Against the depressing influences thus engendered, Trollope lacked the natural resources of his two most famous contemporaries. Thackeray, if he had not always at his command spirits as high as Dickens, by an effort of purely intellectual strength could generally secure the enjoyment of life against the intrusion of unwelcome fancies and gloomy thoughts. Anthony Trollope was without Dickens’ perennially boyish zest of existence or Thackeray’s stubborn opposition to the first approach of the “blue devils.” His manner, habitually abrupt and sometimes imperious, concealed an almost feminine sensibility to the opinions of others, a self-consciousness altogether abnormal in a seasoned and practical man of the world, as well as a strong love of approbation, whether from stranger or friend. The inevitable disappointment of these instincts and desires at once pained and ruffled him beyond his power to conceal, and so produced what his physician and friend, Sir Richard Quain, once happily called “Trollope’s genial air of grievance against the world in general, and those who personally valued him in particular.”
The founding of The Pall Mall Gazette and other literary events belonging to the year 1865 were landmarks in Trollope’s progress for social rather than literary reasons. Some very slight sketches, exclusively or for the most part on hunting, were contributed by him to the evening paper which Frederick Greenwood’s experience and inventiveness had been helped by George Smith’s capital to create.[20] In those days more dining than is the habit to-day was considered essential to journalistic enterprise. George Smith’s earliest Pall Mall dinners soon became famous, and found Anthony Trollope a frequent guest. At these hospitalities he greatly extended the literary and political acquaintanceship which he had begun to make at the Garrick and at the Cosmopolitan, as well as added to it specimens of intellectual power, culture, and cosmopolitan knowledge hitherto seldom collected beneath the same London roof. Such were the three survivors among the chief original writers for The Saturday Review: H. S. Maine, his former Cambridge pupil and subsequently Saturday colleague, William Vernon Harcourt, and G. S. Venables, about whom it was then, as it still remains, uncertain whether he did or did not sit to Thackeray for the Warrington of Pendennis.
The second Lord Lytton, then attached to our Lisbon embassy, Julian Fane, and the eighth Viscount Strangford represented various branches of belles lettres, as well as of diplomacy and cosmopolitanism, in the company among which Trollope now found himself. Not the elder alone, but both the two brothers who were successively the seventh and eighth Lords Strangford are reflected, even to their personal appearance, in the Waldershare of Disraeli’s Endymion—fair with short, curly, brown hair and blue eyes, not exactly handsome, but with a countenance full of expression, and the index of quick emotions, whether of joy or sorrow. George Smythe, the seventh of the Strangford Viscounts, the reputed original of Coningsby, was no longer alive at the time of these Pall Mall dinners. His brother and successor, Percy, figured among Greenwood’s most important contributors from the first. None of the group now mentioned had the same vivid interest for Trollope as Strangford; but the most distinguished of the others, notably Fitzjames Stephen, William Rathbone Greg, George Henry Lewes, and James Hannay, exercised upon him something of the same educational influence that they did upon Greenwood himself. Many years subsequently to this, Trollope met as a guest at the Cosmopolitan Club the ex-officer of the French Navy, L. M. J. Viaud, who, as Pierre Loti, became famous in 1880. “I could not,” was Trollope’s comment, “amid the many personal dissimilarities of the two, but be struck by a certain resemblance between James Hannay’s breezy picturesqueness in stating his views of history or politics, and the touches, as graphic as they were delicate, that made Viaud’s descriptions, whether in conversation or writing, living things.”
The period now reached was to present Trollope with another new connection in periodical literature, not less noticeable in itself, and more far-reaching in some of its consequences than any of those already mentioned. His first dealings with the publishers Chapman and Hall, while still settled at 193 Piccadilly, were, as has been already said, over Dr. Thorne in 1858. Pre-eminent among the nineteenth century writers as the novelist of English home-life, Trollope possessed, and on occasion showed, as much of international sympathy as Bulwer-Lytton himself, and, by original observation as well as by English and foreign reading, took real pains to keep himself in touch with the higher European thought of his time. Occasionally he took his summer holiday at a pretty little hamlet in the Black Forest, Höllenthal, near Freiburg. Here he sometimes received visits from well-placed continental friends who, in a few hours’ talk, took him effectively behind the scenes of European society letters, politics, or finance. From Höllenthal, too, were made those excursions that not only acquainted him with the most-desired hospitalities of Cologne, Frankfort, and Berlin, but that also brought him into the heart of the Fatherland’s inner life as seen, now in obscure towns or obscurer villages, now in the studies and lecture-rooms of thinkers and writers. Such were the experiences that suggested to Trollope’s active mind the possibility of founding a magazine which should be for England what the Revue des deux Mondes was for France; that periodical, as was happily said by Lord Morley of Blackburn, had “brought down abstract discussion from the library to the man in the street.” Why should not, Trollope asked himself, the like of this be done here. The same idea had occurred almost simultaneously to others of light and learning in contemporary literature. Huxley, E. A. Freeman, Sir R. F. Burton, E. S. Beesly, Mr. Frederick Harrison, and the present poet laureate, Mr. Alfred Austin, promised the enterprise their “vote and interest”; Lord Houghton, without whose counsel and goodwill no undertaking of the sort could then have been carried out, forwarded it not only with his blessing but his purse.
Among others less well known but not less active co-operating to the same end were Danby Seymour, Charles Waring, a shrewd, genial Yorkshireman of intellectual tastes and parliamentary ambitions, whose interest in the project had been secured by one already mentioned more than once in these pages, E. F. S. Pigott. Waring, who subsequently married a daughter of Sir George Denys of Draycote, Yorkshire, and was from 1865 to 1868 M.P. for Poole, became the father of Captain Walter Waring, returned in 1907 for Banffshire. In the sixties, however, he was a man about town, living in The Albany, as generous and eclectic in his bachelor hospitalities as, after his marriage, in the cosmopolitan banquets which during the eighties gave his house, 3 Grosvenor Square, a place of its own in the chronicle of the London season. During that subsequent period Waring once thought of buying back from its possessors, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, the periodical to founding which he had contributed. Then, however, Trollope, at whose instance Pigott’s influence had originally prevailed on Charles Waring to co-operate in bringing The Fortnightly Review to the birth, was dead against the parting of the property to any new purchaser.
At the date now looked back upon, Waring’s Albany Chambers were frequented by other clever and notable men, all of them, in their different ways, highly useful at its beginnings to the literary enterprise. Such were Ralph Earle, who, as Benjamin Disraeli’s private secretary during part of 1859, sat for Berwick-on-Tweed. Soon after this Earle gave up politics, as he had before given up diplomacy. He had the Italian or Spanish genius for statecraft, but no special qualifications for a deliberative assembly. The knowledge of international policy and finance, picked up in the course of his European wanderings, he employed congenially and successfully in negotiating concessions from foreign sovereigns and statesmen for great capitalists engaged in railways and other public works, especially Baron de Hirsch. Earle’s House of Commons contemporary, Danby Seymour, Waring’s predecessor in the representation of Poole, was without the rare intellectual power and subtlety that marked Disraeli’s former secretary. He was, however, a typical specimen of the intellectual and political man about town, with an altogether extraordinary knowledge of high-class periodicals in every European country and language. Be sure, was his advice, to cultivate as an entirely new feature, the best account that can be written for each number of all contemporary movements, foreign as well as domestic, with their tendency and value, whether in the region of politics, letters, science, or economics. Seymour’s suggested article at once became a feature, and received from Trollope himself the title, “Home and Foreign Affairs.” The little conferences in the Piccadilly precinct that preceded the appearance of The Fortnightly proved a valuable experience to Trollope. They took him for the first time in his life behind the political scenes, and brought him into close quarters with men from whom he afterwards drew the political figures that flit through his later novels.
Danby Seymour had held subordinate office in Lord Palmerston’s second administration. His brother Alfred, often with him on these occasions, had been member for Shaftesbury. They both had fine estates in Wiltshire—subsequently disposed of to Mr. Percy Wyndham—as well as Mayfair houses, one in Curzon Street, the other near it, and each possessed a fine collection of pictures. In a word, the Seymour kinsmen, to whom The Fortnightly Review operations alone introduced Trollope, were thoroughly characteristic of the class and period that he introduced in Can You Forgive Her? (1864), and which afterwards he was to describe more minutely in the political novels that began with Phineas Finn.
Trollope showed his knowledge of recent and remote history by reminding his company that leading out of the same corridor as Waring’s rooms were those in which Douglas Cook, creator and first editor of The Saturday Review, saw, of a Tuesday morning, his contributors, and later in the day dined his great friends or wealthy patrons of the Hope and Pelham name. A generation earlier Trollope discovered, in the same Piccadilly precinct, Lord Althorp had rallied his followers for the attack upon the Conservatives under the Duke of Wellington that was to establish the reform ministry of Grey. Such formed the associations of the four walls within which were completed the arrangements that resulted in the appearance, on the 15th of May, 1865, of the first number of The Fortnightly Review, with the cry, “No party but a free platform.” At the same time, the choice of George Henry Lewes as first editor, on the then Mr. John Morley’s recommendation, seemed to promise that the champions of progress were not likely to have the worst of it in any discussions which might enliven the pages of The Fortnightly. The title explains itself; the Review was to appear on the first and fifteenth of each month, at a price of two shillings. In 1866 Mr. Morley succeeded Lewes as editor. The October issue of that year announced the suspension for the present of the mid-monthly number. Thus, among the three Fortnightly editors during Trollope’s time, the earliest, George Lewes, was the only one who conducted a magazine literally true to its title. With the number of January, 1867, the present series began; at the same time the price was raised from a florin to half a crown.
Trollope always felt a paternal interest, and sometimes exercised a paternal power, in the periodical that thus at its different stages associated itself with so many well-known names, and that, without any loss of position, had in infancy dropped any etymological claim to the name given it by Trollope himself. When The Fortnightly funds, raised in the manner already described, had been spent, the copyright passed to the publishers. Of these, Frederick Chapman, by his energy and zeal for the enterprise, had already made himself a part of the Review, uniformly co-operating, then and afterwards, in all matters that pertained to it, with Trollope. Thus far, Trollope sympathised with, or did not reprobate, the advanced opinions advocated by its chief writers. He remained, indeed, for many years afterwards, enough of a Liberal to remonstrate with Mr. Alfred Austin on securing for his elder brother, Tom, the Italian correspondence of The Standard, at the price, he feared, of his conversion to Conservatism. For though, as has already been seen, Trollope’s inborn prejudices, social training, and personal antipathies were all strongly Conservative, the accidents of later experience, operating on his actively controversial temper; made him pass for a Liberal during those Palmerstonian and early Gladstonian eras when Liberalism took its principles from the reactionary moderates rather than the progressives. He wished to see in power men whose administrative abilities would secure prosperity and a fair distribution of material comforts, as well as civil or political rights at home, and the exercise of English influence to redress international grievances, and to put down oppression abroad. But this was coupled always with the condition of the country being ruled and represented by the privileged classes, to whom no one was more proud of belonging than himself. So long as they were in the hands of gentlemen, he really cared little about the political label borne by those responsible for the conduct of affairs. The demagogue and leveller, whether on the platform or in print, were always the same abominations to his earlier manhood that the professional agitator and the foreign fomenters of Irish disaffection became to his later years.
His favourite intellectual progeny, as he regarded The Fortnightly Review, might be trusted, he thought, to reflect his own ideas, and to avoid the falsehood of extremes, at least as much in one direction as in the others. He therefore felt something of a Lear’s paternal pain and indignation when the editor and his self-willed contributors seemed bent on converting the periodical from a platform for the discussion of all questions by the light of pure reason, on lines agreeable to impartial intellect alone, into a pulpit, as it struck Trollope, for maintaining the most audacious and subversive neologies, social or political, civil or religious. His misgivings were exchanged for certainty during the course of 1867. In that year the war between labour and capital reached its height. The public had not recovered from the horror and disgust it had received from the trades union excesses which Broadhead had instigated at Sheffield, when Mr. Frederick Harrison came out with his famous defence of strikes and unions in The Fortnightly Review. Nor was it the industrial question only on which The Fortnightly articles excited Trollope’s apprehension. To the end of the sixties and to the first year of the next decade belonged the acutest phase of the perennial dispute whether national elementary teaching should rest on a purely secular, on a chiefly religious basis, or should be supported on the result of a compromise between the two. That last was the ministerial view which, in his pending Elementary Schools Bill, W. E. Forster, as vice-President of the Council, and practically Education Minister, aimed at establishing. He thus, of course, satisfied neither side. The religious educationalists of the National Union, with Manchester for its headquarters, charged the author of the 1870 Bill with indifference whether the rising generation was brought up in the Christianity of its forefathers, or victimised to the heathenish fads and godless crotchets of the secularist and agnostic education-mongers, looked upon with the same horror by Trollope as all other radicals or revolutionaries. On the other hand, the Birmingham League, with Mr. Joseph Chamberlain for its political champion, and the unimpeachably Christian Congregational minister, R. W. Dale, for its prophet and guide, held that, in the long run, both learning and religion would fare best if in State schools religion formed no part of the official curriculum. So, too, thought, or as Trollope fancied, seemed to think, the leading spirits of The Fortnightly Review. Against these Anthony Trollope was up in arms. The articles advocating the League’s policy suggested a deliberate plot to suppress the Holy Scriptures in the National schools.