Anthony Trollope; His Work, Associates and Literary Originals

by T. H. S. Escott

The way of business was also to prove with Trollope the way of amusement and sport. Anthony Trollope had learned to sit a horse in the Spartan severity of the Harrow Weald days. Dared or commanded by his brother Tom to put, bare-backed, a half-broken steed at hedges or ditches in the biggest field of the paternal farm, he was taught at least how to stick on, and never forgot the lesson. “It’s dogged as does it” was often in the mouth of a smaller personage in Orley Farm; and, as will presently be seen, it was doggedness which made Trollope both a sportsman and a novelist.

During his clerkly days at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the already mentioned visits to his sister, Lady Tilley, in Cumberland, and to other houses which had stables, helped him to complete his equestrian education. When therefore, at the age of twenty-six, he began in Ireland, he knew all about riding to hounds, could take up his own line across country, and hold his own against the rest of the field. To create the nucleus of a hunting stable, and secure a really good single mount to begin with, Trollope found easy enough. For some time before the end of his Irish term the one hunter had grown into three, each equally serviceable and creditable to its owner’s judgment of horseflesh. The only trouble at the beginning of his Irish hunting days was a misgiving as to the welcome waiting him from his fellow-sportsmen. Already he had been disappointed at the little notice of his workmanlike turnout, as he flattered himself, taken in the village where he was staying. He had, however, no sooner taken his part in a forty minutes’ run, with a good scent and over a stiffish country, than his sporting, and consequently his social fortune was made. Adventures are to the adventurous. The bustling novelty of his Irish situation had effectually roused Trollope from his moody reveries, had taken him out of himself, and wakened to new life dormant energies of mind as well as body.

On all sides, without any efforts of his own or introductions from others to smooth the way, sprang up acquaintances, soon to develop into lifelong friends. On one of these occasions the chase for the day had come to an end; the fox was killed, and Trollope, finding himself some dozen miles farther from home than he had reckoned, was meditating how to make his way back to the little inn where he put up before the darkness had descended upon a country of which he knew nothing. “My house,” said a friendly voice at his elbow, “is close here, and with us you must stay till to-morrow, and perhaps, when you know what sort of people we are, for some little time after.” The next morning he saw his hosts were in the thick of preparations for a ball that night. Gentlemen partners were sadly wanted for the dance. The visitor surely would not refuse his presence at a pinch, and would let his new friends send for his evening clothes, which were of course with his other things at his temporary headquarters on the other side of the moor. At the age of five-and-twenty Anthony Trollope, if even then something of a heavy weight, was not the less a dancing man, and in favour with lovely young ladies. “Be sure to send my pumps with the rest of my things,” was the message he emphasised to the raw Irish factotum whom he had just taken into his service. The portmanteau thus commanded duly arrived, and, when unpacked, proved to contain in the way of footgear only a pair of bedroom slippers and some boots, double-ironed on the soles, waterproof, absolutely impervious to cold or wet, and made before he left London according to their purchaser’s special instructions, for the roughest sporting use. Beneath the roof where he was staying no foot was so near Trollope’s as to yield it a covering which would safely carry him through the evening’s evolutions. To trouble his host further was quite out of the question. There was, therefore, nothing to do but to take the manservant into his confidence. “Do not,” came that person’s comforting reply, “make yourself uneasy. I will send on a quick pony a boy who knows all the short cuts. The dance shall be kept back an hour or so. By the time it fairly begins, your pumps, I engage, will be waiting before your dressing-room fire.” All of which things, as Trollope in one of his short stories has related, came to pass.

Trollope’s early experiences in Ireland were of the priest as well as of the squire. Once at least he found in the popish vicar of a remote Galway village an ex-Guardsman with whose fashionable escapades, a few years earlier, Mayfair and St. James’s had rung. All that, at first hand, he now saw and heard confirmed him in an impression which had gradually been deepening ever since he set foot in the country. The Irish traditionally had the reputation of being a pastoral and agricultural people. What Trollope now learned and saw for himself of their real characteristics, especially of their keen business instinct, and insistence in their purchases on getting full value for their money, showed him a race qualified above all things to excel in trade. “Old Trollope banging about,” was Froude’s description of Trollope when engaged in his study of mankind. He confessed, however, the accuracy of Trollope’s Irish impressions, and with his own pen several years later illustrated the Irish aptitudes from the same point of view as Trollope had taken. In 1889 appeared Froude’s only novel, an Irish one, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. Its central idea was the permanent ruin of the Irishman at home by centuries of anarchy, of misrule, and by all the evils that followed in their train. Only transplant him sufficiently far from his native soil to conditions that give scope for his keenness in bargain making and his shrewd instinct when to take and when to avoid commercial risks, and he becomes the wariest and surest builder up of fortunes on the face of the earth. Thus, the hero of Froude’s story, Patrick Blake, with his warehouses and his shipping on the Loire, develops not only into a leader of men but a prince among capitalists, and yet, at every turn of his fortunes, in thought, word, and deed, remains a genuine Celt.

Much the same idea, notwithstanding the difference of its setting forth, was present to another writer, whom Froude may not have known, but who was among the most intimate of Trollope’s comrades of the pen. Charles Lever’s college scapegraces or hard-riding, hard-drinking subalterns have but to leave the old home behind them, and then, as surely as they do so, achieve military or diplomatic fame. The spirited and accurate description of Waterloo in Lever’s most popular novel is but the culminating point of Charles O’Malley’s march from one success to another, since the day on which the Duke of Wellington, then Sir Arthur Wellesley, had embarked at Cork his contingent for the Peninsula. Trollope, indeed, never elaborated this thought as deliberately and circumstantially as was done by Froude in The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, or even as Lever in his short stories and O’Dowd papers. The fact itself, however, had been perceived by Trollope long before it had been put down in his note-book by Froude, who, by the way, lived long enough to take Trollope more seriously than he had at first been disposed to do, and to acknowledge that his breezy or boisterous exterior veiled unsuspected gifts of sagacious insight and accurate inference. Galway was known by Trollope even better than Dublin. Again and again in his smaller pieces are reminders that the most prosperous business houses in Cadiz and Madrid were founded by men who went forth from Connaught to seek their fortunes in the sunniest South, and whose descendants still kept a hold on the concerns founded by their sires.

Once he had fairly settled down to his Irish work, Trollope’s manner took on the official veneer which it never afterwards quite lost, but which no more suppressed than it entirely concealed the genuine, genial nature which won him friends thick and fast in the hunting-field and on his daily rounds. There was one social centre, whose owners and whose guests made it a second home for the visitor, and a most instructive school for the study of Irish life and character. Immemorially belonging to successive generations of Gregorys of official rank and great local consideration, Coole Park, near Gort, then had as its master, Trollope’s old Harrow schoolfellow, Sir William Gregory, who lived till 1892, and who had entered Parliament as member for Dublin shortly after Trollope’s Irish course began. Here the novelist found himself in a hotbed of social varieties, and in the heart of a district literally overflowing with the local colour, incidents, and personages enriching his earliest novel. The period was that in which the old picturesque, lawless régime of Sir Jonah Barrington’s memoirs had not been effaced by the modern Anglicising dispensation. In his little park, full of retainers who would have risen as one man to repel any invasion of his ancestral roof, William Gregory lived a patriarchal life simple enough in its ordinary course, but fringed with some of the circumstance proper to a stock rooted in the soil from mythical times. Few visitors of consideration passed any time in Connaught without Coole Park’s hospitable doors opening to them.

The earliest year of Trollope’s Irish residence saw him an habitué of the place, and introduced him to the home life, not only of the local magnates, but of the surrounding peasantry, then generally in the clutches of the “gombeen man,” sometimes a peasant himself, sometimes a shopkeeper or fifth-rate solicitor, who, at usurious rates of interest, used to advance the tenants money to make up their rent. Gregory, if not Trollope, lived to see all this changed, and the “gombeen man’s” occupation taken from him by the fixing of those fair rents which have created a race of peasant proprietors that shrink from no sacrifice to keep their instalments fully paid up. The master of Coole Park shared with his visitor most of his literary, political, and especially classical tastes which had survived the bodily ill-usage of Harrow and Winchester, as well as the subsequent privations of Harrow Weald. Gregory and Trollope had both kept up a trifle of their Greek, as well as a little more of their Latin. They could cap with each other quotations from Virgil or Horace, or the more familiar passages of less known authors. Each of them read the old authors with tolerable ease and therefore with some real enjoyment, not as subjects crammed for examinations, but as literature. Coole Park in these days had declined a good deal from the glories of its social gatherings and of its convivial junketings in the ancestral past. But, to quote Charles Lever, met here among others by Trollope, the Coole Park hosts set a noble example to the whole countryside in not letting the gaieties of their well-appointed roof be interfered with by irregularly paid rents. The declining prosperity of the territorial class, however reluctant Trollope and others may have been to forecast such a prospect, was manifestly destined to result in the legislation actually brought by the year 1849. Of course, when the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849 actually came, Trollope, or those who saw things through the same spectacles as himself, had no good to say about it.

The pauper landlords, who had not the means to put their tenants in the way of doing justice to the land they occupied, were never so personally odious to the tillers of the soil as the new men brought in after 1849. “Down at heels, out at elbows, with no clothes in his wardrobe, and nothing but an overdraft at his bankers, the landlord of whom I saw so much in the early forties was yet in a way the father of his people, and, in his rough, thriftless way, had real care for his tenantry. Heaven protect the Irish tenant from the territorial speculator whom the Encumbered Estates Act could not but instal in his place.” Nothing in its way could be more shrewd or sensible than Trollope’s view of the national results likely to flow from the legislation of 1849. “True,” he said, “these measures will bring fresh capital into the country, but at what a price. The new and improved owners, urged on by their scientific bailiffs, will promptly put up rents all round. The old vicious circle will once again begin with a changed centre, and under fresh conditions. There will be the old poverty. Another land question of a more acute sort will thus have been prepared for. It will, unless I am greatly mistaken, be managed by agitators of a kind yet unknown who will work the business entirely for their own venal ends.” How far this prediction had its fulfilment was exemplified by Trollope in the last of his Irish novels, The Land Leaguers, left unfinished because of his death. This, however, by the way.

It is enough here to point out that Ireland was the country in which Trollope first showed the literary value of the observant habits that his Post Office work had caused him to pick up and gradually to perfect. The mental alertness and the inquisitorial searching below the surface and behind the scenes for the causes of whatever met his eye were essentially the products of his official training. Their exercise upon the facts and characters of daily life was due to the happy chance that sent him across St. George’s Channel; and his Irish experiences first called into activity all the more important powers that were afterwards to bring him fame and fortune in the Barchester novels.

For the rest, Trollope well repaid the warmth of his Irish welcome by combating the traditional misrepresentation of the Irish character. Racial generalisations, he saw, must always suggest so many exceptions as to be practically worthless. Nations exhibit largely prevalent tendencies rather than fixed and universal traits. To quote from Trollope’s table-talk: “As well call all Welshmen thieves because of the nursery lines about Taffy as pronounce thriftlessness a peculiarly Irish fault on the strength of Samuel Lover’s caricatures in Handy Andy, Lever’s portrait of an Irish dragoon, or the casual impressions of a holiday trip in Kerry and Connemara.” So far back as 1780, Arthur Young, in his Tour in Ireland, had touched on the fallacies besetting the popular conception of the tendencies and aptitudes specially distinctive of the exceedingly mixed races that inhabited the country. During the nineteenth century, however, Trollope, among Englishmen, was the earliest observer and writer to bring the same truth out in prominent relief, and so to impress it upon an acute student of his countrymen like Lever as to cause him, in his later stories, to modify his own opinions about the essentially representative features of his Irish types. A clever Dublin lady, under whose eye Trollope made his earliest Irish observations, told me his close looking into the commonest objects of daily life always reminded her of a woman in a shop examining the materials for a new dress. He could therefore not fail to have been struck, while on his official rounds, by the frequent signs in the local physiognomy and temperament in Galway and, indeed, throughout all Connemara, of a Jewish as well as Spanish strain largely mingled with the aboriginal Celtic.