The newspaper writer who turns novelist has already learned, in the exercise of his craft, the art of handling words, with other details of literary technique. Trollope, it has been seen, was practically without newspaper knowledge or training. He could scarcely have found a better substitute for these than the discipline, disappointing and fruitless as at the time it seemed, of casting his crude ideas in a dramatic shape. Socially also in the early sixties Trollope’s theatrical proclivities attracted him to certain pleasant circles that otherwise he might not have entered. Miss Kate Terry had not then become Mrs. Arthur Lewis, but chance made Trollope acquainted with that accomplished actress’s future husband. This gentleman’s rooms in Jermyn Street were at that time the social headquarters of the gifted group then engaged in forming the Artists’ Rifle Corps. Sculptors, painters, authors, as well as players assisted in the movement, out of which there also gradually grew the Arts Club. The earliest idea for its domicile was nothing grander than a modest tenement in the then pre-eminently artistic quarter of Fitzroy Square, where the Arts men would find and desire no more creature comforts than a few Windsor chairs, plain deal tables, long clays, and sanded floors. Instead of this, the new club’s originators made a successful bid for 17 Hanover Square, close to Tenterden Street. It was an historic mansion belonging to the Adam period in the eighteenth century, with elaborate marble mantelpieces, ceilings painted by Angelica Kauffmann, and superb old oak staircases. Here, in 1863, the Arts Club came into existence. To some extent the child of the secessions from the Garrick, the Arts Club in its beginnings was much favoured by the Dickensian faction. Dickens, indeed, himself never belonged to it, but his eldest son, who afterwards succeeded him in the conduct of All the Year Round, made it his chief “house of call,” and in its picturesque dining-room, together with the happily still surviving Mr. Marcus Stone, used frequently to have the author of his being for his guest. Among the most prominent of the Thackeray faction connected with the Arts in its earliest days was Anthony Trollope, who enjoyed all club life with as keen a zest as did his master, Thackeray himself.

About the same time as his connection with the Arts, Trollope became an original member of a very different fraternity. This was the Civil Service Club, 86 St. James’s Street, as its name implies, intended primarily for those composing the staff of our Government offices. The expenses of its maintenance necessitated the admission of outsiders. In 1865, therefore, it dropped the original name, to receive its present style, the Thatched House Club—a topographical designation in every way suitable, seeing that the house stands on nearly the same site as that once occupied by the historical Thatched House tavern. By the time, however, of this change, Trollope had ceased all connection with the place. Nor, he told me, did he ever re-cross its threshold until the occasion, mentioned above, on which the present writer brought him and Edmund Yates together as fellow-guests in its dining-room. Towards the close of his London life Trollope joined the Turf Club in Piccadilly which, in a previous state of existence, had been the Arlington in Arlington Street, famous for the high points of its whist and the expertness of its players. The card room at the Turf was, however, to Trollope the least of its attractions, and indeed his recreations of this sort were always, I am pretty sure, confined to afternoon whist at the Athenæum.

CHAPTER IX
IN PERIODICAL HARNESS

Trollope’s one work in the Thackerayan vein—Brown, Jones, and Robinson—Its failure—Thackeray’s two efforts to enter official life by a side door—Trollope’s opinion of “untried elderly tyros”—And of Thackeray’s limitations—His Life of Thackeray—Philippics against open competition in the Civil Service—A Liberal by profession, but a Tory at heart—Anthony’s bon mot—The Pall Mall Gazette—Hunting life in Essex—Sir Evelyn Wood to the rescue—Trollope’s cosmopolitanism—The Fortnightly Review, an English Revue des Deux Mondes—Its later developments.

TROLLOPE’s London course, literary and social, began, as has been already shown, under Thackeray’s ægis. To the first editor of The Cornhill he owed his place in the set with which he soon became, and always remained, a favourite, as well as his earliest profitable connection with periodical letters. Naturally and properly Trollope repaid this debt to the utmost of his power, not only by every possible acknowledgment of lasting gratitude, but by the occasional compliment of literary imitation. The novels of English country life contributed by him to The Cornhill—Framley Parsonage in 1860, and The Small House at Allington that began to follow it in 1862, the year before Thackeray’s death—showed no sign of Thackeray’s influence. These were the two books that completed the process, begun by The Warden in 1855, of placing permanently the public he by this time understood beneath the spell of his pen. Before, however, the introduction of The Cornhill readers to Lily Dale, John Eames, and Adolphus Crosbie, Trollope had contributed to the same magazine a loosely written, satirical sketch, Brown, Jones, and Robinson, which a hostile critic might be excused for describing as Thackeray-and-water. With a congenial subject, Trollope could always be depended on for abundant humour and irony. Both these qualities in Brown, Jones, and Robinson lack the spontaneity or ease without which the charm of Trollope’s writing disappears. So, in fact, thought Trollope himself; so too, however courteously he softened the expression of his opinion, did the polite and amiable Mr. George Smith. Yet even so, Brown, Jones, and Robinson is not at all poorer than Thackeray’s own mark as seen in many of his earlier pieces for Fraser, and in many of the Roundabout Papers which he hurried through for The Cornhill while the printers were waiting for copy. It was Trollope’s single unqualified failure. Never again was he betrayed by his Thackeray homage into the mistake of mimicry.

As a fact, too, no one knew better than did Trollope, not only his own limitations and deficiencies, but Thackeray’s as well. The plums of the Postmaster-General’s department should in every case fall to men already at work in the office. That feeling of esprit de corps had in 1846 made Trollope oppose Rowland Hill’s introductions from outside to St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Two years later, or twelve years before Trollope’s connection with him began, Thackeray himself had, equally to Trollope’s disgust, contemplated an act of intrusion like Rowland Hill’s in the Postal Service. In 1848 the assistant-secretaryship fell vacant. The then Postmaster-General, Lord Clanricarde, the staunchest friend possessed by the novelist among those in high place, let Thackeray know he would do his best to secure him the billet. Lord Clanricarde’s second in command plainly told his chief that the thing was impossible. The Minister at once gave way, and accepted the official nominee, of course not a little to Thackeray’s chagrin.

On this transaction Trollope’s remark was that, had Thackeray succeeded in his attempt, he would surely have ruined himself. No man, he added, could be fit for the management and performance of special work who had learned nothing of it before his thirty-seventh year, Thackeray’s then age. No man, he further insisted, could be more signally unfit for it than Thackeray. The achievement of his ambition in this matter would have summoned him to duties impossible of performance except after a long course of expert training. In some cases, Trollope admitted, an “untried, elderly tyro” might have put himself into harness and discharged after a fashion the first duty of maintaining discipline over a large body of men; but of all men in the world Thackeray was the most egregiously and fatally disqualified for anything of the sort. The whole subject was one on which Trollope felt some difficulty in expressing himself. On the one hand, his grateful admiration of Thackeray made him anxious not to do that great man any injustice in the matter. On the other hand, his loyalty to his brethren of the Civil Service made him resent his idol’s apparent belief that a man may be a Government secretary with a generous salary and have nothing to do. Nor, he adds, did Thackeray consider how inexpressibly wearisome he would have found the details of his work, or in effect how impossible to a man of his habits and intolerance of all ties would have been attendance in the city every day from eleven to five. The conclusion, therefore, however reluctantly reached, is that Thackeray so underrated the intellectual demands made by their employments on the servants of the State as to see no difficulty in combining the mechanical drudgery of a public office with the creative labour of novel-writing and his other literary work. Yes, not without a touch of bitterness Trollope sums it all up: he might have done it had he risen at five, and sat at his private desk for three hours before beginning the day’s grind at the G.P.O. On this subject Trollope could speak with the practical experience of one who had gone through the exhausting monotony of the official mill, and who had taxed almost to breaking point his exceptional strength by combining with it his unceasing commissions for publishers.

Thackeray’s official aspirations were the fond dreams of a literary man who would fain have recalled in the nineteenth century that Augustan age in which, under Queen Anne, Joseph Addison was a Secretary of State, and, under George I, Matthew Prior became British Ambassador in Paris. Again, since the State is still accustomed to reward with money, titles of honour, garters, or stars, Thackeray wanted to know why men of letters should not have their turn as well as politicians and soldiers. Even in our own evil times the great Anglo-Saxon State on the other side of the Atlantic delighted to honour the pen in this way. The United States had sent Washington Irving (1830) as Minister to London; more than twenty years later (1853), it had made Nathaniel Hawthorne its consul at Liverpool. Fired by these precedents, six years after the miscarriage of his Post Office design, Thackeray (November 1854) had applied for the vacant secretaryship of our Washington Legation, with the result that Lord Clarendon, who then controlled the Foreign Office, replied: first, that the place was already filled; secondly, that it would be unfair to appoint out of the service; thirdly, that being a great novelist would not necessarily ensure a man’s being a good Minister.

When, therefore, Thackeray visited the United States, he did so in his own coat, as he himself put it, and not in the Queen’s. Nor, is Trollope’s comment, is there anyone on whom the Queen’s coat would have sat so ill. However that may be, there are few modern cases which could be cited in support of a literary man’s claim to employment in the English service abroad. During the years following Thackeray’s unsuccessful suit the official prospect for English literature somewhat brightened. Grenville Murray had combined diplomacy and authorship before Thackeray applied for Washington. Trollope’s own friend, Charles Lever, was first introduced to the consular service in 1852. Burton’s experiences of the same department date from 1861. In 1868 James Hannay was not too generously rewarded with the Barcelona consulship for his newspaper services to the Conservative cause. Since then Mr. James Bryce’s success at our Washington Embassy has brought us further in the direction of the great novelist’s dream than would have looked possible in Thackeray’s day.

These are not the only manifestations of the candour that blended itself with the warmth of Trollope’s appreciative friendship for Thackeray. His literary master’s defeat by Cardwell in the Oxford election in 1857 suggests a remark on “his foredoomed failure in the House of Commons, had he ever entered it, a failure rendered inevitable by his intolerance of tedium, his impatience of slow work, and his want of definite or accurate political convictions.”[17] More even than this, when Trollope comes to think about it, he feels by no means sure of Thackeray as Cornhill editor having been the right man in the right place. Did not, he implies, Thackeray’s own often-cited article in his magazine about the editorial position, Thorns in the Cushion, justify that misgiving? The great man was too perfunctory, could not bring himself personally to deal with all the manuscripts which poured in; he was obliged, in fact, as all editors are, to entrust some of the supervisory work to his subordinates. Worse than that, however, Thackeray actually rejected one of Trollope’s proffered contributions in the shape of a short story, on the ground that it might bring a blush to the cheek of the young person. Nothing could be more curiously characteristic of the man who gives it than the opinion formed by the author of Framley Parsonage of the first editor of The Cornhill. Trollope was compounded in nearly equal parts of an enthusiastic impulsiveness that came to him by nature, and of a shrewdly judicial man-of-the-world temper, largely formed and strengthened by his experiences of life in general, and, in a greater degree, of his Post Office experiences in particular. His twofold estimate of Thackeray signally illustrates this balance of opposite tendencies.