ON AND OFF DUTY ROUND THE WORLD
Chafing in harness--“Agin the Government”--_The Three Clerks_--A
visit to Mrs. Trollope--Florentine visitors of note in letters and
art--A widened circle of famous friends--Diamond cut
diamond--Trollope’s new sphere of activity--In Egypt as G.P.O.
ambassador--Success of his mission--_Doctor Thorne_--Homeward
bound--Post and pen work by the way--North and south--_The West
Indies and the Spanish Main_--Carlyle’s praise of it--_Castle
Richmond_ and some contemporary novels--An early instance of
Thackeray’s influence over Trollope’s writings--Famous editors and
publishers--The flowing tide of fortune.
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.