AMERICAN MISSIONS AND COLONIAL TOURS
Trollope’s third visit to America--That of 1868 about the Postal
Treaty and Copyright Commission--Mr. and Mrs. Trollope’s Australian
visit (1871) to their sheep-farming son--Family or personal
features and influences in the colonial novels suggested by this
journey--Trollope as colonial novelist compared with Charles Reade
and Henry Kingsley--Why the colonial novels were preceded by _The
Eustace Diamonds_--Rival South African travellers--Trollope follows
Froude to the Cape--What he thought about the country’s present and
future--How he found out Dr. Jameson and Miss Schreiner--John
Blackwood, Trollope’s particular friend among publishers--Trollope,
Blackwood’s pattern writer--_Julius Cæsar_--Anthony’s birthday
present to John--The South African book--What the critics
said--Well-timed and sells accordingly.
So far, it has been practicable to follow Trollope’s productions almost
exactly in the order in which they came from his pen. The political
novels, as has been seen, constitute a series whose successive parts are
even more closely connected than the various instalments of the
Barchester novels. Thus, _Phineas Finn_ and _Phineas Redux_ form a
single story; _The Prime Minister_ and _The Duke’s Children_ contain the
underplots or afterplots of what has gone before. The Beverley adventure
and its reflection in _Ralph the Heir_, three years afterwards (1871),
formed the biographical prelude to the little group of stories in which
_Phineas Finn_ came first. The examination of these in the preceding
chapter, once begun, had to be completed, or their unity would have been
lost. Hence, some unavoidable little interruption of strict
chronological sequence and the momentary neglect, now to be repaired, of
Trollope’s other doings in the Beverley year. The value set by the
Government on Trollope’s Post Office work was shown immediately after
he had resigned his post at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Nothing could be more
complimentary than the request that he would make a third journey to the
United States for the conclusion of a new postal treaty at
Washington.[28] That task occupied exactly three months and three weeks;
it was begun April 8th and ended July 27th. Then he brought back to
England a success more complete than, from the uncongenial variety of
the American representatives with whom he had to deal, he had at times
feared might prove possible.
The visit also had its literary usefulness. While occupied with the
Washington officials he studied the traits subsequently bodied forth in
his _American Senator_, and before he went home he made advantageous
arrangements with the publishers in New York. During the fourteen years
of life, however, which still remained for him he crossed and recrossed
the Atlantic twice more; altogether therefore he made no less than five
different appearances in the great Republic. Each of them was turned by
him to good account not more in business matters than in observing the
American-Irish developments described elaborately in _The Land
Leaguers_. The United States public and publishers also did Trollope a
particularly good turn by appreciating the political novels, less
warmly, indeed, than the Barchester books, but far more cordially than
had been done by home consumers of these products. The one work that New
York readers would not have was _The Cornhill_ reprint, _Brown, Jones
and Robinson_, pronounced, not perhaps unjustly, by the first American
critic of the day, Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie, the most stupid story ever
coming from the same pen. With that exception Trollope’s magazine
pieces suited the taste of New York better than they did that of London;
during 1860 _Harper’s_ pleased all its friends by publishing his short
stories, _The Courtship of Susan Bell_, _The O’Conors of Castle Conor_,
and _Relics of General Chassé_. These were produced here in the three
volumes entitled _Tales of All Countries_. Trollope’s style, both in his
earlier and later days, was occasionally apt to be much influenced by
his friend Charles Lever. Of the compositions just enumerated, _The
O’Conors_, a transcript of his own early Irish observations, had a
remarkable American success, perhaps because a certain adventurous
breeziness of movement as of style exactly suited a public whose passing
taste had for the moment been more or less formed, not only by Charles
Lever, but by those who had been before him, as Fenimore Cooper and
Captain Marryat. _Harper’s_ did also more for Trollope than show him as
a short story writer at his best; it introduced its readers to _The
Small House at Allington_, _Orley Farm_, as well as to several of his
less known efforts, such as _Lady Anna_.
Generally, the transatlantic verdict confirmed that of the old country
and gave the palm to the pen and ink photographs of provincial home
life. In one respect, however, America strikingly showed its
independence of English estimates by unanimously crediting the political
series from _Phineas Finn_ to _The Duke’s Children_ with a vividness of
portraiture, an experience of and an insight into the leading
personages, forces, and incidents of British public life such as
Trollope’s own countrymen had not then discovered. Why this should have
been so it is not difficult to see. In England, those who cared for the
political novel were still under the Disraelian spell when Trollope put
forth his impressions of public life as he had observed it in the
stories that opened with _Phineas Finn_ (1869), and only closed with
_The Duke’s Children_ (1880). During all those years the intellectual
fascination possessed by Disraeli, whether as writer or politician, for
the English public, so far from diminishing, had, upon the whole,
deepened. The sustained brilliancy of _Lothair_ (1868), and _Endymion_
(1881), sent readers back to _Coningsby_, _Sybil_, and _Tancred_. Of
that literary enchantment the United States knew comparatively little.
As a political novelist, Trollope was judged on his own merits, without,
as in England, any reference to the dazzling and unapproachable genius
who had preceded him. Before Disraeli, Plumer Ward had portrayed
statesmen in romances, which were generally forgotten by Englishmen,
while Bulwer-Lytton had given something of a political flavour to his
best-known novels. By the standard of Ward and Lytton, rather than, as
was the case in England, of Disraeli, the Americans judged Trollope.
They accordingly found in him an actuality and naturalness at once
instructive and refreshing; nor did they miss the verbal fireworks for
which the _Coningsby_ novels had accustomed the English reader to look.
It has already been shown how, on other subjects, Trollope stood with
the American public; before following him in his overseas movements,
some details may here be given of his practical relations with the
American publisher. From English publishers, Trollope, according to his
own estimate, received in all a little under £70,000. His American
receipts were rather more than £3000.[29] Beside his Post Office
Commission, Trollope, during his American visit of 1868, also acted as
the Foreign Office representative on the subject of International
Copyright. That, however, is a question scarcely suitable for treatment
here. As regards the primary and Postal errand, he accomplished the
purpose for which he had been sent, and obtained the terms asked by the
English Government. By the Convention which he negotiated, the postage
on a half ounce letter between England and the United States was fixed
at sixpence. With respect to the literary relations of the two
countries, Trollope brought back no equally definite result, but only
failed to do so because, in the nature of things, success was then
impossible. In the diplomacy of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Trollope essayed
nothing which he did not carry through. The literary monument of his
Egyptian journey in 1858 had been no work descriptive of the country,
but a novel, _The Bertrams_. For, unless he had found himself so far on
his way as Cairo, he would never have pilgrimaged to Jerusalem, or
collected the material in local colour for the Syrian scenes and
incidents in that novel. His official work had then been a Postal
Convention with the Egyptian authorities for our Australian and Indian
mails across the Delta. The same kind of duty he had performed so well
ten years earlier was repeated after the same fashion in 1868.
Trollope’s various transatlantic trips were the prelude to more extended
tours on that other side of the world where his postal rather than
literary labours had already made him a name. These Antipodean
experiences were, during the last eight years of his life, to give him
as a novelist something like a new lease of vigour and freshness.
Trollope’s instinctive sympathy with the temper and tendencies of his
time, whatever the movement in progress might be, had, as the reader
already knows, during his earliest youth, showed itself in the readiness
with which he came under the influence of Anglican leaders. A little
later the perennial Irish question, in its social as well as political,
its sentimental not less than its practical aspects, filled the air, and
gave both direction and colour to his initial experiment as a novelist,
_The Macdermots_ (1847). Active interest in politics was delayed till
the season of youth and enthusiasm had been outlived. But, when a little
over fifty, he could not resist the temptation to take a combatant’s
part in the battle, then at its height between the two great party
leaders of the time. Beaten at Beverley, and so debarred from delivering
himself about men and measures at St. Stephen’s, Trollope turned to
account the experiences he had gathered and the opinions he had formed,
in the _Phineas Finn_ stories.
Meanwhile, however, a new interest in the Greater Britain beyond the
seas had deeply stirred the popular imagination, and reflected itself in
the writings of his best known contemporaries. Trollope accordingly
realised that he had been wasting on party energies meant for the
Empire. Natural affection and the conscious need of securing imaginative
freshness by entire change of scene and thought were other motives
operating in the same direction. Within two or three years of recrossing
the Atlantic homewards, Trollope planned a yet more extensive tour with
the set purpose of bringing back from the Antipodes materials, not only
for history, but for fiction. The earliest writer of Trollope’s day to
feel and express the transoceanic inspiration of the new epoch was
Bulwer-Lytton, some eight years before he became Colonial Secretary in
the Derby Government. The example of _The Caxtons_ soon proved
contagious. In 1856 Trollope’s exact contemporary, Charles Reade,
published _It’s Never too Late to Mend_, whose dramatised form, in 1866,
not only revived the original story’s interest, but infused fresh force
into the agitation against transporting English criminals to
Australasian colonies. In 1859 Henry Kingsley suffused his spirited
romances, _Geoffrey Hamlyn_ and _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ with the
local colour he had collected during a short residence under the
Southern Cross; thus as a colonial novelist he differed from Reade, and
resembled Trollope,[30] in describing, from personal knowledge, the
scenes and incidents whose word-pictures bear in every detail the stamp
of fidelity to life. The original and chief motive of Mr. and Mrs.
Anthony Trollope’s expedition, in the May of 1871, to the other side of
the world, was that they might see once more a son then sheep-farming in
the Australian Bush. Trollope himself would have felt uncomfortable if
he had embarked without feeling that, while making holiday in a far
country, he was also collecting impressions for at least one new book.
Before actually setting sail, therefore, he had contracted with Chapman
and Hall for the Australian volumes published in 1873, and had also
found a newspaper opening for certain travel letters, to be incorporated
afterwards in the book. This, on coming out in 1873, was pronounced, by
_The Times_, “the most agreeable, just, and acute work ever written on
the subject.” On the other hand, _The Athenæum_ and _The Saturday
Review_ dwelt on the length, the diffuseness, and the want of method of
the ponderous volumes, “as dull as they are big.” Perplexity of
arrangement, and occasional obscurity of diction, were other charges
made by these critics against the work. Good taste in dealing with all
personal matters was the chief merit compensating for decline in
literary power, which even these censors allowed. The shrewdness of
insight with which _The Times_ credited Trollope was praise abundantly
justified by events. Indeed Trollope’s one mistake in judgment was his
prophecy about the annexation of Tasmania by Victoria. Any movement of
this kind he might, with a little more carefulness of enquiry and
accuracy of observation, have convinced himself was purely local in its
origin, never, in its growth, exceeded the narrowest limits, and was
repudiated, even in his day, by responsible Tasmanian as well as
Victorian statesmen. It never consequently entered into the regions of
practical politics.
His faith in the certainty of Australasian federation rested on much
stronger ground. Its fulfilment he did not live to witness. That took
place sixteen years after his death when, in the March of 1898, the
Australian Commonwealth bill became law. The book, written in his cabin
during the homeward voyage, succeeded beyond the author’s or publisher’s
expectations. This was due, first, to its happily-timed appearance;
secondly, to the convenient compass within which it brought together the
best that had been said by other writers, and all, indeed, which the
average reader could wish to know about the history, the politics, the
society, the resemblances to or differences from the Mother Country
noticed by Trollope during his eighteen months’ stay in Melbourne, New
South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, and New Zealand. The book
contained few of the carefully prepared literary effects investing the
account of the West Indies with a thoroughly popular charm. But,
whenever in his Australasian volumes Trollope dealt with what had struck
him as really noteworthy, he showed himself once more nearly at his
best; especially in his comparison between sheep-farming and
ostrich-farming as careers, in his few mining scenes, and, above all, in
his most graphic and informing account of the road system, which he had
minutely studied. The first novel resulting from the Australian jaunt
had in it many more touches of personal and domestic autobiography than
the travel volumes. Like _Phineas Redux_, it first came out in _The
Graphic_, and showed the intellectual benefit received by the novelist
from his wanderings under the Southern Cross.
_Harry Heathcote of Gangoill_ (1874), marked by no signs of imaginative
exhaustion, as well as written throughout in the old picturesque
fashion, is based on the industrial fortunes of Trollope’s Australian
son, chequered by climatic caprices and ill-minded neighbours, but in
spite of all this, by unflagging perseverance, steadily advancing. Most
of the Trollopian qualities, the imperious prejudices, and the
autocratic independence, combined with more amiable features appear in
the hero. He had been one of the original settlers, who acquired their
land by the simple process of “claiming” it. After he had made a good
start with his work a fresh Government scheme allowed newcomers to buy
whatever land they liked, even though it were already bespoke by the
earlier settlers. The sole condition of purchase was that the land thus
bought must exceed a certain minimum value. Of course the right of
compulsory purchase given to the “free selectors,” as they were called,
made them at loggerheads with such as had already established themselves
before they came.
Heathcote naturally saw in his nearest neighbour, a free selector, Giles
Medlicot, a man fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, and of
affections dark as Erebus.[31] Soon there comes a great and dangerous
drought. The sheep farmers are on the watch day and night against one of
those prairie fires that would, in a few minutes, destroy all their
flocks’ food. Heathcote, ready to think all evil of the detested
interloper, without any reason suspects the free selector, Medlicot, of
a design to burn his farm and stock. Of course he is wrong; and no
flames, by whomsoever kindled, burst out on his property, at least for
the present. Eventually, however, there comes on him the fiery foe, more
dreaded by the pastoral squatter than pestilence or famine. Then the
gratuitously accused Medlicot proves Heathcote’s true friend; and by his
own courage and skill keeps the outbreak within narrower limits than
Heathcote had ever hoped. A large portion of the farm buildings and
plant is thus saved. The story ends with the reconciliation of the two
men so long and irrationally kept apart by mutual mistrust. Medlicot’s
marriage to Heathcote’s sister-in-law is the seal and fruit of a new
friendship.
The plot is too slight and the narrative too short to afford room for
much character creation. To those who follow, as is being done in these
pages, Trollope’s industrial course, the book has an interest quite
independent of its actual contents. It was written by Trollope in his
sixtieth year. Of the other colonial novelists already mentioned,
Charles Reade had not long turned forty when he published _It’s Never
Too Late To Mend_, and Henry Kingsley was under thirty at the time of
writing _Geoffrey Hamlyn_. This is the book whose glowing wealth of
local colour, scenic word-painting, and keen appreciation of Antipodean
character won for it the praise of an Australian epic. Kingsley’s and
Reade’s romances of life on the other side of the world were followed in
1866 by Hugh Nisbet’s Australian stories. These three writers present a
spirited and complete panorama of colonial existence, character, and
manner. All wrote in the very prime of their powers, but none enlivened
his subjects with a stronger glow of fancy or handled them with more
sureness and strength than, at the age of three-score, was shown by
Trollope in describing the fight with the flames in his _Harry Heathcote
of Gangoil_. This novel, like its colonial successor five years later,
_John Caldigate_, shows, better than could be done by pages of
biographical detail, that, after more than half a century of exacting
and incessant work, its author’s power of accurately observing and
mastering in their full significance new facts or ideas remained
practically unimpaired.
The home and the life to which Trollope returned in England during
December, 1872, were not the same as he had left behind him when
embarking a year and a half earlier on the _Great Britain_ for his
colonial voyage. The pleasant house at Waltham Cross, with its roomy and
always well-filled stables, its many hospitalities and its comparative
nearness to the meets of the Essex Hounds, was exchanged for the abode
in Montagu Square. Here Trollope passed the later portion of his London
life. Here too, on settling himself, he began to live with the
personages of the Australian goldfields story that was to appear in
1879. Long before then, however, he had become sufficiently intimate
with other creations of his fancy to put them into print. An old friend,
Lizzie, (Lady Eustace), received his first attention; in 1873 came _The
Eustace Diamonds_. This novel, like _The Belton Estate_, had first been
written for _The Fortnightly Review_. Its leading figure casually
reappears in later works, especially in _The Prime Minister_, where
Ferdinand Lopez shows at once his scoundrelism and ignorance of the
world in making certain absurd proposals to an attractive, vivacious,
but particularly wide-awake lady. What Lizzie Eustace is in _The Prime
Minister_, she had shown herself before in _The Eustace Diamonds_.
This rich, personable, and clever heroine labours under one weakness:
she can never speak the truth. As Lizzie Greystock, she made a brilliant
marriage with an elderly and opulent baronet. She had not passed her
first youth when she was left a widow more than comfortably provided
for. Amongst her husband’s personal estate is a magnificent diamond
necklace worth £20,000, an heirloom which, at his express wish, the lady
used to wear. To this precious ornament the dead baronet’s nearest
relations disputed her claim, on the ground that as a family possession
it was not his to give. “But,” replied her ladyship, “he gave it to me
for my very own, telling me that my appearance with it would be the best
of all tributes to his memory.” Lady Eustace no more expected this
account of the matter to be believed than she believed it herself. To
one thing, however, she had made up her mind: no one should take the
costly trinket out of her hands. Consequently wherever she goes it
accompanies her.
During one journey she believes she has lost it and gives the alarm.
Soon, however, she recovers her treasure, but does not impart the fact
to the police, whom she has caused to raise a hue and cry. One day the
necklace is really stolen, and the constables, having obtained a clue,
succeed in placing themselves on its track. Restoration is followed by
exposure; Lizzie Eustace’s marriage connections persevere with their
purpose of regaining for themselves the late baronet’s alleged gift to
his wife. Lady Eustace’s besetting weaknesses do not prevent her good
looks and captivating manners from attracting suitors for her hand.
Amongst these are Frank Greystock, one of Trollope’s most conventional
and least interesting specimens of gilded youth; Lord Fawn, a titled
booby, afterwards promoted to a place among the lay figures in the
parliamentary sketches; and another sprig of nobility, Lord George de
Bruce Carruthers, of doubtful reputation and of a bold, bad, buccaneer
appearance. Each of these, however, when it comes to the point, fights
off; Lizzie Eustace, to her chagrin, is left without one of the
trousered sex in tow. At this extremity, there appears on the scene an
ecclesiastical candidate for what she is pleased to call her heart. This
white-chokered adventurer is the Rev. Joseph Emilius, partly Jew, partly
Pole, and wholly scamp, being, in fact, the popular preacher who in
_Phineas Redux_ commits the murder of Mr. Bonteen, on suspicion of which
Phineas is arrested. But by that time Emilius, having served his turn,
has ceased to be Lady Eustace’s second husband in anything but name.
Unlike Gladstone, Disraeli did not consume much contemporary fiction,
parrying any questions on the subject with, “when I want to read a
novel, I write one.” Nor, except to Matthew Arnold, did he often talk to
authors about their works. But soon after the appearance of _The Eustace
Diamonds_, meeting Trollope at Lord Stanhope’s dinner-table, the great
man said to our novelist, “I have long known, Mr. Trollope, your
churchmen and churchwomen; may I congratulate you on the same happy
lightness of touch in the portrait of your new adventuress?” By 1879,
some five years after _Harry Heathcote of Gangoil_, there had been
completed the process of incubation, resulting in the second of the two
colonial stories, _John Caldigate_.
That novel, chiefly written during the voyage to South Africa,
presently to be mentioned, had for its scene the Australian
gold-diggings. We have long since seen how, during his Harrow days,
Anthony Trollope, as a day boy, lived with his father at Julians. Of
that there is some reminiscence in the intercourse under the old family
roof between the actual owner of the Cambridgeshire estate called
Folking and his heir. The two have hot words; the quarrel ends in John’s
selling the right of entail to his father for a lump sum in hard cash.
With this he pays his debts. Together with an old college friend, Dick
Shand, he sets off for the Australian goldfields.
The girl he loves has been left behind him, but on his way out he is
ensnared by Mrs. Smith, a mysterious lady with a past, fascinating by
her manner rather than her beauty, and now provided by her relatives
with a passage out that she may not get into mischief nearer home. Some
time after their arrival at the diggings, Dick Shand, whose weakness has
always been drink, breaks out and disappears, leaving no trace behind.
Caldigate perseveres, finds first one nugget, then another. At this rate
he by and by comes back a rich man. The first thing done by the
masterful and newly-fledged young Crœsus is to seek and obtain
reconciliation with his equally masterful father. Next, having borne
down her mother’s fierce opposition, he marries his boyhood’s flame,
Hester Bolton, the daughter of his father’s banker.
The young couple’s wedded happiness is interrupted by the appearance of
Mrs. Smith, together with John Caldigate’s old goldfield pals, Tom
Crinkett and Mick Maggott. These have bought Caldigate’s claim for a
large sum, only to find the gold suddenly give out. Hence their demand
for half the purchase-money’s (£20,000) return, under threat of a charge
of bigamy for having married Hester while an earlier wife, Mrs. Smith,
was yet alive. Thoroughly scared, Caldigate places his affairs in a
solicitor’s hands, but commits the fatal mistake of paying as hush-money
the £20,000 demanded by the conspirators. This, of course, tells heavily
against him at the trial, and he has to face other evidence, at least as
damning. The charge of bigamy, on which the trial takes place, is
supported by an envelope addressed in John Caldigate’s writing to Mrs.
John Caldigate. As to this, Caldigate admits having once written the
words in jest, but denies having sent the envelope, which, it must be
added, bears the Post Office stamp. In the face of such evidence the
jury could do nothing but convict. After the verdict, Hester finds
herself a wife without a husband; her refusal to return home is followed
by her capture, and forcible detention beneath the parental roof. But
now there begins a sequence of events, all combining to establish John
Caldigate’s innocence and to promise liberation from prison.
In manipulating the official details that are to make John Caldigate a
free man, Trollope shows the same painstaking ingenuity as he had done
during his term of Irish duty in bringing to light the frauds of the
Connemara postmaster. An amusingly acute Post Office clerk proves the
stamp on the envelope to have been manufactured after the date recorded
in the stamp. It was, therefore, a clear case of fake. Next, Dick Shand
surprises everyone by coming home to depose on oath that the alleged
marriage could not by any possibility have taken place at the time
alleged. Finally, the conspirators quarrel over their respective shares
in the £20,000, whose payment so disastrously incriminated Caldigate.
One of the gang turns Queen’s evidence; doing so, he secures the release
of the prisoner, who returns to his faithful wife.
It is as unpleasant as it is a powerful story; at not a few points equal
in graphic vigour and in harrowing multiplicity of incident to the
strong but revoltingly painful descriptions which mark another of
Charles Reade’s novels of colonial as well as maritime adventure, _Hard
Cash_. The pictures of goldfield life are suggestive enough as far as
they go, but would certainly have been better had not Trollope felt
himself under the necessity of having the book finished on his arrival
at Cape Town.
Noticeable for the rapidity of its movement, as well as the freshness of
its description, this second and last colonial novel contains a study
of character, executed with as much power and care as is to be found in
any of the later stories. Mrs. Bolton, Hester’s mother, is an
object-lesson of evangelicalism, seen, not in the actual teaching, but
in its results. Bromley, the Vicar of Folking, Caldigate’s native place,
is a typical easy-going clergyman, a favourite with the squire, and, as
we are left to conclude, with all his right-thinking parishioners. Mrs.
Bolton, unfortunately, has taken her theology from those less genial,
and, indeed, Calvinistic teachers, at whom, though no fresh
representative of the class is mentioned by name, Trollope deals a
farewell blow. Mrs. Bolton, a strong-minded woman, is not in herself
bad-hearted. But for the downright inhumanity of her religious
principles, she would have been a good and wise parent instead of a
bitter Low Churchwoman. It is of course a painful, but an effective
picture, because brought out under its author’s pervading and deep
conviction in these matters. The increasing bitterness of Trollope’s
anti-evangelical temper was not merely an inheritance of the spirit of
his mother’s _Vicar of Wrexhill_, or his early association with F. W.
Faber and other Oxford Anglicans already mentioned; it came also from
his own disappointing experience of what he considered evangelicalism’s
effects on the happiness and character of those he loved. Not later than
July 21, 1877, had been the date fixed by the author for sending in the
complete manuscript. On that day he had no sooner landed in South Africa
than he dropped his packet into the Cape Town Post Office; for at least
half the novel was written during Trollope’s voyage to South Africa.
“A poor, niggery, yellow-faced, half-bred sort of place, with an ugly
Dutch flavour about it,” was the visitor’s earliest impression of the
region in which he had just set foot. It improved a little on
acquaintance; but never interested or impressed him in the same way as
Australia. He found it, however, equally favourable to pedestrianism and
penmanship. “I am,” he said in one of his home letters, “on my legs
every day among the hills for four hours, and every day, too, I do my
four hours writing about what I have seen and heard, after the fashion
of our friend Froude.[32] I then sleep eight hours without stirring. The
other eight hours are divided between reading and eating, with
preponderance to the latter.” “The one person,” wrote Trollope to a
Scotch friend in 1878, “who has most struck me here, is a certain young
compatriot of yours, Leander Starr Jameson, who has just started in
medical practice at Kimberley, and in whom I see qualities that will go
to the making of events in this country.” When free from the influence
of personal feeling, Trollope was seldom far out in his estimates of
character. This acute presage concerning the then little known future
leader of the famous raid was first confided, if I mistake not, to John
Blackwood, the sole recipient of many of Trollope’s best sayings, and
the friend whom he valued more highly than he did any other member of
his own generation. After a really touching and unique fashion,
Trollope, nine years earlier, had shown his attachment to the famous
Scotch publisher; for, in 1870, he had contributed _Cæsar_ to the
Ancient Classics series, the copyright being a free present to “my old
friend John Blackwood.”
On the other hand, Blackwood found in Trollope none of the obstinacy
about which he had heard from others, but a most pleasant and docile
readiness to profit in his work by a publisher’s hints. In his quite
affectionate acknowledgment of the _Cæsar_, he said, “I value it the
more because I have looked this gift-horse in the mouth.” “Your new
classical venture,” said Blackwood to Trollope, “was in a line so
different from anything else you had done, that I scanned it closely; I
can, therefore, speak of its merits.”
Long before this, indeed, Trollope had been cited by Blackwood as a
model contributor. Charles Reade resented some of Blackwood’s proposed
emendations, especially in the case of some interminably diffuse
love-making scenes or conversations. “I have,” mildly rejoined the
publisher, “but ventured on submitting to you considerations, which
other authors of great experience in such feminine matters, for
instance, Trollope, willingly received.” Relations between the two
novelists were already a little strained because of Trollope’s complaint
that Reade had taken the notion of the play _The Wandering Heir_ from
his own story _Ralph the Heir_. Blackwood’s compliments to Trollope must
have rankled in Reade’s heart; for about this time Reade alluded to
Trollope as a literary knobstick, a publisher’s rat, and other pleasant
terms including, I think, his favourite reproach of Homunculus. But
peace-making friends intervened, and the matter settled itself almost as
amicably as at Bob Sawyer’s supper table in Lant Street borough.
The volumes on South Africa, begun the very day _John Caldigate_ left
Cape Town for Edinburgh, were issued by Chapman and Hall. The subject
had at least for some time been full of topical interest. In the May of
1875 the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, had proposed to Sir Henry
Berkeley, the Cape Town Governor, to confederate the three British
colonies, Cape Town, Natal, Griqua Land West, and the two Dutch
republics, The Orange River Free State, and The Transvaal Republic. J.
A. Froude, the historian, then travelling for his health’s sake after
his wife’s death, had, at the Minister’s wish, surveyed the
possibilities of the federation on the spot. Local jealousies prevented
the scheme from being carried through, or rather reduced a great
imperial project to a mere enabling measure in the South African Act of
August 1877. During 1874 the popular concern for South African affairs
culminated in the Langalibalele rising and the shortly following Zulu
War with Cetewayo. Then came Sir Theophilus Shepstone’s annexation of
The Orange River Free State diamond-fields, and Sir Bartle Frere’s Cape
Governorship and South African High Commissionership followed in 1877.
No two nineteenth century men of letters were personally more unlike
each other than James Anthony Froude and Anthony Trollope. “Old
Trollope, after banging about the world so long, now treading in my
footsteps, and, like an intellectual bluebottle, buzzing about at Cape
Town” was the historian’s characteristic comment, made in his softest
and silkiest tones on the novelist’s voyage to the country, visited by
himself some seven years earlier. Trollope secured his object by getting
out his South African book some two years before Froude, in 1880, had
published a line on the subject. In the Kimberley district, Trollope, we
have already seen, had discovered the historic “Dr. Jim.” He next made
the acquaintance and sounded the praises of the clever young lady Miss
Olive Schreiner, author of _The Story of an African Farm_, published on
Trollope’s instance by Chapman and Hall.
In 1878, however, no really popular work about the southern parts of the
dark continent had appeared before Trollope’s volumes. These drew the
Cape provinces, Natal, The Transvaal, and the diamond fields in The
Orange River Free State exactly as at the time they were, and liberally
relieved their purely historical or descriptive contents with touches
often as instructive as they were humorous, revealing scenery and
character by the flashlight of a representative anecdote or well-turned
phrase. The Transvaal annexation, accomplished before his visit, is
called, in a rather Carlylean phrase, one of the “highest-handed acts in
history”: “It was,” said Trollope, “a typical instance of the beneficent
injustice of the British.” For the rest, diamond-fields and goldmines
alike struck him as a “meretricious means of attracting population to
the country.” The Boer farmers are very fine fellows of their kind, most
unhandsomely treated by all English writers except himself. As for the
proposed withdrawal from The Transvaal, it is an idea only worthy of a
pusillanimous dunderhead. The reception given to the South African book
by the critics and public markedly indicated a recovery of the
popularity which a year or two earlier had seemed for the moment on the
wane. _The Times_ declared it had not a page uninstructive or dull. _The
Athenæum_ found that, coming in the nick of time, it admirably supplied
a public want. “Full of freshness and individuality in all its
presentations, social and political,” said _The Academy_. “Always
judicious, often very entertaining, and only from sometimes excessive
zeal a trifle diffuse,” chimed in _The Spectator_.
More satisfactory and important to Trollope than the book’s mere success
was the attention it secured from colonial readers, both at home and
abroad, more particularly with the South African department of the
Colonial Office in Whitehall. Lord Carnarvon was then responsible for
the government of Greater Britain. Before his retirement from the
Beaconsfield administration on the advance of the British fleet to
Constantinople early in 1878, he had read or heard enough of the work to
find its views of South African federation of more value to a
responsible statesman than the details, bearing on that subject, already
brought back to him by Froude from the Cape. This fact soon developed
into intimacy what had hitherto been only a casual acquaintance. There
then lived, at the age of seventy-six, the third Earl Grey; he had been
the singularly able and unsympathetic Colonial Minister in the Russell
administration of 1846. Trollope and Lord Carnarvon chanced, one day, to
come out together from a room in the Athenæum where Lord Grey was. “His
mistake,” said Trollope, referring to Russell’s ex-Colonial Secretary,
“always seemed to be his domination by the idea of its being possible to
give representative institutions and to stop short of responsible
government, after the English fashion under Elizabeth and the Stuarts.”
It was a casual remark, but associated itself with an episode in
Trollope’s life about which something must be said in the next chapter.