct social results of Trollope’s colonial travels and books, especially of his South African experiences. “My own Post Office work,” Trollope once said to me, “together with my own ideas of colonial administration, naturally attracted me to a colonial Minister who, before becoming the head of the department, had a hand in abolishing the old Australian mail service, in creating the Encumbered States Act for the West Indies, in improving England’s African relations with France by the exchange of Albuda for Portendic, in terminating the Hudson Bay monopoly, and of creating British Columbia as an imperial dependency. I could not but contrast Lord Grey’s colonial policy between 1846 and 1852 with Lord Carnarvon’s, which immediately followed. To do this was to see that Carnarvon understood what Grey had always missed,
HARTING GRANGE. SOUTH ENTRANCE.
HARTING GRANGE. SOUTH ENTRANCE.
HARTING GRANGE. SOUTH ENTRANCE.
the vigorous aspiration for self-government natural to an Anglo-Saxon community side by side with the weakness that must beset an executive representing a democracy.” Like other colonial observers, Trollope had been struck by certain resemblances between the condition of New Zealand and the Cape, in that they both required English protection from the natives. “In New Zealand,” continued Trollope, “I saw enough to be sure that there could never have been any chance of quiet for ourselves or safety for the natives until our troops were recalled, and the colonists, forced to rely on their own resources, tried mild and just measures instead of violent ones.” In due time the last regiment was withdrawn, and the trouble with the Maoris ceased. “Generally,” maintained Trollope, “a colony soon becomes a nation, and a spirited nation will not tolerate the control of its internal affairs by a distant Government.” Admitting this in the course of their many conversations on the subject, Carnarvon accepted Trollope’s view that the first business of the Colonial Office was to secure a maximum of profit from the connection. This, the Minister and the novelist agreed, must constitute a moral guarantee that separation, when it comes, will be on mutually amicable terms.
The fourth Lord Carnarvon’s Hampshire hospitalities during the nineteenth century’s last quarter were the social expression of an intellectual idea. Without any parade of preparatory effort, they seemed naturally to reproduce something that was characteristic of Cicero’s country-house parties at his Tusculum and much more that reminded many, Matthew Arnold included, of Falkland’s week-end feast of reason and flow of soul at Great Tew. At Highclere, Trollope frequently met not only the leading colonial politicians of the period, but scholars, lay or clerical, as J. R. Green, J. R. Seeley, Charles Kingsley, H. P. Liddon, as well as representatives of the rising talent and the new learning from Oxford and Cambridge, and sometimes from the foreign Universities. On these occasions he took an innocent boyish pleasure in displaying the Wykehamist hall-mark, liked to feel,and quietly letting it be known that he could read at least Roman authors otherwise than after Colonel Newcome’s manner—in a translation, you know, in a translation. It was in the Highclere smoking-room that, capping one of Trollope’s familiar quotations, Robert Browning added, “My dear Trollope, this display of classical lore really reminds one of Thackeray’s scholar who had earned fame and the promise of a bishopric by his masterly translation ofCornelius Nepos.” Trollope’s earliest magazine work—for theDublin University—had given him the opportunity of rubbing up and trotting out his juvenile acquaintance withCæsar. This afterwards expanded itself into the volume gratuitously contributed, as already described, to Blackwood’s series. Rather less than ten years later, some classical small talk with his host, Robert Herbert, Robert Browning, and an Eton master, Mr. Everard, at Highclere recalled to him his early interest in Cicero, as well as of certain notes made from much miscellaneous reading on the subject. These Ciceronian studies furnished forth the two volumes issued by Chapman and Hall in 1880.
“An unconventional attempt to clothe an ancient Roman with modern interest,” were the words aptly used by Sir William Gregory, Trollope’s old Harrow contemporary, himself a Ciceronian student, to characterise this book. Approaching his subject, not as a scholar or historian, Trollope treats it in a style lively and amusing throughout. The sympathy with Cicero, especially in exile, is as delightful and refreshingly genuine as if Trollope were describing the difficulties of Phineas Finn or the troubles, during his wife’s absence, of Mr. Furnival inOrley Farm. There are the same enlightening good sense and shrewdness in the description of Roman political parties and their leaders as form the best portion of the novels describing the rivalries of Daubeny and Gresham, and analysing the personal or political situations so severely testing the wisdom and the patience of Mr. Palliser and the Duke of Omnium. Of course,Cicerobrought criticisms from a few experts.T. A. Trollope, Anthony’s elder brother, as well as severe disciplinarian in their Winchester days, had been a classical master under Jeune at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. He had therefore cultivated a more exact kind of learning than Anthony. “You ought,” he said afterCicerocame out, “to have let me correct the Latin words in your proof. As it is, having, in your first volume, tried successively Quintillian and Quintilian, in your second you finally relapse into Quintillian. In another error you are at least consistent; for Pætus is always given for Pœtus. Indeed,” he continued, “these diphthongs have been among your worst enemies, because œdile is your standing version for ædile, while by Œschilus I know—what others could only guess—that you mean Æschylus.” More sympathetic censors ignored these literal slips, but could not be blind to so serious an error as occurs in vol. ii. 20, placing the Rostra in the Senate instead of the Forum. It was to be expected also that so keen a censor as Trollope’s Winchester contemporary, Robert Lowe, Lord Sherbrooke, would have had something to say about the proprætor Verres being loosely described as invested with prætorian or consular powers.
Whatever its merits or defects,Ciceroat least resembled most of Trollope’s books in being the literary expression of his personality. FromThe Wardenin 1855 toCiceroin 1880 nearly everything in Trollope’s work—character, incident, description, dialogue—was a natural emanation from the man himself, fresh, spontaneous, and unforced. If, by comparison with those which preceded them, there seems something artificial in the stories still to be mentioned, the reason is that he had never lived in the same intimacy, as he himself put it, with his new personages as he had done with the old. He had set himself to describe no longer friends, but strangers. Since he began withThe Macdermotsin 1847, he had seen many changes in the popular taste for fiction. He had himself encountered successfully many rivals. Wilkie Collins, Whyte-Melville, Miss Braddon, and Shirley Brooks had successively come on. Against all heheld his own; he did not even suffer from Charles Lever’s competition. The creator ofHarry LorrequerandCharles O’Malleybegan writing books that took ground, and were in a vein, which Trollope had already made his own. The later Leverian novels, beginning withThe Daltonsand continuing withSir Brook Fossbrooke, seemed to many, if actually they were not, bids against Trollope’sThe Claverings,Orley Farm, andCan You Forgive Her?They did not diminish the demand for those of Trollope’s books that were variations upon the Barchester series.
Meanwhile, the social conditions of the time had changed as well as the writers. The old exclusiverégimein which Trollope had been born and bred was already doomed. The time-honoured class and caste barriers were broken down. The new social fusion was all but complete. The Stock Exchange and Lombard Street had overflowed into St. James’s. The new wealth had possessed itself of the same acres, and the typical country-house was a glorified edition of the Piccadilly palace. At the same time domestic and social scandals, to be particularised hereafter, semi-detached couples, elderly bucks, being also professional lady-killers, and loveless marriages with all their tragic results, became so common as no longer to attract notice.
As Bacon took all nature for his province, so Trollope had no sooner overpassed the limits of country-house and rectory than he began to make his novel a complete mirror of English life on all levels up-to-date. He may have been occasionally mortified by a passing decline in the demand for Christmas stories and for magazine serials from his pen. He never thought much about the posthumous vitality of his works; although nineteenth-century pictures, clerical or secular, of town or country, of club or drawing-room, of the covert side, of the Government office, of barrister’s chambers, and of the law courts, could not but have, at some future time, the same value for the historian as Fielding and Smollett possessed for Macaulay and Lecky. He realised the necessity, above all things, of guarding himself againstthe charge of literary old-fogeydom. Before completing his sixtieth year he had been continually at work during more than a generation. He must therefore show that he had moved with the times by modernising his themes and their treatment. The anxiety to convince the public that he had as keen an eye as ever for the very newest actualities of the time is especially noticeable inHe Knew He Was Right(1869)[33]andThe Way We Live Now(1875).[34]
The former of these first came out in sixpenny parts during 1867. As originally designed by Trollope it was intended, on something the same scale as had been done by Dickens in the Steerforth episode ofDavid Copperfield, to illustrate the tragical results, to social life and personal character, of unbridled and obstinate self-will—a quality, be it noted, equally characteristic of both novelists. Dickens, however, pointed his moral by the single case of Steerforth. In Trollope’s story, each of the chief personages is opinionated and dictatorial to the same degree; in other words, all go wrong simply because all in turn know they are right. So, it has been seen, inCan You Forgive Her?the heroine’s need of pardon was shared by more than one other lady, as well as by at least two men.
InHe Knew He Was Right, Colonel Osborne, the wealthy, middle-aged rather than elderly, Conservative M.P. and professional lady-killer, has known Mrs. Trevelyan from girlhood. He therefore thinks it the correct thing to laugh at old Lady Milborough’s description of him as a serpent, a hyena, or a kite, and, by his attentions to attractive young maidens, to provoke, in Lady Milborough’s phrase, such domestic break-ups as he brings about under the Trevelyans’ roof. On the other hand, Mr. Trevelyan feels convinced beyond a doubt that, while wronging his wife by no suspicions of the worst kind, it is his duty to warn her strongly against the Colonel, and risk one of Lady Milborough’s break-ups, rather than allow Osborne’s visits.
The best piece of character drawing is Colonel Osborne. After this the neatest touches come in the Devonshire scenes describing Mrs. Trevelyan’s movements after the flight from Curzon Street. The pictures of the quiet home life, in or near Exeter, reproduce as regards places and persons the same originals which were used inRachel Ray. In the later, as well as in the earlier novel, are reflected the same central figure, the old-world maiden lady, and some of the same young people whom in real life she gathered about her. The hostess, known by Trollope from his childhood, was Miss Fanny Bent. Her youthful visitors were Rachel Hutchinson, the doctor’s daughter, and Lucy Bowring, with perhaps one or two schoolfellows brought by her from the neighbouring paternal roof known as Claremont. Here Sir John Bowring passed his closing years. Here, too, Anthony Trollope first studied the feminine types who afterwards grew into Lily Dale, Lucy Robarts, Grace Crawley, Florence Burton, and Julia Brabazon. The last of these characters, as she appeared in the first chapter ofThe Claverings, was, indeed, no other than Lucy Bowring herself, photographed from life. Without exception probably, the portraits of English girls that have made half Trollope’s fame are from Devonian or other West of England models. Stiffness and wrong-headedness were infirmities to which Trollope himself frankly confessed. Of those defects he has entirely compacted the brilliant, wealthy, but suicidally perverse and obstinate Oxonian, Louis Trevelyan. The gloomy and painful plot derives no pleasant relief from the comic or lighter business, centred round the irritatingly vulgar detective, Bozzle. This debased descendant of Inspector Bucket inBleak Housefools the miserable and infatuated husband to the top of his bent; at times he shows off his sharpness by insinuations so fanciful and odious against the runaway wife, that, without the novelist saying so, one knows it is as much as Trevelyan can do to keep from knocking him down.
Like one or two other of Trollope’s feminine characters, who show their independence by sailing dangerously closeto the wind, Mrs. Trevelyan is thoroughly equal to taking care of herself, and, from the ethical point of view, never comes near reproach. With a little more tact, patience and wisdom, on her husband’s part, she would never have been piqued into allowing Osborne’s attentions. She has been exasperated by Trevelyan’s unreasonable exactions. So too, inPhineas Finn, Kennedy’s conjugal accusations make Lady Laura return to her father; but Emily Trevelyan has not been really compromised by her mature admirer. Had her lord and master been less self-conscious and more a man of the world than he is, he would not have fallen a victim to his own groundless jealousy.
When treating feminine subjects, Dickens and Trollope are equally given to represent their subordinate heroines as playing with fire, or forced by circumstances into situations calculated to soil virtue itself or to set malicious tongues wagging against purity incarnate. Sometimes, as with Sir Leicester Dedlock’s wife, and Sir Joseph Mason’s widow, the case is that of a lady with a past. Punishment when due is not escaped entirely, but the wind is generally tempered to the shorn lamb, while both novelists upon occasion invoke special providences for mitigating, if not averting the penalty due to the actually fallen. Thus, inDavid Copperfield, ruin comes indifferently to little Em’ly and Martha; but it seems only in accordance with the fitness of things that the catastrophe should not be equally full of horror in both cases. Poetical justice, therefore, and the kindlier influences of her early nurture ordain Em’ly’s partial rescue from the hideous blackness of poor Martha’s fate. Trollope’s later and less known novels contain no better character than Lady Mabel Grex inThe Duke’s Children. But for her own fine nature and great qualities she would assuredly have been doomed to the irreparable ruin, her deliverance from which comes equally from superhuman guidance and her own heroic self-discipline. Edith Dombey cannot be said to have been allowed by Dickens a narrow escape, because she was never in any real danger. Her mother’s training could not but make her an adventuress; her husband’s short-sighted pride had to be humbled by an elopement which would indeed disgrace his name, but whose circumstances could bring no stain on her. In chastising, by their flight, their respective husbands, Dickens’ second Mrs. Dombey and the Mrs. Trevelyan ofHe Knew He Was Right, to some extent, resemble each other; while in both cases the wifely vengeance recoils with nearly equal severity upon the lady. Generally, however, Trollope lets off more easily than does Dickens his fair triflers with the hearts of men. Thus, inGreat Expectations, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, Estella, is punished as she deserves for trifling with Pip’s affections by being paired off with the surly and ill-conditioned Bentley Drummle. The arch-jilt ofCan You Forgive Her?, Alice Vavasor, issuing scatheless from all her escapades, is not punished at all, but may well thank her stars in becoming the mistress of a comfortable Cambridgeshire country-house as the talented, well-to-do and long-suffering John Grey’s wife.[35]
Trollope’s next attempt at satirising the most malignant social tendencies of the time exposed the idolatry of the golden calf, and in its conception owed something to the pregnant remarks of one of the most influential among his contemporaries. During the season of 1875, Trollope’s hitherto slight acquaintance with Delane ofThe Timesmatured into intimacy. At this time the great editor was much impressed by the growth of extravagance and the increase of reckless speculation in the overgrown and mischievously mixed conglomerate of London society. The subject was one on which he and Trollope thought exactly alike. With equal disgust and indignation both observed the acceptance of mere wealth as a passport to the company of men and women who were social leaders by right of birth. In their many talks about these subjects originated both Trollope’sThe Way We Live Nowand a certainTimesarticle presently to be mentioned. On resettling in London after his colonial expeditions, Trollope had established himself in Montagu Square. The first piece of work he did here was the novel in whose mostprominent figure, Melmotte, a grotesque and nauseating monstrosity, he personified the commercial corruptions of the time with all their brutalising effects upon character, as in private, so in public life.
Grouped round, and more or less associated with the over-coloured financier, Melmotte, were many smaller personages representing or suggesting other vicious propensities of the period. The bloated and ferocious plutocrat has a vulgar but otherwise unobjectionable daughter whom, when she dares any details to cross his will or stand in the way of his villainies, he cuts into pieces—in plain English, horsewhips within an inch of her life. There are other young ladies as unattractive as Marie Melmotte, but less inoffensive. These are the girls who expend their energies and innocence in intrigues to get husbands, not for love, but for the enjoyment of greater freedom and more pocket-money. Melmotte himself carries about him a certain suggestion of Baron Albert Grant in the past, and of Whitaker Wright in the days that were then yet to come. The deterioration of Club life is shown by the blackguard interior of the Beargarden, where stripling debauchees, who sponge on their polite paupers of mothers, and venal and pretentious newspaper hacks eat, drink, and rampage at unholy hours.
Chronology might deny the statement that the Printing House Square manifesto already referred to supplied Trollope with a brief for this book; but both the novel and the article came out in the same year. Each, in its different way, was a commentary on a state of things in which the editor and the novelist would have willingly co-operated in bringing to an end. Trollope’s Melmotte was an exaggerated type of the French, German, and American adventurers who, in Delane’s words, gorge like vultures on the country. These, said the editor, were the men whom English gentlemen of family and station competed with each other in helping to fleece society. These, too, were the qualities concentrated by the novelist in the mammoth speculator of Grosvenor Square, who, before the crash, made himself the demi-god of the season by his splendidhospitalities to no less a person than the “Emperor of China.”
One of the incidents which had chiefly moved Delane, breaking through his editorial custom to pen with his own hand his lay sermon, was this. During the early seventies an English nobleman of ancient title and descent, but of diminished territorial wealth, partly by games of chance in which there seemed some suspicion of foul play, and partly by City speculation into which he was enticed, had lost something like £10,000 to a Californian colonel, long since kicked out of all decent company. This swindling Midas, who had winged Delane’s pen, gave Trollope more than a hint for Melmotte inThe Way We Live Now. Any resemblance borne by Melmotte to another fraudulent and glorified capitalist, the Merdle ofLittle Dorrit, is purely fortuitous. Trollope’s intimate friend Sir Henry James once, in my hearing, mentioned the matter to him, to be told “The Way We Live Nowappeared in 1875; I only readLittle Dorritfor the first time on my way to Germany in 1878.”
During their founder’s and original editor’s life, Trollope wrote for none of Dickens’ magazines. After 1870All the Year Roundwas carried on by Charles Dickens the second; his very capable manager G. Holsworth urged him to secure a novel from Trollope. This was written and published; andMr. Scarborough’s Family[36]was the most deliberately and elaborately satirical of all Trollope’s stories. Mr. Scarborough has conceived and nursed, till it becomes something like a monomania, a detestation of legal restrictions generally and of those imposed by the law of entail in particular. He has therefore, with an ingenuity which highly delights him, contrived his own independence of primogeniture by going through two marriage ceremonies with the mother of his eldest son. One of these rites has been celebrated before that son’s birth, and one after. There are also of course two marriage certificates, each relating to the same nuptials, but each bearing a different date.
According therefore to the document he displays, he can at will prove his eldest son legitimate or illegitimate. This son, Mountjoy, a reckless but amiable spendthrift, has a heartless, calculating and mercenary younger brother, Augustus. Mountjoy, by post-obits and things of that sort, has pledged the paternal property to the Jews. At any cost Scarborough resolves that his fine estate, Tretton Park, shall be kept from the money-lenders. He therefore declares Mountjoy a bastard, and so disqualifies him for inheriting. Thus the younger of the two brothers, Augustus, feels no doubt of soon possessing the acres that, but for the blot on his scutcheon, would have gone to Mountjoy. Meanwhile Mr. Scarborough says nothing, but buys up all Mountjoy’s apparently valueless post-obits. He thus, at comparatively slight expense, gives his alleged natural son a pecuniarily clean slate.
This done he dashes to the ground the hopes of his younger son Augustus by suddenly displaying his first marriage certificate as proof of Mountjoy’s birth in wedlock. Having thus tricked successively all whom it suited his humour to deceive, Mr. Scarborough has no more to do than quietly breathe his last.
The irony and Mephistophelian fun of the story are not confined to the situations now described, but overflow very effectively into the amusingly drawn scenes with the duped and furious money-lenders.
The life at Waltham Cross had been more that of an Essex squire with sporting tastes than of a hard-working author or a busy official. It was an existence whose charm, as years went on, Trollope found himself bent on tasting once more. While casting about for a suitable place, he heard of what seemed as near perfection as possible, in West Sussex. North End, or, as it is to-day known, The Grange, lies in Harting parish, some twelve miles from Chichester and four from Petersfield. At one time two farmhouses, but now joined together, it is among the best and prettiest buildings in the district. Surrounded by an estate of nearly seventy acres, its long line of windows and doors opens on a delightful lawn, with a background ofcopse, studded with Scotch firs and larches. Under these a long walk, worthy of Windsor or Kensington, starting from the garden gate, leads through fields up to a South Down hill. On the lawn itself might have been seen, even since Trollope’s day, at one end, the greenhouse, whose flowers he used to tend. Nor were his North End days passed less industriously than those in Montagu Square, where he had pitched his tent on his return from Australia. His hours were, nominally, almost the same as in the strenuous days when he first cultivated the habit of very early rising, so as to get through the daily task of authorship before being due either at Post Office inspection or a meet of hounds, as the case may be. A cup of hot coffee and milk carried him on till a solid breakfast at about nine; when he sat down to that meal the day’s literary labours had generally been altogether finished.
Only some time after leaving the Post Office, in 1868, did he extensively use dictation for his novels. Good fortune gave him, while still at Montagu Square, for his amanuensis a niece, Miss Bland. Apropos of her sympathetic co-operation, he once said to me: “However early the hour, however dull and depressing the dawn, we soon warm to our work and get so excited with those we are writing about, that I don’t know whether she or I are most surprised when the time comes to leave off for breakfast.”
Trollope seemed in excellent health on settling at North End, Harting, as well as throughout his stay there. But gradually he left his bed later than formerly, and often reduced the number of words forming the diurnal task. Together with this he increased his local hospitalities, as well as enlarged his active interest in all parish concerns whether of business or pleasure. Penny Readings were in those days still popular. Trollope not only patronised and assisted at them, but delighted his rural neighbours by securing on the platform, or in the body of the room, some of his well-known London visitors, notably Sir Henry James and J. E. Millais; while the picturesque surroundings of his Sussex home inspired another guest, the Poet Laureate, Mr. Alfred Austin, with one among the mostcharming of his later works,The Garden that I Love. Not once during his stay at Harting did Trollope see the Goodwood or Hambledon foxhounds “throw off”; and he did not spend more time in the saddle on the South Downs than he would have done during his equestrian constitutionals in Hyde Park.
Ireland first had, in 1847, made Anthony Trollope a novelist. His pen was being exercised on an Irish subject when death took it from his fingers. Before, however, beginningThe Land Leaguers, he had, in 1879, published a short story,An Eye for an Eye, whose scene is laid in county Clare.
Mrs. O’Hara’s life had been ruined by a marriage with a drunken and cruel husband, from whom she has fled. To avoid him, she lives with her daughter Kate in an obscure corner of the Clare coast. To the barracks at the neighbouring town, Ennis, comes Fred Neville, heir to the Scroope earldom, a handsome, charming, morally weak, but altogether irresistible scamp. His acquaintance with Kate leads to an engagement, the declared prelude of an early marriage. Neville’s English relatives succeed in preventing this, but not before Kate’s personal surrender to her lover. The hateful husband now renews his persecutions of the lady who has the misfortune to be his wife. Mrs. O’Hara, maddened by these fresh troubles and by her daughter’s ruin, contrives with her own hand Neville’s fatal fall over a cliff. After this Kate goes abroad to take care of her father, now a broken invalid. Mrs. O’Hara loses her wits and passes the rest of her days in a mad-house. This unpleasant and painful story has no other interest than that of mere horror. It is as depressing and sombre asThe Kellys and the O’Kellyswithout any of the humorous sidelights which in parts relieve the earlier work.
The other Irish novel was written almost concurrently with a very slight sketch,An Old Man’s Love—his last completed story—a year afterThe Land Leaguers. The writing ofThe Land Leaguershad been prepared for by his final stay, during some weeks, on the other side of St. George’s Channel, in the spring of 1882. To that periodbelongs his decisive separation from Gladstonian Liberalism. His warm friendship with W. E. Forster had made him reluctant to leave the Liberals even after he had begun to distrust their policy; but during his stay on the other side of St. George’s Channel in the spring of 1882, he had penetrated the artificial, purely American, and Anti-British origin of Irish Nationalism. The professional agitation-monger against the British connection, as described inThe Land Leaguers, was a Yankee, perhaps with some Hibernian strain in his blood, but, from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear, equally ignorant of and indifferent to the welfare and the wants of the population whether from a national or local point of view. Jack-of-all-trades, master of none, he appeared one day as the plausible and patriotic champion of oppressed Erin on the platform; the next, as the promoter of a bogus land company at a Galway market; and then, by a complete change of part, as the insinuating concert or theatrical impresario, who philanthropically puts young ladies with pretty faces, good figures, and voices in the way of making their fortunes and enriching their families. The literary contrasts thus suggested are worked up inThe Land Leaguerswith pathos and power, as well as old humour.[37]
Trollope’s two greatest contemporaries, Thackeray and Dickens, did not live to finish their last novels,Denis DuvalandEdwin Droodrespectively. So, too, it was with Trollope himself. After a journey to Italy about a year before his death he prepared himself for writingThe Land Leaguersby two tours in Ireland. This was one of the only two books—Framley Parsonagehaving been the other—whose publication began before the closing chapter had been written; it was therefore destined to remain a fragment.
Of the practically unknown stories belonging to this period, the only one which it would be fair, however briefly, to recall isDr. Worth’s School(1881). That contains a last addition to the long clerical portrait gallery—a pedagogue in holy orders, in whom, to judge from his temperament, the artist must have taken an autobiographical interest. For Dr. Wortle has the same reputation as Trollope himself for blustering amiability, an imperious manner and a good heart. With the rectory of Bowick he combines schoolmastering of a very select and remunerative kind. Of course Dr. Wortle himself is too busy, and his wife too preoccupied with parochial or social duties to bestow much personal attention upon the boys. All this is therefore left to the assistant master, Mr. Peacocke, and his wife.
Peacocke, an ex-Fellow of Trinity, has spent much time in America. Here he first met Mrs. Peacocke, a young and beautiful woman, married while a mere girl to a worthless and cruel profligate, Ferdinand Lefroy, who soon afterwards disappears, killed, it is said, in a drunken brawl. The first husband, as will at once be guessed, is not dead but, as he soon shows, very much alive. Peacocke has thus to choose between deserting the defenceless woman, whom, however vainly, he has done all he could to make his wife, or brazening it out, risk the consequences, and refuse to give her up. Adopting that latter course, he makes much trouble for himself, even in such a paradise of matrimonial laxity as the United States. He therefore recrosses the Atlantic with the hope of beginning a new life in his native land. At Dr. Wortle’s, Peacocke is doing well when the story of his own and his wife’s past becomes known. Pressure is now placed on Dr. Wortle to dismiss his immoral usher. His generous refusal to do so loses him nearly all his pupils, and determines Peacocke to search America for evidence that, by conclusively establishing Lefroy’s death, will clear both Dr. Wortle and himself. His errand succeeds. Peacocke brings back with him proof of his having violated neither the marriage law nor the decalogue. The way is therefore open for an indisputably legal union with Mrs. Peacocke. That is followed by the return of prosperity to all persons concerned. The parents who have withdrawn their sons rally round Peacocke’s loyal chief. The curtain falls on the entrance upon the new lease of prosperity of Dr. Wortle’s school and all connected with it.
Few novelists have beat out their gold leaf so thin aswas systematically done by Trollope. None but himself have persisted in the practice for years without encountering signs of weariness in their public that have caused them to change their ways. Trollope never felt, or, at least, practically acknowledged such a compulsion.Dr. Wortle’s Schoolonly attained to the dimensions of a book, because the story that gives the title to the volume receives the addition of incidents and characters, organically quite unconnected with the central personages and plot. Trollope, therefore, consistently and to the last, in the structure of his novels persevered with a method somewhat apt to try his readers’ patience. In other words, by distracting attention from the creatures of his imagination originally placed in the foreground, he weakens their hold upon the mind. The legitimate or the most serviceable purpose of an underplot is to illustrate from another part of the stage, or on a stage entirely different, those evolutions of character or course of action belonging to the maiden narrative. This was almost as entirely ignored by Trollope as it was thoroughly understood by Dickens.
InDombey and Sonthe gipsy underplot is a close parallel to, as well as an apposite commentary on, the principal theme of Mr. Dombey and his second wife. Like Edith Skewton, Alice Brown is a tall, handsome girl, out of whose beauty a grasping and worthless mother makes what capital she can. Alice’s outlook on life is in every particular Edith’s also; one of scorn for herself and her mother, and a weary defiance to the world. Alice, too, resembles Edith in being a much less strong-willed mother’s passive instrument, not from any sympathy with her, but from an utter indifference to good or ill. Further, the personal likeness between the two is explained by the fact of Alice Brown’s being Edith Dombey’s illegitimate sister. Again, it is through Alice’s mother, Mrs. Brown, that Dombey discovers the continental whereabouts of the defaulting Carker and of his own wife. The analogy appears still closer when one remembers that, after the mother’s death, Alice rises above the level to which she had been degraded, without knowing whathappiness means. With Dickens, the whole episode is not the less significant because it is shadowy, and its vagueness at no point interferes with the central narrative.
Another quality distinguishing Trollope from most other novelists is a literary style, shown from the first and retained to the last, exactly suited to his subject-matter, appealing at once to the cultivated and the general reader. Writing not for a limited circle—like his junior in years, but, in work, almost his contemporary, Meredith, or his avowed master and idol, Thackeray—with his pen, as in his pursuits, habits, and tastes, he was, after the English manner, essentially masculine. Yet he knew more of the feminine mind and nature than any author of his generation. His descriptions of mixed society in drawing-room or Club may occasionally lack lightness in handling, polish and point. His scenes, humorous or pathetic, serious or trivial, between women alone in seaside lodgings or in country houses, unite with a vividness of presentation a fineness of touch, unique in English fiction. That was the quality apropos of which a London hostess once said to him, “Mr. Trollope, how do you know what we women say to each other when we get alone in our room?” A few hours before this question, being at the Athenæum, he had heard a member of the Club complain that inThe Last Chronicle of BarsetMrs. Proudie was still allowed to live. “Feeling sure,” said Trollope, “from this, that the bishopess was beginning to pall on the public, I went home and killed her.” Add to this width, depth, and variety of the interest he excited the fact that he never risked being dull in the affectation or effort of being profound and that, from first to last, his bold, clear, if sometimes diffuse style was tainted by no symptoms of the modern euphuism known as preciosity, Trollope’s claim to the description of a national novelist cannot be denied.
The advance of the story, prose or verse, narrative or dramatic, from the Attic stage to Samuel Richardson, as from the creator of Clarissa to the creator of Hetty Sorrel, has been from incident to character. Character analysisand character casuistry naturally go together. Hence, to some degree it has been already possible to see in Trollope the progenitor of the twentieth-century problem novel. From that point of view, the man, whose development has been traced in these pages, was the typical product, not of a great creative, but of a reflective and critical age. Thus he illustrated, in however different form, the same influences of his age as showed themselves, among prose writers, not only in Meredith, but in Matthew Arnold or Carlyle, in A. W. Kinglake or in Laurence Oliphant; and among poets, in Browning.
The turn for psychological puzzles together with the dissection of human motive and action common to the two men made Trollope Browning’s favourite among contemporary writers. Socially, during the last half of their careers the novelist and the poet led much the same lives, visiting at the same houses and most easily unbending in the same company. One of the latest occasions on which the two met each other was in the grounds of Lambeth Palace in 1882. Their host upon that occasion was Archibald Campbell Tait. By something of a coincidence, before the year was out both the archbishop and that literary guest who was more closely associated by his writings than any English author with the higher and lower orders of the Anglican clergy were dead. Tait died on December 3rd, Trollope on December 6th.
During the two years passed by him at Harting there had been no great decline in his health. After leaving his Sussex home, he saw little again of Montagu Square. With that place, however, those who knew him best always most pleasantly connected his name. There the book-room or study, the scene of nearly all his literary toils, with Miss Bland for his amanuensis, was on the ground-floor behind the dining-room. Above that his books had overflowed into a double drawing-room; one of its chief features was a capacious recess at the north end, fitted with some book-shelves, but chiefly used by him for visitors with whom he wished some special talk. The contents of the shelves now mentioned had a history highly characteristic of their owner. Robert Bell, the once universally known book-lover, critic, and author, had left to his widow a smaller estate than was expected. His library was announced for sale at Willis and Sotheran’s. “This,” said Trollope, “must not be. We all know the difference in value between buying and selling of books.” He at once saw the executors; the auction arrangements were cancelled. Trollope bought all the volumes at a price, fixed by himself, much above their market worth.
This was only one instance of the kindly and unselfish actions unostentatiously performed by one among the broadest-minded, kindest-hearted of men. Not unreservedly a man of peace himself, he more than once acted as peacemaker, in reconciling to each other friends of his long at variance. Thus a difference originating in the newspaper office (The Daily News) with which they both had to do, kept apart for nearly a generation two of his intimates, Edward Pigott and Edward Dicey. Neither would probably have spoken again to the other but for Trollope’s genial and tactful intervention. This happened during the last eighteen months of his life. His manner in doing it reminded both men of a sixth-form boy who, separating two juniors engaged in fisticuffs, bids them, with a gentle kick, go about their business.
When, in 1873, Trollope had taken the Montagu Square house, it was for the purpose of ending both his days and his work there and there only. The fates, however, had decided against that. In the late autumn of 1882 Trollope reappeared in London, but took up his abode at Garland’s Hotel, Suffolk Street, Pall Mall. On the 3rd of November, while dining at the house of his brother-in-law, Sir John Tilley, he had a paralytic seizure. He was removed to a nursing home at 34 Welbeck Street, and attended by Dr. Murrell with Sir William Jenner in consultation. For a fortnight his condition improved; then came a relapse. Death followed after an illness which had lasted about a month. On the following Saturday, December 9th, he was laid to rest, not far from Thackeray’s grave, in Kensal Green. Among those present at his funeralwere: the most famous survivor of his literary generation, Robert Browning; J. E. Millais, his artistic colleague in so many novels; Mr. Alfred Austin; Frederick Chapman, the head of the publishing firm Chapman and Hall, with which during many years previously he chiefly had to do, his own small interest in which he bequeathed to his family; and an Australian friend, Mr. Rusden, as the representative of those colonies where he had long found some of his most loyal readers.
On the same day that Trollope died there died also, at Cannes, the French socialistic writer Louis Blanc, known to Trollope during the years of his London exile, and, it might have been thought, long forgotten by his English acquaintances. Nevertheless the London papers of December 7th, 1882, devoted a larger space to their comments on the French Radical’s career than to the English novelist’s works. The newspaper verdict was generally represented byThe Times, which, after a passing reference to his miscellaneous literary activities, correctly enough reflected the public estimate by emphasising Trollope’s sustained hold on his readers and the uniform level of merit during thirty-five years of unceasing work.
His death was immediately followed by some fall in the demand for his writing. Since then, however, time has redressed the balance after so marked a fashion that, among the leading literary features of the twentieth century, a permanent revival of popular interest in the novels and in the man who wrote them will have a place.
COMPILED BY MARGARET LAVINGTONWITH NOTES DRAWN CHIEFLY FROM HISAUTOBIOGRAPHYAND FROM INFORMATION KINDLY GIVEN BY HIS SON,HENRY M. TROLLOPE
THE MACDERMOTS | OF | BALLYCLORAN, | By | Mr. A.Trollope. | In Three Volumes. | London: | Thomas Cautley Newby, Publisher, | 72, Mortimer Street, Cavendish Sq. | 1847. |
THE MACDERMOTS | OF | BALLYCLORAN, | By | Mr. A.Trollope. | In Three Volumes. | London: | Thomas Cautley Newby, Publisher, | 72, Mortimer Street, Cavendish Sq. | 1847. |
Small 8vo. Vol. I., pp. 345; Vol. II., pp. 382; Vol. III., pp. 743 (sic). [This figure is plainly a misprint for 437, as the preceding page is numbered 436.]
The plot, which Trollope considered to be as good as any he ever made, of this book, was conceived during a walk with his friend, John Merivale, around the village of Drumsna, Co. Leitrim, in the course of which they came upon the modern ruins of a country-house, as described in Chapter I. It was begun in September 1843, and finished a year after his marriage, which took place in June 1844. His mother, Mrs. Frances Trollope the novelist, arranged for its publication with Mr. Newby, who neither paid the author anything nor rendered an account of the sales which were presumably very small. The sum of £48, 6s.9d.mentioned in the Autobiography as received for this book was probably therefore in respect of the new edition of 1859. Mr. Henry Merivale Trollope kindly informs me that another copy of the first edition in his possession contains a new and different title-page, as though the publisher, seeing that another novel had been issued, hoped to help the sale of his remaining copies by the additional words, “Author ofThe Kellys and the O’Kellys.” The book is in all other respects the same. This later title-page reads as follows: