THE IRELAND THAT TROLLOPE KNEW
A fresh start--Off to Ireland--The dawn of better things--Ireland
in the forties and after--The Whigs and Tories in turn make vain
efforts to remove the nation’s chief grievances--The most
deep-seated evils social rather than political--Trollope’s bond of
union with the “distressful country”--Sowing the seed of authorship
on Bianconi’s cars and in the hunting-field--“It’s dogged as does
it”--Ireland’s hearty welcome to the Post Office official--Trollope
and his contemporaries on the Irishman in his true light--The
future novelist at Sir William Gregory’s home--The legislation of
1849--The history and race characteristics of the Irish and the
Jews compared--Irish novelists of Trollope’s day--Marriage with
Miss Heseltine in 1844--His social standing and hunting reputation
in Ireland--Interesting notabilities at Coole Park--Triumphant
success of Trollope’s Post Office plot--Scoring off the advocate.
In his periodical murmurings at the dispensations of fate, Anthony
Trollope spared himself at least as little as he did others. In the
retrospective censures upon Colonel Maberly and any others in authority
over him during his initiation into the Government service, he magnified
rather than extenuated his own shortcomings. Private letters about him
to his own relatives from those of the Freeling family, who long
remained in more or less close touch with the Post Office, show the low
esteem in which he complains of having been held by his official masters
to have been for the most part imaginary. The impression, even in its
most unfavourable aspects, left behind him at St. Martin’s-le-Grand on
his transfer to Ireland in 1841 was not so much one of incapacity for
work as of indisposition to it. If he showed himself to be unpunctual,
spiritless, and untidy, that was generally put down to want, not of
power, but of proper training for his duties. According to the habit of
the time, all subjects not classical had been “extras” at Anthony
Trollope’s schools. Thanks to his home lessons, from the beginnings of
his official course he could express himself clearly and tersely; he had
inherited and retained throughout life his mother’s clear, flowing
calligraphy. Of arithmetic, however, he knew little or nothing. Here, as
in other respects, he improved as he went on. A spruce and finished
official in his youth he never indeed became; but, on landing at Dublin
in the September of 1841, he had outgrown the unpunctuality, the want of
method, and the _gaucheries_ which so often opened against him the vials
of Colonel Maberly’s wrath. Thrown on his own resources in dealing with
all sorts of people, from departmental overseers in St.
Martin’s-le-Grand to lodging-house landladies in Marylebone, he had
picked up enough worldly wisdom and insight into character to compensate
for any failing of personal or official equipment.
Once in Ireland, he had no sooner looked round him than he fancied he
could see a resemblance between the condition of the country and his own
state and prospects. This inspired him with a kind of sympathetic
affection for the Irish people. In the June before Trollope landed at
Dublin, Queen Victoria’s first Parliament had come to an end, with the
result that, of the long-promised Whig reforms for Ireland, the only
instalments actually carried into effect were an unpopular Poor Law of
doubtful efficacy, and certain measures, largely dictated by the
Conservative opposition, for dealing with the inveterate evils of tithe
collection as well as with municipal corporations. It was the Irish
tithe abuses which had caused a literary admirer of Anthony Trollope’s
mother, Sydney Smith, to say: “There is no cruelty like it in all
Europe, in all Asia, in all discovered parts of Africa, and in all that
we have ever heard of Timbuctoo.” For centuries Ireland had been not
only the object of English misrule and neglect, but the victim of the
English party system. The exigencies of that party system secured
periodical surrenders to Irish agitators, which were called
concessions, and spasmodic outbursts of eleemosynary lavishness, which
were in reality merely part payments of long overdue debts. Three years
before the Victorian era began, the Tories, led by Peel, had made way
for the Whigs under Melbourne. Whoever was out or whoever was in,
O’Connell remained master of the position. Without truckling to that
dictator, neither Whig nor Tory minister thought of moving a step. The
habit of English surrender to Irish importunity, when sufficiently
persevering and acute, had, when Anthony Trollope crossed St. George’s
Channel, produced the feeling that agitation and outrage were the two
infallible instruments for wresting the demands of the moment. Neither
of the two great political connections had shown more statesmanship than
its rival in its Irish policy. But for the three months nominal tenure
of office by Peel in 1835, the Whigs had enjoyed unbroken control of
affairs during more than a decade.
Now, in the month of Anthony Trollope’s first crossing the Irish
Channel, a change had come, and the Tories were to have their turn. When
therefore Trollope passed his first night in Dublin, the Castle was
enjoying the novel experience of a Conservative Viceroy, Lord de Grey.
His official term coincided with some attempt at improving the state of
the country from which much was hoped. The most important and promising
project recommended by his predecessors Peel, however, had shelved. Five
years before Trollope’s departure from St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the Whig
ministers had contemplated introducing railways into Ireland. Peel’s
opposition to that proposal precluded him from himself adopting it,
notwithstanding his private conviction of its usefulness. Instead he
took the earliest step towards that Roman Catholic endowment at which,
when out of office, he had so often shied. In the early future, he let
it be understood, he would increase the education grant and qualify the
Roman Catholics for receiving gifts and holding property for charitable
and religious uses. At the same time, he promised an extension of the
county franchise, and votes in boroughs to all who paid poor rates. The
great feature in the Conservative surrender to popular Irish feeling
was the abandonment of Protestant ascendency as an administrative
principle. There was now appointed for dealing with charitable bequests
a new Commission, half of whose members were Irish Papists, and whose
secretary belonged to the same denomination. The new policy secured a
permanent endowment for paying Roman Catholic priests and building Roman
Catholic chapels.
But these measures of Irish relief, however well received, attracted
less attention than the personality of the man who, as Trollope settled
down to his Post Office work, had just been installed at the viceregal
lodge. The magnificent presence, the great wealth, the fine temper, and
the impartial sympathies of Lord de Grey had not yet, and indeed never
did, endear him to the Irish heart; but they had really impressed the
Irish imagination. The _personnel_ of Peel’s whole administration was
marked by two characteristics: first, its deference to the principle of
aristocratic connection; secondly, its recognition of past official
services. The chief Irish secretary under Lord de Grey, Lord Eliot, was,
like Grey himself, the subject of Orange criticism. Such censure in the
circumstances of the time was looked upon as a recommendation, while as
for Lord de Grey, the only doubt felt about him was whether he might not
prove somewhat too much of the _beau sabreur_ to labour only for peace.
Never since the introduction of constitutional government could Ireland
have been more under the control of an individual ruler than when
Trollope made his acquaintance with the country. Neither his Tory
supporters nor the most influential of his personal adherents, Stanley
and Graham, had been consulted in the appointments made. If further
proof were needed of the Prime Minister’s determination to dominate the
administration, it would be found in the fact that, to make sure of
crossing swords himself with Palmerston in the Commons over imperial
policy, he dispensed with a Foreign Under Secretary in the Lower House.
To the Irish people therefore, as Trollope discovered directly he began
to know something of the country, Peel was not only the head of the new
Government, but concentrated in himself its most decisive authority and
its highest prerogatives.
The educational reforms and the Roman Catholic educational subsidies to
which Peel had early given the Conservative sanction were not to be
carried out in Grey’s time, and did not come within Trollope’s
observation. “Property has its duties as well as its rights.” So in 1838
had said Thomas Drummond, the engineer officer who filled for five years
the chief secretaryship. The words dwelt in the Irish mind long after
their echoes had died away from the Irish ear. In his new quarters,
Anthony Trollope had no sooner time to look round than he descried
everywhere detailed proof of Drummond’s remark having lost none of its
force since it was first made. Excessive population and deficient
production were the two great evils, each social rather than political,
of the land from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear. In England there
was at this time an average of one agricultural labourer to every
thirty-four cultivated acres. In Ireland the average was one to every
fourteen. One-third of the entire population depended for food on the
little plots round their cabins on the barren hillside or on the
uncertain moor. The great monument of English enterprise for relieving
Irish need was the large workhouse in each new Poor Law district,
execrated by the masses, and only acquiesced in by those who were better
off. Within two years of Trollope’s arrival in Dublin, there had set in
a steady increase of crime, and an addition, visible on all sides, to
the chronic distress. Nor did the lot of those who owned the soil
display to Trollope much that raised them greatly above its industrial
occupants. His boyish acquaintance with his father’s agricultural
failures in Harrow Weald seemed to repeat themselves, as he observed the
struggles of the Irish squireens, in the dilapidated tenements that they
still called their country houses, to postpone indefinitely the evil day
of being sold up by the attorney and the usurer. The urban
neighbourhoods were no better off than the rural. Most of the towns
within Trollope’s district had once been the seats of some small
industries. Many if not most of these had now declined into a languor
which had often caused them to be entirely abandoned, and had sometimes
withdrawn the bulk of the population they had formerly supported from
their homes.
On all sides, therefore, melancholy and desolation were in the
foreground on which Trollope daily gazed. In the desponding moods of
which he had naturally many after first realising his loneliness in a
strange country, Trollope’s fancy could not but detect a certain
congeniality between his own lot, present or future, and the dismal
destinies, the depressing sights and sounds surrounding him. The
distressful country thus found, in its newest comer, one who at heart
was as distressful as itself. The social and political atmosphere of the
country, even before Trollope came, had begun to be stirred by the note
of Celtic preparation for throwing off the Saxon yoke. Trollope’s
apprenticeship to his Irish work corresponded with the birth of the
Young Ireland movement. In that, however, there could be nothing which
appealed to his imagination with anything like the force of the human
wastage, daily in some new form presented to his eye.
But if his surroundings seemed saddening, almost, at times, to
stupefaction, Trollope gradually extracted from them food for honest and
severe thought, as well as a stimulus for invigorating exertion, both of
body and mind. In Ireland for the present he had to live. Ireland
therefore should yield him the material out of which he should make for
himself a name among State servants, as well as reputation and perhaps
fortune with his pen. When the forties were drawing to a close, railway
development was among the specifics periodically applied to the healing
of Irish distress. But when Trollope first knew the country that mode of
treatment belonged to the future. The popular method of locomotion was
that begun in the year of his own birth, 1815, by an Italian settler,
who thought he saw the beginnings of a fortune. Charles Bianconi started
his operations in 1815 by running cars from Clonmel to Cahir. Of these
conveyances he had travelling in 1841 as many as sufficed regularly at
short intervals to touch all the more important southern and western
towns. The daily total of the collective miles covered by them was three
thousand six hundred. The animals used would have been enough to mount a
cavalry regiment. Half the secret of Bianconi’s success was, as he
explained to Trollope, the discovery of short cuts between the different
stages, and ensuring to his vehicles a maximum of speed with a minimum
expenditure of motive power. Trollope was not slow to profit by the
hint, nor would he ever have done so well as he did in the capacity of
surveyor but for Bianconi’s itinerary instructions. The shrewd Milanese
also took him behind the scenes of the Irish people in their daily life.
“The most apparently poverty-stricken of the peasant farmers for whom my
cars have found fresh markets,” he said, “are very often,
notwithstanding their dirty and dilapidated dwellings, comparatively
well-to-do. And when, filled with pity for a man looking sadly
out-of-elbows, you drop some sympathetic word, you must be prepared to
hear that his cows and sheep upon the mountains are to be reckoned by
tens and scores, and to be told that he is, maybe, richer than your
honour.” Thus early in his Hibernian apprenticeship did the new
surveyor, as regards the state of the people among whom he was to live,
receive the extra official lessons that, supplemented by his own later
observation, made him a sounder authority on most Irish subjects than
nine-tenths of the statesmen legislating for them at Westminster.
The way of business was also to prove with Trollope the way of amusement
and sport. Anthony Trollope had learned to sit a horse in the Spartan
severity of the Harrow Weald days. Dared or commanded by his brother Tom
to put, bare-backed, a half-broken steed at hedges or ditches in the
biggest field of the paternal farm, he was taught at least how to stick
on, and never forgot the lesson. “It’s dogged as does it” was often in
the mouth of a smaller personage in _Orley Farm_; and, as will
presently be seen, it was doggedness which made Trollope both a
sportsman and a novelist.
During his clerkly days at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the already mentioned
visits to his sister, Lady Tilley, in Cumberland, and to other houses
which had stables, helped him to complete his equestrian education. When
therefore, at the age of twenty-six, he began in Ireland, he knew all
about riding to hounds, could take up his own line across country, and
hold his own against the rest of the field. To create the nucleus of a
hunting stable, and secure a really good single mount to begin with,
Trollope found easy enough. For some time before the end of his Irish
term the one hunter had grown into three, each equally serviceable and
creditable to its owner’s judgment of horseflesh. The only trouble at
the beginning of his Irish hunting days was a misgiving as to the
welcome waiting him from his fellow-sportsmen. Already he had been
disappointed at the little notice of his workmanlike turnout, as he
flattered himself, taken in the village where he was staying. He had,
however, no sooner taken his part in a forty minutes’ run, with a good
scent and over a stiffish country, than his sporting, and consequently
his social fortune was made. Adventures are to the adventurous. The
bustling novelty of his Irish situation had effectually roused Trollope
from his moody reveries, had taken him out of himself, and wakened to
new life dormant energies of mind as well as body.
On all sides, without any efforts of his own or introductions from
others to smooth the way, sprang up acquaintances, soon to develop into
lifelong friends. On one of these occasions the chase for the day had
come to an end; the fox was killed, and Trollope, finding himself some
dozen miles farther from home than he had reckoned, was meditating how
to make his way back to the little inn where he put up before the
darkness had descended upon a country of which he knew nothing. “My
house,” said a friendly voice at his elbow, “is close here, and with us
you must stay till to-morrow, and perhaps, when you know what sort of
people we are, for some little time after.” The next morning he saw his
hosts were in the thick of preparations for a ball that night. Gentlemen
partners were sadly wanted for the dance. The visitor surely would not
refuse his presence at a pinch, and would let his new friends send for
his evening clothes, which were of course with his other things at his
temporary headquarters on the other side of the moor. At the age of
five-and-twenty Anthony Trollope, if even then something of a heavy
weight, was not the less a dancing man, and in favour with lovely young
ladies. “Be sure to send my pumps with the rest of my things,” was the
message he emphasised to the raw Irish factotum whom he had just taken
into his service. The portmanteau thus commanded duly arrived, and, when
unpacked, proved to contain in the way of footgear only a pair of
bedroom slippers and some boots, double-ironed on the soles, waterproof,
absolutely impervious to cold or wet, and made before he left London
according to their purchaser’s special instructions, for the roughest
sporting use. Beneath the roof where he was staying no foot was so near
Trollope’s as to yield it a covering which would safely carry him
through the evening’s evolutions. To trouble his host further was quite
out of the question. There was, therefore, nothing to do but to take the
manservant into his confidence. “Do not,” came that person’s comforting
reply, “make yourself uneasy. I will send on a quick pony a boy who
knows all the short cuts. The dance shall be kept back an hour or so. By
the time it fairly begins, your pumps, I engage, will be waiting before
your dressing-room fire.” All of which things, as Trollope in one of his
short stories has related, came to pass.
Trollope’s early experiences in Ireland were of the priest as well as of
the squire. Once at least he found in the popish vicar of a remote
Galway village an ex-Guardsman with whose fashionable escapades, a few
years earlier, Mayfair and St. James’s had rung. All that, at first
hand, he now saw and heard confirmed him in an impression which had
gradually been deepening ever since he set foot in the country. The
Irish traditionally had the reputation of being a pastoral and
agricultural people. What Trollope now learned and saw for himself of
their real characteristics, especially of their keen business instinct,
and insistence in their purchases on getting full value for their money,
showed him a race qualified above all things to excel in trade. “Old
Trollope banging about,” was Froude’s description of Trollope when
engaged in his study of mankind. He confessed, however, the accuracy of
Trollope’s Irish impressions, and with his own pen several years later
illustrated the Irish aptitudes from the same point of view as Trollope
had taken. In 1889 appeared Froude’s only novel, an Irish one, _The Two
Chiefs of Dunboy_. Its central idea was the permanent ruin of the
Irishman at home by centuries of anarchy, of misrule, and by all the
evils that followed in their train. Only transplant him sufficiently far
from his native soil to conditions that give scope for his keenness in
bargain making and his shrewd instinct when to take and when to avoid
commercial risks, and he becomes the wariest and surest builder up of
fortunes on the face of the earth. Thus, the hero of Froude’s story,
Patrick Blake, with his warehouses and his shipping on the Loire,
develops not only into a leader of men but a prince among capitalists,
and yet, at every turn of his fortunes, in thought, word, and deed,
remains a genuine Celt.
Much the same idea, notwithstanding the difference of its setting forth,
was present to another writer, whom Froude may not have known, but who
was among the most intimate of Trollope’s comrades of the pen. Charles
Lever’s college scapegraces or hard-riding, hard-drinking subalterns
have but to leave the old home behind them, and then, as surely as they
do so, achieve military or diplomatic fame. The spirited and accurate
description of Waterloo in Lever’s most popular novel is but the
culminating point of Charles O’Malley’s march from one success to
another, since the day on which the Duke of Wellington, then Sir Arthur
Wellesley, had embarked at Cork his contingent for the Peninsula.
Trollope, indeed, never elaborated this thought as deliberately and
circumstantially as was done by Froude in _The Two Chiefs of Dunboy_, or
even as Lever in his short stories and O’Dowd papers. The fact itself,
however, had been perceived by Trollope long before it had been put down
in his note-book by Froude, who, by the way, lived long enough to take
Trollope more seriously than he had at first been disposed to do, and to
acknowledge that his breezy or boisterous exterior veiled unsuspected
gifts of sagacious insight and accurate inference. Galway was known by
Trollope even better than Dublin. Again and again in his smaller pieces
are reminders that the most prosperous business houses in Cadiz and
Madrid were founded by men who went forth from Connaught to seek their
fortunes in the sunniest South, and whose descendants still kept a hold
on the concerns founded by their sires.
Once he had fairly settled down to his Irish work, Trollope’s manner
took on the official veneer which it never afterwards quite lost, but
which no more suppressed than it entirely concealed the genuine, genial
nature which won him friends thick and fast in the hunting-field and on
his daily rounds. There was one social centre, whose owners and whose
guests made it a second home for the visitor, and a most instructive
school for the study of Irish life and character. Immemorially belonging
to successive generations of Gregorys of official rank and great local
consideration, Coole Park, near Gort, then had as its master, Trollope’s
old Harrow schoolfellow, Sir William Gregory, who lived till 1892, and
who had entered Parliament as member for Dublin shortly after Trollope’s
Irish course began. Here the novelist found himself in a hotbed of
social varieties, and in the heart of a district literally overflowing
with the local colour, incidents, and personages enriching his earliest
novel. The period was that in which the old picturesque, lawless
_régime_ of Sir Jonah Barrington’s memoirs had not been effaced by the
modern Anglicising dispensation. In his little park, full of retainers
who would have risen as one man to repel any invasion of his ancestral
roof, William Gregory lived a patriarchal life simple enough in its
ordinary course, but fringed with some of the circumstance proper to a
stock rooted in the soil from mythical times. Few visitors of
consideration passed any time in Connaught without Coole Park’s
hospitable doors opening to them.
The earliest year of Trollope’s Irish residence saw him an _habitué_ of
the place, and introduced him to the home life, not only of the local
magnates, but of the surrounding peasantry, then generally in the
clutches of the “gombeen man,” sometimes a peasant himself, sometimes a
shopkeeper or fifth-rate solicitor, who, at usurious rates of interest,
used to advance the tenants money to make up their rent. Gregory, if not
Trollope, lived to see all this changed, and the “gombeen man’s”
occupation taken from him by the fixing of those fair rents which have
created a race of peasant proprietors that shrink from no sacrifice to
keep their instalments fully paid up. The master of Coole Park shared
with his visitor most of his literary, political, and especially
classical tastes which had survived the bodily ill-usage of Harrow and
Winchester, as well as the subsequent privations of Harrow Weald.
Gregory and Trollope had both kept up a trifle of their Greek, as well
as a little more of their Latin. They could cap with each other
quotations from Virgil or Horace, or the more familiar passages of less
known authors. Each of them read the old authors with tolerable ease and
therefore with some real enjoyment, not as subjects crammed for
examinations, but as literature. Coole Park in these days had declined a
good deal from the glories of its social gatherings and of its convivial
junketings in the ancestral past. But, to quote Charles Lever, met here
among others by Trollope, the Coole Park hosts set a noble example to
the whole countryside in not letting the gaieties of their
well-appointed roof be interfered with by irregularly paid rents. The
declining prosperity of the territorial class, however reluctant
Trollope and others may have been to forecast such a prospect, was
manifestly destined to result in the legislation actually brought by the
year 1849. Of course, when the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849 actually
came, Trollope, or those who saw things through the same spectacles as
himself, had no good to say about it.
The pauper landlords, who had not the means to put their tenants in the
way of doing justice to the land they occupied, were never so personally
odious to the tillers of the soil as the new men brought in after 1849.
“Down at heels, out at elbows, with no clothes in his wardrobe, and
nothing but an overdraft at his bankers, the landlord of whom I saw so
much in the early forties was yet in a way the father of his people,
and, in his rough, thriftless way, had real care for his tenantry.
Heaven protect the Irish tenant from the territorial speculator whom the
Encumbered Estates Act could not but instal in his place.” Nothing in
its way could be more shrewd or sensible than Trollope’s view of the
national results likely to flow from the legislation of 1849. “True,” he
said, “these measures will bring fresh capital into the country, but at
what a price. The new and improved owners, urged on by their scientific
bailiffs, will promptly put up rents all round. The old vicious circle
will once again begin with a changed centre, and under fresh conditions.
There will be the old poverty. Another land question of a more acute
sort will thus have been prepared for. It will, unless I am greatly
mistaken, be managed by agitators of a kind yet unknown who will work
the business entirely for their own venal ends.” How far this prediction
had its fulfilment was exemplified by Trollope in the last of his Irish
novels, _The Land Leaguers_, left unfinished because of his death. This,
however, by the way.
It is enough here to point out that Ireland was the country in which
Trollope first showed the literary value of the observant habits that
his Post Office work had caused him to pick up and gradually to perfect.
The mental alertness and the inquisitorial searching below the surface
and behind the scenes for the causes of whatever met his eye were
essentially the products of his official training. Their exercise upon
the facts and characters of daily life was due to the happy chance that
sent him across St. George’s Channel; and his Irish experiences first
called into activity all the more important powers that were afterwards
to bring him fame and fortune in the Barchester novels.
For the rest, Trollope well repaid the warmth of his Irish welcome by
combating the traditional misrepresentation of the Irish character.
Racial generalisations, he saw, must always suggest so many exceptions
as to be practically worthless. Nations exhibit largely prevalent
tendencies rather than fixed and universal traits. To quote from
Trollope’s table-talk: “As well call all Welshmen thieves because of the
nursery lines about Taffy as pronounce thriftlessness a peculiarly Irish
fault on the strength of Samuel Lover’s caricatures in _Handy Andy_,
Lever’s portrait of an Irish dragoon, or the casual impressions of a
holiday trip in Kerry and Connemara.” So far back as 1780, Arthur Young,
in his _Tour in Ireland_, had touched on the fallacies besetting the
popular conception of the tendencies and aptitudes specially distinctive
of the exceedingly mixed races that inhabited the country. During the
nineteenth century, however, Trollope, among Englishmen, was the
earliest observer and writer to bring the same truth out in prominent
relief, and so to impress it upon an acute student of his countrymen
like Lever as to cause him, in his later stories, to modify his own
opinions about the essentially representative features of his Irish
types. A clever Dublin lady, under whose eye Trollope made his earliest
Irish observations, told me his close looking into the commonest objects
of daily life always reminded her of a woman in a shop examining the
materials for a new dress. He could therefore not fail to have been
struck, while on his official rounds, by the frequent signs in the local
physiognomy and temperament in Galway and, indeed, throughout all
Connemara, of a Jewish as well as Spanish strain largely mingled with
the aboriginal Celtic.
Trollope, it has been seen, had entered on his Irish employment with a
firm persuasion of being destined to follow the maternal example, and to
commence novelist as soon as he had got together enough material for his
first chapter. The resolve of devoting himself to fiction gained fresh
strength from his early visits, already described, to Coole Park. The
beginning there of his acquaintanceship with Charles Lever was in itself
to Trollope a literary event. Lever’s earliest novel, _Harry Lorrequer_,
had at that time been recently running through the _Dublin University
Magazine_. With the exception of his mother, the creator of _Charles
O’Malley_ was the earliest writer of fiction whom Trollope had ever
known. Of Fenimore Cooper he had heard much from his mother, who often
saw him in Paris. Walter Scott, it occurred to him, had by his genius
thrown the glamour of romance over the Highlands; he who wrote _The Last
of the Mohicans_ had rescued the Red Indians from the commonplace. In
like manner too the Irish romancist to whom Gregory had made him known
had comically idealised the mess-room and parade-ground. Why, in the
fullness of time should not Anthony himself find some class of the
community from which to extract literary entertainment for readers on
the lookout for novelty? Pending that, it would not be waste of time to
found a preliminary essay upon the daily doings of the people among whom
for the present his lot was cast. Miss Edgeworth’s _Castle Rackrent_ and
_The Absentee_ he had read about the same time as he first pored over
the pages of Jane Austen’s _Pride and Prejudice_. Then, at the close of
the eighteenth century, and before the middle of the nineteenth, had
come from various hands many Irish stories racy of the soil with which
Trollope first made acquaintance in Gregory’s library.
Mrs. S. C. Hall’s masterpiece, _The Whiteboy_, did not come before 1845.
Long before then, however, she had made hits on both sides of St.
George’s Channel with, to name only a few in a long list, _The
Buccaneer_ and _The Outlaw_. Two years Mrs. Hall’s senior, but like her
then still living and flourishing, was William Carleton; his _Traits and
Stories of the Irish Peasantry_, having first appeared in _The Christian
Examiner_, was republished as a book in 1830. Nine years later appeared
Carleton’s longest, most ambitious and, as Trollope found it, really
stimulating story, _Fardorougha the Miser_. So far as Lever himself had
been under any obligations to his predecessors, it was rather to the
ideas and incidents, than to the personages scattered through Lady
Morgan’s vivacious pages. Far the most famous Irish novel of the time
was Gerald Griffin’s _The Collegians_, which owed most of its later fame
to its having formed the foundation of the popular Irish melodrama, _The
Colleen Bawn_. The forties were too early for Trollope to meet, at Coole
Park or elsewhere, a writer born in 1830, and so exactly fifteen years
his junior. This was the now little known, if not entirely forgotten,
Charles Joseph Kickham, who, dying in 1882, had lived long enough, as
the writer of _Sally Cavanagh, or The Untenanted Graves_, and
_Knocknagow, or The House of Tipperary_, to be acclaimed the Irish
Dickens. None of the writers nor their books now mentioned proved so
useful to Trollope as one or two from William Carleton’s pen. The first
of these was a volume that had followed _Fardorougha the Miser_ in 1839,
and that, under the title of _Tales of Ireland_, was always compared by
Trollope to Dean Ramsay’s _Reminiscences of Scottish Life and
Character_. Three more of Carleton’s books completed Anthony Trollope’s
literary training for the work of an Irish novelist. These were
_Valentine M‘Clutchy_, _the Irish Agent_, _The Tithe Procter_, and _The
Squanders of Castle Squander_.
Going to Ireland as a bachelor, Anthony Trollope had been naturally
expected, by the public opinion of the localities where he became known,
to find a wife among its residents. It was indeed on Irish soil, at a
well-known seaside resort, that he first met the lady to whom he in 1842
became engaged, and who in 1844 took his name. Her home, however, was in
Yorkshire, at Rotherham, near Sheffield, where her father, Mr.
Heseltine, had the management of a bank. With his marriage closes the
earliest instalment of Anthony Trollope’s Irish experiences. He had
begun his abode in the country as a man entirely unknown except to the
few who had heard of his mother’s books. That did not always prove a
recommendation, for from the day of her having found, as was said, in
the Harrow clergyman named Cunningham, the Vicar of Wrexhill’s original,
Mrs. Trollope had been charged with putting her friends or enemies into
her stories. To such an extent was this supposed to be the case that
when, several years afterwards, Charles Lever was thrown into her
society at Florence, he markedly avoided her, whether as a partner at a
whist-table or a next-door neighbour at dinner. Anthony Trollope’s
friendship therefore with Lever, so far from originating in his
acquaintance with Mrs. Trollope, would have been rather hindered by it,
and was indeed a very gradual growth that had not reached maturity even
when Trollope’s novels had become at least as popular as those of Lever
himself.
But, during the earlier years of his long sojourn amongst them, the
Irish classes and masses knew Trollope, not as a writer, but as the
impersonation of the severest officialism. Not having gone to a
University after school, nor even since his school-days having had time
to move in society and assimilate its easier ways, he long combined much
of youthful crudity with civilian stiffness. He had, in fact,
unconsciously formed his manner upon that of the men who were around him
and above him at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. As a companion and
conversationalist he lacked the lightness of touch, the elasticity and
ease communicated to each other by young men of his station in life, at
college, at the club, or in the companionship of travel. At Harrow, none
of his school-fellows had done him a better turn than William Gregory,
his later friend of Coole Park, by disposing of a rumour, which local
invention had not been slow to embroider with more sinister legends,
that Trollope’s father was an outlaw. Hence, of course, the
discreditable appearance of the boy himself. What an outlaw meant, none
of them exactly knew. But the word had an evil sound. Doubtless the
person whom it indicated must, by certain misdemeanours, have made
himself the enemy of his species. This is the kind of defamatory gossip
which pursues its victim long after the incidents that have given rise
to the lie are forgotten. Gregory therefore sometimes found occasion for
repeating to his Connaught neighbours the contradiction by which he had
so signally served his friend at school.
The best idea of Trollope’s sporting life in Ireland during these years
is to be gathered, not from any of the rather bald entries in his
characteristically honest autobiography, but from certain passages in
his book, _The Macdermots of Ballycloran_, presently to be mentioned.
Roscommon county was credited by Trollope with the best gentlemen riders
to be met with throughout Ireland.[4] But, in truth, during the forties
Trollope could enter no Irish hunting-field without finding himself
before a picked tribunal of experts in horseflesh and horsemanship. To
these judges his performances in the saddle soon approved themselves.
Courage and perseverance he never wanted; he soon acquired notable skill
in shaping his course to the point for which quarry and pack were likely
to steer. He knew also how to get out of his mount the utmost
performance with the least exhaustion. Between himself and the animal he
bestrode there existed a real sympathy. Still it was some time before
the critics of the covert-side allowed his hands on his horse to be as
good as his seat was firm. On the whole, however, he gradually won among
sportsmen something like the reputation in the Connaught chase that was
afterwards to be secured by his own Phineas Finn for the management of
Lord Chiltern’s “Bonebreaker” on the broad pastures and the awkward
banks and ditches of Northamptonshire. His taste for the stage made him
also a real country-house acquisition when private theatricals were
going on.
In the ball-room he showed the same inexhaustible vigour and energy as
in the hunting-field. In this way his own feats and accomplishments, to
the speedy extension of his visiting-list, justified in all quarters the
introductions given him by his friends at Coole Park. Galway has been
immemorially pre-eminent among Irish counties for its hospitality. The
entertainments of Lord Clancarty at Garbally had secured European fame,
before Trollope’s day, for the best known, most cosmopolitan and
convivial of its owners--British Ambassador successively at the Hague
and at Brussels, as well as for a short time English representative at
the Vienna Congress. The Garbally festivities, however, were rather
stories of which Trollope had heard than scenes in which he had played a
part. His introduction behind the scenes of Irish politics and
journalism grew out of no other cause than his intimacy at Coole Park.
In 1842 his friend Gregory became Member for Dublin. Had Trollope chosen
to do so, he could have said a great deal about this electoral contest,
and could have acquainted us with some among the most typical and
miscellaneous Irish notabilities of the time. Those in whose company we
should have found ourselves would have included Sir John and Lady Burke,
a host and hostess of the patrician and joyous old school; their
handsome son, about whose wavy golden hair the maidens of his native
land went wild; Granby Calcraft, a broken-down Irish swell whom
Thackeray had seen and satirised; a gentleman named Nolan, but
universally known as “Tom the Devil”; as well as the little group whose
members, next to the candidates themselves, were active combatants in
the Dublin election. These included two academic clergymen, one Tresham
Gregg, the other Professor Butt, both of them Protestant patriots, vying
with each other in the strength of their lungs and in the exuberance of
their spoken or written rhetoric. The company would have been incomplete
had it not included the greatest character of his time, Remy Sheehan,
with a figure like a peg-top, but brimful of the finest Irish brains,
who reinforced by the pen in his paper and by his speech on the platform
the Castle power that promoted Gregory’s triumph, and that was exercised
throughout by the Viceroy, Lord de Grey, through his chief secretary,
Lord Eliot.
By 1850, though with his literary spurs still to win, Trollope had risen
from the surveyor’s clerkship to the position of Post Office inspector.
In that capacity he found himself intellectually pitted against the
shrewdest and most popular of Irish advocates then living. This
encounter of wits ended in a victory for Trollope. At that time, it must
be prefaced, Post Office orders were as practically unused as postal
notes were unknown. Small sums, when transmitted by post, were sent in
coin of the realm. These enclosures occasionally went wrong. Trollope
made it part of his duty to rectify, by tracing, these miscarriages.
Such a quest he once pursued, after a method of his own, in county Cork.
He marked a sovereign, and, carefully wrapping it up in a sheet of
notepaper, enclosed it in a stamped envelope, addressed by him to the
furthest post-town in the district. Having posted this in the ordinary
way, he began his operations. Riding on horseback, he timed himself to
reach every stage on the road taken by the vehicle carrying the
post-bags, just before the coach or mail-cart came in. At every
successive stoppage he practically asserted the right of a Government
inspector to search the mail-bags. The process was continued throughout
the journey till the stage at which the inspector, looking into the bag,
found his letter had been opened, had been re-sealed, and the decoy coin
it contained abstracted. His next move was to retrace his way to the
village most recently passed through.
The police now conducted the search, and found the marked sovereign in
the postmistress’s possession. That lady, a great local favourite as it
happened, was placed on her trial shortly afterwards at the Tralee
Assizes. Her many friends co-operated to secure for her defence Isaac
Butt, then one of the chief counsel on the circuit, afterwards C. S.
Parnell’s predecessor in the Home Rule leadership at Westminster. Butt
no sooner got Trollope into the witness-box than he began to
cross-examine him after the fashion for which he was famous. In this
case the barrister’s object was to play upon the inspector’s notoriously
choleric sensibilities, to worry him into some contradiction or blunder
of testimony, and thus hold him up before the jury as a reckless
circulator of libels and sarcasms about Irish things and persons, for
the amusement of an English audience. Reading aloud or describing
certain passages alleged to have been penned by Trollope concerning
Ireland, Butt asked whether a man who wrote thus loosely could be
trusted in his assertions about the truth and honesty of others.
Never did the ingenious and ably executed plan of an eminent advocate
more completely miscarry. Trollope never once lost his temper or his
head. Instead of being bewildered, he remained clear and exact from
first to last. Was he, asked Butt, perfectly certain that he had marked
in a particular way one side or both sides of the coin? Yes, he was; and
with overwhelming politeness he again described, for the benefit of the
jury, the secret meaning of the mark he had chosen, and the instrument
with which he had made it. At one point, indeed, he showed the faintest
sign of hesitation. Just then he remembered that a witty Scotsman in the
House of Commons had recently called the Irish members, Isaac Butt among
them, “talking potatoes.” The thought of the simile at once smoothed out
the frown on Trollope’s face. As a fact, it was a duel between two men
not, upon the whole, ill-matched. Butt knew of Trollope’s rasping manner
and proneness to passionate explosion. Nothing of that sort showed
itself now. The witness maintained his composure unruffled throughout,
disarming, as to some extent it seemed, even his legal adversary by his
urbane good-humour. The two, however, found the opportunity of
exchanging Parthian shots at each other, just before they separated.
“Good-morning, triumphant Post Office Inspector,” was Butt’s farewell
utterance. Trollope’s amiably satirical, if rather baldly _tu quoque_
rejoinder, was, “Good-morning, triumphant cross-examiner.”