Trollope, it has been seen, had entered on his Irish employment with a firm persuasion of being destined to follow the maternal example, and to commence novelist as soon as he had got together enough material for his first chapter. The resolve of devoting himself to fiction gained fresh strength from his early visits, already described, to Coole Park. The beginning there of his acquaintanceship with Charles Lever was in itself to Trollope a literary event. Lever’s earliest novel, Harry Lorrequer, had at that time been recently running through the Dublin University Magazine. With the exception of his mother, the creator of Charles O’Malley was the earliest writer of fiction whom Trollope had ever known. Of Fenimore Cooper he had heard much from his mother, who often saw him in Paris. Walter Scott, it occurred to him, had by his genius thrown the glamour of romance over the Highlands; he who wrote The Last of the Mohicans had rescued the Red Indians from the commonplace. In like manner too the Irish romancist to whom Gregory had made him known had comically idealised the mess-room and parade-ground. Why, in the fullness of time should not Anthony himself find some class of the community from which to extract literary entertainment for readers on the lookout for novelty? Pending that, it would not be waste of time to found a preliminary essay upon the daily doings of the people among whom for the present his lot was cast. Miss Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and The Absentee he had read about the same time as he first pored over the pages of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Then, at the close of the eighteenth century, and before the middle of the nineteenth, had come from various hands many Irish stories racy of the soil with which Trollope first made acquaintance in Gregory’s library.
Mrs. S. C. Hall’s masterpiece, The Whiteboy, did not come before 1845. Long before then, however, she had made hits on both sides of St. George’s Channel with, to name only a few in a long list, The Buccaneer and The Outlaw. Two years Mrs. Hall’s senior, but like her then still living and flourishing, was William Carleton; his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, having first appeared in The Christian Examiner, was republished as a book in 1830. Nine years later appeared Carleton’s longest, most ambitious and, as Trollope found it, really stimulating story, Fardorougha the Miser. So far as Lever himself had been under any obligations to his predecessors, it was rather to the ideas and incidents, than to the personages scattered through Lady Morgan’s vivacious pages. Far the most famous Irish novel of the time was Gerald Griffin’s The Collegians, which owed most of its later fame to its having formed the foundation of the popular Irish melodrama, The Colleen Bawn. The forties were too early for Trollope to meet, at Coole Park or elsewhere, a writer born in 1830, and so exactly fifteen years his junior. This was the now little known, if not entirely forgotten, Charles Joseph Kickham, who, dying in 1882, had lived long enough, as the writer of Sally Cavanagh, or The Untenanted Graves, and Knocknagow, or The House of Tipperary, to be acclaimed the Irish Dickens. None of the writers nor their books now mentioned proved so useful to Trollope as one or two from William Carleton’s pen. The first of these was a volume that had followed Fardorougha the Miser in 1839, and that, under the title of Tales of Ireland, was always compared by Trollope to Dean Ramsay’s Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character. Three more of Carleton’s books completed Anthony Trollope’s literary training for the work of an Irish novelist. These were Valentine M‘Clutchy, the Irish Agent, The Tithe Procter, and The Squanders of Castle Squander.
Going to Ireland as a bachelor, Anthony Trollope had been naturally expected, by the public opinion of the localities where he became known, to find a wife among its residents. It was indeed on Irish soil, at a well-known seaside resort, that he first met the lady to whom he in 1842 became engaged, and who in 1844 took his name. Her home, however, was in Yorkshire, at Rotherham, near Sheffield, where her father, Mr. Heseltine, had the management of a bank. With his marriage closes the earliest instalment of Anthony Trollope’s Irish experiences. He had begun his abode in the country as a man entirely unknown except to the few who had heard of his mother’s books. That did not always prove a recommendation, for from the day of her having found, as was said, in the Harrow clergyman named Cunningham, the Vicar of Wrexhill’s original, Mrs. Trollope had been charged with putting her friends or enemies into her stories. To such an extent was this supposed to be the case that when, several years afterwards, Charles Lever was thrown into her society at Florence, he markedly avoided her, whether as a partner at a whist-table or a next-door neighbour at dinner. Anthony Trollope’s friendship therefore with Lever, so far from originating in his acquaintance with Mrs. Trollope, would have been rather hindered by it, and was indeed a very gradual growth that had not reached maturity even when Trollope’s novels had become at least as popular as those of Lever himself.
But, during the earlier years of his long sojourn amongst them, the Irish classes and masses knew Trollope, not as a writer, but as the impersonation of the severest officialism. Not having gone to a University after school, nor even since his school-days having had time to move in society and assimilate its easier ways, he long combined much of youthful crudity with civilian stiffness. He had, in fact, unconsciously formed his manner upon that of the men who were around him and above him at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. As a companion and conversationalist he lacked the lightness of touch, the elasticity and ease communicated to each other by young men of his station in life, at college, at the club, or in the companionship of travel. At Harrow, none of his school-fellows had done him a better turn than William Gregory, his later friend of Coole Park, by disposing of a rumour, which local invention had not been slow to embroider with more sinister legends, that Trollope’s father was an outlaw. Hence, of course, the discreditable appearance of the boy himself. What an outlaw meant, none of them exactly knew. But the word had an evil sound. Doubtless the person whom it indicated must, by certain misdemeanours, have made himself the enemy of his species. This is the kind of defamatory gossip which pursues its victim long after the incidents that have given rise to the lie are forgotten. Gregory therefore sometimes found occasion for repeating to his Connaught neighbours the contradiction by which he had so signally served his friend at school.
The best idea of Trollope’s sporting life in Ireland during these years is to be gathered, not from any of the rather bald entries in his characteristically honest autobiography, but from certain passages in his book, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, presently to be mentioned. Roscommon county was credited by Trollope with the best gentlemen riders to be met with throughout Ireland.[4] But, in truth, during the forties Trollope could enter no Irish hunting-field without finding himself before a picked tribunal of experts in horseflesh and horsemanship. To these judges his performances in the saddle soon approved themselves. Courage and perseverance he never wanted; he soon acquired notable skill in shaping his course to the point for which quarry and pack were likely to steer. He knew also how to get out of his mount the utmost performance with the least exhaustion. Between himself and the animal he bestrode there existed a real sympathy. Still it was some time before the critics of the covert-side allowed his hands on his horse to be as good as his seat was firm. On the whole, however, he gradually won among sportsmen something like the reputation in the Connaught chase that was afterwards to be secured by his own Phineas Finn for the management of Lord Chiltern’s “Bonebreaker” on the broad pastures and the awkward banks and ditches of Northamptonshire. His taste for the stage made him also a real country-house acquisition when private theatricals were going on.
In the ball-room he showed the same inexhaustible vigour and energy as in the hunting-field. In this way his own feats and accomplishments, to the speedy extension of his visiting-list, justified in all quarters the introductions given him by his friends at Coole Park. Galway has been immemorially pre-eminent among Irish counties for its hospitality. The entertainments of Lord Clancarty at Garbally had secured European fame, before Trollope’s day, for the best known, most cosmopolitan and convivial of its owners—British Ambassador successively at the Hague and at Brussels, as well as for a short time English representative at the Vienna Congress. The Garbally festivities, however, were rather stories of which Trollope had heard than scenes in which he had played a part. His introduction behind the scenes of Irish politics and journalism grew out of no other cause than his intimacy at Coole Park. In 1842 his friend Gregory became Member for Dublin. Had Trollope chosen to do so, he could have said a great deal about this electoral contest, and could have acquainted us with some among the most typical and miscellaneous Irish notabilities of the time. Those in whose company we should have found ourselves would have included Sir John and Lady Burke, a host and hostess of the patrician and joyous old school; their handsome son, about whose wavy golden hair the maidens of his native land went wild; Granby Calcraft, a broken-down Irish swell whom Thackeray had seen and satirised; a gentleman named Nolan, but universally known as “Tom the Devil”; as well as the little group whose members, next to the candidates themselves, were active combatants in the Dublin election. These included two academic clergymen, one Tresham Gregg, the other Professor Butt, both of them Protestant patriots, vying with each other in the strength of their lungs and in the exuberance of their spoken or written rhetoric. The company would have been incomplete had it not included the greatest character of his time, Remy Sheehan, with a figure like a peg-top, but brimful of the finest Irish brains, who reinforced by the pen in his paper and by his speech on the platform the Castle power that promoted Gregory’s triumph, and that was exercised throughout by the Viceroy, Lord de Grey, through his chief secretary, Lord Eliot.
By 1850, though with his literary spurs still to win, Trollope had risen from the surveyor’s clerkship to the position of Post Office inspector. In that capacity he found himself intellectually pitted against the shrewdest and most popular of Irish advocates then living. This encounter of wits ended in a victory for Trollope. At that time, it must be prefaced, Post Office orders were as practically unused as postal notes were unknown. Small sums, when transmitted by post, were sent in coin of the realm. These enclosures occasionally went wrong. Trollope made it part of his duty to rectify, by tracing, these miscarriages. Such a quest he once pursued, after a method of his own, in county Cork. He marked a sovereign, and, carefully wrapping it up in a sheet of notepaper, enclosed it in a stamped envelope, addressed by him to the furthest post-town in the district. Having posted this in the ordinary way, he began his operations. Riding on horseback, he timed himself to reach every stage on the road taken by the vehicle carrying the post-bags, just before the coach or mail-cart came in. At every successive stoppage he practically asserted the right of a Government inspector to search the mail-bags. The process was continued throughout the journey till the stage at which the inspector, looking into the bag, found his letter had been opened, had been re-sealed, and the decoy coin it contained abstracted. His next move was to retrace his way to the village most recently passed through.
The police now conducted the search, and found the marked sovereign in the postmistress’s possession. That lady, a great local favourite as it happened, was placed on her trial shortly afterwards at the Tralee Assizes. Her many friends co-operated to secure for her defence Isaac Butt, then one of the chief counsel on the circuit, afterwards C. S. Parnell’s predecessor in the Home Rule leadership at Westminster. Butt no sooner got Trollope into the witness-box than he began to cross-examine him after the fashion for which he was famous. In this case the barrister’s object was to play upon the inspector’s notoriously choleric sensibilities, to worry him into some contradiction or blunder of testimony, and thus hold him up before the jury as a reckless circulator of libels and sarcasms about Irish things and persons, for the amusement of an English audience. Reading aloud or describing certain passages alleged to have been penned by Trollope concerning Ireland, Butt asked whether a man who wrote thus loosely could be trusted in his assertions about the truth and honesty of others.
Never did the ingenious and ably executed plan of an eminent advocate more completely miscarry. Trollope never once lost his temper or his head. Instead of being bewildered, he remained clear and exact from first to last. Was he, asked Butt, perfectly certain that he had marked in a particular way one side or both sides of the coin? Yes, he was; and with overwhelming politeness he again described, for the benefit of the jury, the secret meaning of the mark he had chosen, and the instrument with which he had made it. At one point, indeed, he showed the faintest sign of hesitation. Just then he remembered that a witty Scotsman in the House of Commons had recently called the Irish members, Isaac Butt among them, “talking potatoes.” The thought of the simile at once smoothed out the frown on Trollope’s face. As a fact, it was a duel between two men not, upon the whole, ill-matched. Butt knew of Trollope’s rasping manner and proneness to passionate explosion. Nothing of that sort showed itself now. The witness maintained his composure unruffled throughout, disarming, as to some extent it seemed, even his legal adversary by his urbane good-humour. The two, however, found the opportunity of exchanging Parthian shots at each other, just before they separated. “Good-morning, triumphant Post Office Inspector,” was Butt’s farewell utterance. Trollope’s amiably satirical, if rather baldly tu quoque rejoinder, was, “Good-morning, triumphant cross-examiner.”