Fresh from these austere warnings, theoretical and practical, against the enfeebling influences of grace and urbanity of demeanour, Trollope began his official pupillage at St. Martin’s-le-Grand under the Draconic Colonel Maberly, who communicated to most of his juniors his own healthy contempt for mere courtesy of speech and amenity of manner. Moreover, during the early sixties, the social influence insensibly exhaled by a man of Thackeray’s intellectual calibre upon his worshippers resulted in Trollope’s modelling not only his diction but his deportment on him whom he had taken for his social patron as well as literary master. Thackeray, though spoken of by Trollope and others as one of the Garrick fathers, did not, as a fact, come in till 1832. Even thus he was by five years the club senior of Dickens, who joined in 1837. During all Trollope’s earlier time, therefore, without a rival to dispute his claim or to dissent from his ruling, in the frequent absences of Dickens, he pervaded and dominated the place. Dickens, indeed, as an old friend of his mother, welcomed Trollope on his election. Thackeray’s favour it was which admitted Trollope to the set whose central figure was the author of Vanity Fair. Thus, at the beginning of his London course, did circumstances give Trollope a place among those whose bond of union was devotion to Thackeray, and whom loyalty constrained to see personal opponents to themselves in all demurrers to their great master’s ruling.
The leading Thackerayans, and therefore Trollope’s warm partisans, among the early Garrick members, grouped themselves round a Sussex baronet, a figure prominent in the society of his time, as well as filling a position especially conspicuous and authoritative in all cricketing circles, not more in his county, where he had done much to revive the game he liked so much and played so well, than on the committee of the Marylebone Club. Wherever, indeed, manly sports of any kind were popular, there Sir Charles Taylor was a personage. With this rich, clever, sarcastic man about town was Henry de Bathe, who did not inherit the family baronetcy till 1870, but who, at the time now recalled, shared with Taylor the distinction of being a Garrick autocrat. Taylor’s shrewd, bitter social estimates and aphorisms were remembered in the club long after he was forgotten. One of his deliverances, suggested by the accuracy of Whyte-Melville’s social descriptions, had taken the form of a caution to novelists, and was given to me by Trollope, to the following effect: “Would that other writers about society would learn from Melville. Then we should hear less than we do about icing the claret and taking the chill off the champagne.” Trollope abstained from putting Taylor into any of his books. In Black Sheep, however, Edmund Yates took him for the original of his Lord Dollamore, and drew him to the life in his consultation, in all difficulties, of a favourite walking-stick.
More general and genuine than the club popularity either of Taylor or Bathe was that enjoyed by another of Trollope’s earliest and warmest Garrick friends, Mr. Fladgate, with whom may be coupled James Christie. Both of these outlived Trollope, Christie by fifteen years, Fladgate by seven, the latter retaining, to the day of his death, the affectionate style of “Papa,” bestowed upon him as one of the club’s earliest members. The solicitors to whose firm “Papa” Fladgate belonged are still the Garrick’s legal advisers. Another of Garrick’s contemporaries, or even seniors, who has lived into this third year of King George V, is Sir Charles Rivers-Wilson, to-day not only the club’s doyen, but trustee. After him comes perhaps the sole survivor of those with whom Trollope used to dine off the famous Garrick steak, Sir Bruce Seton. Two years Trollope’s junior in club standing, he was for many years a constant member of a little dining-group at the club, comprising, in addition to himself, the late Sir Richard Quain, Algernon Borthwick, who died Lord Glenesk, and William Howard Russell of The Times. The epoch now recalled was fruitful of curiosities in club character who have long since gone out of date. Among the club representatives of the drama were James Anderson and Walter Lacy, both actors of the old school, tragedians whose masters were Kemble and Kean, as well as impressive elocutionists of a certain majestic dignity. These two men, if about the same age, were not, at least in their later years, on terms of mutual friendship. Trollope, who soon became a committee-man, took a keen interest in everything that concerned the management of the place, knew the names of nearly all the servants, and had their dossiers by heart. Thus he had a closer acquaintance than he might otherwise have had with George Farmer, the club steward, whose methods remained in force long after he had passed away, who thus, within his own sphere, left his mark on the club economy, and who was also as great a despot downstairs as Taylor, Bathe, and Thackeray in the upper regions.
The details of facts and figures already given show that, during most of the sixties, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were all members of the Garrick together. “We were, however,” to quote Trollope’s own words, “two sets as widely separated from each other, and as seldom intermingling, as if we had been assembled under two entirely different roofs; I never saw Thackeray and Dickens engaged in any regular conversation. If either of them entered a room when the other and only one or two more, perhaps, were its occupants, he seemed to have come in to look for something he had mislaid, and, if he did not make rather an abrupt exit, stayed only to bury himself in a newspaper, in silence, or in forty winks. Once, and once only, I can recall Thackeray making a remark about Dickens’s writing, though to whom I shall abstain from all effort to recall. The subject was Little Dorrit, then appearing in monthly parts. ‘I cannot,’ observed some one, ‘see the falling off in Dickens complained of by his critics.’ ‘At least,’ rejoined Thackeray, ‘it must be admitted that a good deal of Little D. is d——d rot.’” And here it should be explained that, when Trollope joined the Garrick in 1861, the club was still in the ground-swell of an internal dispute which, four years earlier, had agitated it to its very foundations, and divided its members into two mutually embittered companies.
The incident which had led to this state of civil war, insignificant and even contemptible in itself, would probably have passed off without serious results, but that, after the fashion now to be described, it had the effect of ranging the two giants of the place, Dickens and Thackeray, on opposite sides. Edmund Yates had criticised Thackeray, not, it may be admitted, in the best taste, in a cheap paper so obscure as to be entirely below a great man’s notice. The material for these remarks, Thackeray maintained, could only come from the writer’s chance meeting with himself in the Garrick smoking-room. Beyond any writer of his time, Thackeray, on grounds of good taste and good sense alone, should have been magnanimous enough to pocket this annoyance as an indiscretion, of which he had himself set such flagrant examples. Such had been the ridicule and abuse heaped by his pen for years on Edward Bulwer-Lytton, on Dionysius Lardner, and only desisted from when the public began to resent the monotony of these acrimonious insults. His caricature of his own Garrick acquaintance, Archdeckne, in Pendennis as Foker, had been at least as gross a violation of all club amenities as any paragraphs written by Yates. Neither in its beginnings, its progress, nor its end was Trollope in the slightest degree mixed up in this episode, whose finale may be briefly recapitulated. At the instance of the novelist who had found such dire cause of personal offence in the poor little peccant paragraphs, Edmund Yates was called upon by the club committee to apologise to the illustrious object of his attack, or to resign. On the advice of Dickens, he refused the ultimatum; a general meeting was then held, and he was formally expelled. All this, though in every detail before his time, seemed so comparatively fresh, and formed the subject of so many conversational retrospects, that Trollope may well have found it difficult to avoid expressing an opinion on the personal merits of the case. Such casual comments are not likely to have been too gentle towards the vanquished party, and for these reasons. As a member of Thackeray’s Cornhill staff, and owing his warm reception at the club to his editor’s introduction, the author of Framley Parsonage was not, from personal accidents, likely to be prepossessed in Yates’s favour.
Trollope, though sixteen years the older of the two, had still to make his literary, if not his official reputation, when Yates entered the Post Office as clerk in the missing-letter department in 1847. Each of them may have served the same masters at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, but each was the representative and disciple of a literary school essentially different from that to which the other belonged. Trained by Dickens on Household Words, Yates first showed what he could do as a novelist in his master’s line with Broken to Harness, so early as 1854, just a year before Trollope had made himself known to the public by The Warden. The two men, therefore, notwithstanding Trollope’s seniority, were yet sufficiently near each other to be contemporaries and rivals. Yates’s expulsion from the Garrick was followed by the withdrawal, not only of Dickens himself, but of Wilkie Collins and one or two more. Independently, however, of the Yates incident, Dickens had already made up his mind to leave the club because the assistant editor of his magazine, W. H. Wills, had been rejected from it.
Henceforth Thackeray reigned at the club alone, and next to him, as it seemed to some, came Trollope. While his connection with the club, or with them, still lay in the future, Thackeray’s henchman had secured the ejection of a member for no other reason than his having incurred the personal displeasure of the great man who ruled the place. Yates, however, left some friends as well as several enemies behind him at the Garrick. Among the former was W. H. Russell, who long afterwards, when the affair had become ancient history, ventured to praise his writings in the presence of Anthony Trollope. It was then reported—and the statement has been repeated since his death—that Yates owed much of his success as a novelist to Mrs. Cashel Hoey’s co-operation. When, therefore, Trollope spoke of this lady as having written his books for him, he was originating no slander, but merely repeating a current piece of literary gossip, which Yates’s literary methods may to some extent have explained.
Most practised literary workmen in their social hours are silent, even to their intimate friends, about what occupies their pens and thoughts for the moment. That, however, was not Yates’s way. Whether he might be writing a book or editing a periodical, he liked to discuss in detail the progress of his work among those with whom he habitually lived. The mise-en-scène, and the persons of his stories furnished topics of table talk with his shrewd and highly-endowed wife first, afterwards with the clever women who were often in her drawing-room. To that number belonged Mrs. Hoey, who had worked with him on Dickens’ magazines, and who was a constant visitor at his house. To her in a special degree he unfolded the plot, incidents, and even portions of the dialogue in the novel he had in hand, inviting from her criticism, suggestions for improvement not only in single episodes, but in the structure of the book. Of course Mrs. Hoey often submitted in writing the notions for which she had been conversationally asked. Yates was not the person to underrate or even to be silent about his obligations to any literary adviser he valued, and might well have mentioned the matter to Trollope himself, had the two ever held any friendly conversation on literary matters.
As it was, Trollope erred in repeating a loose rumour as a statement of fact. That slip in judgment and tact naturally aggravated the soreness felt by Yates at his other Garrick troubles, and was deeply resented. The two men, indeed, for more than ten years remained strangers. Their oldest and kindest friend, Sir Richard, then simply Dr. Quain, expressed his pleased surprise to meet them both as guests at the same club dinner-table towards the close of the seventies, whispering in his pleasant Irish way to the host, “How did you manage to bring them two together?” Perhaps modern English literature might be searched in vain for men at once so eminent, so touchy, so ready to take offence with each other, and with all the world besides, as the four now mentioned:
“Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer.”