ON HER MAJESTY’S SERVICE AND HIS OWN
Maternal influence in the Barchester novels--Trollope’s first
literary success with _The Warden_--The Barchester cycle
begun--Origin of the _Barchester Towers_ plot--The cleric in
English fiction--Conservatism of Trollope’s novels--Typical scenes
from _The Warden_--Hiram’s Hospital--Archdeacon Grantly’s
soliloquy--Crushing the rebels--Position of the Barchester series
in the national literature--Collecting the raw material of later
novels--The author’s first meeting with Trollope--The novelist
helped by the official--Defence of Mrs. Proudie as a realistic
study--The Trollopian method of railway travelling--A daily
programme of work and play.
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, 2_s._ 6_d._ 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.