IN 1870 Trollope left Waltham Cross; in May 1871 he, without his wife, visited his son, the farmer, in Australia; in 1872 he settled definitely in London at 39 Montagu Square.
From this date (or possibly from the earlier year 1870) begins Trollope’s decline and fall; no very dramatic or exceptional decline, only that slow descent through old age and death accompanied with the inevitable fading of his popularity as a writer.
Three misfortunes had occurred to Trollope in 1868 and 1869 — the unhappy editorship of St. Paul’s Magazine, the Beverley election in the autumn of 1868, and an unlucky change in publishers. As editor of St. Paul’s he was not a success, because he was for ever moving in two opposite directions, first away from the intellectuals toward his magazine public, then away from his magazine public toward the intellectuals. He wrote to Austin Dobson, examining his poetry line by line, emphasising always that it should be absolutely simple and clear for his public, insisting, too (that most fatal for literature of all possible appeals), “that it should give no offence”. “I will use both your poems on the condition that you ease a prejudice on my part by expunging the joke about Gibbon’s Decline and Fall!” Not thus are true poets persuaded to give their best.
The Beverley election also was ill-advised. He lost over it two thousand pounds and gained nothing except — and this was in fact a very real gain — the splendid election chapters in Ralph the Heir.
With regard to his novels he had, ever since 1860, achieved one success after another. For Phineas Finn and for He Knew He was Right he received the highest prices he had yet been offered. For Phineas, £3200, and for He Knew He was Right, £3200. These sums were contracted for in 1868.
Mr. Michael Sadleir cites a memory of that delightful critic, Thomas Seccombe, which proves how widely at this time he was known. Seccombe recorded how “an intellectual clown at Hengler’s made a sort of rigmarole of patter out of the titles of Trollope’s books, and the product was received by salvos of cheers”. Is there a single novelist alive in England to-day whose works could be enumerated at a music hall and received with a “salvo of cheers”? Other times, other manners!
But the prices that he received for Phineas and He Knew He was Right were the top ones of his career. These two books did not earn their money, and that dangerous moment in any writer’s financial career was reached when it was generally known that he had been overpaid. Mr. Sadleir’s account of this crisis is admirably put:
The fact had more than merely a technical publishing significance. For the first time Trollope had obviously been paid beyond his value—” obviously” because the doings of a best seller are never very secret, and the book trade and the craft of authorship had then, as now, a strange intuitive sense of the reality or otherwise of current values. The knowledge percolated through publishers’ offices and from desk to editorial desk that the two latest Trollope novels had not earned their keep. Automatically and in response to this disquieting rumour his estimated value as a book or serial proposition checked. There was no catastrophic fall; but the rise had stopped, the apex had been passed. For a while the actual reduction in payments was slight. His contracts show hat for the six years from 1870 to 1876 his prices were, though with some difficulty, stabilised at a point well below the rate paid by George Smith or Virtue, but not so very far below that paid by Chapman and Hall in 1861 for Orley Farm and in 1864 for Can You Forgive Her? He was in the first stage of a decline. The second stage began in 1876, after which date the market sagged dangerously. From then to the end of his life there was rapid decadence.
Moreover, Trollope’s whole association with Virtue, the publisher, was a misfortune. Virtue, before he started St. Paul’s, had to no real extent been a book publisher and was seriously ignorant of the difficulties and risks of that business. He also took as partner when he put Trollope into St. Paul’s a man as ignorant as himself.
So the Virtue affairs crashed, there was a general sale, and Trollope, to quote from Mr. Sadleir once more, found himself involved (through sale of copyrights) with Strahan and with Strahan’s connections, and later with Isbister. Implication with these firms was bad for his repute. Their imprints lowered his status, and the result of this loss of status were soon manifest. He could not regain his old place in the esteem of such a man as Smith; he was as a serious novelist slightly blown upon.
Wherefore he became primarily a writer of novels for serials, of novels whose subsequent book issue was less important than their magazine appearances. And this, in an author of Trollope’s capacity and achievement, is a sure mark of decadence. The numerous stories published during the last period carry many and varied imprints — Hurst and Blackett, Sampson Low, Macmillan, Tinsley, Strahan, Isbister, Chatto and Windus.
Few of these represent direct contracts between author and publisher. They resulted from the sub-sale to a book publisher, by a magazine proprietor who had bought the copyright, of the book rights in a story purchased primarily for serialisation. With one or two exceptions, only those novels of the late period are genuine novel-ventures by a book publisher which bear the imprint of Chapman and Hall or of Blackwood. In such cases the contracts were made directly with Trollope and reflected the publishers’ belief that the novel as a book was worth the purchase; the rest are mainly sales at second hand arranged and carried through by magazine proprietors to swell the profits of their magazines.
It is of the first importance that anyone who would understand the conditions of Trollope’s later years should realise this serious change in his book status. It would, however, give an entirely wrong impression to suggest that these eight years at 39 Montagu Square were not happy ones. During them he was as bustling and energetic as ever. In the winters of 1873-75 he hunted with all his old zeal, he travelled every summer on the Continent, in 1875 he went for a second time to Australia, in 1877 he was in South Africa, in 1878 he went to Iceland.
In Mr. Sadleir’s account of these years there is a charming detail of his London life:
His orphan niece, Florence Bland, who had come to live at Waltham Cross in 1863 as quite a little girl, was very much the daughter of the house at Montagu Square, and acted also as a faithful and essential secretary. She helped to arrange the now numerous books in their new home, ticketing each one with a shelf letter and its number on that shelf, fixing the little blue-paper book plate of her uncle’s crest.
Still more important was her actual secretarial work. Trollope began to suffer at intervals from writer’s cramp, and Florence Bland would sit and write to his dictation. Of the later novels several were largely written by her hand. During dictation she might not speak a single word, offer a single suggestion One day he tore up a whole chapter and threw it into the waste-paper basket, because she ventured on an emendation. On such outbreaks family jokes were gaily built. Florence Bland would be asked at breakfast if Trollope ever took a stick to her; she would smile, and he would laugh aloud and bang the table and, with his black eyes bright behind his spectacles, declare that some such punishment was sadly overdue.
His London life during these years was very regular:
At Montagu Square, as at Waltham Cross, Trollope was early at his desk. Most of the day’s writing was over by eleven o’clock. Then he would ride out or drive to attend to such committee work as might arise from the numerous undertakings in which he was interested. Whist at the Garrick was a daily ceremony between tea and dinner. At night he dined abroad or entertained his many friends at home.
But in 1880 came the change. He left London and settled at Harting, near Petersfield. He was bothered with asthma. Also he was weary. He wrote to George Eliot at the beginning of 1879:
When I am written to I answer like a man at an interval of a week or so. But in truth I am growing so old that, although I still do my daily work, I am forced to put off the lighter tasks from day to day. I do not feel like that in the cheery morning; but when I have been cudgelling my overwrought brain for some three or four hours in quest of words, then I fade down and begin to think it will be nice to go to the club and have tea and play whist!
Also now he had the sense that must grow upon every ageing author whose career stretches far behind him of the overcrowded stage, the multitude of aspiring, venturing aspirants, the hopeless futures of so many of them. About this time he wrote from Montagu Square to a friend who had asked his advice concerning a “commencing” poet:
It is so hard to answer without seeming both overbearing and unfriendly. The poets of the day are legion. The manuscripts which lie in the hands of publishers and editors of magazines are tens of thousands.
I do not say a word against the Miltonic, Homeric, Virgilian, Petrarchan merits of the poet — or poetess; nor can I, as of course I have not seen a line. But as he writes of his friend all the other thousands write of theirs. In the middle of all this, who is to hold out a helping hand?
Now and again from amidst the million, someone, selected by some competitive examination, comes up, and, lo, a poet is there. This poet has as good a chance as anyone else. But the struggler has to know that he or she must struggle amongst 10,000, and must look to 9999 chances of absolute failure.
In the teeth of this what hope can you hold out or what advice can one give? No doubt great numbers of poems find their way up to all the magazines, and all the papers, and many of the Reviews. Now and again one makes its way in, and then — with a very much rarer now and again — one comes forth at last as a name recognised and well known!
But the competitor must go through the all but hopeless struggle, and must send his poem up to the Editors — or to some Editor, not much matter what.
There is despondency here and a sense that the literary life, seen from its midst in London, was growing too tangled and tumultuous for him. At first the change to Harting cheered him.
He described it in a letter to Alfred Austin:
Yes, we have changed our mode of life altogether. We have got a little cottage here, just big enough (or nearly so) to hold my books, with five acres and a cow and a dog and a cock and a hen. I have got seventeen years’ lease and therefore I hope to lay my bones here. Nevertheless, I am as busy as would be one thirty years younger, in cutting out dead boughs, and putting up a paling here and a little gate there. We go to church and mean to be very good, and have maids to wait on us. The reason for all this I will explain when I see you, although, as far as I see at present, there is no good reason other than that we were tired of London.
But by 1882 there was increasing ill-health. The Phoenix Park murders in May of that year sent him to Ireland and started him on a novel, The Land Leaguers, which he did not live to finish.
In August, in very hot weather, he travelled to Ireland again and did himself no good.
On the evening of November 3, sitting with some friends after dinner in Garland’s Hotel, reading Anstey’s Vice Versa, which had just then appeared, he had a stroke.
Five weeks later, as has already been stated, on December 6, he died.
Before discussing the novels of the later years mention of the travels makes this a fitting moment in which to speak of the books by Trollope that were not fiction.
He published works of travel on North America, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and privately published a lively and amusing little book, How the “Mastiffs” went to Iceland. He also edited the Commentaries of Caesar, published Lives of Cicero and Palmerston, and certain volumes of sketches — Hunting Sketches, Travelling Sketches, Clergymen of the Church of England, and only within the last year there has appeared a volume of sketches on London Tradesmen. In addition to these there is the Autobiography, volumes of the short stories — Tales of all Countries (two series), Lotta Schmidt, An Editor’s Tales, Frau Frohmann — might also be added to this list, as many of the items in them are sketches rather than tales.
It is the merest truth to say that most of these volumes are now quite dead and no resurrection for them is to be expected.
Of the books of travel the work on South Africa is still a lively and amusing narrative. It is apparently more than that, for so great a South African authority as Sarah Gertrude Millin has this to say of it at the beginning of her book, The South Africans:
When Anthony Trollope came to South Africa in the year 1877, he went through it — its provinces and its problems — with his characteristic swift and imperturbable thoroughness. He dined with governors, slept in Boer farm houses, inspected mission schools, chatted with Kaffirs, with Hottentots, with poor whites, with Dutchmen, with Englishmen. He bought a cart and a team of horses and travelled across land as yet untracked by railways. He entered a Transvaal recently annexed by Sir Theophilus Shepstone, his eight Civil Servants and twenty-five policemen. He chronicled, as he went on his way, a new revolt by Kreli and his Galekas.
He realised the importance of the diamond fields, but barely foresaw the consequences of the gold fields. He stood, that is, at the very point in history when the old Africa ended and the new Africa began. He looked at what was shown him and listened to what was told him and said: “I shall write my book and not yours.” He built up, as day by day he discharged on paper his clear and detailed impressions, as sane and wise a book on South Africa as has ever been written, a book which, despite some mistakes, has still for our own time its meaning.
These words deserve quotation in full partly because they would please so greatly the man about whom they were written and partly because they give so charming a picture of his vigour, industry, honesty, and bustling vitality.
“I shall write my book and not yours.” We can hear him saying it not only of this book but of all the others, and most especially of the Autobiography. The other travel books are frankly failures. His American book is interesting in many ways but too hastily written, and in the Australian and West Indies volumes he seems to have fallen between two stools; in the effort to record impressions that should have lasting value he has lost the vivacity and picturesqueness of the momentary passing traveller.
That is not to say that good things are not to be found — there are good things in every work published under Trollope’s name, even in Lady Anna and Marion Fay, but in their final impression these books are dead.
The Commentaries of Caesar was an odd attempt for him to make, and it was not a success, but it has the unusual charm clinging to it that he gave the proceeds from it as a present to his publisher. How often, before or since, has such a gift been made? We know, alas, of no other instance.
Generosity was not in this case happily rewarded. Blackwood was grateful; for the rest there were sneers or silence, and in one case his gift to a friend was acknowledged in these unkind words: “Thanks for your comic Caesar.”
The Lives of Cicero and of Palmerston were also unsuccessful. Trollope in both cases was adventuring into a country where he was not, and could not possibly be, king. He had not the gifts necessary for such tasks, as he himself very honestly recognised. The Sketches, whether of Hunting or Travelling or Clerics, are good journalistic sketches and are still readable. The Hunting volume is the best of them, but there is nothing here that compares with the splendid hunting to be found in Framley Parsonage or Phineas Redux or Ayala’s Angel, or The Eustace Diamonds. In the same way the Clergymen of the Church of England are poor lifeless dummies compared with Mr. Harding, Archdeacon Grantley, and Mr. Crawley.
With the exception of the immortal Autobiography, none of these non-fiction volumes deserve extended comment save, possibly, the Thackeray.
This too was a failure, but it merits, nevertheless, attention from any lover of Trollope. It had the misfortune, on its publication, to irritate seriously Thackeray’s family, and one sees, on re-reading it, why it should do so. Trollope, in writing about his adored friend, had both his sentiment and his honesty to wrestle with. There was the additional difficulty that Thackeray had made it known that he wished no life to be written of him.
Trollope loved his friend so deeply that one can feel the throb of his affection in every page of this book, but at the same time he would tell no lies, but would write what seemed to him to be the truth. He knew Thackeray only in his later years, with the result that he leaves a rather unfortunate portrait of a man bowed down with pain and sickness and loneliness, someone a little acid from melancholy although loyal and charming to his close friends. Trollope, too, criticises his friend on many grounds, and das but grudging tribute to pay him as a lecturer and editor.
Moreover, Trollope, as he shows in the Autobiography, was no aesthetic critic of letters. He knew what he liked and what he did not like and was not afraid to speak out, but his reasons were merely personal and moral.
Of his simple, honest moral code there is a great deal in these Thackeray pages, and while it reveals to us much that is interesting about Trollope the man, it tells us nothing at all about Thackeray the artist. Nevertheless, for anyone who cares for Trollope the man this book is revealing and deserves reading.
The novels of this last period of Trollope’s life have an interest quite apart from their own literary merit. The Way We Live Now, Mr. Scarborough’s Family, Dr. Worth’s School, Cousin Henry, An Eye for an Eye, The Land Leaguers, and Kept in the Dark occupy a place of their own, have a value of their own that is distinctive and unique, and their position in the range of Trollope’s work, their strange “apartness” from the character of the novels by which he is best known, the evidence that they offer of possibilities in him never sufficiently extended (signs of this have already been apparent in The Eustace Diamonds, He Knew He was Rights and The Bertrams), gives them an aesthetic importance as yet, I think, recognised by no critic of his work.
But first there is one novel of this later period, free entirely from the dark and gloomy tone of these others, that is possibly the most unjustly neglected of all the Trollope novels — I mean Ayala’s Angel.
There is not, I believe, anywhere extant a single extended criticism of this delightful book. It has for long been out of print and none of the recent excavators who have succeeded in liberating far less worthy novels like Castle Richmond and Miss Mackenzie have apparently given it a thought.
And yet it is one of the most charming of all the long list. It is the lightest and airiest of them all, it has a gaiety and happiness and playfulness that Trollope, gay and happy though he often was, never exceeded. It was published little more than a year before his death; it is among those novels that the pundits have dismissed with a rather scornful pity; it is an old man’s work, and yet what vigour of scene and creation, what vitality of action and dialogue it contains!
It is of course too long and its latter half is, like the latter half of too many of Trollope’s novels, all easily foreseen and, as a procession of events, disconnected, but the easy gaiety of it carries it; Trollope’s hand does not tire. How excellent, too, the original scheme of the two sisters, orphans and penniless, allotted one to a rich relation, the other to a poor one, the pattern changing as the heroines move from world to world. In the development of this he is a little lazy, as he is often tempted to be — he could, we feel, make more in actual plot complication of the variety that his idea offers him — but good though the original idea is, it is really for the incidental things that the story is so noteworthy. It was his last gay novel, the last time that we catch that chuckle of good-natured humour that the earlier books brought us so constantly.
Of characters there are God’s plenty. The whole Tringle family: the rich Sir Timothy, kind, stupid, and bewildered; Lady Tringle, half a snob, half a bully, half a fairy godmother; the desperate wayfaring Tom; the “Ugly Sisters” Gertrude and Augusta; — then the “poor” household, the Dossitts (how excellently felt is the relationship between Aunt Tringle and Aunt Dossett!); the masculine lovers, Hamel the artist and the ruby-haired Colonel Jonathan Stubbs (almost as good as Will Belton and of the same stock); and Captain Batsby; and then the two sisters themselves, Ayala and Lucy, round whose relationship so much hangs, a relationship that might so easily be tearfully sentimental but is never permitted to be so.
Ayala Dormer is a worthy third in the race for Trollope heroines, taking her place only a little way behind Lucy Robarts and Lady Glencora.
She is exquisitely beautiful, of course, but this time Trollope makes you feel her beauty. She is in no danger of priggishness like Lily Dale, and although, of course, she shares the fate of all Trollope heroines in hesitating between two lovers, she is not too stupid about it. She hesitates because of her dream of perfect masculine beauty united to perfect masculine character, and, the world being what it is, it must naturally take her three volumes before she learns that her “angel” resides only in Paradise.
A delightful quality in her is her aliveness to the world as it is. She understands it all through her native wit and cleverness. But because she understands it she does not therefore condemn it or read its cynical lessons in the modern manner. She can laugh at Tom Tringle and like him too. She is honest in her pleasure at the riches and gaiety that Aunt Emmeline offers her, she is honest in her detection of Aunt Dosse’s narrowness and ignorance, but she takes all these things as she finds them, getting fun out of everything and grudging no one any fun that is not for her.
She dances through the three long volumes, the most natural Cinderella in the world; her only real resentment is against Augusta Traffic, who deserves all her resentment. The other girls are almost as good. Gertrude Tringle’s letter to her mother announcing her elopement to Captain Batsby is a little masterpiece.
After a bald statement of fact the letter is as follows:
We mean to be married at Ostend, and then will come back as soon as you and papa say that you will receive us. In the meantime I wish you would send some of my clothes after me. Of course I had to come away with very little luggage, because I was obliged to have my things mixed up with Ben’s, I did not dare to have my boxes brought down by the servants. Could you send me the green silk in which I went to church the last two Sundays, and my pink gauze and the grey poplin? Please send two or three flannel petticoats, as I could not put them among his things, and as many cuffs and collars as you can cram in. I suppose I can get boots at Ostend, but I should like to have the hat with the little brown feather. There is my silk jacket with the fur trimming, I should like to have that. I suppose I shall have to be married without any regular dress, but I am sure papa will make up my trousseau to me afterwards. I lent a little lace fichu to Augusta; tell her that I should like to have it. Give papa my best love, and Augusta, and poor Tom, and accept the same from your affectionate daughter, — GERTRUDE.
There is no space here to do more than mention the delightful London scenes, streets and clubs and squares, or poor Tom’s fight with the Colonel, or Hamel’s interview with Sir Timothy, or the excellent hunting, or the lovers’ talks in Gobblegoose Wood, or the excitement of the new grey silk frock, or the episode of the diamond necklace — Ayala’s Angel is, after the Barchester novels, one of the first half-dozen best things in the whole Trollope history.
The transition from the happiness of Ayala’s Angel to the sardonic mood of the other group lies through Dr. Wortle’s School. Dr, Worth is still sunny in its atmosphere, but its sarcasm is heavier and angrier than it has ever been in his work before.
It is maintained that Dr. Wortle himself is Trollope. That must be qualified, because although Dr. Wortle is Trollope in so far as he is jolly and generous and pugnacious, honest and plucky, he is an entirely undeveloped character. What he is on the first page that he is on the last. He is given to us always in the flat, never in the round. We know after the first chapter that if anyone in the story is to be defended Dr. Wortle is to do the defending and, at the end of the book, that is exactly what he has done. But although he has been active no one else has been active in return. That is, he has done various things to other people but no one has done anything to him, not even his author. It is true that angry parents have written to him, and his Bishop has gently reproved him, and his wife has had some moments of uneasiness concerning him. All these things should have affected, not Dr. Wortle — he is too set to be radically altered — but our knowledge of Dr. Wortle. We know him no better on the last page than we did at the end of the first twenty.
Trollope has once again been lazy, and to see how really lazy he has been we can suggest as a fitting parallel that earlier book, The Warden. The two novels are in many ways similar. In each the central figure is sympathetic, obstinate, and with a good deal of Trollope in his composition; in each it is a question as to whether an official post should be surrendered because of the world’s gossip, and in each the daughter of the criticised official provides the love story. But a comparison of Mr. Harding with Dr. Wortle at once offers the difference. Mr. Harding is seen in the round, not only because, moving as he does through the whole Barchester sequence, we are able to watch him at considerable length, but also because Trollope is not content in his case to be satisfied with the first glimpse of him; his energy here is greater and drives him forward to much deeper investigations. It is possible that an author may have his characters in the flat rather than in the round because of his tempestuous energy. This is always the case with Smollett and often with Dickens, but when it happens with Trollope, whose whole genius lies in just this ability to see his people “rounded” it means that he is tired and lazy.
Nevertheless, Dr. Wortle is one of the real figures in the Trollope gallery and no study of Trollope is complete without him. Moreover, if he is taken with Will Belton, he gives a real portrait of the mature Anthony, just as The Three Clerks and Johnny Eames introduce us to the immature.
Dr. Worth’s School may have been too easily written, but it avoids completely one of its author’s notorious weaknesses — it is never unduly prolonged and has not a moment’s dullness, nor does it contain any triangle love affairs. Its villain, too, is quite admirable. Robert Lefroy, from the moment of his first dramatic appearance until his final fruitless attempt at blackmail, is always genial in character. Nothing in Trollope is better than this geniality of his villains, and many a modern novelist might learn a useful lesson here. So soon as a Trollopian villain is not genial, it means that he has gone beyond his author’s sympathy and he becomes at once a caricature. Lefroy is astonishingly real in quite transpontine conditions, and the American chapters are admirably convincing. His final notion about the cousin is an excellent little surprise for the nervous reader, and we congratulate Mr. Peacocke on his ruthless treatment of it. Mr. Peacocke, although colourless, is thoroughly determined and deserves his reward.
There is a further comparison to be made between this book and The Warden which is instructive. The satire in Dr. Worth, although it is never ill-tempered, is serious; the satire in The Warden, with its Dr. Anticant and the three sons of the archdeacon who so closely resemble three well-known divines, is the light-hearted gambolling of a schoolboy. The satire of Dr. Worthy both social and ecclesiastical, is slight and undeveloped, but it is restive and rebellious. The question round which the Doctor’s position turns is one that, twenty years earlier, Trollope would have debated very hotly.
He would not only himself have been greatly disturbed at the thought of a man living with a woman to whom he was not married — however legitimate the excuse — but he would have seen the justice of all the arguers against it. The sins committed, or rather contemplated, by Glencora Palliser and Laura Kennedy distress him profoundly, and he can only treat the Senora Neroni lightly by turning a blind eye to her possible moral conduct.
He hotly defends himself, not only against his critics but also against himself, for the mere introduction of Carrie Brattle into The Vicar of Bullhampton. But now in his old age he simply cannot any longer be bothered. He says to the world: “I have paid attention to your social hypocrisies long enough. I care as much as you do for goo d conduct and right living, but I care still more for honest common sense.” He had always cared, of course, for honest common sense, and he had always tilted at the special brand of hypocrisy that seemed to him to go with a certain sort of nonconformity, but he is advancing now to the modern view of greater consideration for the individual case.
In Dr. Wortle there is an astonishing absence of moral repetition — that kind of repetition to which he was especially liable, the reiterated discussion of a case that has, in the reader’s mind, long before settled itself. “These people are right,” says Dr. Wortle-Trollope, “so let’s have no more nonsense.”
It is untrue, of course, to assert that the mood of irony, and even of bitterness, had not been present in him from the very first. It is plainly apparent in the early Irish novels, where it has the form of a natural melancholy and tenderness for lonely and ill-treated souls; it loses itself through much of the work of the middle period, although it is acutely present in The Bertrams (the heroine of that unpleasant work is one of his most serious attempts at the portrayal of bitter character), in He Knew He was Right, and in persons like Mrs. Prime and Mr. Kennedy and Dockwrath; it begins to be manifest in the later political novels (Ferdinand Lopez is curtain-raiser to The Way We Live Now), and in the last years is fully in evidence. There is in this novel something of the weariness of old age, something of disappointment, a little perhaps of ill-health, but Trollope was to the very last, when that fatal stroke silenced him while he was laughing over the pages of Vice Versa, a man who carried life bravely on his back.
Neither old age nor the consciousness that as novelist he was dropping behind his period dimmed or daunted him in the least; he was the triumphant rider to hounds to the end. Rather this vein in him that gives so much power and interest to the most unjustly neglected novels of his last years was part of his character and his talent. It gathered strength as he grew, and at the end he stands stoutly asserting, “I shall write my book and not yours”.
The book supremely of this mood, one of the most remarkable of all the English novels published between 1860 and 1890, is The Way We Live Now.
This novel, had it been written by anyone else or had it been published anonymously, would never have been allowed to pass out of English fiction, but because it came after a long series of novels by the same hand, and because its author had been for some years before its appearance far too readily “taken for granted” by the critics, its remarkable qualities remained unperceived.
It has, in the first place, astonishing atmosphere. It is, more completely perhaps than any other story of his, a novel of London life. As Ayala’s Angel has all the sunshine and lightness of London, so this has its darkness and brooding sense of danger. Every character in the book is caught into this atmosphere, and even the ridiculous Lady Carbury, who begins so lightly, is lucky at the last to slip out of this tenebrous world into the arms of the faithful Mr. Browne. It is the story of the lives of two families, the Carburys and the Melmottes, and the dominating figure is Melmotte himself. In spite of certain absurdities, Melmotte is a figure of dominating size. When the reader looks back Melmotte appears to him as something bigger than anything he has said or done. It is Trollope’s greatest achievement here that he does stand as a kind of symbolic figure, the only symbolic figure, save possibly Mrs. Proudie, that Trollope ever achieved. In sober fact he is a dirty, bullying, greedy, ignorant charlatan, who tumbles swiftly to absolute ruin; he is an animal, and for once Trollope regards him, until the last, with small pity; but the shadow that he casts is greater than himself, and to ourselves, who can look back now and see what the self-confidence and material prosperity of that period in English development was preluding, he has a prophetical air.
Trollope is more brutal in his drawing of him than at any other time he allowed himself to be. In the scene in which Melmotte ill-treats his daughter there is a power which he has never allowed himself to reveal before, and in all the passages concerning Melmotte’s attempts to wrest her money from the unhappy girl, he is remarkable in an entirely new manner.
All the incidents connected with his decline and fall have this same half-fantastic, half-symbolic colour — the dinner to the Emperor of China, the election, the absurd scenes in the House of Commons, the final crash.
Every side of English life is shown to Succumb, hypocritically, greedily, falsely, to his supposed power — literature, the Church, politics, English country life, finance — and at the last, in the cleverest touch of all, when the wretch is gone, the world, quite blind to its own weaknesses, shrugs its shoulder and goes gaily on.
How he has progressed also in the art of satire since the caricatures of The Warden! Lady Carbury’s letter, on the first page of the book, when she is writing to various editors that they may push her new work on “Criminal Queens”, is as satirically alive to-day as it was forty years ago.
The sketch of Semiramis is at any rate spirited, though I had to twist it about a little to bring her in guilty. Cleopatra, of course, I have taken from Shakespeare. What a wench she was! I could not quite make Julia a queen; but it was impossible to pass over so piquant a character. You will recognise in the two or three ladies of the empire how faithfully I have studied my Gibbon. Poor dear old Belisarius! I have done the best I could with Joanna, but I could not bring myself to care for her. In our days she would simply have gone to Broadmoor. I hope you will not think that I have been too strong in my delineations of Henry VIII. and his sinful but unfortunate Howard. I don’t care a bit about Anne Boleyn. I’m afraid that I have been tempted into too great length about the Italian Catherine, but in truth she has been my favourite. What a woman! What a devil! Pity that a second Dante could not have constructed for her a special hell. How one traces the effect of her training in the life of our Scotch Mary! I trust you will go with me in my view as to the Queen of Scots. Guilty! Guilty always! Adultery, murder, treason, and all the rest of it. But recommended to mercy because she was royal. A queen, bred, born and married, and with such other queens around her, how could she have escaped to be guilty? Marie Antoinette I have not quite acquitted. It would be uninteresting — perhaps untrue. I have accused her lovingly and have kissed when I scourged. I trust the British Public will not be angry because I do not whitewash Caroline, especially as I go along with them altogether in abusing her husband.
Of all the good letters in Trollope, this is one of the best, but it is the only light touch in this book. All the characters, Lady Carbury herself, the wretched Felix, Henrietta Carbury, whose hesitations between Roger Carbury and Paul Montague afford the only trace of the conventional and far too dilatory Trollope in the whole story, Mrs. Hartle, the miserable Madame Melmotte and the unhappy daughter Marie (a remarkably drawn character), John Crumb and Ruby Ruggles, these and many more pass under Melmotte’s shadow.
It is the book in which, for a moment, Trollope seems really to despair of human nature. It gains its stature from that very thing; it has a compelling force of almost savage disgust. How far was this a momentary mood, or was it the result of an impulse towards a new manner and a fresh talent? The smaller novels that cluster, in this period of his work, around it answer possibly that question.
But before turning to these other novels there remains a point of very real interest concerning Melmotte’s creation. He is the first character of Trollope’s who is entirely independent of Trollope’s personality.
This is of course not to say that all the persons in the earlier books — the Mr. Slopes, the Adolphus Crosbies, the Lily Dales, the Pallisers and the rest — are various emanations of hidden characteristics of Trollope. It is not so true that novelists reveal their own personalities in their creations as that they place those creations in an atmosphere peculiar to their own individuality. Becky Sharp is not Thackeray, but she would not exist did not Thackeray see life from his own personal angle. Of ah the greater novelists Tolstoi alone moves like God, flinging creations into a void and leaving them to find their own worlds for themselves. It is frequently the case that a novelist who is most detached in his sympathies, who utters no judgement and allows no personal bias, for that very reason steeps his characters in his own personal atmosphere. This is true of writers as different as Tchehov and Arnold Bennett. But in every novelist’s career the moment arrives when he is sick unto death of this personality, of the few things that he can do, of the fashion in which everything the more he endeavours to change it insists on being the same as before. This is always the moment for the critic to watch, and on the issue of that restlessness frequently depends the final value of the novelist as artist.
It is one of the strangest and most ironical facts in the career of Trollope as artist that the moment of restlessness came at the very end of his career when all the watchers were too sleepy to notice it. Melmotte is the point of departure — a departure that might have led to new glories but, because it came when it did, led almost nowhere at all.
There is nothing more remarkable in the history of Trollope’s genius than that, with a personality finely based on a very few simple things, he created such a various world of people, but every character of his before Melmotte is, so to speak, in his confidence. He hands the wretched Crosbie or the wretched Kennedy with a nod to the reader as though he would say: “These are not men whom I can like, try as I may, but they are men for whom I wish you to have some tenderness.” He is always, whether for good or ill, at the reader’s side. But Melmotte he does not introduce to the reader, Melmotte rather imposes himself not only upon the reader but upon Trollope, and from his first introduction to his last appearance he forces Trollope to impersonality, and so, in creating him, Trollope suddenly discovers a new power of realising creation, from outside rather than from within. He is perhaps not actively aware of what this is going to mean to his art, but we cannot doubt that, had he had time and vigour, he would have passed on from that pleasant personal atmosphere in which he was a sort of genial host at a very mixed garden party to that impersonal world of art where he is used as a medium for the creation of figures greater than he knows.
This is not to say that the one world is of larger size than the other. Who can be sufficiently sure that in the final judgement Valérie Marneffe is greater than Elizabeth Bennett, Raskolnikov than Tom Jones, Jude and Sue than Mr. Micawber and Betsy Trotwood; but it is towards the world of Raskolnikov and Jude that after The Way We Live Now Trollope might have moved.
The shabby end of the dirty adventurer has something of this new impersonal grandeur about it:
The member for Westminster caused no further inconvenience. He remained in his seat for perhaps ten minutes, and then, not with a very steady step, but still with sufficient capacity sufficient for his own guidance, he made his way down to the doors. His exit was watched in silence, and the moment was an anxious one for the Speaker, the clerks, and all who were near him. Had he fallen someone — or rather some two or three — must have picked him up and carried him out. But he did not fall either there or in the lobbies, or on his way down to Palace Yard. Many were looking at him, but none touched him. When he had got through the gates, leaning against the wall he hallooed for his brougham, and the servant who was waiting for him soon took him home to Bruton Street. That was the last which the British Parliament saw of its new member for Westminster.
Melmotte as soon as he reached home got into his sitting-room without difficulty, and called for more brandy and water. Between eleven and twelve he was left there by his servant with a bottle of brandy, three or four bottles of soda-water, and his cigar case. Neither of the ladies of the family came to him, nor did he speak of them. Nor was he so drunk then as to give rise to any suspicion in the mind of the servant. He was habitually left there at night, and the servant as usual went to his bed. But at nine o’clock on the following morning the maidservant found him dead upon the floor. Drunk as he had been — more drunk as he probably became during the night — still he was able to deliver himself from the indignities and penalties to which the law might have subjected him by a dose of prussic acid.
The last scene in the Commons and the death that followed it is not a sporadic moment in another impulse of Trollope’s art — there are, as I have already said, such sporadic moments in The Bertrams and He Knew He Was Right — it is rather a definite step into definitely new country.
The consequences of this step were not, because of the circumstances, very great. They were interesting as prophecies rather than achievements. These prophecies are to be found in Mr. Scarborough’s Family, An Eye for an Eye, Cousin Henry, and the uncompleted Landleaguers.
The most curious and important of these is undoubtedly Mr. Scarborough’s Family. This is Trollope’s most malevolent novel, and it contains Trollope’s most malevolent plot. Mr. Scarborough detests the law of entail. He has therefore performed two marriage ceremonies with his eldest son’s mother, one before the boy’s birth, one after. He can therefore make this son legitimate or illegitimate at will. Because this eldest son is a reckless fellow and is in the hands of the Jews, old Scarborough proclaims him a bastard, then settles secretly his debts, and, when the younger son is becoming something too arrogant over his prospects, produces the first marriage certificate and so restores the eldest son. Then, smiling sardonically, dies.
The book as a whole is amusing, the moneylenders are especially well done, but the malevolence of it all gives it its character. It might almost have been written, in certain of its chapters, by Peacock, and at other times it reminds one of the author of Erewhon. What a curiously humorous sardonic young man Trollope might have been had he been born ten years before he died!
And yet not entirely. There are works of these same last years which show the old Trollope sinking into a sort of ghostly repetition of his worst literary self. To say nothing of the pallid Marion Fay there are little stories like Kept in the Dark and An Old Man’s Love, little stories that depend for their interest on absurd situations as when in Kept in the Dark a lover dismisses his young lady because, before she knew him, she had been engaged for a short period to Somebody else — there’s gentlemanly conduct for you! — and in An Old Man’s Love, when the young lover, his pockets bulging with Kimberley diamonds, returns to England a moment after the young girl has accepted (out of a sense of duty, of course) her elderly Mr. Whittlestaff. Were these the only works of Trollope’s older years, then critics and philosophers would be justified in their ruthless indifference. No, all that world of Trollope’s talent — the world of the Barsetshire lanes, and the hesitating damsel, and the aristocratic country house, and the local vicar ambling on his nag — was dead. Ayala’s Angel was the last lively flavour of it. And out of the ashes Melmotte rose, and with Melmotte strange un-Trollopian things like Cousin Henry and An Eye for an Eye.
It would be running too far to claim success for Cousin Henry. Both his novel and An Eye for an Eye have a curious amateur immature air as though they were the works of some beginner of talent. Cousin Henry tells the story of a weak young man who, finding a will that will disinherit him, tells no one of his discovery and suffers tortures of fear and evil conscience. The plot suffers from the inevitability of its conclusion. We know that the will will be found and Cousin Henry punished. Nor is Henry himself at all interesting. He is not one of the villains like Crosbie with whom Trollope has sympathy — like Lopez and George Vavasour he is one of the black sheep, but he has none of their bluster or braggadocio. He is a “nothing”. But his moods are something. As he sits in the library not daring to move lest someone should enter during his absence and discover the will, he becomes a figure who, like Melmotte, is greater than himself and greater than Trollope’s intention. A whole world of new motives, analyses of passion, subjective thoughts and deeds was about to invade the English novel at this time, and Trollope, even in such a little book as this, seems suddenly to be, without his own intention, in touch with it. He does not yet know how to deal with it; he is fumbling and hesitating, but he is in touch.
He is fumbling and hesitating again in An Eye for an Eye, which is in some respects a rather ludicrous little novel. It has the good old Transpontine theme of the young heir to the peerage who betrays the beautiful maiden and is then afraid to marry her.
There is no very good reason why he should not marry her. He argues a good deal with himself, with Trollope, and with the reader that, having given his oath to his uncle, the noble peer, that he would not marry the beautiful maiden, he’ must keep his word, but none of his audiences are in the least convinced. He is a feeble young idiot, and his beautiful lady-love a tiresome, helpless puppet. It is the heroine’s mother, a fierce and laconic lady, who at last, yielding to an impulse of quite natural impatience, pushes the hero over a cliff. No one can blame her, nor can anyone miss the hero. I am afraid that it is in itself a rather silly story, nor does any character live in it, but again in its moral and spiritual atmosphere it touches this new world that Trollope was on the edge of discovering. It is a moral rather than a physical atmosphere. Mrs. O’Hara is in herself melodramatic and false, but, when the little book is closed, a poetic symbolism hangs over the memory of her that gives it a larger, grander size than many of the more successful, more practical works.
And the long list ends with the unfinished Landleaguers. What a strange, touching rounding off of the whole career is this return, in sickness and old age, to the. Irish novel that so many years before had been begun with so much strength and power. The Landleaguers is a postscript to The Macdermots and the Kellys, and, in the first half at least, no mean postscript either. We are given the old Ireland that, in all his excursions to Barchester and the House of Commons and Prague and Australia, he has always carried with him. The novel opens with great vigour in its history of the misfortunes of the Jones family, the strange little Catholic boy Florian, the floodings and boycottings and cattle-maimings. It moves with a fine strong sweep until the scene of Florian’s murder; after that it flags and dies away. The scenes of the musical and Jewish world in London are feeble in the extreme, and are witness, as are Kept in the Dark and Marion Fay, that that whole world has died in him for ever. But in the earlier Irish scenes that new poetic tragic realisation of life that has so ironically come to him too late is everywhere to be found. Too late and too early! In those first two Irish novels it was there; in this last group again; and, in between, all the books that won him fame and give him now his position!
His performance, his potentiality. He becomes surely the greater artist when we realise that he was the author not only of Barchester Towers but of The Macdermots and Cousin Henry, and that he was the creator of Melmotte and Mrs. O’Hara as well as of Archdeacon Grantley and Mrs. Proudie.