All these things are well known to the Archdeacon, with whom, as the representative of Anglican orthodoxy in its most attractive form, Trollope makes it plain enough what his own sympathies are. Who, our author asks, would not feel charity for a prebendary, when walking the quiet length of that long aisle at Winchester, looking at those decent houses, at that trim grass plat, and feeling the solemn, orderly comfort of the spot? Or who could be hard upon a dean, while wandering about the sweet close of Hereford, and owning that here solemn tower and storied window are all in unison and all perfect? Again, who could lie basking in the halls of Salisbury, gaze on Jewel’s Library, and on that unequalled spire, without feeling that bishops should sometimes be rich? Looking upon this pleasant scene almost with a proprietorial interest, the Archdeacon had answered his father-in-law’s question, Why shouldn’t they petition? with a brazen echo of the inquiring words and a remark that he would like to say something to them altogether, and let them know why they shouldn’t.
Poor Mr. Harding is equally terror-stricken at this first threat of what is coming, and at his relative’s later insistence on the Warden’s company upon the occasion. And now the eventful afternoon has come; the hour has struck. See the Archdeacon as, in Trollope’s picture, he stands up to make his speech. Erect in the middle of that little square, he looked like an ecclesiastical statue placed there as a fitting illustration of the Church militant here on earth; his shovel-hat, large, new, and well pronounced, a Churchman’s hat in every inch, declared the profession as plainly as does the Quaker’s broad brim; his heavy eyebrow, large, open eyes, full mouth and chin, expressed the solidity of his order; the broad chest, amply covered with fine cloth, told how well-to-do was its estate. One hand ensconced within his pocket, he evinced the stubborn hold which our mother Church keeps on her temporal possessions. The other loose for action, was ready to fight, if need be, in her defence. Below these the decorous breeches and neat black gaiters, showing so admirably that well-turned leg, betokened the grace, the decency, the outward beauty of our church establishment. Thus much for the orator.[11] The speech that follows, read at full length in the original text, will be admitted to justify every word said about this episode here. It is also to be noticed that, within less than ten years of his earliest essay in fiction, Trollope had touched the high-water mark of his literary excellence. As regards terseness and picturesqueness combined, he never afterwards described any scene with more power and felicity than Dr. Grantly’s address to the insurgent almsmen, and his father-in-law’s inward misery while he is compelled to stand by and listen.
Greater writers than Trollope have failed always to be sure of doing their best work, as indeed they have themselves been the first to admit. “I consider,” said Murray to Byron, “about half of your Don Juan to be first-rate.” Disclaiming that measure of praise, the poet continued: “Were it as you say, I should have surpassed Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare; for about which of these can it be said that half of his work was up to the highest level of his power?” If throughout the rest of The Warden, and in its Barchester successors, Trollope had kept up the concentration of thought, the close packing of graphic phrase, and the general exercise of brain-power at the same point as in the specimens now given, he might have left behind him portraits scarcely less instinct with immortality than David Copperfield, Micawber, Steerforth, Uriah Heep, or, passing to the rival of him who created these, Arthur Pendennis, Clive, Ethel, and Colonel Newcome. Even as it is, the succession of works beginning with The Warden, ending with The Last Chronicle of Barset, and taking just twelve years for their production, will bear comparison with all but the masterpieces of Trollope’s greatest contemporaries. They will, that is, find a place only a little below The Newcomes and Our Mutual Friend or George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Among the fathers of English fiction, Trollope ranks with Richardson for novelty of ideas and genuine originality of characters. His portraits may exaggerate personal features, but the more important of his creations are met with in his pages for the first time. Good or bad, excellent or mediocre, his Barchester men, women, and children are in all their lineaments his own.
Among those figuring in Messrs. Longmans’ authors’ list during the fifties was the Rev. James Pycroft, author of The Cricket Field, as well as one or two stories. Pycroft’s opinion was justly valued and sometimes asked by William Longman. Apropos of The Warden, soon after its publication Pycroft said to Longman: “Here at least you are breaking new ground. Novels of adventure, of naval or military life, and of politics by Plumer Ward’s successor Benjamin Disraeli, must be at a discount. But the domestic economy of the Church, as it is sketched here, is absolutely virgin soil. Let your new author stick to that; so will he add to your wealth and, if he have staying power, build up his own fame.” That judgment of a clerical and literary expert, duly conveyed by the verdict of the publisher to the author, was followed in 1858 by The Athenæum calling The Warden a clever, spirited, sketchy story, upon the difficulties surrounding that vexed question, the administration of charitable trusts. Here was enough encouragement for Trollope to write, and for Longman to publish, Barchester Towers; for that, the author did not go more out of his way specially to make any clerical studies than for The Warden. He had, to quote his own words to the present writer, “seen a certain amount of clergymen on my Post Office tours, just as I had seen them before at Harrow or Winchester; I think too I may have inherited some of my good mother’s antipathies towards a certain clerical school. But if I have shown any particular knowledge of or insight into clerical life, it has been evolved from knowledge of the world in general, varied experience, real hard study, and a serious course of self-culture. And, I most emphatically add, not from special intimacy with one, or indeed any, cathedral precinct and its personages. Take my Barchester. Here and there may be detected a touch of Salisbury, sometimes perhaps of Winchester. But what I am conscious of having depicted is the Platonic idea ([Greek: idea]) of a cathedral town; after all,” he added, “in clerical nature of either sex there is a great deal of human nature. Humanity varies infinitely in its outer garb; its inward heart is much about the same everywhere. Aproned prelates and gaitered deans, with their domestic belongings, are much as the middle-aged gentlemen who are the heads of purely secular households. Is there as close a family likeness between my different Barchester books as there used to be between the successive instalments of The Naggletons in Punch; and is Mrs. Proudie more ecclesiastical because she possesses to an usual degree the petticoated intermeddler’s capacity of making her husband’s life a burden to him? Dickens gibbeted cant in the person of Dissenters, of whom I never knew anything. I have done so in Mr. Slope, an Anglican, but the unbeneficed descendant of my mother’s Vicar of Wrexhill.”
The twelve years separating The Warden from The Last Chronicle of Barset produced fifteen novels. Of these, six were variations on the Barchester theme, nine placed the reader among scenes and persons entirely new. Among the characters thus introduced to the public were some who soon became as real as their author, and whose names to-day are at least as familiar as his own. Trollope was often accused of exaggeration in the case of his Barchester folk. He met the charge in this way. “If you look at them as likenesses of persons seen in the everyday life of cathedral towns, or in their little ecclesiastical worlds elsewhere, it may be so. But from my point of view their ecclesiastical setting is merely an accident. Take them for what I meant them—typical actors and actresses in the comedy of life on the domestic and provincial stage—where am I guilty of extravagance or caricature? Cucullus non facit monachum. A man may wear a black coat and white choker, and clothe his nether limbs in priestly gear, without losing his idiosyncrasies as a human being. As Sam Slick said, there is a great deal of nature in human nature; even, he might have added, among the clerical class. I costumed and styled my people ecclesiastically for the sake of novelty. Beyond that I never intended my clerical portraiture to go.”
While making his studies and arranging his materials for the stories of English life that will bear comparison with Jane Austen, he did a good deal of reading, chiefly with a view of generally equipping himself for magazine and perhaps even newspaper writing. At the great world show in Hyde Park of 1851 he humorously proposed to exhibit four three-volume novels, all failures, but together furnishing a conclusive proof of industry. That was before the one-volume success of The Warden. The triumphant discovery of the line in which he could command success did not dispel some misgivings as to the dropped stitches and the blank places in his education. These weak points must be seen to without delay. So he sets his mother and his brother Tom certain pieces of research work to do. First they were to hunt up thirteen names, not biblical, of personal forces in the world’s history, beings of unquestionable genius—great men, great women, great captains, and great rebels. With the exception of the relatives now mentioned, Trollope certainly never requisitioned friend or kinsfolk in this way. Throughout his life he had two fears: first, lest he should write himself out; secondly, lest the intellectual nourishment he took in should be unequal to the creative effort of pen that he put forth. Hence, whether in Ireland, in Essex, or in London, he always had a regular supply of books from Mudie’s. These, if he did not look into them, he expected his wife, his niece, or some other member of his home circle to read and to talk about to him. But in England, as in Ireland, it was the Post Office servant who made the novelist.
While that process was going forward I first became known to Anthony Trollope. Living, as a child, with my parents at Budleigh Salterton in South Devon, I found one day the morning’s lessons interrupted by the announcement that a strange gentleman who seemed in a hurry desired to see my father at once. The visitor, then on his Post Office rounds in the west, and known as the author of The Warden, and the visited had not seen each other since the days when they were schoolboys at Winchester together. The stranger, I can just recollect, as I watched him at our midday dinner, seemingly added to his naturally large dimensions by a shaggy overcoat, or it may have been a large, double-breasted pea-jacket, making him look like one of those sea-captains about whom in the fifties we used to hear a great deal on the Devonshire coast. Penny postage, with all its intended benefits, was then, it must be remembered, on its trial. Every corner of the western counties had been, or at the time referred to was being, travelled over by Trollope for the purpose of ensuring the regular delivery of letters throughout the kingdom, of inquiring into all complaints, with a view of investigating the circumstances and removing the cause. This official pilgrimage was for two reasons a landmark in Trollope’s course, literary and official. It gave him all that he wanted in the way of human varieties for peopling not only the pages of The Warden but, in their earlier portions, of the other Barchester books. Secondly, it enabled him to show that the public department he had entered as a youth of nineteen had now no more active, alert, and resourceful servant than himself. He had for some time reported the usefulness of roadside letter-boxes in France, and advised their being tried in England. His proposal was experimentally adopted. On his suggestion of the exact spot for the purpose, the first pillar-box was erected at St. Heliers, Jersey, in 1853.
Four years after having created that monument of his official zeal and skill, he improved on his success with The Warden by the appearance, in 1857, of Barchester Towers. On the additions made by this new story to the group first seen in The Warden, it is needless here to dwell. Mr. Slope again illustrates Trollope’s hereditary dislike of the average evangelical clergyman. As for Slope’s patroness, Mrs. Proudie, Trollope’s apology for her may be given here in his own words. These were first addressed to the already mentioned James Pycroft, William Longman’s friend. “Before you put her down as a freak of fancy, let me ask you one question. Review the spiritual lords and their better halves such as you have known, and tell me whether it is the bishop or the bishop’s wife who always takes the lead in magnifying the episcopal office? If you and I live long enough, we shall see an indefinite extension of the movement that has already created new sees in Manchester and Ripon. In the larger and older sees there will be a cry that the diocesan work is too heavy for one man; then will come the demand for the revival of suffragan bishops. You now speak about the higher and lower order of the clergy; you will then have a superior and inferior class of prelates. If at some great country-house gathering there happen to be a full-grown wearer of the mitre and his episcopal assistant, you may expect to hear the hostess debating whether the suffragan should have his seat at the dinner-table when the guests sit down, or whether his chief might not prefer that he should come in afterwards with the children and the governess to dessert. He, good easy man, may take it all meekly enough, but not so his lady. When the suffragans are multiplied, human nature will undergo some great revolution if the suffraganesses do not contain a good many who are as fussy, as officious, as domineering, and ill-bred as my chatelaine of the Barchester palace.”
“Boy, help me on with my coat.” Those were the only words I can recollect Trollope addressing to me on the occasion just described. It was not until the earliest years of my London work, that I heard his voice again. He had then settled in or near London, and had vouchsafed me the beginnings of an acquaintance which a little later was to grow into an intimacy ended only by his death. During the seventies, my occupations took me a great deal about different parts of the United Kingdom. One November day, at Euston Station, he entered the compartment of the train in which I was already seated, on some journey due north. Just recognising me, he began to talk cheerily enough for some little time; then, putting on a huge fur cap, part of which fell down over his shoulders, he suddenly asked: “Do you ever sleep when you are travelling? I always do”; and forthwith, suiting the action to the word, sank into that kind of snore compared by Carlyle to a Chaldean trumpet in the new moon. Rousing himself up as we entered Grantham, or Preston, Station, he next inquired: “Do you ever write when you are travelling?” “No.” “I always do.” Quick as thought out came the tablet and the pencil, and the process of putting words on paper continued without a break till the point was reached at which, his journey done, he left the carriage.
Several years later, when recalling this meeting, he told me that during this journey he had added a couple of chapters to a serial story. Ever since he had first turned novelist in Ireland, he had found himself too busy with Post Office work to do much in the day, too tired and sleepy for anything like a long spell of labour at night. He recollected having heard Sir Charles Trevelyan speak of the intellectual freshness and capacity for prolonged exertion felt by him when, having gone to bed an hour or so before midnight, he woke up as long after. “Never,” said Sir Charles, “did my brain seem clearer or stronger, and the work of minute writing easier or better done than when, indisposed to sleep, I went through my papers, often in the quiet which precedes the dawn.” The suggestion was no sooner made than followed. At first Trollope exactly imitated Trevelyan, and, after a short nap, worked for an hour or two, and then composed himself to slumber again. By degrees he made the experiment of taking as much sleep as he could by 5.30 A.M. Then, if he did not wake of his own accord, he was called, in his early days by his old Irish groom, afterwards by another servant. Coffee and bread and butter were brought to him in his dressing-room. Then came the daily task of pen he had set himself. This accomplished, if in London he mounted his horse for never less than a good half-hour’s ride in Hyde Park before sitting down to the family breakfast as nearly as possible at eleven. That left him with a comfortable sense of necessary duty fulfilled, and the whole day lay before him for pleasure or business, his chief afternoon amusement being a rubber at the Garrick.