The figures gathered round the leading personages in this twin drama illustrate the closeness with which Trollope studied every phase of Irish life. They are as racy of the soil as Charles Lever himself. Their truth and freshness indeed so much impressed Lever that they suggested to him the new variety of Irish character to be met with in his latest writings. The Irish squire who lives more by his wits than his land, Walter Blake, might indeed, had he wanted such inspiration, have supplied the germ of Dudley Sewell in Sir Brook Fossbrooke, and the other products of the post-Lorrequer period. An effeminate, slightly made man of about thirty, good-looking, gentlemanlike, with a cold, quiet, grey eye, and a thin lip, infallible on racing matters, riding boldly good horses, always drinking the very best claret that Dublin could procure, a finished gambler, who makes his six hundred a year, as to style of life, do the work of as many thousands. Here is a description entirely in the later Leverian style, and with the Leverian ring in the words of the well-bred, sporting adventurer, who plays his own game with such an entire absence of scruple, and with such polished serenity, that his friend Frank Ballindine has to thank some of Dot Blake’s remarks to Lord Cashel for the temporary rupture of his engagement with Fanny Wyndham. Lever’s first profession was medicine. How well Trollope understood its Irish representatives may be seen from his sketch of Doctor Colligan, who, attending Anty Lynch in the illness brought on by her brother’s brutality, resents, by knocking him down, a hint from Barry that he would make it worth the physician’s while to contrive the patient’s death. Of special interest, in view of what Trollope’s next novel was to be, is the Anglican clergyman on the Ballindine property, George Armstrong, whose life is a battle with tradesmen and tithe-payers, but who, though on one occasion Frank Ballindine has to supply him with a suit of clothes before despatching him on some errand to his lady-love, can always enjoy a good dinner when he gets one, and pilots his sorry hunter so cleverly as generally to be in at the death when out with hounds.
CHAPTER V
COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE AND ITS LITERARY FRUITS
Trollope’s Examiner articles—Opposing religious experiences of boyhood and early manhood—Moulding influences of his Irish life—The cosmopolitan in the making—Interest in France and the French—La Vendée—Trollope’s relation to other English writers on the French Revolution—The moving spirits of the Vendean insurrection—Peasant royalist enthusiasm—Opening of the campaign—The Chouans of fact and fiction—A republican portrait-gallery—Barère—Santerre—Westerman—Robespierre—Eleanor Duplay.
AT the time of their first appearance the two Irish novels just described were commercial and literary failures. They preceded, however, even if they did not help to bring about, a turn for good in their author’s fortunes. It was indeed only after the full establishment of Trollope’s reputation that both The Macdermots and The Kellys and the O’Kellys were shown by the reflected light of success to abound in promise. The discovery might have been made earlier had not the books long remained practically unknown. However, Dickens’ friend and biographer, John Forster, then the most formidable critic and exacting editor on the London Press, thought sufficiently well of Trollope’s work to commission from him for The Examiner certain articles about the districts chiefly affected by the successive ravages of plague and famine in 1847. The broken fences, the deserted farms, and the monotonously endless stretches of misery and destitution in Trollope’s Post Office district, including Cork, Kerry, and Clare, were soon to be further disfigured by sights more terrible. Starvation did but prepare the way for the most hideous forms of new and ghastly disease.
Sufferers soon found their skins tight drawn, like a drum, to the face, and covered with small light hairs, as of those on a gooseberry. The poor wretches thus plague-stricken, having no longer roofs to shelter them, were huddled together in wigwams pitched under park walls, with no other food than that which the charity of the owners of these demesnes supplied. Conspicuous among the landlords who answered these appeals were Lord Dunkellin and Edmund O’Flaherty of Knockbane, near Galway. Out of all this misery, the political agitators, largely imported from the other side of the Atlantic, had begun in 1846 to make capital. This was their way of drawing Ireland into the subversive vortex which had already sucked in nearly the whole European continent. The appeal of the sedition mongers seemed to Trollope a failure, or at best but partially and superficially successful. As to the general condition in 1848, he told The Examiner that it was not a revolutionary year, at least for Ireland. They talked about rows. But these, he said, existed only in newspaper columns. From Portrush to Waterford, and from Connemara to Dublin, there would be found no trace of any widespread, popular plan for converting peasant occupiers into sovereign proprietors. No one realised more fully than the Connaught crofter the folly and futility of the talk about abolishing the difference between employers and employed. In England, wrote Trollope, there was too much intelligence to look for any general improvement on a sudden. In Ireland there was too little intelligence to look for any improvement at all.
The English Government, now under Sir Robert Peel, had taken the first step towards relieving Irish distress by freeing the ports for the admission of foreign grain in 1846. Trollope himself had seen the universal alleviation following the arrival of Indian corn for the starving people. Next, Lord John Russell, as Prime Minister in 1847, instituted relief-works to help the unemployed masses. These measures were attacked from two different quarters. Among the Irish peasantry some complained of not being fed absolutely for nothing. The landed classes were disposed to doubt the necessity of any State interference at all. But in his third Irish novel, Castle Richmond (1860), dealing with the famine period, Trollope himself testified to the alacrity shown by the territorial class in co-operating with the State. And Trollope was likely to be an impartial judge. His personal sympathies were not then with the Whigs. The English public man with whom he was chiefly in communication, the philanthropic Lord Shaftesbury, having served under Wellington and Peel, passed for a Conservative. The main points of his Examiner articles have been already given. The whole little series formed an answer to the charges against ministers brought by their censors, alike in Press and Parliament. The seven years he had passed on the other side of St. George’s Channel had indeed been turned to such good account as to make him an authority on Irish affairs in their then most prominent aspect.
Meanwhile, by the personal intercourse of society, or by instructive and inspiring correspondence with useful friends, Trollope had improved his acquaintance with men, manners, and things in a way that was afterwards to bear literary fruit. Between 1846 and 1850, his mother still lived at Florence, and though Anthony did not actually visit Florence till 1853, he and Mrs. Trollope, during those years, held regular and copious communication with each other through the post. In this way many pleasant glimpses are caught of diverse personalities famous, or at least interesting. There is F. W. Faber, first met at Mr. Sloane’s, the wealthy Anglo-Florentine, who gave the church of Santa Croce its new front. To Faber, Trollope was apparently first attracted by his having been the most brilliant Harrovian of his time. This acquaintanceship at once deeply interested Mrs. Trollope, and was to have a lasting effect upon her son. His first religious lessons may have been those in the Church catechism. He had then been taken in spiritual charge by Cunningham, the evangelical vicar of Harrow, caricatured, it was generally believed, in Mrs. Trollope’s Vicar of Wrexhill. To that divine he did his best in the way of listening as a duty, but the copious interspersion of casual conversation by him and other Low Church teachers with scriptural tags and devout ejaculations first made Trollope secretly think he was talking nonsense. In this way the youthful Anthony imbibed a sceptical disgust for the social ways and religious tenets of all that school. Filled with these prejudices, he came under a spiritual influence very different from any of which so far he had any experience.
His Winchester days had closed with missing New College. A little later he found himself hopelessly beaten for a small entrance scholarship on a minor foundation at Cambridge. To both Universities he made several short visits. At Oxford he heard the future Cardinal Newman preach from the pulpit of St. Mary’s. The effect of those sermons was deepened by many conversations with the preacher, and afterwards with the already mentioned F. W. Faber, whose personal charm was felt as strongly by Anthony as it had been by his mother, through whom indeed the son first knew that accomplished divine and poet, both in his Anglican and his Roman stage. Not indeed that Anthony Trollope was ever near to becoming a partisan of either side. Still at the outset his sympathies were, as afterwards, inclined towards the moderate, lettered, and generally accomplished members of the High Church party. As a boy, while with his parents abroad, he had seen and liked the home life of Roman Catholics. During the interval that separated his Irish stories from his third novel, he turned to good account the opportunities provided him by his mother for improving his knowledge of continental institutions, secular or religious, and the personal types they tended to produce. At each fresh point of his literary evolution Trollope’s industry in some degree took on the colour of the surroundings amid which it was exercised. The earlier of his Irish books grew out of his Post Office work in the “Isle of Saints.” Between 1848 and 1850, his cosmopolitan training had begun, and indeed advanced some way. Some years later his Tales of All Countries was to form a memorial of his experiences as a citizen of the world. Before these, came La Vendée. That novel, if written at all, would have been written probably in a very different manner but for the recent widening in his social, religious, and political horizons.
Trollope had been born amid the world-wide ferment of the ground swell following the great national convulsion in France with which the eighteenth century closed. Those commotions had seemed the more real and recent to his childhood from the constant conversational references to them as portending what England herself might expect. He had heard stories of the privations and hair-breadth escapes experienced by refugees from the reign of terror when struggling to place the Straits of Dover between themselves and their oppressors of the first French republic. In those parts of England from the first, at least by name familiar to him, he had seen the country houses where the royalist émigrés had found an asylum more than once during the years between the murder of the French king and the Vienna Congress. He had heard English prejudice describe French loyalty to the old régime as a mere pose, and Protestant prejudice refuse to see anything that was worthy the name of “true religion and undefiled” in the teachings of the Popish priesthood or in the daily life of their most loyal devotees. His more recent intercourse with men like Faber and Newman had, without leading him to a spiritual crisis, caused him to review and recast his religious conceptions. He had been taught as a boy to turn his back on all pre-Reformation doctrines and rites. His own experiences had now more than reconciled him to the working of the papal system in Ireland. On the whole he had found the Irish Roman Catholic priests kindly and far from bigoted men, honestly anxious to do their duty towards their flock, as well as towards the official representatives of that Protestant ascendency which in their heart they were bound to detest. Neither had Trollope, always open though his keen eyes were, known many authentic cases of priestly greed, intrigue, intolerance, or proselytism. The conventional charges, in fact, made by evangelicals against the hierarchy and officials of a foreign Church could from Trollope’s own experience be disproved. The mere fact of such accusations being brought deepened his distrust and dislike of Low Churchism and all its ways.
Possessed by such a spirit of reaction from the popular Calvinism which his mother had lashed in The Vicar of Wrexhill, he sat down, after The Kellys and the O’Kellys, to his third novel, La Vendée. By that time half a century had passed since the issues and methods of the French Revolutionaries, which destroyed Burke’s friendship with Fox, had left Whiggism in a state of intestine feud. An impulse such as had urged Coleridge and Southey into the Tory camp produced in Trollope a desire to write a story showing the French royalists in politics at their best, and the reasonableness of their religion as one by which to live and die. His public school associations had been genuine Wykehamist—that is to say, high Tory in Church and State. As a boy of fifteen he had heard of the “three days” which, on July 27, 1830, sent the last of the Bourbons, Charles X, from his French throne across the English Channel. At the age of thirty-three, while, as has been seen, going his Post Office rounds through Connaught, he had watched the progress of the second French Revolution of the nineteenth century. He might have been presented in his British asylum to the lately arrived “Mr. Smith,” who was none other than the Louis Philippe formerly, with the results already described, visited in his palace by Trollope’s mother. Hodie tibi, cras mihi, while La Vendée was in course of preparation for the press, English Tories and many who were not Tories had persuaded themselves that reform in politics, dissent in religion, and the progressive removal of ancient landmarks in Church or State would gradually bring this country under the same pernicious influences as those which had unsettled and devastated the greater part of the world beyond the Dover Straits. In La Vendée Trollope successfully fulfilled the twofold end of flattering conservative sentiment, religious or political, and of breaking comparatively fresh soil, as well as portraying new characters in a period that then seemed almost modern.