John Forster, who, after the fashion already described, had given Trollope his first chance of appearing in print, was one among the latest survivors of those who knew Thackeray intimately. Told in the year of his death, 1876, of Thackeray in the Men of Letters series being allotted to Trollope, he remarked with surprise, “Why, Trollope only knew him as editor of The Cornhill.” These things were before my time. Neither to me nor, I think, to any of my day, did Trollope volunteer any remarks about the extent to which circumstances had carried his personal knowledge of Thackeray. That the literary acquaintance of the two men eventually ripened into something like social intimacy was the opinion of Thackeray’s own familiars, such as the already mentioned E. F. S. Pigott and Tom Taylor who, though six years the great man’s junior, had been with him at Cambridge, and whose friendship with him to the day of his death was as unbroken as it was close. The same view on this point was taken also by G. A. Sala, who personally disliked Trollope, and had formerly resented his approaches to Thackeray, as well as by the accomplished and socially omniscient Sir W. A. Fraser, who, from his own independent experience, circumstantially confirmed to me the accuracy shown by Trollope in his rendering of all Thackerayan details. Both these henchmen of the great novelist were book and, incidentally, autograph collectors. Shortly before his death, Fraser and Trollope, each on a separate occasion going to dine with Thackeray at Palace Gate, brought with him a specially bound set of Thackeray’s works that the author might write his name therein. To both men Thackeray excused himself from doing so at the time, promised that he would see to the matter next day, and return the volumes. Meanwhile, the fatal Christmas had come and gone; the great man was no more. The books were punctually sent back to their owners. In neither set had Thackeray’s name been written.
Trollope’s Cornhill experiences, under Thackeray first and, in the case of The Claverings, under his successor, marked by far the most important and profitable connection with periodical literature. As a journalist, however, he had begun on the weekly press in 1848, while he was doing Post Office duty in Ireland. In 1859 or 1860 Merivale’s History of the Romans under the Empire excited in him a wish to combat the views expressed in that work about the Cæsars. The result was two articles on the subject, one dealing with Julius, the other with Augustus, in the Dublin University Magazine. By that time Charles Lever’s editorship of this periodical had ceased; but his good word helped Trollope with his successor. The articles then written, and just noticed, formed the germ of a future book hereafter to be mentioned. But, at the date of these Dublin University opportunities, Trollope was so entirely overcome with indignant disgust at the prospect of the Civil Service being thrown open to competitive examination, that he could write or think about little else. The Dublin University Magazine allowed him to relieve his overwrought feelings by discharging several pages of furious invective at the proposed change and its authors.
Whatever at different periods Trollope might think and call himself, his natural prejudices were always those of aristocratic and reactionary Toryism. Upon whatever grade, and whatever the work, provided it was not of an essentially plebeian kind, the public offices of this country must be reserved for gentlemen. Examinations might in some degree test brains; they could not ensure breeding. Without the ideas, the antecedents, and the social training which must remain the privilege of birth, mere book knowledge, diligence, and aptitude for drudgery would not of themselves guarantee the State the higher qualities it had a right to expect in its servants. Here spoke the same spirit as that which had impelled Anthony Trollope’s kinsman, the great Conservative squire, Sir John Trollope, in 1846 to place loyalty to his Protectionist principles before loyalty to his leader, Sir Robert Peel. Asseverations of this kind were much in request as arguments with those bent on retaining State employment for the exclusive profit of the privileged classes. Nor beyond these rhetorical commonplaces, with their conventional appeals to a pseudo-aristocratic feeling, did Anthony Trollope’s case against competitive examinations go. He lived long enough, if not cordially to acquiesce in the new system, yet, becoming Sir Charles Trevelyan’s personal friend, to agree with him that competition did not in its working involve more evils than patronage.
While on one of his visits to the Irish capital, about his contributions to the academic periodical, he first made, through the social offices of Charles Lever, one of the friendships that he renewed with special appreciation in his later life. J. S. Le Fanu had succeeded Lever as the editor of the Dublin University Magazine; to Le Fanu’s house in Merrion Square Trollope, accordingly, was taken by Lever. Here in the course of the evening a young lady—his host’s niece—asked whether she should read something to them she had written. The budding authoress became celebrated a little later as Miss Rhoda Broughton, and the manuscript in hand was that of a story that established her as a novelist in 1867, Not Wisely, but Too Well. Recalling this incident many years afterwards, Lever said: “Never before or since did I see Anthony Trollope so agreeable or so witty as on the evening he listened to the extracts Miss Broughton recited from her earliest book. In fact, the only mot with which I can ever credit him was flashed out on that occasion. The talk, I think, had been brought by W. H. Russell, who was of the party, to some one specially disliked by Trollope. ‘But,’ said Trollope, dismissing the subject, ‘let us hope better things of him in the future, as the old lady said when she heard that F. D. Maurice had preached the eventual salvation of all mankind.’”
Trollope took his place in the social and literary life of London under conditions and at an age that ensured his enjoying these new experiences with a greater zest than had they come earlier, and because they were the deferred, and occasionally the despaired of reward for toil, endurance, exile, equal to the picturing of his fondest dream. At the age of forty-five, with powers of enjoyment, as of work, yet unimpaired, he had in advance guaranteed himself against inconvenience from any possible check in his literary course by the eastern district surveyorship. This raised him above the dependence of a publisher’s hack, and enabled him to make better terms for his books. Its social as well as official experiences might, as he shrewdly foresaw, be trusted to ensure his imagination such a constant supply of fresh material as would preserve freshness and guard him against the sin of self-repetition. Thus, in little more than ten years after his earliest and unsuccessful novel, The Macdermots, and in five years after his first success with The Warden, he had won a position which rendered it tolerably certain that no new literary enterprise would be floated by men like George Smith, without the invitation of his services and goodwill. In another work[18] I have stated so fully the origin of The Pall Mall Gazette that any references to it here must be confined to the few points of contact between that newspaper and Trollope, whom it did not concern, in his impressions of this journalistic incident, circumstantially to bring out the fact that, beyond its name, The Pall Mall Gazette of real life owed nothing to Thackeray, and, as regards all its details, was the exclusive device of its first owner and its first editor. The announcement of the historical paper, prepared by Frederick Greenwood, who alone planned and who long conducted it, said nothing about a journal written “by gentlemen for gentlemen,” but only that a few men of letters had decided upon starting on a new venture which they thought would be found different from anything then before the public. Contributions of course were invited from Trollope upon any social events or humours of the hour that interested him. By this time he was as well known in certain parts of England as he had begun to be nearly a quarter of a century earlier, on the other side of St. George’s Channel, for an enthusiastic and intrepid rider to hounds.
At Waltham House, where his Post Office duties had made it convenient to settle, he was within practicable distance of several different meets. At Harlow, some ten miles from Waltham, were the kennels of the Essex pack, and with these he soon became a familiar figure. His earliest hunting friend, Charles Buxton, between 1865 and 1871 Member for East Surrey, on Trollope’s re-establishment in the home counties, was himself still a keen rider to hounds; Buxton’s friendship and introduction proved of special service to Trollope in connection with his favourite pastime. During Trollope’s experience of the Essex country, the district opened to him by his friends of the Buxton family was that known as the Roothings, chiefly hunted by the staghounds, but occasionally also the scene of a fox hunt. Famous for its stiff riding, it abounded in formidable fences and in deep ditches. In the sixties Trollope was a very heavy weight, and therefore frequently in difficulties; of these he made light, pulling himself together with surprising speed after a series of spills, and seldom failing to hold a good place at the end of a run. Of his fellow-Nimrods in the East Anglian region, there are still left Sir Evelyn Wood and Mr. E. N. Buxton, from personal experience to testify to the undaunted alacrity with which, after having been lost to view in the field, Trollope scaled the sides of a Roothing dyke, reappeared in the saddle, and pushed on with unabated vigour.
In addition to his weight, fatal, of course, to anything like equestrian elegance, Trollope had to contend against a defect of vision which no artificial relief entirely obviated. Hence some of the difficulties that used to beset him with the Essex pack and with H. Petre’s staghounds. His popularity in the field generally brought him timely relief in answer to his call for help. Such proved the case when, on one occasion, he had been making up lost ground after a fall in the middle of a ploughed field. The fellow-sportsman who then answered to his cry was no less a person than the present Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. “For heaven’s sake,” exclaimed Trollope, “be careful; I am afraid to move lest I should trample on my spectacles which have just fallen off my nose.” Quick as thought, the future Field-Marshal alighted from his horse, and retrieved the glasses. Having fitted them to his nose, Trollope rejoined the hunt with as much serene sturdiness as if the little contretemps had never occurred. Trollope’s sporting performances in the eastern home counties had also a social side he found highly useful for the purposes of his novels. Many of the sportsmen lived at London or elsewhere, renting at local inns a certain amount of stabling for their horses, together with suites of rooms for themselves during the season. They thus formed a club whose members, as often as convenient, dined together, and of which Trollope soon became free. It was a pleasant, cheery life that exactly suited the eminently clubbable Trollope. Glimpses of it are given in those passages of Phineas Finn describing the performances of that novel’s hero on Lord Chiltern’s Bonebreaker.
As Trollope wrote, so did he ride, confident that the animal he bestrode, equally the novelist’s Pegasus as his Irish mare, would in each case carry him successfully from point to point. Whether with the pen or on horseback, he took his own line. Neither checks nor even falls prevented his finishing at the spot and the hour he had from the first fixed. As much as he could desire of the sport he loved, in a good country, and with social accessories just suited to him; a constitution, naturally of iron, as yet practically untouched by years, and revealing no unsound spot; a sense of official importance gratified by the authority delegated to him from St. Martin’s-le-Grand; the inheritance at the London club he most frequented, the Garrick, of something like Thackeray’s own position; ascendency firmly established and wide popularity permanently won in the calling of novelist; freedom from all present anxiety as to his circumstances, and every year bringing a solid addition to his funded savings—all this surely formed a combination, such as might have made him who commanded it the happiest, as he was certainly the most fortunate, of men. And yet Trollope’s life was chronically saddened by recurrent moods of indefinable dejection and gloom. A sardonic melancholy he had himself imputed to Thackeray. In his own case the sardonic element was wanting, but the melancholy was habitually there, darkening his outlook alike upon the present and the future. “It is, I suppose,” he said, addressing the friend to whom, more than to any other, he unbosomed himself, Sir J. E. Millais, “some weakness of temperament that makes me, without intelligible cause, such a pessimist at heart.”
These seizures of despondency generally overtook him as he was riding home from a day with the hounds. They began with the reflection that he rode heavier in each successive season, and that in the course of nature the hunting, repeatedly prolonged beyond what he had fixed as its term, would have to be given up. The vague presentiment of impending calamity, as he himself put it, came, no doubt, from nothing more than an increasingly practical discovery of the Horatian truth:
“Singula de nobis anni prædantur euntes.”[19]