by Hugh Walpole
“That is too hard,” said he, “deuced hard.”
“I’m very sorry,” said Rachel.
“So shall I be — uncommon. Really, Mrs. Cornbury, I think a turn or two would do her good. Don’t you?”
“I can’t say I do. She says she would rather not, and of course you won’t press her.”
“I don’t see it in that light — I really don’t. A gentleman has his rights, you know, Mrs. Cornbury. Miss Ray won’t deny—”
“Miss Ray will deny that she intends to stand up for this dance. And one of the rights of a gentleman is to take a lady at her word.”
“Really, Mrs. Cornbury, you are down upon one so hard.”
Rachel,” she said, “would you mind coming across the room with me: there are seats on the sofa on the other side.”
Then Mrs. Cornbury sailed across the floor, and Rachel crept after her more dismayed than ever. Mr. Griggs the while stood transfixed to his place, stroking his moustache with his hand, and showing plainly by his countenance that he didn’t know what he ought to do next.
“Well, that’s cool,” said he, “confounded cool.”
I don’t know whether its proper place is here, but there is a little minor English landscape which seems to belong to this more hidden and silent English rural world, the hills and valleys of Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. This is one of the little stories, only an episode, a proud, generous, irascible old father, a gentle faithful-until-death little heroine and a villain of desperate wickedness. It is not a very credible little story, and it is ironical that on one of the very few occasions when Trollope does offer us a non-vacillating heroine we should find it difficult to believe in her fidelity, but the tale is played out among the Westmorland hills, ten miles north of Keswick, and here, as in Can You Forgive Her? where there is a background of the same country, Trollope seems especially happy in his colours and tones and shapes of hill and sky. It is to be regretted that he did not use this landscape more frequently.
It is impossible to leave these English landscapes without speaking of the figure who, outside the Barchester circle, seems to me to dominate all of them. This is Will Belton of The Belton Estate, one of the quietest and one of the finest of all Trollope’s novels, one inevitably to be read by anyone who would understand Trollope’s quality.
For one reader at least he is the favourite male character in all this long series of novels — favourite because he is a charming human being, favourite because he is as a type one of the most difficult to create successfully, but favourite in especial because surely in him we have most nearly Trollope’s own portrait of himself.
If anyone wishes a composite and detailed portrait of Trollope, the man, let him study The Three Clerks (a very poor novel and only interesting for its autobiographical touches), the portrait of Johnny Eames in The Small House, and The Last Chronicle and Dr. Worth’s School. And then, putting these works behind him, let him read The Belton Estate. Will Belton is Trollope and Trollope is Will Belton. It is true that there are some important differences. Belton cares nothing for Art and Letters, Belton, at least so far as he is revealed to us, did not know what shyness was (I suspect the truth of this). But at heart the two men were surely identical. Will is full of what the Victorians called sensibility. On one occasion, when he hears of his Clara’s engagement, we are told that he went to sleep flooding his pillow with his tears. (We wish that we hadn’t been told of this. It makes us uncomfortable.) He is impetuous and impatient. He is honester than the day, simple and direct and with a continuous sense of humour. Courageous of course, one of those Englishmen who knocks down his enemy with one hand and pulls him up and forgives him with the other. All these things was, and is, Trollope. As Will goes bursting through the pages of this delightful novel, flinging his clothes into bags, pulling them out again, rushing out to the Hunt, hastening back to catch a train, caring for his crippled sister with the tenderness of a woman, hating his rival but never showing him an injustice, kissing his lady-love, protecting her, adoring and then at last, when he has her for ever safely in his keeping, listening to her nocturnal chatter and then— “But Will Belton was never good for much conversation at this hour, and was too fast asleep to make any rejoinder to the last remark”.
And in drawing this character Trollope shows, once and for all, how good an artist he is. One slip to the right and the man is maudlin, one to the left and the man’s a bore. But the creator keeps serenely on his way, knowing that he has here material that is his authentic own, and that he can’t make a mistake.
This sense of assuredness runs through the book. In every sense it is a good one. Clara Amedroz is one of Trollope’s better heroines. Here with. Lucy Robarts and the sisters in Ayala’s Angel, Marie Goesler, Glencora Palliser, Mary Thorne, he reveals to us his great gift — almost unique in English fiction — of drawing women who are sprightly, daring, humorous, and pure. Pure in the real sense in refusing even to touch moral evil (I am afraid this is not quite true of Lady Glencora), and yet never becoming bores, prigs, or pedants.
Neither Thackeray nor Dickens ever achieved this quite and, after Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell is the most successful novelist in this exceedingly difficult task of saving Victorian morality and yet keeping the heroine alive.
The story, too, of The Belton Estate, simple though it is, is a good one. For once the heroine has real and convincing reason for her hesitation between her two lovers, if indeed the chilly Captain Aylmer can be honoured with that name. Aylmer is the kind of man with whom a little country girl like Clara would fall in love, and her courage and spirit when she pays her awful visit to the Aylmer family (how excellent is the episode of the hashed chicken!) is charming and natural. It has, with Rachel Ray and The Vicar of Bullhampton, the same delicate ivory-tinted carefulness and minutiae of detail. Lady Aylmer and her family are not caricatures, though very easily they might have been.
It is a good book with which to end this chapter which, in spite of its excursion into foreign lands, has tried to show that some of these novels do, even more surely than the Barchester series, paint English scenes and characters with a water-colour delicacy that is art at its finest.
Rachel and her mother, the Bullhampton vicar and old Brattle, Will Belton and his Clara — did these figures and their stories alone remain to us out of the great mass of Trollope’s work his justification as one of the truest and soundest of our English novelists stands.
CHAPTER VI. THE LATER YEARS AND THE LATER BOOKS
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 Fin
n 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 th
e 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.