A contrast in all respects to Harry Esmond’s wife, Lady Desmond stands out as the most impressive figure in the last of Trollope’s earlier novels. Her life and heart story personifies a tragic element that, though of a very different sort, marks this book as clearly as it pervades and suffuses The Macdermots. On ne badine pas avec l’amour; Alfred de Musset’s title might really serve as a motto to Trollope’s book. The beautiful girl who, from being nobody, becomes Countess of Desmond, has persuaded, or tried to persuade herself, that the marriage which brings position and title can very well dispense with love. She has no sooner acted on this principle than she finds her mistake; whether as wife or widow, to the last page of the book the misery of her desolation is unrelieved. The decline of the Desmond race, and the lonely house on a bleak moor inhabited by the last Earl’s widow, with her son and daughter, are painted with the same force of delineation as, thirteen years earlier in The Macdermots, had acquainted those able to judge for themselves with the coming of a new novelist of a most uncommon order. Rugged harshness and gloomy power have been recognised above as constituting the dominant note of The Macdermots. Qualities of the same sort contribute to invest with an air of stern melancholy rather than pathos the figure of the widow who reigns at Desmond Court in the sombre house bequeathed by her husband, entirely unrelieved by the performance of those gracious and winning philanthropies, ordained, it would seem, by Providence, by way of solacing the loneliness and lightening the shadows of bereavement. Not the stern, if passionately loving Countess, but her daughter Clara, is the one angel of good works issuing from the three-storeyed, quadrangular, heaven-forsaken old house, rumoured to cover ten acres,[14] to help the young ladies at Richmond Castle, the Miss Fitzgeralds, in the distribution of Indian corn. That was the article of food which, first prepared by Clara Desmond and her friends with their own hands in the public kitchens, had been provided by the Government for mitigating the horrors of general starvation. Castle Richmond contains in Clara Desmond, as a type of pure, winning, picturesque girlhood, a worthy successor to Katie Woodward in The Three Clerks, as well as a fit precursor of the Lucy Robarts about to be introduced in Framley Parsonage.

As regards Trollope’s approaching connection with the house of Smith and Elder and their most famous man of letters, it is worth recalling that, so far back as 1848, Anthony Trollope, like others of the G.P.O. staff, had been up in arms at the rumoured invasion of St. Martin’s-le-Grand by a fresh outsider for an assistant secretaryship. This was none other than Thackeray himself, who had received the actual offer or the promise of the place from Lord Clanricarde. Trollope’s personal associations, therefore, of his subsequent editor and model, were in marked contrast to the loving admiration animating all later references to the man in whom Trollope saw his literary and personal ideal, but in whom, had Thackeray secured the position, he would have found an adversary not less detested than Rowland Hill himself. It was in the October of 1859 that Thackeray, when entering on The Cornhill enterprise, received from Trollope an offer of a selection for the new magazine from his Tales of All Countries. The proposal brought in the shape of reply two letters, both equally satisfactory, since each of them afforded practical proof of the golden opinion, both among writers and publishers, which Trollope had now securely won. Not even excepting George Henry Lewes, no expert in his craft detected literary pretenders more keenly or exposed them more pitilessly than Thackeray. His business colleagues, Smith and Elder, like the Blackwoods and only one or two more of that day, had the gift of discovering sound promise, and of never producing anything but really good work. “Neither John Blackwood nor George Smith,” said Anthony Trollope to me many years later, “let anything worth doing slip through his fingers, rated a manuscript’s value too high or too low, or ever misjudged the humour of the hour and the taste of the public. Nor,” he added, remembering The Warden days, “did, I am bound to say, William Longman either.”

Twelve years before the date now reached, a packet of closely written letter-paper slips from an unknown parsonage on the Yorkshire moors had reached the firm subsequently connected with the author of Vanity Fair. George Smith, the life, soul, and brains of the establishment, lost not a moment in addressing himself to the unknown budget. “From 9 A.M. to noon, afterwards, with scarcely a pause, till the lamps were lighted,” he told Trollope, who told the present writer, “I read on, absorbed in the small, clear calligraphy enshrining such strange, strong thought. Beyond doubt there had fallen into my lap a precious stone of the rarest order. In forming that opinion,” continued Smith to Trollope, “I went entirely by my own judgment, and communicated it to the author the same day.” The consequence was that, in 1847, Smith and Elder brought out Jane Eyre. Its unknown, shrinking writer, who could scarcely be tempted to her publishers’ dinner-table, quietly took her place in the front rank of the English authoresses.

The master-mind of George Smith still ruled the house to which Trollope had introduced himself. Smith at least had carefully read, and was favourably impressed by, Trollope’s fresh and minute insight into provincial life and character, whatever its phases, ecclesiastical indeed first, but almost equally lay. “The man,” he said, “who can draw so well country society in cathedral towns, being himself a rider to hounds, can have nothing to learn from Surtees if he touches it occasionally from the sporting side.” Smith therefore commissioned from Trollope a three-volume novel for £1000, to be run through the new magazine. At the same time, in terms of very exceptional cordiality, Thackeray personally welcomed to his pages the author of The Three Clerks; for Thackeray, while seeing a possible rival to Trollope as a clerical novelist in the creator of Mr. Gilfil and the Rev. Amos Barton, never doubted Trollope’s qualifications for success in fiction whence churchmen and church matters should be banished. The encouraging communication to Trollope from his new editor contained one casual expression so characteristically appropriate to its recipient that in passing it may be mentioned here. Thackeray speaks of Trollope’s having “tossed a good deal about the world.” Just twelve years after this use of that expression, James Anthony Froude put, with a slight difference, the same idea when, a little more picturesquely, he spoke of Trollope as having “banged about the world” more than most people. At the point now reached there rolled to Trollope the tide which, adroitly taken by him as it was at the flood, bore him in life from the fame he had already secured to uninterrupted fortune and wealth. That tide, after, as often happens, a slight falling off of readers on his death, has, within thirty years of that event, been followed by an undoubted revival of his popularity with twentieth-century readers, not less wide and marked than that enjoyed by him in his own age. The new epoch of the varied and industrious career thus opened provides appropriate material for a fresh chapter.

CHAPTER VIII
ESTABLISHMENT IN LONDON

Resettlement in England—Bright prospects for the future—Importance of The Cornhill connection—Framley Parsonage and other novels of clerical life—Some novelists and their illustrators—Trollope’s debt to Millais—The social services of leading lights help him in his historical pictures of the day—Election to the Garrick and Athenæum Clubs—Anthony Trollope as he appeared in 1862—Leading Garrick figures—Thackeray’s social and literary mastery over Trollope—Thackeray, Dickens, and Yates in a Garrick squabble—A divided camp—Trollope on Yates and Yates on Trollope—The origin of the politico-diplomatic Cosmopolitan Club—Informal gatherings—Trollope becomes a member—Some famous “Cosmo” characters—The end of the club—Other clubs frequented by Trollope—The Fielding—The Arundel—The Arts—The Thatched House—The Turf.

THE first effect of Trollope’s connection with The Cornhill Magazine, its editor, and its owners was to make his life more literary and less official than it had so far been. Naturally, therefore, he decided on leaving Ireland as soon as he could, and on establishing himself in London, the one place where he could satisfactorily pursue the career now brought within his reach. Not, indeed, that the prospect opening to him in 1860 included a sudden or a final severance of his connection with a country where he had passed nearly a score of eventful and prosperous years, where he had first discovered his real strength, and where by slow degrees the Post Office hack had transformed himself into the popular man of letters. From the St. Martin’s-le-Grand point of view, he was but exchanging a Post Office surveyorship in Ulster for a like position in the English eastern counties, where he could generally order his movements as suited his interests and tastes.

When in 1841, on his outward journey, he first crossed St. George’s Channel at the age of twenty-six, it was with a mind agitated by morbid discontent for the past, and charged with gloomy misgivings for the future. The process of improvement had indeed been slow and often painful, but it was now complete. The clouds which so long darkened his existence had finally lifted. He no longer brooded over the gloomy retrospect; the path that lay before him was brightened by the hope born of actual achievement. From the country to which, just a quarter of a century ago, he had brought a past of failure, he took back a present of success, and a future of assured fame. The long gallops with the Meath hounds and the Ward staghounds, or the several other packs with which he rode, by quickening his circulation, had strengthened his nerves, and generally placed him in the highest state of physical fitness. With the exhilarating sense of being at home in the saddle, there had come an inspiring confidence in his powers of thought and language. Moreover, his term of Irish and English service combined had been varied by the foreign missions which, as already described, trained his pen to versatility, and brought him fresh credit in new lines of literary performance. All this had helped him so much with his London chiefs as to ensure him the home appointment for which he now applied. The surveyorship of the eastern counties, secured by Trollope after some little difficulty and delay, gave him the chance of keeping up his favourite sport by settling him comfortably in Hertfordshire, at Waltham Cross. Here he was within easy reach of more than one East Anglian pack, as well as the social life of the metropolis in which he had been born, but of which, since his boyhood, he had seen little, and of whose social life he knew nothing.

He had scarcely settled down to the combined parts of State servant, London littérateur, and eastern county fox-hunter, when he followed up his first success of The Warden with a book indicating the greatest stride in the direction of fame and fortune he had yet made. This was Framley Parsonage. The appearance of its first instalment in The Cornhill had been arranged for during one of Trollope’s earlier flights across the Channel before he had resettled himself in England. Among the stories thus far written by its author, it possessed most of actuality in its incidents, as well as of personal charm in its characters. These qualities were due to the fact that the views of life and character, clerical or lay, contained in its pages, were as a whole those of the era to which the book belonged. In 1838 the State had done something towards the restraint of pluralities in the Church. When, therefore, he had finished the book that first made its mark, the Anglicanism of Trollope’s youthful reminiscence was something more than merely threatened. There had indeed actually begun the reform of those ecclesiastical abuses and the curtailment of those privileges whose picturesque aspects on their social and personal side appealed so strongly to Trollope’s conservative and artistic sense, and his sympathies with which show themselves in all his clerical stories long after the old system was not only doomed, but already passing away. The change had begun, it must be remembered, some ten years before the appearance of The Warden. Even then the old Church and State polity was tottering to its fall. By the time Framley Parsonage was running through The Cornhill, it had been practically replaced by the new régime.

The modernised picture of clerical life from the social point of view, taken in Framley Parsonage, distinguishes it not only from anything said on the same subject by Trollope himself before, but from George Eliot’s sketch of the Anglican rector and rectory given in Adam Bede (1859). The Cornhill proprietor and editor had agreed that what they wanted from Trollope was an up-to-date socio-clerical story, depicting the most characteristic features and incidents of upper middle-class English society in provincial districts, dominated to a certain extent by orthodox ecclesiastical and aristocratic or squirearchical influence. These requirements were satisfied to the minutest detail. The rectory, the country house, and the castle, like the inmates of each, described in Framley Parsonage, exactly reflect all that was most distinctive of the sixties, and therefore invest the story with something of the usefulness to the historian of the future possessed by Jane Austen’s novels, or discerned by Lecky and Macaulay in Fielding and Smollett. There was scarcely an English village without a rectory or a house whose occupant might have passed for Lord Lufton or Mark Robarts. One used, indeed, to hear the most circumstantial stories of how Trollope had himself met these characters during his Post Office tours. He had, of course, on these official rounds, so increased in every direction a large and varied acquaintanceship that he had become something of a household word throughout England as a State servant some time before his books lay on every drawing-room table. As for Lucy Robarts, she took the hearts of the vicarage and country-house public by storm, to retain them even after Lily Dale made her bow in The Small House at Allington. Her reputed originals multiplied so rapidly that every neighbourhood soon possessed one of them, to whom the novelist, it was added, had lost his heart before he made her his heroine, and to whom he would have made an offer at a certain country ball had he not unfortunately possessed a wife already.