IN PERIODICAL HARNESS
Trollope’s one work in the Thackerayan vein--_Brown, Jones, and
Robinson_--Its failure--Thackeray’s two efforts to enter official
life by a side door--Trollope’s opinion of “untried elderly
tyros”--And of Thackeray’s limitations--His _Life of
Thackeray_--Philippics against open competition in the Civil
Service--A Liberal by profession, but a Tory at heart--Anthony’s
_bon mot_--_The Pall Mall Gazette_--Hunting life in Essex--Sir
Evelyn Wood to the rescue--Trollope’s cosmopolitanism--_The
Fortnightly Review_, an English _Revue des Deux Mondes_--Its later
developments.
Trollope’s London course, literary and social, began, as has been
already shown, under Thackeray’s ægis. To the first editor of _The
Cornhill_ he owed his place in the set with which he soon became, and
always remained, a favourite, as well as his earliest profitable
connection with periodical letters. Naturally and properly Trollope
repaid this debt to the utmost of his power, not only by every possible
acknowledgment of lasting gratitude, but by the occasional compliment of
literary imitation. The novels of English country life contributed by
him to _The Cornhill_--_Framley Parsonage_ in 1860, and _The Small House
at Allington_ that began to follow it in 1862, the year before
Thackeray’s death--showed no sign of Thackeray’s influence. These were
the two books that completed the process, begun by _The Warden_ in 1855,
of placing permanently the public he by this time understood beneath the
spell of his pen. Before, however, the introduction of _The Cornhill_
readers to Lily Dale, John Eames, and Adolphus Crosbie, Trollope had
contributed to the same magazine a loosely written, satirical sketch,
_Brown, Jones, and Robinson_, which a hostile critic might be excused
for describing as Thackeray-and-water. With a congenial subject,
Trollope could always be depended on for abundant humour and irony. Both
these qualities in _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_ lack the spontaneity or
ease without which the charm of Trollope’s writing disappears. So, in
fact, thought Trollope himself; so too, however courteously he softened
the expression of his opinion, did the polite and amiable Mr. George
Smith. Yet even so, _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_ is not at all poorer
than Thackeray’s own mark as seen in many of his earlier pieces for
_Fraser_, and in many of the _Roundabout Papers_ which he hurried
through for _The Cornhill_ while the printers were waiting for copy. It
was Trollope’s single unqualified failure. Never again was he betrayed
by his Thackeray homage into the mistake of mimicry.
As a fact, too, no one knew better than did Trollope, not only his own
limitations and deficiencies, but Thackeray’s as well. The plums of the
Postmaster-General’s department should in every case fall to men already
at work in the office. That feeling of _esprit de corps_ had in 1846
made Trollope oppose Rowland Hill’s introductions from outside to St.
Martin’s-le-Grand. Two years later, or twelve years before Trollope’s
connection with him began, Thackeray himself had, equally to Trollope’s
disgust, contemplated an act of intrusion like Rowland Hill’s in the
Postal Service. In 1848 the assistant-secretaryship fell vacant. The
then Postmaster-General, Lord Clanricarde, the staunchest friend
possessed by the novelist among those in high place, let Thackeray know
he would do his best to secure him the billet. Lord Clanricarde’s second
in command plainly told his chief that the thing was impossible. The
Minister at once gave way, and accepted the official nominee, of course
not a little to Thackeray’s chagrin.
On this transaction Trollope’s remark was that, had Thackeray succeeded
in his attempt, he would surely have ruined himself. No man, he added,
could be fit for the management and performance of special work who had
learned nothing of it before his thirty-seventh year, Thackeray’s then
age. No man, he further insisted, could be more signally unfit for it
than Thackeray. The achievement of his ambition in this matter would
have summoned him to duties impossible of performance except after a
long course of expert training. In some cases, Trollope admitted, an
“untried, elderly tyro” might have put himself into harness and
discharged after a fashion the first duty of maintaining discipline over
a large body of men; but of all men in the world Thackeray was the most
egregiously and fatally disqualified for anything of the sort. The whole
subject was one on which Trollope felt some difficulty in expressing
himself. On the one hand, his grateful admiration of Thackeray made him
anxious not to do that great man any injustice in the matter. On the
other hand, his loyalty to his brethren of the Civil Service made him
resent his idol’s apparent belief that a man may be a Government
secretary with a generous salary and have nothing to do. Nor, he adds,
did Thackeray consider how inexpressibly wearisome he would have found
the details of his work, or in effect how impossible to a man of his
habits and intolerance of all ties would have been attendance in the
city every day from eleven to five. The conclusion, therefore, however
reluctantly reached, is that Thackeray so underrated the intellectual
demands made by their employments on the servants of the State as to see
no difficulty in combining the mechanical drudgery of a public office
with the creative labour of novel-writing and his other literary work.
Yes, not without a touch of bitterness Trollope sums it all up: he might
have done it had he risen at five, and sat at his private desk for three
hours before beginning the day’s grind at the G.P.O. On this subject
Trollope could speak with the practical experience of one who had gone
through the exhausting monotony of the official mill, and who had taxed
almost to breaking point his exceptional strength by combining with it
his unceasing commissions for publishers.
Thackeray’s official aspirations were the fond dreams of a literary man
who would fain have recalled in the nineteenth century that Augustan age
in which, under Queen Anne, Joseph Addison was a Secretary of State,
and, under George I, Matthew Prior became British Ambassador in Paris.
Again, since the State is still accustomed to reward with money, titles
of honour, garters, or stars, Thackeray wanted to know why men of
letters should not have their turn as well as politicians and soldiers.
Even in our own evil times the great Anglo-Saxon State on the other side
of the Atlantic delighted to honour the pen in this way. The United
States had sent Washington Irving (1830) as Minister to London; more
than twenty years later (1853), it had made Nathaniel Hawthorne its
consul at Liverpool. Fired by these precedents, six years after the
miscarriage of his Post Office design, Thackeray (November 1854) had
applied for the vacant secretaryship of our Washington Legation, with
the result that Lord Clarendon, who then controlled the Foreign Office,
replied: first, that the place was already filled; secondly, that it
would be unfair to appoint out of the service; thirdly, that being a
great novelist would not necessarily ensure a man’s being a good
Minister.
When, therefore, Thackeray visited the United States, he did so in his
own coat, as he himself put it, and not in the Queen’s. Nor, is
Trollope’s comment, is there anyone on whom the Queen’s coat would have
sat so ill. However that may be, there are few modern cases which could
be cited in support of a literary man’s claim to employment in the
English service abroad. During the years following Thackeray’s
unsuccessful suit the official prospect for English literature somewhat
brightened. Grenville Murray had combined diplomacy and authorship
before Thackeray applied for Washington. Trollope’s own friend, Charles
Lever, was first introduced to the consular service in 1852. Burton’s
experiences of the same department date from 1861. In 1868 James Hannay
was not too generously rewarded with the Barcelona consulship for his
newspaper services to the Conservative cause. Since then Mr. James
Bryce’s success at our Washington Embassy has brought us further in the
direction of the great novelist’s dream than would have looked possible
in Thackeray’s day.
These are not the only manifestations of the candour that blended itself
with the warmth of Trollope’s appreciative friendship for Thackeray. His
literary master’s defeat by Cardwell in the Oxford election in 1857
suggests a remark on “his foredoomed failure in the House of Commons,
had he ever entered it, a failure rendered inevitable by his intolerance
of tedium, his impatience of slow work, and his want of definite or
accurate political convictions.”[17] More even than this, when Trollope
comes to think about it, he feels by no means sure of Thackeray as
_Cornhill_ editor having been the right man in the right place. Did not,
he implies, Thackeray’s own often-cited article in his magazine about
the editorial position, _Thorns in the Cushion_, justify that misgiving?
The great man was too perfunctory, could not bring himself personally to
deal with all the manuscripts which poured in; he was obliged, in fact,
as all editors are, to entrust some of the supervisory work to his
subordinates. Worse than that, however, Thackeray actually rejected one
of Trollope’s proffered contributions in the shape of a short story, on
the ground that it might bring a blush to the cheek of the young person.
Nothing could be more curiously characteristic of the man who gives it
than the opinion formed by the author of _Framley Parsonage_ of the
first editor of _The Cornhill_. Trollope was compounded in nearly equal
parts of an enthusiastic impulsiveness that came to him by nature, and
of a shrewdly judicial man-of-the-world temper, largely formed and
strengthened by his experiences of life in general, and, in a greater
degree, of his Post Office experiences in particular. His twofold
estimate of Thackeray signally illustrates this balance of opposite
tendencies.
John Forster, who, after the fashion already described, had given
Trollope his first chance of appearing in print, was one among the
latest survivors of those who knew Thackeray intimately. Told in the
year of his death, 1876, of Thackeray in the Men of Letters series being
allotted to Trollope, he remarked with surprise, “Why, Trollope only
knew him as editor of _The Cornhill_.” These things were before my
time. Neither to me nor, I think, to any of my day, did Trollope
volunteer any remarks about the extent to which circumstances had
carried his personal knowledge of Thackeray. That the literary
acquaintance of the two men eventually ripened into something like
social intimacy was the opinion of Thackeray’s own familiars, such as
the already mentioned E. F. S. Pigott and Tom Taylor who, though six
years the great man’s junior, had been with him at Cambridge, and whose
friendship with him to the day of his death was as unbroken as it was
close. The same view on this point was taken also by G. A. Sala, who
personally disliked Trollope, and had formerly resented his approaches
to Thackeray, as well as by the accomplished and socially omniscient Sir
W. A. Fraser, who, from his own independent experience, circumstantially
confirmed to me the accuracy shown by Trollope in his rendering of all
Thackerayan details. Both these henchmen of the great novelist were book
and, incidentally, autograph collectors. Shortly before his death,
Fraser and Trollope, each on a separate occasion going to dine with
Thackeray at Palace Gate, brought with him a specially bound set of
Thackeray’s works that the author might write his name therein. To both
men Thackeray excused himself from doing so at the time, promised that
he would see to the matter next day, and return the volumes. Meanwhile,
the fatal Christmas had come and gone; the great man was no more. The
books were punctually sent back to their owners. In neither set had
Thackeray’s name been written.
Trollope’s _Cornhill_ experiences, under Thackeray first and, in the
case of _The Claverings_, under his successor, marked by far the most
important and profitable connection with periodical literature. As a
journalist, however, he had begun on the weekly press in 1848, while he
was doing Post Office duty in Ireland. In 1859 or 1860 Merivale’s
_History of the Romans under the Empire_ excited in him a wish to combat
the views expressed in that work about the Cæsars. The result was two
articles on the subject, one dealing with Julius, the other with
Augustus, in the _Dublin University Magazine_. By that time Charles
Lever’s editorship of this periodical had ceased; but his good word
helped Trollope with his successor. The articles then written, and just
noticed, formed the germ of a future book hereafter to be mentioned.
But, at the date of these _Dublin University_ opportunities, Trollope
was so entirely overcome with indignant disgust at the prospect of the
Civil Service being thrown open to competitive examination, that he
could write or think about little else. The _Dublin University Magazine_
allowed him to relieve his overwrought feelings by discharging several
pages of furious invective at the proposed change and its authors.
Whatever at different periods Trollope might think and call himself, his
natural prejudices were always those of aristocratic and reactionary
Toryism. Upon whatever grade, and whatever the work, provided it was not
of an essentially plebeian kind, the public offices of this country must
be reserved for gentlemen. Examinations might in some degree test
brains; they could not ensure breeding. Without the ideas, the
antecedents, and the social training which must remain the privilege of
birth, mere book knowledge, diligence, and aptitude for drudgery would
not of themselves guarantee the State the higher qualities it had a
right to expect in its servants. Here spoke the same spirit as that
which had impelled Anthony Trollope’s kinsman, the great Conservative
squire, Sir John Trollope, in 1846 to place loyalty to his Protectionist
principles before loyalty to his leader, Sir Robert Peel. Asseverations
of this kind were much in request as arguments with those bent on
retaining State employment for the exclusive profit of the privileged
classes. Nor beyond these rhetorical commonplaces, with their
conventional appeals to a pseudo-aristocratic feeling, did Anthony
Trollope’s case against competitive examinations go. He lived long
enough, if not cordially to acquiesce in the new system, yet, becoming
Sir Charles Trevelyan’s personal friend, to agree with him that
competition did not in its working involve more evils than patronage.
While on one of his visits to the Irish capital, about his contributions
to the academic periodical, he first made, through the social offices
of Charles Lever, one of the friendships that he renewed with special
appreciation in his later life. J. S. Le Fanu had succeeded Lever as the
editor of the _Dublin University Magazine_; to Le Fanu’s house in
Merrion Square Trollope, accordingly, was taken by Lever. Here in the
course of the evening a young lady--his host’s niece--asked whether she
should read something to them she had written. The budding authoress
became celebrated a little later as Miss Rhoda Broughton, and the
manuscript in hand was that of a story that established her as a
novelist in 1867, _Not Wisely, but Too Well_. Recalling this incident
many years afterwards, Lever said: “Never before or since did I see
Anthony Trollope so agreeable or so witty as on the evening he listened
to the extracts Miss Broughton recited from her earliest book. In fact,
the only _mot_ with which I can ever credit him was flashed out on that
occasion. The talk, I think, had been brought by W. H. Russell, who was
of the party, to some one specially disliked by Trollope. ‘But,’ said
Trollope, dismissing the subject, ‘let us hope better things of him in
the future, as the old lady said when she heard that F. D. Maurice had
preached the eventual salvation of all mankind.’”
Trollope took his place in the social and literary life of London under
conditions and at an age that ensured his enjoying these new experiences
with a greater zest than had they come earlier, and because they were
the deferred, and occasionally the despaired of reward for toil,
endurance, exile, equal to the picturing of his fondest dream. At the
age of forty-five, with powers of enjoyment, as of work, yet unimpaired,
he had in advance guaranteed himself against inconvenience from any
possible check in his literary course by the eastern district
surveyorship. This raised him above the dependence of a publisher’s
hack, and enabled him to make better terms for his books. Its social as
well as official experiences might, as he shrewdly foresaw, be trusted
to ensure his imagination such a constant supply of fresh material as
would preserve freshness and guard him against the sin of
self-repetition. Thus, in little more than ten years after his earliest
and unsuccessful novel, _The Macdermots_, and in five years after his
first success with _The Warden_, he had won a position which rendered it
tolerably certain that no new literary enterprise would be floated by
men like George Smith, without the invitation of his services and
goodwill. In another work[18] I have stated so fully the origin of _The
Pall Mall Gazette_ that any references to it here must be confined to
the few points of contact between that newspaper and Trollope, whom it
did not concern, in his impressions of this journalistic incident,
circumstantially to bring out the fact that, beyond its name, _The Pall
Mall Gazette_ of real life owed nothing to Thackeray, and, as regards
all its details, was the exclusive device of its first owner and its
first editor. The announcement of the historical paper, prepared by
Frederick Greenwood, who alone planned and who long conducted it, said
nothing about a journal written “by gentlemen for gentlemen,” but only
that a few men of letters had decided upon starting on a new venture
which they thought would be found different from anything then before
the public. Contributions of course were invited from Trollope upon any
social events or humours of the hour that interested him. By this time
he was as well known in certain parts of England as he had begun to be
nearly a quarter of a century earlier, on the other side of St. George’s
Channel, for an enthusiastic and intrepid rider to hounds.
At Waltham House, where his Post Office duties had made it convenient to
settle, he was within practicable distance of several different meets.
At Harlow, some ten miles from Waltham, were the kennels of the Essex
pack, and with these he soon became a familiar figure. His earliest
hunting friend, Charles Buxton, between 1865 and 1871 Member for East
Surrey, on Trollope’s re-establishment in the home counties, was himself
still a keen rider to hounds; Buxton’s friendship and introduction
proved of special service to Trollope in connection with his favourite
pastime. During Trollope’s experience of the Essex country, the district
opened to him by his friends of the Buxton family was that known as the
Roothings, chiefly hunted by the staghounds, but occasionally also the
scene of a fox hunt. Famous for its stiff riding, it abounded in
formidable fences and in deep ditches. In the sixties Trollope was a
very heavy weight, and therefore frequently in difficulties; of these he
made light, pulling himself together with surprising speed after a
series of spills, and seldom failing to hold a good place at the end of
a run. Of his fellow-Nimrods in the East Anglian region, there are still
left Sir Evelyn Wood and Mr. E. N. Buxton, from personal experience to
testify to the undaunted alacrity with which, after having been lost to
view in the field, Trollope scaled the sides of a Roothing dyke,
reappeared in the saddle, and pushed on with unabated vigour.
In addition to his weight, fatal, of course, to anything like equestrian
elegance, Trollope had to contend against a defect of vision which no
artificial relief entirely obviated. Hence some of the difficulties that
used to beset him with the Essex pack and with H. Petre’s staghounds.
His popularity in the field generally brought him timely relief in
answer to his call for help. Such proved the case when, on one occasion,
he had been making up lost ground after a fall in the middle of a
ploughed field. The fellow-sportsman who then answered to his cry was no
less a person than the present Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. “For
heaven’s sake,” exclaimed Trollope, “be careful; I am afraid to move
lest I should trample on my spectacles which have just fallen off my
nose.” Quick as thought, the future Field-Marshal alighted from his
horse, and retrieved the glasses. Having fitted them to his nose,
Trollope rejoined the hunt with as much serene sturdiness as if the
little contretemps had never occurred. Trollope’s sporting performances
in the eastern home counties had also a social side he found highly
useful for the purposes of his novels. Many of the sportsmen lived at
London or elsewhere, renting at local inns a certain amount of stabling
for their horses, together with suites of rooms for themselves during
the season. They thus formed a club whose members, as often as
convenient, dined together, and of which Trollope soon became free. It
was a pleasant, cheery life that exactly suited the eminently clubbable
Trollope. Glimpses of it are given in those passages of _Phineas Finn_
describing the performances of that novel’s hero on Lord Chiltern’s
Bonebreaker.
As Trollope wrote, so did he ride, confident that the animal he
bestrode, equally the novelist’s Pegasus as his Irish mare, would in
each case carry him successfully from point to point. Whether with the
pen or on horseback, he took his own line. Neither checks nor even falls
prevented his finishing at the spot and the hour he had from the first
fixed. As much as he could desire of the sport he loved, in a good
country, and with social accessories just suited to him; a constitution,
naturally of iron, as yet practically untouched by years, and revealing
no unsound spot; a sense of official importance gratified by the
authority delegated to him from St. Martin’s-le-Grand; the inheritance
at the London club he most frequented, the Garrick, of something like
Thackeray’s own position; ascendency firmly established and wide
popularity permanently won in the calling of novelist; freedom from all
present anxiety as to his circumstances, and every year bringing a solid
addition to his funded savings--all this surely formed a combination,
such as might have made him who commanded it the happiest, as he was
certainly the most fortunate, of men. And yet Trollope’s life was
chronically saddened by recurrent moods of indefinable dejection and
gloom. A sardonic melancholy he had himself imputed to Thackeray. In his
own case the sardonic element was wanting, but the melancholy was
habitually there, darkening his outlook alike upon the present and the
future. “It is, I suppose,” he said, addressing the friend to whom, more
than to any other, he unbosomed himself, Sir J. E. Millais, “some
weakness of temperament that makes me, without intelligible cause, such
a pessimist at heart.”
These seizures of despondency generally overtook him as he was riding
home from a day with the hounds. They began with the reflection that he
rode heavier in each successive season, and that in the course of nature
the hunting, repeatedly prolonged beyond what he had fixed as its term,
would have to be given up. The vague presentiment of impending calamity,
as he himself put it, came, no doubt, from nothing more than an
increasingly practical discovery of the Horatian truth:
“_Singula de nobis anni prædantur euntes._”[19]
Against the depressing influences thus engendered, Trollope lacked the
natural resources of his two most famous contemporaries. Thackeray, if
he had not always at his command spirits as high as Dickens, by an
effort of purely intellectual strength could generally secure the
enjoyment of life against the intrusion of unwelcome fancies and gloomy
thoughts. Anthony Trollope was without Dickens’ perennially boyish zest
of existence or Thackeray’s stubborn opposition to the first approach of
the “blue devils.” His manner, habitually abrupt and sometimes
imperious, concealed an almost feminine sensibility to the opinions of
others, a self-consciousness altogether abnormal in a seasoned and
practical man of the world, as well as a strong love of approbation,
whether from stranger or friend. The inevitable disappointment of these
instincts and desires at once pained and ruffled him beyond his power to
conceal, and so produced what his physician and friend, Sir Richard
Quain, once happily called “Trollope’s genial air of grievance against
the world in general, and those who personally valued him in
particular.”
The founding of _The Pall Mall Gazette_ and other literary events
belonging to the year 1865 were landmarks in Trollope’s progress for
social rather than literary reasons. Some very slight sketches,
exclusively or for the most part on hunting, were contributed by him to
the evening paper which Frederick Greenwood’s experience and
inventiveness had been helped by George Smith’s capital to create.[20]
In those days more dining than is the habit to-day was considered
essential to journalistic enterprise. George Smith’s earliest _Pall
Mall_ dinners soon became famous, and found Anthony Trollope a frequent
guest. At these hospitalities he greatly extended the literary and
political acquaintanceship which he had begun to make at the Garrick and
at the Cosmopolitan, as well as added to it specimens of intellectual
power, culture, and cosmopolitan knowledge hitherto seldom collected
beneath the same London roof. Such were the three survivors among the
chief original writers for _The Saturday Review_: H. S. Maine, his
former Cambridge pupil and subsequently _Saturday_ colleague, William
Vernon Harcourt, and G. S. Venables, about whom it was then, as it still
remains, uncertain whether he did or did not sit to Thackeray for the
Warrington of _Pendennis_.
The second Lord Lytton, then attached to our Lisbon embassy, Julian
Fane, and the eighth Viscount Strangford represented various branches of
_belles lettres_, as well as of diplomacy and cosmopolitanism, in the
company among which Trollope now found himself. Not the elder alone, but
both the two brothers who were successively the seventh and eighth Lords
Strangford are reflected, even to their personal appearance, in the
Waldershare of Disraeli’s _Endymion_--fair with short, curly, brown hair
and blue eyes, not exactly handsome, but with a countenance full of
expression, and the index of quick emotions, whether of joy or sorrow.
George Smythe, the seventh of the Strangford Viscounts, the reputed
original of Coningsby, was no longer alive at the time of these _Pall
Mall_ dinners. His brother and successor, Percy, figured among
Greenwood’s most important contributors from the first. None of the
group now mentioned had the same vivid interest for Trollope as
Strangford; but the most distinguished of the others, notably Fitzjames
Stephen, William Rathbone Greg, George Henry Lewes, and James Hannay,
exercised upon him something of the same educational influence that they
did upon Greenwood himself. Many years subsequently to this, Trollope
met as a guest at the Cosmopolitan Club the ex-officer of the French
Navy, L. M. J. Viaud, who, as Pierre Loti, became famous in 1880. “I
could not,” was Trollope’s comment, “amid the many personal
dissimilarities of the two, but be struck by a certain resemblance
between James Hannay’s breezy picturesqueness in stating his views of
history or politics, and the touches, as graphic as they were delicate,
that made Viaud’s descriptions, whether in conversation or writing,
living things.”
The period now reached was to present Trollope with another new
connection in periodical literature, not less noticeable in itself, and
more far-reaching in some of its consequences than any of those already
mentioned. His first dealings with the publishers Chapman and Hall,
while still settled at 193 Piccadilly, were, as has been already said,
over _Dr. Thorne_ in 1858. Pre-eminent among the nineteenth century
writers as the novelist of English home-life, Trollope possessed, and on
occasion showed, as much of international sympathy as Bulwer-Lytton
himself, and, by original observation as well as by English and foreign
reading, took real pains to keep himself in touch with the higher
European thought of his time. Occasionally he took his summer holiday at
a pretty little hamlet in the Black Forest, Höllenthal, near Freiburg.
Here he sometimes received visits from well-placed continental friends
who, in a few hours’ talk, took him effectively behind the scenes of
European society letters, politics, or finance. From Höllenthal, too,
were made those excursions that not only acquainted him with the
most-desired hospitalities of Cologne, Frankfort, and Berlin, but that
also brought him into the heart of the Fatherland’s inner life as seen,
now in obscure towns or obscurer villages, now in the studies and
lecture-rooms of thinkers and writers. Such were the experiences that
suggested to Trollope’s active mind the possibility of founding a
magazine which should be for England what the _Revue des deux Mondes_
was for France; that periodical, as was happily said by Lord Morley of
Blackburn, had “brought down abstract discussion from the library to
the man in the street.” Why should not, Trollope asked himself, the like
of this be done here. The same idea had occurred almost simultaneously
to others of light and learning in contemporary literature. Huxley, E.
A. Freeman, Sir R. F. Burton, E. S. Beesly, Mr. Frederick Harrison, and
the present poet laureate, Mr. Alfred Austin, promised the enterprise
their “vote and interest”; Lord Houghton, without whose counsel and
goodwill no undertaking of the sort could then have been carried out,
forwarded it not only with his blessing but his purse.
Among others less well known but not less active co-operating to the
same end were Danby Seymour, Charles Waring, a shrewd, genial
Yorkshireman of intellectual tastes and parliamentary ambitions, whose
interest in the project had been secured by one already mentioned more
than once in these pages, E. F. S. Pigott. Waring, who subsequently
married a daughter of Sir George Denys of Draycote, Yorkshire, and was
from 1865 to 1868 M.P. for Poole, became the father of Captain Walter
Waring, returned in 1907 for Banffshire. In the sixties, however, he was
a man about town, living in The Albany, as generous and eclectic in his
bachelor hospitalities as, after his marriage, in the cosmopolitan
banquets which during the eighties gave his house, 3 Grosvenor Square, a
place of its own in the chronicle of the London season. During that
subsequent period Waring once thought of buying back from its
possessors, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, the periodical to founding which
he had contributed. Then, however, Trollope, at whose instance Pigott’s
influence had originally prevailed on Charles Waring to co-operate in
bringing _The Fortnightly Review_ to the birth, was dead against the
parting of the property to any new purchaser.
At the date now looked back upon, Waring’s Albany Chambers were
frequented by other clever and notable men, all of them, in their
different ways, highly useful at its beginnings to the literary
enterprise. Such were Ralph Earle, who, as Benjamin Disraeli’s private
secretary during part of 1859, sat for Berwick-on-Tweed. Soon after
this Earle gave up politics, as he had before given up diplomacy. He had
the Italian or Spanish genius for statecraft, but no special
qualifications for a deliberative assembly. The knowledge of
international policy and finance, picked up in the course of his
European wanderings, he employed congenially and successfully in
negotiating concessions from foreign sovereigns and statesmen for great
capitalists engaged in railways and other public works, especially Baron
de Hirsch. Earle’s House of Commons contemporary, Danby Seymour,
Waring’s predecessor in the representation of Poole, was without the
rare intellectual power and subtlety that marked Disraeli’s former
secretary. He was, however, a typical specimen of the intellectual and
political man about town, with an altogether extraordinary knowledge of
high-class periodicals in every European country and language. Be sure,
was his advice, to cultivate as an entirely new feature, the best
account that can be written for each number of all contemporary
movements, foreign as well as domestic, with their tendency and value,
whether in the region of politics, letters, science, or economics.
Seymour’s suggested article at once became a feature, and received from
Trollope himself the title, “Home and Foreign Affairs.” The little
conferences in the Piccadilly precinct that preceded the appearance of
_The Fortnightly_ proved a valuable experience to Trollope. They took
him for the first time in his life behind the political scenes, and
brought him into close quarters with men from whom he afterwards drew
the political figures that flit through his later novels.
Danby Seymour had held subordinate office in Lord Palmerston’s second
administration. His brother Alfred, often with him on these occasions,
had been member for Shaftesbury. They both had fine estates in
Wiltshire--subsequently disposed of to Mr. Percy Wyndham--as well as
Mayfair houses, one in Curzon Street, the other near it, and each
possessed a fine collection of pictures. In a word, the Seymour kinsmen,
to whom _The Fortnightly Review_ operations alone introduced Trollope,
were thoroughly characteristic of the class and period that he
introduced in _Can You Forgive Her?_ (1864), and which afterwards he was
to describe more minutely in the political novels that began with
_Phineas Finn_.
Trollope showed his knowledge of recent and remote history by reminding
his company that leading out of the same corridor as Waring’s rooms were
those in which Douglas Cook, creator and first editor of _The Saturday
Review_, saw, of a Tuesday morning, his contributors, and later in the
day dined his great friends or wealthy patrons of the Hope and Pelham
name. A generation earlier Trollope discovered, in the same Piccadilly
precinct, Lord Althorp had rallied his followers for the attack upon the
Conservatives under the Duke of Wellington that was to establish the
reform ministry of Grey. Such formed the associations of the four walls
within which were completed the arrangements that resulted in the
appearance, on the 15th of May, 1865, of the first number of _The
Fortnightly Review_, with the cry, “No party but a free platform.” At
the same time, the choice of George Henry Lewes as first editor, on the
then Mr. John Morley’s recommendation, seemed to promise that the
champions of progress were not likely to have the worst of it in any
discussions which might enliven the pages of _The Fortnightly_. The
title explains itself; the Review was to appear on the first and
fifteenth of each month, at a price of two shillings. In 1866 Mr. Morley
succeeded Lewes as editor. The October issue of that year announced the
suspension for the present of the mid-monthly number. Thus, among the
three _Fortnightly_ editors during Trollope’s time, the earliest, George
Lewes, was the only one who conducted a magazine literally true to its
title. With the number of January, 1867, the present series began; at
the same time the price was raised from a florin to half a crown.
Trollope always felt a paternal interest, and sometimes exercised a
paternal power, in the periodical that thus at its different stages
associated itself with so many well-known names, and that, without any
loss of position, had in infancy dropped any etymological claim to the
name given it by Trollope himself. When _The Fortnightly_ funds, raised
in the manner already described, had been spent, the copyright passed to
the publishers. Of these, Frederick Chapman, by his energy and zeal for
the enterprise, had already made himself a part of the Review, uniformly
co-operating, then and afterwards, in all matters that pertained to it,
with Trollope. Thus far, Trollope sympathised with, or did not
reprobate, the advanced opinions advocated by its chief writers. He
remained, indeed, for many years afterwards, enough of a Liberal to
remonstrate with Mr. Alfred Austin on securing for his elder brother,
Tom, the Italian correspondence of _The Standard_, at the price, he
feared, of his conversion to Conservatism. For though, as has already
been seen, Trollope’s inborn prejudices, social training, and personal
antipathies were all strongly Conservative, the accidents of later
experience, operating on his actively controversial temper; made him
pass for a Liberal during those Palmerstonian and early Gladstonian eras
when Liberalism took its principles from the reactionary moderates
rather than the progressives. He wished to see in power men whose
administrative abilities would secure prosperity and a fair distribution
of material comforts, as well as civil or political rights at home, and
the exercise of English influence to redress international grievances,
and to put down oppression abroad. But this was coupled always with the
condition of the country being ruled and represented by the privileged
classes, to whom no one was more proud of belonging than himself. So
long as they were in the hands of gentlemen, he really cared little
about the political label borne by those responsible for the conduct of
affairs. The demagogue and leveller, whether on the platform or in
print, were always the same abominations to his earlier manhood that the
professional agitator and the foreign fomenters of Irish disaffection
became to his later years.
His favourite intellectual progeny, as he regarded _The Fortnightly
Review_, might be trusted, he thought, to reflect his own ideas, and to
avoid the falsehood of extremes, at least as much in one direction as in
the others. He therefore felt something of a Lear’s paternal pain and
indignation when the editor and his self-willed contributors seemed bent
on converting the periodical from a platform for the discussion of all
questions by the light of pure reason, on lines agreeable to impartial
intellect alone, into a pulpit, as it struck Trollope, for maintaining
the most audacious and subversive neologies, social or political, civil
or religious. His misgivings were exchanged for certainty during the
course of 1867. In that year the war between labour and capital reached
its height. The public had not recovered from the horror and disgust it
had received from the trades union excesses which Broadhead had
instigated at Sheffield, when Mr. Frederick Harrison came out with his
famous defence of strikes and unions in _The Fortnightly Review_. Nor
was it the industrial question only on which _The Fortnightly_ articles
excited Trollope’s apprehension. To the end of the sixties and to the
first year of the next decade belonged the acutest phase of the
perennial dispute whether national elementary teaching should rest on a
purely secular, on a chiefly religious basis, or should be supported on
the result of a compromise between the two. That last was the
ministerial view which, in his pending Elementary Schools Bill, W. E.
Forster, as vice-President of the Council, and practically Education
Minister, aimed at establishing. He thus, of course, satisfied neither
side. The religious educationalists of the National Union, with
Manchester for its headquarters, charged the author of the 1870 Bill
with indifference whether the rising generation was brought up in the
Christianity of its forefathers, or victimised to the heathenish fads
and godless crotchets of the secularist and agnostic education-mongers,
looked upon with the same horror by Trollope as all other radicals or
revolutionaries. On the other hand, the Birmingham League, with Mr.
Joseph Chamberlain for its political champion, and the unimpeachably
Christian Congregational minister, R. W. Dale, for its prophet and
guide, held that, in the long run, both learning and religion would fare
best if in State schools religion formed no part of the official
curriculum. So, too, thought, or as Trollope fancied, seemed to think,
the leading spirits of _The Fortnightly Review_. Against these Anthony
Trollope was up in arms. The articles advocating the League’s policy
suggested a deliberate plot to suppress the Holy Scriptures in the
National schools.
His disapproval of the political school whose ascendency _The
Fortnightly_ confessed did not prevent him from being one of its
contributors. In addition to the novel he ran through it, _The Belton
Estate_, presently to be dwelt on, he made the Review an arena for a
struggle with E. A. Freeman about the morality of field sports in
general, and of his own greatly enjoyed hunting in particular. This
controversy, marked on both sides by prejudice rather than argument, and
by vigour instead of subtlety, was, as might have been expected, no
better than a waste of time, temper, and space. Had it been possible to
bring forward any new pros or cons, neither Freeman nor Trollope was the
man to do it. Ouida and her friend, Sir Frederick Johnstone, talking
over the matter at one of her Langham Hotel _causeries intimes_, “where
cigarettes and even cigars were permitted,” said: “I think if these two
pundits had handed the matter over to us, we could have put a little
more life into it, and perhaps sent up by a few copies the periodical
which is the pasture-ground of professors and prigs.” Trollope was as
far from being a prig as from being a philosopher. But he had equally
few qualifications for a controversialist likely to freshen up an
ancient theme, and in this disability he was well matched with Freeman.
Meanwhile, he had invested capital in the house of Chapman and Hall;
after the publishing business had been turned into a limited company he
remained one of the shareholders, and transmitted his interest in it to
those in whose favour he drew his will. He was, from its foundation to
the end of his life, a director of the company, but besides this, his
intimacy with the manager of its publishing business, Frederick Chapman,
as well as with that gentleman’s well-to-do relatives with a large share
in the concern, gave, and kept for Trollope to the day of his death, the
position of an _amicus curiæ_, whose literary advice was asked and
taken on important matters. But the sensational stage of the development
of _The Fortnightly_ was not fully reached during his life. He survived,
however, to witness the first signs of its advent in an article which,
under the signature “Judex,” appeared in the spring of 1880, after
Beaconsfield’s final overthrow, and the formation of Gladstone’s second
Cabinet. “It was,” said the writer of the article now recalled, “an
extraordinary victory won by the nation against an extraordinary man, in
some of his powers never surpassed, whose life was the most astonishing
of all careers in the annals of parliament, and who, though decisively
vanquished, would not, it was to be hoped, retire, because a Liberal
Government, more than any other, imperatively needs a strong Opposition
for the due and sane performance of its work.” This composition was at
once discovered to have the importance of a State paper. The editor, Mr.
John Morley, had not then entered parliament as member for
Newcastle-on-Tyne. Previously, however, to that he had fought not only
Blackburn but Westminster under the Gladstonian flag. He was known to
stand high in the Liberal leader’s confidence. It was generally
asserted, without contradiction then or since, that the pseudonym at the
end of the piece veiled the identity of no less a person than W. E.
Gladstone himself. Trollope, at the most, did not think much of it, and
drily remarked that fictitious pen names violated one of the principles
of the Review. He had consistently protested, and indeed actively
struggled against, the conversion of an impartial and philosophical
magazine into the mouthpiece of men to whose opinions he could not
reconcile himself, though their expression was judiciously revised by an
editor not only as able, but as fair-minded as any periodical was
fortunate enough to possess. Having retired from practical opposition,
and accepted what he thought was the inevitable, he remarked: “The
whirligig of time brings its own revenges, and wisdom is justified of
her children. I shall not live to see it, but a generation or so hence
_The Fortnightly_, recovering from these its earlier excesses, will
revert to its original mission, and give the world the best which can be
written for or against any school of politics and philosophy in Church
or State.” This characteristic prediction has at least, in the twentieth
century, fulfilled itself to the letter. Under its present accomplished
editor, as under his latest predecessors, irrespectively of party
position or personal proclivities, the periodical has been opened to all
competent writers with a message to deliver.