ESTABLISHMENT IN LONDON
Resettlement in England--Bright prospects for the
future--Importance of _The Cornhill_ connection--_Framley
Parsonage_ and other novels of clerical life--Some novelists and
their illustrators--Trollope’s debt to Millais--The social services
of leading lights help him in his historical pictures of the
day--Election to the Garrick and Athenæum Clubs--Anthony Trollope
as he appeared in 1862--Leading Garrick figures--Thackeray’s social
and literary mastery over Trollope--Thackeray, Dickens, and Yates
in a Garrick squabble--A divided camp--Trollope on Yates and Yates
on Trollope--The origin of the politico-diplomatic Cosmopolitan
Club--Informal gatherings--Trollope becomes a member--Some famous
“Cosmo” characters--The end of the club--Other clubs frequented by
Trollope--The Fielding--The Arundel--The Arts--The Thatched
House--The Turf.
The first effect of Trollope’s connection with _The Cornhill Magazine_,
its editor, and its owners was to make his life more literary and less
official than it had so far been. Naturally, therefore, he decided on
leaving Ireland as soon as he could, and on establishing himself in
London, the one place where he could satisfactorily pursue the career
now brought within his reach. Not, indeed, that the prospect opening to
him in 1860 included a sudden or a final severance of his connection
with a country where he had passed nearly a score of eventful and
prosperous years, where he had first discovered his real strength, and
where by slow degrees the Post Office hack had transformed himself into
the popular man of letters. From the St. Martin’s-le-Grand point of
view, he was but exchanging a Post Office surveyorship in Ulster for a
like position in the English eastern counties, where he could generally
order his movements as suited his interests and tastes.
When in 1841, on his outward journey, he first crossed St. George’s
Channel at the age of twenty-six, it was with a mind agitated by morbid
discontent for the past, and charged with gloomy misgivings for the
future. The process of improvement had indeed been slow and often
painful, but it was now complete. The clouds which so long darkened his
existence had finally lifted. He no longer brooded over the gloomy
retrospect; the path that lay before him was brightened by the hope born
of actual achievement. From the country to which, just a quarter of a
century ago, he had brought a past of failure, he took back a present of
success, and a future of assured fame. The long gallops with the Meath
hounds and the Ward staghounds, or the several other packs with which he
rode, by quickening his circulation, had strengthened his nerves, and
generally placed him in the highest state of physical fitness. With the
exhilarating sense of being at home in the saddle, there had come an
inspiring confidence in his powers of thought and language. Moreover,
his term of Irish and English service combined had been varied by the
foreign missions which, as already described, trained his pen to
versatility, and brought him fresh credit in new lines of literary
performance. All this had helped him so much with his London chiefs as
to ensure him the home appointment for which he now applied. The
surveyorship of the eastern counties, secured by Trollope after some
little difficulty and delay, gave him the chance of keeping up his
favourite sport by settling him comfortably in Hertfordshire, at Waltham
Cross. Here he was within easy reach of more than one East Anglian pack,
as well as the social life of the metropolis in which he had been born,
but of which, since his boyhood, he had seen little, and of whose social
life he knew nothing.
He had scarcely settled down to the combined parts of State servant,
London _littérateur_, and eastern county fox-hunter, when he followed up
his first success of _The Warden_ with a book indicating the greatest
stride in the direction of fame and fortune he had yet made. This was
_Framley Parsonage_. The appearance of its first instalment in _The
Cornhill_ had been arranged for during one of Trollope’s earlier flights
across the Channel before he had resettled himself in England. Among the
stories thus far written by its author, it possessed most of actuality
in its incidents, as well as of personal charm in its characters. These
qualities were due to the fact that the views of life and character,
clerical or lay, contained in its pages, were as a whole those of the
era to which the book belonged. In 1838 the State had done something
towards the restraint of pluralities in the Church. When, therefore, he
had finished the book that first made its mark, the Anglicanism of
Trollope’s youthful reminiscence was something more than merely
threatened. There had indeed actually begun the reform of those
ecclesiastical abuses and the curtailment of those privileges whose
picturesque aspects on their social and personal side appealed so
strongly to Trollope’s conservative and artistic sense, and his
sympathies with which show themselves in all his clerical stories long
after the old system was not only doomed, but already passing away. The
change had begun, it must be remembered, some ten years before the
appearance of _The Warden_. Even then the old Church and State polity
was tottering to its fall. By the time _Framley Parsonage_ was running
through _The Cornhill_, it had been practically replaced by the new
_régime_.
The modernised picture of clerical life from the social point of view,
taken in _Framley Parsonage_, distinguishes it not only from anything
said on the same subject by Trollope himself before, but from George
Eliot’s sketch of the Anglican rector and rectory given in _Adam Bede_
(1859). _The Cornhill_ proprietor and editor had agreed that what they
wanted from Trollope was an up-to-date socio-clerical story, depicting
the most characteristic features and incidents of upper middle-class
English society in provincial districts, dominated to a certain extent
by orthodox ecclesiastical and aristocratic or squirearchical influence.
These requirements were satisfied to the minutest detail. The rectory,
the country house, and the castle, like the inmates of each, described
in _Framley Parsonage_, exactly reflect all that was most distinctive
of the sixties, and therefore invest the story with something of the
usefulness to the historian of the future possessed by Jane Austen’s
novels, or discerned by Lecky and Macaulay in Fielding and Smollett.
There was scarcely an English village without a rectory or a house whose
occupant might have passed for Lord Lufton or Mark Robarts. One used,
indeed, to hear the most circumstantial stories of how Trollope had
himself met these characters during his Post Office tours. He had, of
course, on these official rounds, so increased in every direction a
large and varied acquaintanceship that he had become something of a
household word throughout England as a State servant some time before
his books lay on every drawing-room table. As for Lucy Robarts, she took
the hearts of the vicarage and country-house public by storm, to retain
them even after Lily Dale made her bow in _The Small House at
Allington_. Her reputed originals multiplied so rapidly that every
neighbourhood soon possessed one of them, to whom the novelist, it was
added, had lost his heart before he made her his heroine, and to whom he
would have made an offer at a certain country ball had he not
unfortunately possessed a wife already.
_Framley Parsonage_, therefore, from which dates his trade value with
the publishers, was the earliest novel that made him a favourite with
the hundreds of English households, the great event in whose lives is
the arrival of the weekly book-box from Mudie’s. The personal intimacy
between Trollope’s readers and his characters at the point now reached
began to be quickened and deepened by J. E. Millais, whose tastes,
sympathies, and exceptional insight into the life and characters
depicted by Trollope qualified him, beyond any other artist of his time,
to interpret with his brush the most characteristic creations of the
novelist’s pen. Who shall say how much in its mental pictures of Mr.
Pickwick and other Dickensian beings the popular imagination was helped
by the illustrations of “Phiz”? Would the Rugby boys, for instance,
described in _Tom Brown_, have roared with laughter, as they did, if
Hablot K. Browne’s pencil had not breathed a new reality into the
novelist’s account of Mr. Winkle’s equestrian difficulties, of Jingle’s
boasted performances in the West Indian cricket-field, or into the fat
boy’s fiendish interruption of the tender passages between Rachael
Wardle and Tracy Tupman. Dickens also derived scarcely less signal
service from George Cattermole in _The Old Curiosity Shop_, and from
George Cruikshank in _Oliver Twist_. With writers of less genius than
Dickens, such as Charles Lever and Harrison Ainsworth, their personages
and situations were often saved only from complete failure by the same
artist’s help.
More conspicuously than in any of these instances did Trollope’s
association with Millais make the artist an active, if not the chief,
partner in the creation of the novelist’s characters. In 1861 Trollope
had not begun the personal acquaintance, which soon ripened into a
lifelong intimacy, with the master of the brush whose personal charm and
genial fellowship brought fresh brightness and lasting joy into the
novelist’s life, at the same time that his drawings acquainted the
Anglo-Saxon world with the manner and meaning of every expression on
Lucy Robarts’ face, with her every gesture or movement, with the
plaiting of her hair, with the simple little pendant of dull gold on her
velvet neckband, with the fringe of her bodice, and with the very folds
of her dress.
This fortunate conjunction of pen and pencil resulted to hosts of
readers, American as well as English, in a real revelation of country
life. These now realised, as they had never done before, the principles
underlying the modern village polity with all its personal gradations in
the scale of dignity and rank. Trollope’s novels and Millais’ engravings
thus completed for multitudes the lessons in provincial existence and
character which Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen had begun. The country
parish was now shown as the State in miniature, the kingly power being
represented, in the present instance, by Lord Lufton and his mother at
Framley Court. Between the Court and the Parsonage the relations
described reflected the union of the civil and the spiritual authority.
With _Framley Parsonage_, therefore, in the early sixties, begins the
period when Trollope’s successive books were events in the publishing
year, and the instalments of his work were awaited with scarcely less
interest than each coming portion of Dickens’s _Great Expectations_,
then running through _All the Year Round_, or of Thackeray’s _Lovel the
Widower_ and _Roundabout Papers_, then appearing in the same magazine
pages as Trollope’s. Thackeray, indeed, had destined his own _Lovel_ for
the chief fiction of _The Cornhill_. It did not seem to him quite strong
enough for that honour. Hence the opening which he gave Trollope. Now,
too, began Trollope’s introduction into the literary and general society
of the capital in which he had been born, partly bred, and in which he
had served his earliest apprenticeship to the Government service that
formed the foundation of his fortunes. Of its real life, except from
outside, he as yet knew nothing.
Such chance glimpses into society in London as Trollope had secured in
his earliest days were due almost or entirely to the good offices of the
old Harrow friend, William Gregory, who subsequently, as has been
already described, did so much to make his Irish sojourn profitable as
well as pleasant. Among the more prominent figures in the great world of
their day occasionally visited by Trollope was Lord Clanricarde, who, in
London as well as in Ireland, was fond of playing the part of Mæcenas to
young men of promise. Together with Gregory, Trollope, a young man under
thirty, dined with Clanricarde in Carlton House Terrace. On entering the
drawing-room, they found its only occupant a fat elderly parson. He
must, the new-comers whisperingly agreed, be the family chaplain. The
conjecture had not been murmured in a tone low enough to prevent its
being overheard by the divine, who in a moment began to convince them
that he was not one of their host’s dependants by, in Trollope’s words,
“chaffing them out of their lives” until they descended to the
dining-room, and even after that. This incident forms Trollope’s
introduction to Sydney Smith, without whom, in the early forties, no
fashionable party was complete. The most useful entertainer and friend
secured by Gregory to Trollope was, however, Henry Thoby Prinsep, whose
acquaintanceship had proved of earlier value to Thackeray. This genial,
opulent, and influential Indian official had three sons, the second,
Trollope’s particular friend, being the clever and popular artist “Val”
Prinsep; while the two others, still living, were respectively in the
Indian Civil and Military Service. Prinsep kept open house for Trollope,
as for many others, beneath his roof.
Anthony Trollope’s personal knowledge of Thackeray began to improve
itself into friendship; at Thoby Prinsep’s, also, he heard many amusing
stories about a gentleman’s adventures in quest of a parliamentary
seat,[15] as well as met habitually the artist Millais, whom he first
knew from George Smith, and who, in the manner already described, was so
appreciably to promote the novelist’s advance towards a world-wide
popularity. As Prinsep’s guest also, Trollope made another artistic
friendship, that with the painter Watts, whom, it will be remembered, he
had already seen at Florence. Among Prinsep’s other notable visitors
were the reigning beauties of the time, Lady Somers, Miss Virginia
Pattle, and the highly endowed daughters of a gallant officer in “John
Company’s” army, now only recollected as “Old Blazer.” The same company
was sometimes adorned by the great artistic and literary patron of that
period, Lord Lansdowne, as well as an anecdotical Nestor of the polite
world, who nearly saw the nineteenth century out, Alfred Montgomery.
This gentleman humorously claimed, by his conversational reminiscences
of cathedral towns, to have given Trollope some hints for his Barchester
characters. Montgomery’s social services proved, indeed, scarcely less
invaluable than Gregory’s, and opened to Trollope many doors on the
higher levels.
At the houses now referred to, he heard all the gossip about the
celebrities of the forties: how, notwithstanding his starched austerity
in the House, Sir Robert Peel’s social playfulness in private life made
him really delightful; how Lord Lincoln was quite the pleasantest of all
Peel’s followers; how Lord George Bentinck, though private secretary to
Canning, was quite uneducated, and only got into parliament by an
accident, to become Tory leader by a fluke. He heard too, how, when not
at a race, Lord George attended the House of Commons; how, going down to
Westminster from White’s after dinner, he slept soundly all the evening
on a back bench; and how, though in 1847 he had resigned over Russell’s
Jew Bill, he wished all the Jews back in the Holy Land, because the
Tories had become a No Popery and No Jew party. Thus Trollope was a
looker-on at the game when, on the Tory side, the players were Lord
Granby, as Bentinck’s successor, and Herries, who sportingly admitted
that, though Bentinck had given the mount, it was Dizzy’s riding which
won the race. Some of Anthony Trollope’s later novels take one to a
resort called the Beargarden. In their author’s younger days a haunt
that might have appropriately borne that name was the Hanover Rooms on
one of their smartest gala nights. For about a century, from 1775 to
1875, these premises were used for concerts and balls, till, at the
later of the dates just mentioned, they were utilised as the Hanover
Square Club. When W. H. Gregory and Anthony Trollope were youths about
town, these rooms were not only fashionable, but fast. In one of the
vestibules or passages, the two friends witnessed a noticeable but, as
it proved, a somewhat risky feat of strength by the Lord Methuen of the
day, performed upon a baronet, who, from his immense estates in the
principality, was known--like those who were before and after him in his
title--as the King of Wales. Sir Watkin William Wynne weighed some
fifteen stone. Methuen, to relieve the dullness of a waiting interval,
lifted him by the trousers waist-band, and held him out at full length
with one hand, only to drop him when the trousers material gave way.
In the sixties, indeed, few were left who had been fashionable figures
in Trollope’s boyhood. Besides Gregory, however, when Trollope took up
his eastern counties’ surveyorship, the most notable survivor, in
addition to Alfred Montgomery, was Sir Henry Taylor, who had been at the
Colonial Office before Trollope went to Ireland as a surveyor’s clerk.
He was there still in the year that Trollope re-established himself in
an English home at Waltham House. During the early sixties, Sir Henry
Taylor’s literary fame and social influence, still at their height, had
opened the best houses in England, both to himself and to any person of
promise he might take up. No man was ever at any time less on the look
out for a patron or an introduction to patrons than Anthony Trollope.
Taylor himself owed his official career, as well as much of his
commanding place in society, to the great physician of the time, Sir
Henry Holland. That medical magnate, having in earlier years befriended
Mrs. Trollope, now joined Taylor in advancing the interests of her son.
The two had even hoped to secure Trollope’s election to the Athenæum by
the committee, some years before that event actually took place--in
1864. Meanwhile, as Milnes’s guest at the Sterling Club, Trollope made
intellectual acquaintances as distinguished as any whom he met
afterwards at the Athenæum, and heard specimens of the conversation at a
meal, which had been the speciality of some famous London sets, but then
in the process of dying out. This was the dinner- or breakfast-table talk
which, seldom or never becoming general, chiefly assumed the form of a
monologue by a single brilliantly gifted performer. S. T. Coleridge in
remote times had founded the school, with Sidney Smith for his
successor, Macaulay and Carlyle for his subsequent followers. “It was,
no doubt,” said Trollope to me, “a good discipline for an impatient and
irritable listener, but it never seemed to teach one anything.” It was
three years before his Athenæum membership that Thackeray’s good offices
introduced Trollope to the Garrick Club, April 5, 1861, and so gave him
a recognised place among the professional literary workers of his time.
His connection with this club was fraught with consequences of no small
interest in themselves, as well as in their influence upon Trollope’s
personal relations with some of his best-known contemporaries. The
Athenæum, which some years later was to bear Trollope’s name on its
books, had been founded in 1824, and stood upon the Pall Mall site once
occupied by Carlton House. Its early, and indeed immediate success, was
largely due to the personal efforts of John Wilson Croker, the Rigby of
Disraeli’s novels, and the distinguished patronage secured by Croker for
the enterprise. The name it now bears did not finally supersede the
appellation first suggested, the “Society,” till 1830, when the present
building, designed by Decimus Burton, opened to receive the members. The
Mæcenas of his age, the great Lord Lansdowne, had deigned to become an
original member. He attracted to the place not only some half-dozen of
his political contemporaries or juniors in the front rank of politics,
such as Sir James Mackintosh, Romilly, Macaulay and Brougham, but also
the brightest lights in the firmament of literature or science at Bowood
and Lansdowne House, Thomas Moore and Theodore Hook, Humphry Davy and
Michael Faraday.
Trollope’s earliest club, the Garrick, was the Athenæum’s junior by some
seven years. It originated in an idea thrown out at a meeting in Drury
Lane Theatre, August 7, 1831. The proposal had no sooner taken definite
shape than measures for translating it into existence were pushed
promptly forward. By October 15, 1831, several members had been elected,
the rules had been drawn up and approved, as well as the general
committee appointed. The Duke of Sussex, the foremost, in all
intellectual movements, of George III’s sons, had actively associated
himself with the project from the first. He figured in the earliest
members’ list as patron, and presided over the opening dinner, February
13, 1832, at Probat’s Hotel, 35 King’s Street, Covent Garden. Here the
club was housed till, a full generation later, its establishment beneath
its present roof in Garrick Street. The Garrick, therefore, known to
Trollope during his earlier years in London, was not that at which,
rather than at his home in Montagu Square, he found it sometimes
convenient, in his later days, to entertain his friends, but the genuine
and original “little G,” as Thackeray affectionately used to call it,
and as Thackeray’s most devoted disciple, Trollope himself, got into the
way of denominating it too.
Before describing his early Garrick associates, let it be recalled what
these saw in Trollope himself. At this time, his forty-fifth year,
Trollope was passing into a remarkably vigorous middle age. As for the
bodily signs of advancing years, which visibly multiplied on him after
having completed his first half-century, not a trace was to be found in
1862. Upright and elastic in figure, he showed to special advantage, and
seemed some years younger than his age, in the saddle, from which men at
the club window occasionally saw him descending, while a groom was in
waiting to take his horse home. His voice, sharp, authoritative,
inclining to severe always, sometimes peremptory and gruff, had in it
the ring of perfect vigour and health, as of body, so of mind and nerve.
The official manner, contracted, as has been seen, during the period of
his Irish surveyorship, had become a part of the man himself, though it
veiled a more than feminine self-consciousness. Trollope’s “abrupt
bow-wow” way, as it came to be called, was not merely the personal
peculiarity of a well-bred man of the world, but, by all who knew him
and his antecedents, was recognised as a note of the social school in
which he had been trained quite as much as an attribute of the
individual. The good old High Churchmen of the pre-ritualistic period,
whether at Winchester, Oxford, in the rectory, or the manor house,
distrusted and discouraged the _suaviter in modo_, because they thought
it likely to enervate the _fortiter in re_.
Fresh from these austere warnings, theoretical and practical, against
the enfeebling influences of grace and urbanity of demeanour, Trollope
began his official pupillage at St. Martin’s-le-Grand under the Draconic
Colonel Maberly, who communicated to most of his juniors his own
healthy contempt for mere courtesy of speech and amenity of manner.
Moreover, during the early sixties, the social influence insensibly
exhaled by a man of Thackeray’s intellectual calibre upon his
worshippers resulted in Trollope’s modelling not only his diction but
his deportment on him whom he had taken for his social patron as well as
literary master. Thackeray, though spoken of by Trollope and others as
one of the Garrick fathers, did not, as a fact, come in till 1832. Even
thus he was by five years the club senior of Dickens, who joined in
1837. During all Trollope’s earlier time, therefore, without a rival to
dispute his claim or to dissent from his ruling, in the frequent
absences of Dickens, he pervaded and dominated the place. Dickens,
indeed, as an old friend of his mother, welcomed Trollope on his
election. Thackeray’s favour it was which admitted Trollope to the set
whose central figure was the author of _Vanity Fair_. Thus, at the
beginning of his London course, did circumstances give Trollope a place
among those whose bond of union was devotion to Thackeray, and whom
loyalty constrained to see personal opponents to themselves in all
demurrers to their great master’s ruling.
The leading Thackerayans, and therefore Trollope’s warm partisans, among
the early Garrick members, grouped themselves round a Sussex baronet, a
figure prominent in the society of his time, as well as filling a
position especially conspicuous and authoritative in all cricketing
circles, not more in his county, where he had done much to revive the
game he liked so much and played so well, than on the committee of the
Marylebone Club. Wherever, indeed, manly sports of any kind were
popular, there Sir Charles Taylor was a personage. With this rich,
clever, sarcastic man about town was Henry de Bathe, who did not inherit
the family baronetcy till 1870, but who, at the time now recalled,
shared with Taylor the distinction of being a Garrick autocrat. Taylor’s
shrewd, bitter social estimates and aphorisms were remembered in the
club long after he was forgotten. One of his deliverances, suggested by
the accuracy of Whyte-Melville’s social descriptions, had taken the
form of a caution to novelists, and was given to me by Trollope, to the
following effect: “Would that other writers about society would learn
from Melville. Then we should hear less than we do about icing the
claret and taking the chill off the champagne.” Trollope abstained from
putting Taylor into any of his books. In _Black Sheep_, however, Edmund
Yates took him for the original of his Lord Dollamore, and drew him to
the life in his consultation, in all difficulties, of a favourite
walking-stick.
More general and genuine than the club popularity either of Taylor or
Bathe was that enjoyed by another of Trollope’s earliest and warmest
Garrick friends, Mr. Fladgate, with whom may be coupled James Christie.
Both of these outlived Trollope, Christie by fifteen years, Fladgate by
seven, the latter retaining, to the day of his death, the affectionate
style of “Papa,” bestowed upon him as one of the club’s earliest
members. The solicitors to whose firm “Papa” Fladgate belonged are still
the Garrick’s legal advisers. Another of Garrick’s contemporaries, or
even seniors, who has lived into this third year of King George V, is
Sir Charles Rivers-Wilson, to-day not only the club’s _doyen_, but
trustee. After him comes perhaps the sole survivor of those with whom
Trollope used to dine off the famous Garrick steak, Sir Bruce Seton. Two
years Trollope’s junior in club standing, he was for many years a
constant member of a little dining-group at the club, comprising, in
addition to himself, the late Sir Richard Quain, Algernon Borthwick, who
died Lord Glenesk, and William Howard Russell of _The Times_. The epoch
now recalled was fruitful of curiosities in club character who have long
since gone out of date. Among the club representatives of the drama were
James Anderson and Walter Lacy, both actors of the old school,
tragedians whose masters were Kemble and Kean, as well as impressive
elocutionists of a certain majestic dignity. These two men, if about the
same age, were not, at least in their later years, on terms of mutual
friendship. Trollope, who soon became a committee-man, took a keen
interest in everything that concerned the management of the place, knew
the names of nearly all the servants, and had their _dossiers_ by
heart. Thus he had a closer acquaintance than he might otherwise have
had with George Farmer, the club steward, whose methods remained in
force long after he had passed away, who thus, within his own sphere,
left his mark on the club economy, and who was also as great a despot
downstairs as Taylor, Bathe, and Thackeray in the upper regions.
The details of facts and figures already given show that, during most of
the sixties, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were all members of the
Garrick together. “We were, however,” to quote Trollope’s own words,
“two sets as widely separated from each other, and as seldom
intermingling, as if we had been assembled under two entirely different
roofs; I never saw Thackeray and Dickens engaged in any regular
conversation. If either of them entered a room when the other and only
one or two more, perhaps, were its occupants, he seemed to have come in
to look for something he had mislaid, and, if he did not make rather an
abrupt exit, stayed only to bury himself in a newspaper, in silence, or
in forty winks. Once, and once only, I can recall Thackeray making a
remark about Dickens’s writing, though to whom I shall abstain from all
effort to recall. The subject was _Little Dorrit_, then appearing in
monthly parts. ‘I cannot,’ observed some one, ‘see the falling off in
Dickens complained of by his critics.’ ‘At least,’ rejoined Thackeray,
‘it must be admitted that a good deal of _Little D._ is d----d rot.’”
And here it should be explained that, when Trollope joined the Garrick
in 1861, the club was still in the ground-swell of an internal dispute
which, four years earlier, had agitated it to its very foundations, and
divided its members into two mutually embittered companies.
The incident which had led to this state of civil war, insignificant and
even contemptible in itself, would probably have passed off without
serious results, but that, after the fashion now to be described, it had
the effect of ranging the two giants of the place, Dickens and
Thackeray, on opposite sides. Edmund Yates had criticised Thackeray,
not, it may be admitted, in the best taste, in a cheap paper so obscure
as to be entirely below a great man’s notice. The material for these
remarks, Thackeray maintained, could only come from the writer’s chance
meeting with himself in the Garrick smoking-room. Beyond any writer of
his time, Thackeray, on grounds of good taste and good sense alone,
should have been magnanimous enough to pocket this annoyance as an
indiscretion, of which he had himself set such flagrant examples. Such
had been the ridicule and abuse heaped by his pen for years on Edward
Bulwer-Lytton, on Dionysius Lardner, and only desisted from when the
public began to resent the monotony of these acrimonious insults. His
caricature of his own Garrick acquaintance, Archdeckne, in _Pendennis_
as Foker, had been at least as gross a violation of all club amenities
as any paragraphs written by Yates. Neither in its beginnings, its
progress, nor its end was Trollope in the slightest degree mixed up in
this episode, whose finale may be briefly recapitulated. At the instance
of the novelist who had found such dire cause of personal offence in the
poor little peccant paragraphs, Edmund Yates was called upon by the club
committee to apologise to the illustrious object of his attack, or to
resign. On the advice of Dickens, he refused the ultimatum; a general
meeting was then held, and he was formally expelled. All this, though in
every detail before his time, seemed so comparatively fresh, and formed
the subject of so many conversational retrospects, that Trollope may
well have found it difficult to avoid expressing an opinion on the
personal merits of the case. Such casual comments are not likely to have
been too gentle towards the vanquished party, and for these reasons. As
a member of Thackeray’s _Cornhill_ staff, and owing his warm reception
at the club to his editor’s introduction, the author of _Framley
Parsonage_ was not, from personal accidents, likely to be prepossessed
in Yates’s favour.
Trollope, though sixteen years the older of the two, had still to make
his literary, if not his official reputation, when Yates entered the
Post Office as clerk in the missing-letter department in 1847. Each of
them may have served the same masters at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, but each
was the representative and disciple of a literary school essentially
different from that to which the other belonged. Trained by Dickens on
_Household Words_, Yates first showed what he could do as a novelist in
his master’s line with _Broken to Harness_, so early as 1854, just a
year before Trollope had made himself known to the public by _The
Warden_. The two men, therefore, notwithstanding Trollope’s seniority,
were yet sufficiently near each other to be contemporaries and rivals.
Yates’s expulsion from the Garrick was followed by the withdrawal, not
only of Dickens himself, but of Wilkie Collins and one or two more.
Independently, however, of the Yates incident, Dickens had already made
up his mind to leave the club because the assistant editor of his
magazine, W. H. Wills, had been rejected from it.
Henceforth Thackeray reigned at the club alone, and next to him, as it
seemed to some, came Trollope. While his connection with the club, or
with them, still lay in the future, Thackeray’s henchman had secured the
ejection of a member for no other reason than his having incurred the
personal displeasure of the great man who ruled the place. Yates,
however, left some friends as well as several enemies behind him at the
Garrick. Among the former was W. H. Russell, who long afterwards, when
the affair had become ancient history, ventured to praise his writings
in the presence of Anthony Trollope. It was then reported--and the
statement has been repeated since his death--that Yates owed much of his
success as a novelist to Mrs. Cashel Hoey’s co-operation. When,
therefore, Trollope spoke of this lady as having written his books for
him, he was originating no slander, but merely repeating a current piece
of literary gossip, which Yates’s literary methods may to some extent
have explained.
Most practised literary workmen in their social hours are silent, even
to their intimate friends, about what occupies their pens and thoughts
for the moment. That, however, was not Yates’s way. Whether he might be
writing a book or editing a periodical, he liked to discuss in detail
the progress of his work among those with whom he habitually lived. The
_mise-en-scène_, and the persons of his stories furnished topics of
table talk with his shrewd and highly-endowed wife first, afterwards
with the clever women who were often in her drawing-room. To that number
belonged Mrs. Hoey, who had worked with him on Dickens’ magazines, and
who was a constant visitor at his house. To her in a special degree he
unfolded the plot, incidents, and even portions of the dialogue in the
novel he had in hand, inviting from her criticism, suggestions for
improvement not only in single episodes, but in the structure of the
book. Of course Mrs. Hoey often submitted in writing the notions for
which she had been conversationally asked. Yates was not the person to
underrate or even to be silent about his obligations to any literary
adviser he valued, and might well have mentioned the matter to Trollope
himself, had the two ever held any friendly conversation on literary
matters.
As it was, Trollope erred in repeating a loose rumour as a statement of
fact. That slip in judgment and tact naturally aggravated the soreness
felt by Yates at his other Garrick troubles, and was deeply resented.
The two men, indeed, for more than ten years remained strangers. Their
oldest and kindest friend, Sir Richard, then simply Dr. Quain, expressed
his pleased surprise to meet them both as guests at the same club
dinner-table towards the close of the seventies, whispering in his
pleasant Irish way to the host, “How did you manage to bring them two
together?” Perhaps modern English literature might be searched in vain
for men at once so eminent, so touchy, so ready to take offence with
each other, and with all the world besides, as the four now mentioned:
“Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer.”
It seems necessary to go back to Horace’s description of Achilles for a
summary of the qualities personified by the literary quartet now
referred to. And yet Yates appreciated Thackeray’s greatness as well as
that of his chief, Dickens; while underrating none of his rival’s
masterpieces, Thackeray was fond of telling the question often put to
him by his children: “Why don’t you write books, real books, like Mr.
Dickens?” Apart from their mutual compliments, paid on such occasions as
the Theatrical Fund dinner,[16] there was no parade of exceptional
cordiality between the two greatest novelists of their age.
High genius always appreciates genius, whatever its personal setting.
Dickens and Thackeray were, therefore, above the pettiness of belittling
each other. Between Anthony Trollope, however, and Edmund Yates, with
all their cleverness, there always existed a good deal of mutual
depreciation and jealousy. Especially was this the case in and after
1868; for in that year F. I. Scudamore, who had been made a G.P.O.
Secretary over Trollope’s head, took Yates for his assistant in
arranging the transfer of the telegraphs from a private company to the
State. Yates, therefore, thought he had as good reason as Trollope for
pride in his work as a Post Office servant; while, as for his social
antecedents, if he had not been, like Trollope, at a public school, he
had, before going to a German university, been in its best days under
Dyne, at Highgate School. Neither man had many pretensions to real
scholarship, but Yates had read and remembered the regulation Latin
Classics well enough to quote them quite as aptly as Trollope. In
facility and force of literary expression, he was at least Trollope’s
equal; in ready wit and resourcefulness he was his superior. But of the
English life that Trollope depicted he knew nothing. The success of
Thackeray and of Dickens he could understand and admire. Both of them
describe different aspects, and hit off certain angles of personal
character connected with that existence which Yates knew and had
studied. But as for Trollope, with his parsons, sporting or priggish,
his insipid young ladies and the green, callow boys upon whom experience
was wasted, and opportunities thrown away--in a word, these washed-out
imitations of Thackeray, as to Yates they seemed--it passed Yates’s
comprehension that the public should find any flavour to its taste in
all this. It even stirred his indignation to hear of publishers paying
such a writer prices approaching those commanded by the twin chiefs of
his craft themselves.
It must be remembered, too, that Yates’s notions of what constitutes
conversational cleverness were largely those he had imbibed as a youth
in the school of Albert Smith. Hence the opinion recorded in his
autobiography, that Trollope did not shine in society and had only
humour of a very second-rate kind. Yates himself, like Dickens, talked
well, and talked for effect. From both his parents he had inherited
marked histrionic power, which showed itself in his performances as
_raconteur_, in the inflections of his voice and the gesture of his
hands. To Trollope such action and pose were altogether foreign. With
real humour, indeed, he overflowed, as has already been shown from _The
Macdermots_ and _The Warden_, and as will be seen more fully later on,
but, unlike Yates, he kept it for his books, and never wasted it on
social effects. Moreover, Trollope had committed what Yates resented as
an unpardonable sin by refusing to sit for his portrait in the
“Celebrities at Home” then appearing in _The World_. It should, however,
be mentioned that, after this honour had been declined, Yates, in his
magazine, _Time_, published about Trollope a highly eulogistic article,
whose proof, before it appeared, he sent Trollope, not only to read, but
to revise and touch up as he pleased. The Post Office, like other public
departments, has had its literary ornaments, whose best traditions
subsequently to the period now dealt with have been perpetuated by Mr.
Buxton Forman, in the domain of literary criticism, and by Mr. A. B.
Walkley, as an authority on the drama in all its developments. But, in
the nineteenth century, Yates and Trollope ran each other a neck and
neck race for priority as representatives of St. Martin’s-le-Grand in
_belles lettres_.
High animal spirits and irrepressible buoyancy entered largely into the
Dickensian estimate of social wit and humour. Few, if any, of these
qualities belonged to Trollope by nature, or had become his acquisition
by habit. A writer who put so much felicity and fun into the lighter
passages of his stories could not, indeed, but occasionally introduce
happiness and pungency into his table talk. But, as Anthony Trollope
himself remarked, “the conversational credit of our family is maintained
not by me but by my brother Tom.” Thomas Adolphus Trollope’s academic
training, natural subtlety, and turn for humorous paradox caused him,
after a fashion always entertaining and often original, to play with the
problems of metaphysics and theology, amid the applause of those
Florentine circles where he was better known and appreciated than in any
London drawing-rooms or clubs. His brother Anthony at his best brimmed
over with shrewd common-sense. Occasionally, when asked a question, he
put his answer in a memorable shape, but, apart from the distinction won
by his pen, was welcomed in Society not so much for a talker as for a
listener.
Anthony Trollope’s election to the Athenæum has already been mentioned
as coming twelve years after his admission to the Garrick. In 1874 too,
he was made free of another little society that, unlike the two clubs
already named, has recently ceased to exist. The Cosmopolitan Club
originated in a period whose social usages, though belonging to the last
half of the Victorian era, are separated from the twentieth century by a
space of more than years. The earliest move made towards the formation
of this little club was by A. H. Layard, in conjunction with Sir Robert
Morier, among the most successful diplomatists of his time. During his
Foreign Office days in London he was the occupant of some Bond Street
rooms. Here the private meeting of men, for the most part belonging to
politics, foreign or domestic, first became weekly or bi-weekly
institutions. Other authorities, equally well informed, hold the true
founder of the institution to have been Sir William Stirling Maxwell,
who, before the settlement on premises of their own, gave the society a
home in his Knightsbridge house. Certain it is that, after a few years,
the increase in members made it necessary to start housekeeping on their
own account. Among the several roofs beneath which the Cosmopolitans
have settled themselves, that sheltering them during most of Trollope’s
time was 45 Charles Street, Berkeley Square, where the artist, G. F.
Watts, formerly had his studio. When Trollope joined the Club in or
about 1874, the method of election dispensed entirely with the usual
club ballot-box, which always remained as unknown as the process of
blackballing itself. Together with one or two more, known to most of the
members by introduction as an occasional visitor, Trollope had produced
a good impression on the premises. In due time therefore, as a proof of
membership, he paid the modest entrance fee at the club’s bankers. This
done, till the year 1880 he remained among the most regular _habitués_
of the place. The accommodation consisted of a single room. The weekly
meetings were held on Thursday and Sunday evenings, between ten and
midnight, during the session. No solid refreshments were served; but on
a side-table were tea, coffee, and aerated waters, with its usual
spirituous adjuncts.
Among those most frequently at the place in Trollope’s time were
Tennyson, who, on his visits to London, found the “Cosmo” more congenial
than most other resorts, and his friend Monckton Milnes, after 1863 Lord
Houghton, who more than any other of his friends had induced Peel, when
Premier, to bestow the laureateship on Tennyson after Wordsworth’s
death. Abraham Hayward; Grant Duff; Lord Barrington, one of Disraeli’s
secretaries; Henry Drummond-Wolff; Lord Granville’s brother, Frederick
Leveson-Gower; Robert G. W. Herbert, so long permanent Under Secretary
at the Colonial Office; his successor Robert Meade; and the
already-mentioned Sir Richard Quain--all were conspicuous in the little
group of which Trollope formed one in the tobacco parliaments of the
little Mayfair caravanserai. As noticeable as any of the foregoing, and
often playing a really important part in the secret political history of
his period, was Dr. Quin, whom Trollope first met at the Cosmopolitan,
and whose good words about Trollope’s novels helped to secure their
admission to Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Perhaps the only
cabinet negotiation of which Trollope knew something from behind the
scenes was that pressed on Dr. Quin by Disraeli in 1868, with a view of
detaching Lord Granville from his Liberal allegiance and inducing him to
serve under Lord Derby. In the days now looked back upon, the
Cosmopolitan Club was the paradise of the intelligent foreigner in
London. Thither the French statesman Adolphe Thiers was repeatedly
brought by Kinglake, and there Trollope gained an insight into political
manœuvres, domestic or foreign, which he found highly useful for his
later books.
The Cosmopolitan Club survived Trollope by exactly twenty-five years.
Shortly after the twentieth century had completed its first decade, most
of the Cosmopolitans whom Trollope knew had followed him to the grave.
The younger men that now came on had their own resorts. Moreover, it
must be remembered that, even until well into the nineteenth century’s
second half, smoking after dinner was allowed in very few houses.
Gradually the future King Edward VII’s influence removed the social
prejudice against tobacco, with a result that the cigar or cigarette
became not less universal than the coffee. At the same time, too, such
of the old Cosmopolitans as were left felt less disposed than in their
younger day to go out after dinner. The new generation also which had
risen up did not appreciate the honour of membership as keenly as had
been done by its predecessors. In 1902 the sanitary arrangements of the
Charles Street premises were found to be in a parlous state. The house,
in fact, which had not been overhauled for a century, was discovered to
be literally afloat with sewage under the basement. The cost of the
necessary repairs was prohibitive. Still struggling against dissolution,
the club migrated to the Alpine Society’s rooms in Savile Row, and
dragged on a maimed existence till 1907, in or after which it was
formally wound up.
In 1862, then, Anthony Trollope’s club life began on the King’s Street,
Covent Garden, premises, shortly before his day visited by the domestic
convulsions already described. At the date now looked back upon, the
Garrick, though by far the most distinguished of the number, was only
one among several literary and theatrical societies which were not their
own landlords. Among the other clubs of that class, the most notable was
the Fielding, which found its home, first at Offley’s Hotel, afterwards
at the Cider Cellars, and which was much frequented by Dickens and
Yates, subsequently to the Garrick split. Here, after he had consulted
with Trollope on the subject, an unsuccessful attempt was made by E. F.
S. Pigott to bring Dickens and Thackeray amicably together. Trollope’s
loyalty to Thackeray did not permit him actually to join the Fielding,
but did not prevent his frequently visiting the place, chiefly as the
guest of Pigott, who used, by-the-bye, to say that “Anthony’s”
well-meant but impatient zeal had caused the miscarriage of the delicate
personal negotiations that native kindness and tact fitted him above all
men to conduct.
The Covent Garden district in Trollope’s earlier London days was
honeycombed by more or less Bohemian societies, housed beneath various
roofs, but all equally unfamiliar to Trollope. The Arundel Club, indeed,
patronised into existence by the Talfourd family, was once visited by
him, together with Charles Reade, long after it had established itself
within walls of its own in Salisbury Street, Strand. But the Savage,
then in its struggling infancy at Ashley’s, Henrietta Street, the
Reunion in Maiden Lane, the Knights of the Round Table at Simpson’s in
the Strand, he had never heard of till I myself mentioned these places
to him. All these were journalistic haunts, with a certain vogue during
the nineteenth century’s second half. The only advantage Trollope could
have derived from entering any one of them might have been a little more
first-hand knowledge than he ever possessed about newspaper writers,
their manners, and their methods. An occasional glimpse of the resorts
now named might have helped him to avoid the mistakes concerning
newspaper life and men that, as it is, he generally commits when
touching on the subject in his stories. Yet Trollope’s club experiences
were far from being confined to the bodies already mentioned.
The interest in stage matters inherited by Trollope from his mother may
have caused him some disappointment, but was not without its practical
advantages. The exercise of attempting and failing to write a good play,
_The Noble Jilt_, helped to produce a capital story, _Can You Forgive
Her?_--presently to be mentioned--as well as helped him as a novelist by
putting him on his guard against some of his literary defects. His
admiration for his _Cornhill_ editor and model, Thackeray, was perhaps
responsible for a tendency in Trollope occasionally to buttonhole his
reader, to obtrude on him the author’s own personality, and not
sufficiently to leave to events and characters the telling of their tale
and the pointing of their moral. The smallest experience in dramatic
writing shows him who essays it, as Trollope did, the necessity of vivid
effects, and the presentation of incidents in such a way as to dispense
with the author’s appearance in the _rôle_ of chorus.
The newspaper writer who turns novelist has already learned, in the
exercise of his craft, the art of handling words, with other details of
literary technique. Trollope, it has been seen, was practically without
newspaper knowledge or training. He could scarcely have found a better
substitute for these than the discipline, disappointing and fruitless as
at the time it seemed, of casting his crude ideas in a dramatic shape.
Socially also in the early sixties Trollope’s theatrical proclivities
attracted him to certain pleasant circles that otherwise he might not
have entered. Miss Kate Terry had not then become Mrs. Arthur Lewis, but
chance made Trollope acquainted with that accomplished actress’s future
husband. This gentleman’s rooms in Jermyn Street were at that time the
social headquarters of the gifted group then engaged in forming the
Artists’ Rifle Corps. Sculptors, painters, authors, as well as players
assisted in the movement, out of which there also gradually grew the
Arts Club. The earliest idea for its domicile was nothing grander than a
modest tenement in the then pre-eminently artistic quarter of Fitzroy
Square, where the Arts men would find and desire no more creature
comforts than a few Windsor chairs, plain deal tables, long clays, and
sanded floors. Instead of this, the new club’s originators made a
successful bid for 17 Hanover Square, close to Tenterden Street. It was
an historic mansion belonging to the Adam period in the eighteenth
century, with elaborate marble mantelpieces, ceilings painted by
Angelica Kauffmann, and superb old oak staircases. Here, in 1863, the
Arts Club came into existence. To some extent the child of the
secessions from the Garrick, the Arts Club in its beginnings was much
favoured by the Dickensian faction. Dickens, indeed, himself never
belonged to it, but his eldest son, who afterwards succeeded him in the
conduct of _All the Year Round_, made it his chief “house of call,” and
in its picturesque dining-room, together with the happily still
surviving Mr. Marcus Stone, used frequently to have the author of his
being for his guest. Among the most prominent of the Thackeray faction
connected with the Arts in its earliest days was Anthony Trollope, who
enjoyed all club life with as keen a zest as did his master, Thackeray
himself.
About the same time as his connection with the Arts, Trollope became an
original member of a very different fraternity. This was the Civil
Service Club, 86 St. James’s Street, as its name implies, intended
primarily for those composing the staff of our Government offices. The
expenses of its maintenance necessitated the admission of outsiders. In
1865, therefore, it dropped the original name, to receive its present
style, the Thatched House Club--a topographical designation in every way
suitable, seeing that the house stands on nearly the same site as that
once occupied by the historical Thatched House tavern. By the time,
however, of this change, Trollope had ceased all connection with the
place. Nor, he told me, did he ever re-cross its threshold until the
occasion, mentioned above, on which the present writer brought him and
Edmund Yates together as fellow-guests in its dining-room. Towards the
close of his London life Trollope joined the Turf Club in Piccadilly
which, in a previous state of existence, had been the Arlington in
Arlington Street, famous for the high points of its whist and the
expertness of its players. The card room at the Turf was, however, to
Trollope the least of its attractions, and indeed his recreations of
this sort were always, I am pretty sure, confined to afternoon whist at
the Athenæum.