CHAPTER VII
ON AND OFF DUTY ROUND THE WORLD
Chafing in harness—“Agin the Government”—The Three Clerks—A visit to Mrs. Trollope—Florentine visitors of note in letters and art—A widened circle of famous friends—Diamond cut diamond—Trollope’s new sphere of activity—In Egypt as G.P.O. ambassador—Success of his mission—Doctor Thorne—Homeward bound—Post and pen work by the way—North and south—The West Indies and the Spanish Main—Carlyle’s praise of it—Castle Richmond and some contemporary novels—An early instance of Thackeray’s influence over Trollope’s writings—Famous editors and publishers—The flowing tide of fortune.
THE high-class Civil Service official is opposed to change. Trollope’s constitutional conservatism shows itself in his sympathetic and approving tolerance of those parts and personages in the ecclesiastical polity generally held to call more than others for the reformer’s pruning-knife. At the Post Office, towards the public, and the juniors of his department, a martinet, Trollope never outgrew something of the rebel’s readiness, on the slightest provocation, to rise against the powers that be. His feud with Rowland Hill had become, during the later years of Hill’s secretaryship, the talk of the office. During something like a quarter of a century, in divers capacities and in many different parts of the world, he had proved his strenuous, varied, self-sacrificing loyalty to the public service. Yet uniform zeal for his work did not prevent him from sometimes measuring swords with his chiefs. It was The Three Clerks, published in 1858, which, rather than any of the socio-clerical stories, first commended Trollope to Thackeray as a story-teller. What specially attracted Thackeray to this novel was its Katie Woodward, the best specimen of an English girl which the author had yet drawn. The leading incidents passed for a satire upon the scheme of competitive examinations then advocated chiefly by Sir Charles Trevelyan, the undoubted Sir Gregory Hardlines of the story. This element of caricature, and the outspoken criticism of the highest magnates, had already roused much official and personal wrath, when the novelist crowned his offence by orally preaching to the rank and file the duty of a stout stand against the attack by the ruling powers not only on their clerkly rights but their privileges as Englishmen.
At this time the Civil Service had not become a free profession. In one of the great rooms of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Trollope collected and told malcontents of the place that it was their duty to agitate till, outside office-hours and in all personal relationships, they were as much their own masters as if they had nothing to do with State employ. Mr. Secretary Rowland Hill was at once up in arms. The firebrand who had thus tried to inflame the worst passions of the Queen’s servants ought, he declared openly, to be dismissed. These words, and the incidents which had led up to them, eventually reached the Postmaster-General, then the second Lord Colchester, a member of the Derby Government. The inflammatory speaker was therefore sent for by the Minister, and told that the authorities of the department were anxious to be relieved of his services. “Is your lordship,” meekly asked Trollope, “prepared to dismiss me?” In reply Lord Colchester, who, with his father’s Eldonian Toryism, combined a certain sense of humour that his father did not possess, smiling oracularly, deprecated any recourse to extremities. From that portion of his long duel with Rowland Hill, Trollope consequently came forth with flying colours.
After such a triumph over his chief adversary, he thought he might allow himself a little holiday. His mother still lived at Florence. This town, though not becoming the national capital till 1864, had long been among the most cosmopolitan, interesting, and pleasant of social centres in Europe. Many of the names best known in Anglo-Saxon letters and art on both sides of the Atlantic were habitual visitors or occasional residents. England had its representatives in Elizabeth and Robert Browning, at their beautiful villa, Casa Guidi, its outside a thicket of flowers whose fragrance could be scented from afar, its interior a jungle of carpets and tapestry such as Clytemnestra might have bade her lord to tread on his return from Troy. Among other notable figures were E. C. Grenville Murray, of whom more will be said hereafter, and Charles Lever, then recently appointed vice-consul at Spezzia. In 1867 Lever became consul at Trieste, but neither his earlier nor his later office prevented his constant reappearance among those acquaintances on the Arno with whom, almost up to the time of his death in 1872, he appears specially at home and at his best in or out of his native Dublin.
One memorable experience Anthony Trollope brought away from his visit to his mother at Florence. She took him to see Walter Savage Landor at Fiesole. Their host some years earlier had appeared in Bleak House as Boythorn, greatly, as was said, to his own indignation. As a fact, none received more pleasure from the sketch than Landor himself. “Dickens,” he said to young Trollope, “never did anything more life-like than when he portrayed my superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness.” He then told his visitors on no account to miss reading two works which he had recently taken up, and had indeed to some extent rediscovered. One of these was Hope’s Anastasius; the other was the work[12] by which Trelawny had made his name, just a generation before Byronic associations widened his notoriety, largely developed his anecdotal vein, and qualified him for sitting to Thackeray for the portrait of Captain Sumphington. Of other famous Anglo-Florentines Trollope saw much not only then, but afterwards. For the Bleak House incident just described, exactly as I heard it from them, I am indebted to two of these, the future Lord Houghton, then Monckton Milnes, and Edward Smythe Pigott, who died, on the eve of the twentieth century, dramatic censor, but at the time now looked back upon was a brilliant young man of an old Somerset stock and of some fortune, just plunging into literature and journalism. The acquaintance thus begun gradually ripened into a lifelong intimacy. This gave Pigott the distinction of being one among the very few who can have been almost simultaneously consulted, by two nineteenth-century novelists so well known as Anthony Trollope and George Eliot, about developments of plot and character in at least two stories by each of these writers that eventually appeared about the same time.
Through some of those already mentioned, Trollope made two interesting additions to his acquaintances, either of which would have sufficed to make his stay in Florence a thing to be remembered. One of these was R. C. Trench, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, then on his Italian travels; the other was Frederick Leveson-Gower, the late Lord Granville’s brother, to whom he became subsequently indebted for much of his insight into parliamentary and party matters, all utilised by him to the full in his later political novels. Among the brethren of the brush on pilgrimage to the capital of Italian art, J. E. Millais, long afterwards to become Trollope’s friend and illustrator, was in Florence during Trollope’s visit, but did not meet him then. Frederick Leighton and G. F. Watts, however, were both for the first time seen by Trollope more than once during a foreign trip, marking a distinct stage in his intellectual growth. Watts at this time was a painter of established renown, having executed his Westminster Hall cartoon of Caractacus in 1843. Leighton had made his mark more recently, though it was on another Italian trip some years before Trollope saw him that he had gathered local colour and inspiration for his great picture of “Cimabue’s Madonna carried in procession through the streets of Florence,” and bought by Queen Victoria in 1855.
In Florence too, when Trollope first saw it, were also other men of mark and interest, with whom the acquaintance, then first made, grew afterwards in England to familiar friendship. The first and only Lord Glenesk, at that time Algernon Borthwick, proposed Trollope for the English Club. When the two men dined there for the first time together, they were joined by another famous Anglo-Tuscan, the then renowned correspondent of The Morning Post, James Montgomery Stuart, always full of good stories, especially about the twin literary leaders and rivals at the time, Carlyle and Macaulay. One was to the following effect: Sixteen years after its publication in The Edinburgh, Carlyle’s Frederick the Great wiped out Macaulay’s estimate of the Prussian sovereign. Montgomery Stuart, touching on the subject to Macaulay, whom he knew well, saw his face suddenly crimson. Then came a torrent of invective against Carlyle, whose writings Stuart was told to avoid as so much poison. As a novelist, Trollope had not then gone beneath the surface for the cross-currents and the violent eddies that disturb the waters of matrimonial life. He had a rare opportunity of studying such incidents first hand during his stay under the shadow of Brunelleschi’s Duomo; for the place then was known by the French as pre-eminently the city of les femmes galantes, and was already not less notorious than Paris itself as the abode of Anglo-Saxon couples detached, semi-detached, or some time since wholly disunited. The already mentioned Charles Lever, whose habitual absences at Florence from his Spezzia vice-consulate would have cost him his post but for the unfailing entertainment with which his vivacious reports furnished the Foreign Office, was far from being the only old friend from Ireland to repeat on Italian soil the welcome he had given on Irish to the same visitor just a generation earlier. Sir William Gregory of Coole Park, and at least one of the Moyville Vandeleurs, all from time to time shone forth in this pleasantest of Anglo-Italian constellations.
The trip now described so brightened Trollope himself as, in my old friend Pigott’s words, to make him help Charles Lever towards keeping Florence society in good spirits. It sent him back to England with a mind full of fresh ideas and characters for his books. But at this locomotive epoch Trollope was fond of applying to his own circumstances the words of Tristram Shandy’s scullion: “We are here to-day, and there to-morrow.” Before he could settle down to another novel, he was under marching orders again. The truth is St. Martin’s-le-Grand now saw in Trollope not only a capable servant but a seasoned and tactful man of the world, with the wit to turn his cosmopolitan experiences into political as well as literary capital. The service, thought Lord Colchester, still at the head of the department, might as well get out of him, while he was there, all they could. Anthony Trollope therefore found himself told off to the land of the Pharaohs under circumstances that involve some reference to previous Anglo-Egyptian relations. A new Anglo-Egyptian treaty was wanted. The chief Irish surveyor, as Trollope then was, seemed to the rulers of St. Martin’s-le-Grand the proper person to negotiate it. From Dublin, therefore, to London, quick as steam could take him, the G.P.O. ambassador sped. Preoccupied and overcharged with official affairs, he found time in the midst of arrangements for his departure eastward, to plant the new novel which he had just planned, Doctor Thorne, upon a publisher, not however on the new Burlington Street house to which he had already mentioned it. Richard Bentley, having first entertained Trollope’s terms, £400 down, for the book, cried off. The figure, he said, must be reduced by at least one hundred. In the case of the man with whom he had now to deal, it would have been wiser to refuse the manuscript outright than to make any attempt at beating down the author. The novelist at once told Mr. Bentley that, having changed his terms, he need trouble himself to think no more of the matter. The miscarriage of these negotiations was to have consequences more far-reaching than could have been foreseen by Trollope himself. He at once went to Chapman and Hall, then doing their business at 193 Piccadilly. The senior partner, Edward Chapman, agreed to take Doctor Thorne at its writer’s valuation. Thus began a connection noticeable alike in the annals of that publishing house and in the career of Trollope himself.
The time taken by these little matters did not prevent Trollope’s reaching Egypt on the appointed day. On his arrival at Cairo, the first thing that struck Trollope, like most other new-comers to the place, and unfamiliar with oriental sights, was the donkey-boys—who are, or were, to Cairo much what commissionaires are to London—waiting at central points to take messages and letters. Trollope had arranged for himself a little programme of travel in the Near East. He did not therefore propose lingering on the Nile a day longer than his mission absolutely required. One of nineteenth-century Cairo’s social peculiarities noticed by Trollope was the rarity of private or official addresses among native personages. Parcels and papers were left for them at Shepheard’s or some other hotel, and eventually came into their hands when they next happened to be passing that way. The manager of the inn where Trollope put up, in reply to a question about the residence or office of the Pasha’s minister with whom the visitor’s business lay, assured him that anything left at the hotel bureau could not fail to be placed before him. This did not at all accord with Trollope’s ideas. He insisted on sallying forth at once with all the documents; he had already ascertained in what direction he might encounter or at least hear of the official whom he wanted. Approaching the first donkey-boy visible in the street, he flung himself into the saddle and rode off on his errand. The desired individual, however, remained for the present out of sight.