CHAPTER VI

ON HER MAJESTY’S SERVICE AND HIS OWN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII

ON AND OFF DUTY ROUND THE WORLD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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