by Hugh Walpole
Here, too, I may perhaps be allowed to add a personal although second-hand impression. Many years ago, when I was a small boy to whom authors seemed splendid beings of another and greater world, I asked a middle-aged friend of mine whether he had ever seen an author.
It appeared that he had seen, and even met, several, and for the most part they were disappointing. But once, as a young man, standing in a village street, there had appeared suddenly riding out of the autumn orange mist a gigantic rider upon a gigantic horse. This vast apparition had all but ridden the young man down. The rider, black-bearded, with a back like a mountain, a chest like a wall, staying his wild career, had roared out in a voice like a torrent inquiries as to the health of the family of the butcher or the postmaster standing near my middle-aged friend, then, with a great shout of “good-morning” that seemed to wake the whole dead village street into life, had gone charging off into the mist again. That was Anthony Trollope.
The second background to the happiness of his middle years was the Garrick Club.
He was elected to the Garrick Club early in 1861, and from that time many of his pleasantest hours were spent there. His friendship with Thackeray helped him greatly in making other friends and assisted him also to an enemy or two. It led him into the famous Thackeray-Yates quarrel, into details of which we need not here enter. His love for and admiration of Thackeray was one of the most important elements in his life: so deep and true was this love that he could not see clearly enough to make his life of him in the “English Men of Letters” series anything but a failure.
There is something of the idolising of the younger schoolboy for the elder in Trollope’s attitude to Thackeray, as indeed there was an air of schoolboy seriousness in all his friendships. Ever since those muddy lonely days at school he had, in his heart, longed to be popular — this of course from no snobbishness, no material ambition, but solely that he might kill that sense, ever present in him from his childhood, that he was an ostracised creature, someone “outside the world”.
But here, as indeed so often, he explains himself better than anyone else can ever explain him:
I think that I became popular among those with whom I associated. I have long been aware of a certain weakness in my own character, which I may call a craving for love. I have ever had a wish to be liked by those around me — a wish that during the first half of my life was never gratified. In my schooldays no small part of my misery came from the envy with which I regarded the popularity of popular boys. They seemed to me to live in a social paradise, while the desolation of my pandemonium was complete. And afterwards, when I was in London as a young man, I had few friends.
Among the clerks in the Post Office I held my own fairly for the first two or three years; but even then I regarded myself as something of a pariah. My Irish life had been much better, I had had my wife and children, and had been sustained by a feeling of general respect. But even in Ireland I had in truth lived but little in society. Our means had been sufficient for our wants but insufficient for entertaining others. It was not till we had settled ourselves at Waltham that I really began to live much with others. The Garrick Club was the first assemblage of men at which I felt myself to be popular.
And besides the friendships there was the whist!
I enjoyed infinitely at first the gaiety of the Garrick. It was a festival to me to dine there — which I did indeed but seldom; and a great delight to play a rubber in the little room upstairs of an afternoon. I am speaking now of the old club in King Street. The playing of whist before dinner has since that become a habit with me, so that unless there be something else special to do — unless there be hunting, or I am wanted to ride in the park by the young tyrant of my household, it is “my custom always in the afternoon”. I have sometimes felt sore with myself for this persistency, feeling that I was making myself a slave to an amusement which has not after all very much to recommend it. I have often thought that I would break myself away from it and “swear off”, as Rip Van Winkle says. But my swearing off has been like that of Rip Van Winkle. And now, as I think of it coolly, I do not know but that I have been right to cling to it.
The third background was the Cornhill.
The first number of the Cornhill Magazine under Thackeray’s editorship was announced to appear on the first day of 1860, and, towards the end of 1859 — on October 23 to be exact — Trollope wrote to Thackeray offering himself as a contributor of short stories. Thackeray’s answer to this letter was to suggest that Trollope should write for the Cornhill a three-volume novel to be published serially in that magazine, starting with the first number.
Here was a grand opportunity for Trollope, but there remained only six weeks before the first appearance of the paper, and it also happened that in those same six weeks the Trollope family must make the move to Waltham Cross.
But Trollope was not the man to miss such a chance. He hurried over from Ireland, made his agreement with Smith, Elder, and — seven weeks later — the first instalment of Framley Parsonage appeared in the first number of the Cornhill.
The story leapt into instant popularity, and, indeed, we may take the serial publication of Framley Parsonage as the second great step — the success of Barchester Towers being the first — in Trollope’s upward literary career. But, beside the literary and worldly success, there was the importance of the new and precious friendships that, through the Cornhill, he made.
It was in January 1860 [he tells us] that Mr. George Smith — to whose enterprise we owe not only the Cornhill Magazine but the Pall Mall Gazette — gave a sumptuous dinner to his contributors. It was a memorable banquet in many ways, but chiefly so to me because on that occasion I first met many men who afterwards became my most intimate associates. It can rarely happen that one such occasion can be the first starting point of so many friendships.
It was at that table, and on that day, that I first saw Thackeray, Charles Taylor (Sir) — than whom in later life I have loved no man better — Robert Ball, G. H. Lewes, and Sir John Everett Millais. With all these men I afterwards lived on affectionate terms.
First of these, of course, was Thackeray, and George Smith tells an odd, touching, and very revealing little story of Trollope’s first meeting with him:
At one of these dinners Trollope was to meet Thackeray for the first time, and was greatly looking forward to an introduction to him. Just before dinner I took him up to Thackeray and introduced him with ail the suitable empressement. Thackeray curtly said, “How do?” and, to my wonder and Trollope’s anger, turned on his heel! He was suffering at the time from a malady which at that particular moment caused him a sudden spasm of pain; though we, of course, could not know this. I well remember the expression on Trollope’s face at that moment, and no one who knew Trollope will doubt that he could look furious on an adequate — and sometimes an inadequate — occasion! He came to me the next morning in a very wrathful mood, and said that had it not been that he was in my house for the first time, he would have walked out of it. He vowed he would never speak to Thackeray again, etc etc. I did my best to soothe him; and, though rather violent and irritable, he had a fine nature of great kindliness, and I believe he left my room in a happier frame of mind than when he entered it. He and Thackeray became close friends.
Such was the beginning of one of the finest and most generous friendships in English letters.
There was also Millais with whom Trollope’s novels will be for ever associated.
Here again, in writing of him with that strange mixture of affection, business, and English reserve Trollope is entirely self-revealing:
Mr. Millais was engaged to illustrate Framley Parsonage, but this was not the first work he did for the magazine. In the second number there is a picture of his accompanying Monckton Milnes’ Unspoken Dialogue. The first drawing he did for Framley Parsonage did not appear till after the dinner of which I have spoken, and I do not think that I knew at the time that he was engaged on my novel. When I did know it, it made me ver
y proud.
He afterwards illustrated Orley Farm, The Small House of Allington, Rachel Ray, and Phineas Finn. Altogether he drew from my tales eighty-seven drawings, and I do not think that more conscientious work was ever done by man. Writers of novels know well — and so ought readers of novels to have learned — that there are two modes of illustrating, either of which may be adopted equally by a bad and by a good artist. To which class Mr. Millais belongs I need not say; but, as a good artist, it was open to him simply to make a pretty picture or to study the work of the author from whose writing he was bound to take his subject. I have too often found that the former alternative has been thought to be the better, as it certainly is the easier method. An artist will frequently dislike to subordinate his ideas to those of an author, and will sometimes be too idle to find out what those ideas are. But this artist was neither proud nor idle. In every figure that he drew it was his object to promote the views of the writer whose work he had undertaken to illustrate, and he never spared himself any pains in studying that work, so as to enable him to do so.
I have carried on some of those characters from book to book, and have had my own early ideas impressed indelibly on my memory by the excellente of his delineations. Those illustrations were commenced fifteen years ago, and from that time up to this day my affection for the man of whom I am speaking has increased. To see him has always been a pleasure. His voice has been a sweet sound in my ears. Behind his back I have never heard him praised without joining the eulogist; I have never heard a word spoken against him without opposing the censurer. These words, should he ever see them, will come to him from the grave, and will tell him of my regard — as one living man never tells another.
“As one living man never tells another.” Is there not in that sentence the whole of Trollope’s reticence, awkwardness, shyness, and is there not in this entire passage all his loyalty, honesty, and deep, even emotional affection?
So, with the roses and strawberries and hunting and Christmas parties and visits of friends of Waltham Cross, the whist and social fun of the Garrick Club, the friendships and honours of the Cornhill, his middle years brought the fulfilment of all his desires.
The journeys abroad upon which he is sent by the Post Office — travels to Italy and Egypt, Palestine and the West Indies and North America — prevent any kind of stagnation. He goes bustling about the world, writing ceaselessly, observing everything, carrying with him everywhere his British self-reliance as well as his personal reticence, leading one of the fullest, widest, most energetic lives possible to a human being. Over these years and beyond them is spread the sequence of the Political Novels.
The six novels usually included in the political series are bound together by a sequence in human history rather than any general political scheme.
They are The Eustace Diamonds, Can You Forgive Her? Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, and The Duke’s Children.
For the writing of five of these Trollope himself is the authority.
Who will read [he says in the Autobiography] Can You Forgive Her? Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister consecutively, in order that they may understand the character of the Duke of Omnium, of Plantagenet Palliser, and of Lady Glencora? Who will ever know that they should be so read? When these words were written The Duke’s Children was not as yet published, but it follows in natural sequence The Prime Minister.
The Eustace Diamonds makes a fitting prelude to the series, partly because of the appearance of Lady Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser in its pages, partly because of the important intrusion of Lizzie Eustace and her greasy clergyman into the final drama of Phineas Redux.
As a matter of fact, there is quite a little politics in The Eustace Diamonds. There is, for instance, the urgent question of whether five farthings should go to a penny, one of the stepping-stones of Planty Palls’ rise to glory.
The Duke of Omnium is of course prominent in the Barsetshire novels, and Palliser and Lady Glencora make their first public bow to the world in The Small House. They seem, to one reader, at least, to linger behind many another Trollope novel. They were the favourites of Trollope’s heart, and they must often, I think, have been on the very edge of pushing into other people’s family fortunes, homes, and chronicles where they had no real business. He would have liked, I believe, to bring them into every story that he wrote.
But the only other novel that might claim any real place in the political series is Ralph the Heir, and this not because of actual politics but only that it has in it some of the best electioneering scenes in English fiction, electioneering scenes, too, taken directly from Trollope’s own rather unfortunate experience.
It is not of itself a good novel — an unconvincing fable inordinately drawn out, — but if any one wishes to know exactly what an electioneering campaign was like in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, here is the true picture waiting for them.
The Eustace Diamonds is one of the best novels that Trollope ever wrote; in Lizzie Eustace it contains one of the truest and most consistent human beings that Trollope ever drew.
As is the case with all his better novels, except possibly Orley Farm and Phineas Redux, the central theme is simple and concrete. Lizzie Eustace, a young widow, has in her possession some Eustace family diamonds to which she has no right. Is she going to give them up or will she be able to keep them?
As any reader of the Trollope novels must be aware, it was one of his most dangerous temptations to succumb to the lengthy needs of serial publication and extend his stories to sadly unnecessary lengths, but although The Eustace Diamonds was one of his later serials (it was published in the Fortnightly from July 1871 and was finally, as regarded sales, his most successful work since The Small House at Allington), it is not a page too long. Development follows development logically and with well-calculated surprise, and every incident revolves round the central theme. Moreover, the sub-plots (so often the weakening factors in a Trollope novel) are here little tiresome as may be. Even Mrs. Carbuncle, who in name and history approaches very closely to caricature, is not wearisome, and, in her final letter to Lizzie Eustace, amusing and violently human.
The book is perhaps richer in a variety of sharply contrasted but truly observed human beings than any other of Trollope’s novels, save Barchester Towers and The Last Chronicle of Barset.
The events move quite naturally out of human nature, the characters are not, as is the case with so many novelists, dictated by the events.
Lizzie Eustace herself is a masterpiece of observation and humour. She is, it is true, a masterpiece in water colour. In comparison with her sinful sisters — she has much in common of course with Becky Sharp and something with all the common, vulgar selfish women of fiction from Emma Bovary to the hard little heroines of Mrs. Wharton’s fiction — she is a little faint, a little muted — but she is the heroine of a book that is light comedy from first to last, and nothing could be more admirable than the way in which Trollope sustains his book in one key throughout.
She is especially alive because of Trollope’s sympathy for her. One of the most remarkable elements in all his work is his hatred of the sin and love for the sinner. No novelist in English fiction is better at drawing cads, sharpers, bounders, down-at-heel loafers, ladies of light virtue, lawyers’ touts, shabby detectives. From Adolphus Crosbie to Lizzie Eustace he has a kind fatherly protecting eye upon them all, and this, although he was himself a man of the most scrupulous honour, with a constantly expressed disgust of shabby dealing, meanness, and any kind of vulgarity.
He shrinks from nothing in his picture of Lizzie, and one of the best things in the novel is Frank Greystock’s sudden vision of her as she really is after his last journey with her to Portray.
It can have been no easy thing for her creator to have made it conceivable that she should have appealed to suitors as different as Lord Fawn, Frank Greystock, and the loathly Emilius, but he shows us that she was sufficiently clever to attack each man on his individual weakne
ss, but not clever enough to make it more than a superficial attack.
Very cleverly illustrated, too, is the fashion in which Lizzie slides from one position into another, too shallow and false to feel the catastrophes of any of them; even on the brink of imprisonment she can only see in the Major Mackintosh who comes to examine her a handsome man who, had he not already a wife and seven children, might be persuaded to marry her.
Of all the shallow women in fiction she is perhaps the shallowest. So shallow is she that nothing, no sarcasm, no rebuff, no social disgrace, no, not even the loss of the diamonds, can touch her.
It is true that after the second and real robbery at the hotel she is for a moment upset, but in five minutes she is once more calculating her chances. One of the truest characters in the book and one of the most original in all Trollope, Lord George the Corsair, realises this because he has the same philosophy, only his is something consciously developed to meet the world with the chicanery that the world deserves, while Lizzie is not clever enough to elaborate anything for herself — she can only submit to the rag-tag and bob-tail of her shabby character, and let it carry her where it will. The Corsair’s final parting with her is excellent Trollope:
He stood there still looking down upon her, speaking with a sarcastic submissive tone, and, as she felt, intending to be severe to her. She had sent for him, and now she didn’t know what to say to him. Though she believed that she hated him, she would have liked to get up some show of an affectionate farewell, some scene in which there might have been tears, and tenderness, and poetry — and, perhaps, a parting caress. But with his jeering words, and smiling face, he was as hard to her as a rock. He was now silent, but still looking down upon her as he stood motionless on the rug — so that she was compelled to speak again.