It seems necessary to go back to Horace’s description of Achilles for a summary of the qualities personified by the literary quartet now referred to. And yet Yates appreciated Thackeray’s greatness as well as that of his chief, Dickens; while underrating none of his rival’s masterpieces, Thackeray was fond of telling the question often put to him by his children: “Why don’t you write books, real books, like Mr. Dickens?” Apart from their mutual compliments, paid on such occasions as the Theatrical Fund dinner,[16] there was no parade of exceptional cordiality between the two greatest novelists of their age.
High genius always appreciates genius, whatever its personal setting. Dickens and Thackeray were, therefore, above the pettiness of belittling each other. Between Anthony Trollope, however, and Edmund Yates, with all their cleverness, there always existed a good deal of mutual depreciation and jealousy. Especially was this the case in and after 1868; for in that year F. I. Scudamore, who had been made a G.P.O. Secretary over Trollope’s head, took Yates for his assistant in arranging the transfer of the telegraphs from a private company to the State. Yates, therefore, thought he had as good reason as Trollope for pride in his work as a Post Office servant; while, as for his social antecedents, if he had not been, like Trollope, at a public school, he had, before going to a German university, been in its best days under Dyne, at Highgate School. Neither man had many pretensions to real scholarship, but Yates had read and remembered the regulation Latin Classics well enough to quote them quite as aptly as Trollope. In facility and force of literary expression, he was at least Trollope’s equal; in ready wit and resourcefulness he was his superior. But of the English life that Trollope depicted he knew nothing. The success of Thackeray and of Dickens he could understand and admire. Both of them describe different aspects, and hit off certain angles of personal character connected with that existence which Yates knew and had studied. But as for Trollope, with his parsons, sporting or priggish, his insipid young ladies and the green, callow boys upon whom experience was wasted, and opportunities thrown away—in a word, these washed-out imitations of Thackeray, as to Yates they seemed—it passed Yates’s comprehension that the public should find any flavour to its taste in all this. It even stirred his indignation to hear of publishers paying such a writer prices approaching those commanded by the twin chiefs of his craft themselves.
It must be remembered, too, that Yates’s notions of what constitutes conversational cleverness were largely those he had imbibed as a youth in the school of Albert Smith. Hence the opinion recorded in his autobiography, that Trollope did not shine in society and had only humour of a very second-rate kind. Yates himself, like Dickens, talked well, and talked for effect. From both his parents he had inherited marked histrionic power, which showed itself in his performances as raconteur, in the inflections of his voice and the gesture of his hands. To Trollope such action and pose were altogether foreign. With real humour, indeed, he overflowed, as has already been shown from The Macdermots and The Warden, and as will be seen more fully later on, but, unlike Yates, he kept it for his books, and never wasted it on social effects. Moreover, Trollope had committed what Yates resented as an unpardonable sin by refusing to sit for his portrait in the “Celebrities at Home” then appearing in The World. It should, however, be mentioned that, after this honour had been declined, Yates, in his magazine, Time, published about Trollope a highly eulogistic article, whose proof, before it appeared, he sent Trollope, not only to read, but to revise and touch up as he pleased. The Post Office, like other public departments, has had its literary ornaments, whose best traditions subsequently to the period now dealt with have been perpetuated by Mr. Buxton Forman, in the domain of literary criticism, and by Mr. A. B. Walkley, as an authority on the drama in all its developments. But, in the nineteenth century, Yates and Trollope ran each other a neck and neck race for priority as representatives of St. Martin’s-le-Grand in belles lettres.
High animal spirits and irrepressible buoyancy entered largely into the Dickensian estimate of social wit and humour. Few, if any, of these qualities belonged to Trollope by nature, or had become his acquisition by habit. A writer who put so much felicity and fun into the lighter passages of his stories could not, indeed, but occasionally introduce happiness and pungency into his table talk. But, as Anthony Trollope himself remarked, “the conversational credit of our family is maintained not by me but by my brother Tom.” Thomas Adolphus Trollope’s academic training, natural subtlety, and turn for humorous paradox caused him, after a fashion always entertaining and often original, to play with the problems of metaphysics and theology, amid the applause of those Florentine circles where he was better known and appreciated than in any London drawing-rooms or clubs. His brother Anthony at his best brimmed over with shrewd common-sense. Occasionally, when asked a question, he put his answer in a memorable shape, but, apart from the distinction won by his pen, was welcomed in Society not so much for a talker as for a listener.
Anthony Trollope’s election to the Athenæum has already been mentioned as coming twelve years after his admission to the Garrick. In 1874 too, he was made free of another little society that, unlike the two clubs already named, has recently ceased to exist. The Cosmopolitan Club originated in a period whose social usages, though belonging to the last half of the Victorian era, are separated from the twentieth century by a space of more than years. The earliest move made towards the formation of this little club was by A. H. Layard, in conjunction with Sir Robert Morier, among the most successful diplomatists of his time. During his Foreign Office days in London he was the occupant of some Bond Street rooms. Here the private meeting of men, for the most part belonging to politics, foreign or domestic, first became weekly or bi-weekly institutions. Other authorities, equally well informed, hold the true founder of the institution to have been Sir William Stirling Maxwell, who, before the settlement on premises of their own, gave the society a home in his Knightsbridge house. Certain it is that, after a few years, the increase in members made it necessary to start housekeeping on their own account. Among the several roofs beneath which the Cosmopolitans have settled themselves, that sheltering them during most of Trollope’s time was 45 Charles Street, Berkeley Square, where the artist, G. F. Watts, formerly had his studio. When Trollope joined the Club in or about 1874, the method of election dispensed entirely with the usual club ballot-box, which always remained as unknown as the process of blackballing itself. Together with one or two more, known to most of the members by introduction as an occasional visitor, Trollope had produced a good impression on the premises. In due time therefore, as a proof of membership, he paid the modest entrance fee at the club’s bankers. This done, till the year 1880 he remained among the most regular habitués of the place. The accommodation consisted of a single room. The weekly meetings were held on Thursday and Sunday evenings, between ten and midnight, during the session. No solid refreshments were served; but on a side-table were tea, coffee, and aerated waters, with its usual spirituous adjuncts.
Among those most frequently at the place in Trollope’s time were Tennyson, who, on his visits to London, found the “Cosmo” more congenial than most other resorts, and his friend Monckton Milnes, after 1863 Lord Houghton, who more than any other of his friends had induced Peel, when Premier, to bestow the laureateship on Tennyson after Wordsworth’s death. Abraham Hayward; Grant Duff; Lord Barrington, one of Disraeli’s secretaries; Henry Drummond-Wolff; Lord Granville’s brother, Frederick Leveson-Gower; Robert G. W. Herbert, so long permanent Under Secretary at the Colonial Office; his successor Robert Meade; and the already-mentioned Sir Richard Quain—all were conspicuous in the little group of which Trollope formed one in the tobacco parliaments of the little Mayfair caravanserai. As noticeable as any of the foregoing, and often playing a really important part in the secret political history of his period, was Dr. Quin, whom Trollope first met at the Cosmopolitan, and whose good words about Trollope’s novels helped to secure their admission to Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Perhaps the only cabinet negotiation of which Trollope knew something from behind the scenes was that pressed on Dr. Quin by Disraeli in 1868, with a view of detaching Lord Granville from his Liberal allegiance and inducing him to serve under Lord Derby. In the days now looked back upon, the Cosmopolitan Club was the paradise of the intelligent foreigner in London. Thither the French statesman Adolphe Thiers was repeatedly brought by Kinglake, and there Trollope gained an insight into political manœuvres, domestic or foreign, which he found highly useful for his later books.
The Cosmopolitan Club survived Trollope by exactly twenty-five years. Shortly after the twentieth century had completed its first decade, most of the Cosmopolitans whom Trollope knew had followed him to the grave. The younger men that now came on had their own resorts. Moreover, it must be remembered that, even until well into the nineteenth century’s second half, smoking after dinner was allowed in very few houses. Gradually the future King Edward VII’s influence removed the social prejudice against tobacco, with a result that the cigar or cigarette became not less universal than the coffee. At the same time, too, such of the old Cosmopolitans as were left felt less disposed than in their younger day to go out after dinner. The new generation also which had risen up did not appreciate the honour of membership as keenly as had been done by its predecessors. In 1902 the sanitary arrangements of the Charles Street premises were found to be in a parlous state. The house, in fact, which had not been overhauled for a century, was discovered to be literally afloat with sewage under the basement. The cost of the necessary repairs was prohibitive. Still struggling against dissolution, the club migrated to the Alpine Society’s rooms in Savile Row, and dragged on a maimed existence till 1907, in or after which it was formally wound up.
In 1862, then, Anthony Trollope’s club life began on the King’s Street, Covent Garden, premises, shortly before his day visited by the domestic convulsions already described. At the date now looked back upon, the Garrick, though by far the most distinguished of the number, was only one among several literary and theatrical societies which were not their own landlords. Among the other clubs of that class, the most notable was the Fielding, which found its home, first at Offley’s Hotel, afterwards at the Cider Cellars, and which was much frequented by Dickens and Yates, subsequently to the Garrick split. Here, after he had consulted with Trollope on the subject, an unsuccessful attempt was made by E. F. S. Pigott to bring Dickens and Thackeray amicably together. Trollope’s loyalty to Thackeray did not permit him actually to join the Fielding, but did not prevent his frequently visiting the place, chiefly as the guest of Pigott, who used, by-the-bye, to say that “Anthony’s” well-meant but impatient zeal had caused the miscarriage of the delicate personal negotiations that native kindness and tact fitted him above all men to conduct.
The Covent Garden district in Trollope’s earlier London days was honeycombed by more or less Bohemian societies, housed beneath various roofs, but all equally unfamiliar to Trollope. The Arundel Club, indeed, patronised into existence by the Talfourd family, was once visited by him, together with Charles Reade, long after it had established itself within walls of its own in Salisbury Street, Strand. But the Savage, then in its struggling infancy at Ashley’s, Henrietta Street, the Reunion in Maiden Lane, the Knights of the Round Table at Simpson’s in the Strand, he had never heard of till I myself mentioned these places to him. All these were journalistic haunts, with a certain vogue during the nineteenth century’s second half. The only advantage Trollope could have derived from entering any one of them might have been a little more first-hand knowledge than he ever possessed about newspaper writers, their manners, and their methods. An occasional glimpse of the resorts now named might have helped him to avoid the mistakes concerning newspaper life and men that, as it is, he generally commits when touching on the subject in his stories. Yet Trollope’s club experiences were far from being confined to the bodies already mentioned.
The interest in stage matters inherited by Trollope from his mother may have caused him some disappointment, but was not without its practical advantages. The exercise of attempting and failing to write a good play, The Noble Jilt, helped to produce a capital story, Can You Forgive Her?—presently to be mentioned—as well as helped him as a novelist by putting him on his guard against some of his literary defects. His admiration for his Cornhill editor and model, Thackeray, was perhaps responsible for a tendency in Trollope occasionally to buttonhole his reader, to obtrude on him the author’s own personality, and not sufficiently to leave to events and characters the telling of their tale and the pointing of their moral. The smallest experience in dramatic writing shows him who essays it, as Trollope did, the necessity of vivid effects, and the presentation of incidents in such a way as to dispense with the author’s appearance in the rôle of chorus.