His disapproval of the political school whose ascendency The Fortnightly confessed did not prevent him from being one of its contributors. In addition to the novel he ran through it, The Belton Estate, presently to be dwelt on, he made the Review an arena for a struggle with E. A. Freeman about the morality of field sports in general, and of his own greatly enjoyed hunting in particular. This controversy, marked on both sides by prejudice rather than argument, and by vigour instead of subtlety, was, as might have been expected, no better than a waste of time, temper, and space. Had it been possible to bring forward any new pros or cons, neither Freeman nor Trollope was the man to do it. Ouida and her friend, Sir Frederick Johnstone, talking over the matter at one of her Langham Hotel causeries intimes, “where cigarettes and even cigars were permitted,” said: “I think if these two pundits had handed the matter over to us, we could have put a little more life into it, and perhaps sent up by a few copies the periodical which is the pasture-ground of professors and prigs.” Trollope was as far from being a prig as from being a philosopher. But he had equally few qualifications for a controversialist likely to freshen up an ancient theme, and in this disability he was well matched with Freeman.

Meanwhile, he had invested capital in the house of Chapman and Hall; after the publishing business had been turned into a limited company he remained one of the shareholders, and transmitted his interest in it to those in whose favour he drew his will. He was, from its foundation to the end of his life, a director of the company, but besides this, his intimacy with the manager of its publishing business, Frederick Chapman, as well as with that gentleman’s well-to-do relatives with a large share in the concern, gave, and kept for Trollope to the day of his death, the position of an amicus curiæ, whose literary advice was asked and taken on important matters. But the sensational stage of the development of The Fortnightly was not fully reached during his life. He survived, however, to witness the first signs of its advent in an article which, under the signature “Judex,” appeared in the spring of 1880, after Beaconsfield’s final overthrow, and the formation of Gladstone’s second Cabinet. “It was,” said the writer of the article now recalled, “an extraordinary victory won by the nation against an extraordinary man, in some of his powers never surpassed, whose life was the most astonishing of all careers in the annals of parliament, and who, though decisively vanquished, would not, it was to be hoped, retire, because a Liberal Government, more than any other, imperatively needs a strong Opposition for the due and sane performance of its work.” This composition was at once discovered to have the importance of a State paper. The editor, Mr. John Morley, had not then entered parliament as member for Newcastle-on-Tyne. Previously, however, to that he had fought not only Blackburn but Westminster under the Gladstonian flag. He was known to stand high in the Liberal leader’s confidence. It was generally asserted, without contradiction then or since, that the pseudonym at the end of the piece veiled the identity of no less a person than W. E. Gladstone himself. Trollope, at the most, did not think much of it, and drily remarked that fictitious pen names violated one of the principles of the Review. He had consistently protested, and indeed actively struggled against, the conversion of an impartial and philosophical magazine into the mouthpiece of men to whose opinions he could not reconcile himself, though their expression was judiciously revised by an editor not only as able, but as fair-minded as any periodical was fortunate enough to possess. Having retired from practical opposition, and accepted what he thought was the inevitable, he remarked: “The whirligig of time brings its own revenges, and wisdom is justified of her children. I shall not live to see it, but a generation or so hence The Fortnightly, recovering from these its earlier excesses, will revert to its original mission, and give the world the best which can be written for or against any school of politics and philosophy in Church or State.” This characteristic prediction has at least, in the twentieth century, fulfilled itself to the letter. Under its present accomplished editor, as under his latest predecessors, irrespectively of party position or personal proclivities, the periodical has been opened to all competent writers with a message to deliver.

CHAPTER X
THE BROADENING OF THE LITERARY AND GEOGRAPHICAL HORIZON

Trollope as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. G. H. Lewes among the lions of literature and science at The Priory, Regent’s Park—Charles Dickens present in the spirit, not in the flesh, thinks Adam Bede is by Bradbury or Evans, and doesn’t fancy it is Bradbury—Was there any exchange of literary influence between George Eliot and Trollope?—Trollope’s new departure illustrates the progress from the idyllic to the epic—Orley Farm—Its plot—Trollope’s first visit to the United States, in 1860.

THACKERAY’s death in 1863 had left Trollope without any special intimate among his fellow-craftsmen. Several years later, indeed, his success as a novelist brought him, after the manner to be duly mentioned in its proper place, into business relations with Dickens, his mother’s rather than his own old friend. John Forster, it has been seen, may be said first to have brought him out in print. With that ex-editor of The Examiner, Trollope always maintained some social intimacy, visiting him first in the Lincoln’s Inn Chambers, where he so long lived, and afterwards more frequently at his house in Queen’s Gate. Here the chief new literary acquaintance formed by Trollope was with the second Lord Lytton, who snatched from his diplomatic employments abroad enough time for constant reappearance in literary circles at home. Between 1865 and 1875, however, the most interesting and eventful visits paid by Trollope to any host among contemporary writers were those to Mr. and Mrs. G. H. Lewes at The Priory, North Bank, Regent’s Park. At these well-known Sunday afternoon receptions, Trollope first found himself at the social heart of the highest nineteenth century culture. G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope were all nearly of an age. How far Lewes and his scientific tastes affected George Eliot’s literary style may be an open question. There is no doubt that George Eliot in her turn influenced Trollope’s views of life and character. In Trollope’s time, the regular Sunday habitués of the double drawing-room at The Priory, for the most part men, seldom failed to number among them Frederick Leighton, whose drawings for Romola decorated the walls; E. S. Beesly, History Professor at London University College; Robert Browning always; sometimes, on his rare visits to London, Alfred Tennyson; the philosophers Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, E. F. S. Pigott invariably; occasionally Owen Jones, to whose decorative art The Priory owed scarcely less than the Crystal Palace itself; some men of note from the Universities; and generally one or two foreigners of distinction in letters, science, or art.

Of all this company, none more frequently than Trollope obtained a seat near Mrs. Lewes’ armchair on the left of the fire-place. The two novelists never talked publicly about themselves, but among the guests there were some who noticed a kind of parallel in George Eliot’s and Anthony Trollope’s literary courses. The earliest successes of both with the general public won the favour also of their most famous fellow-authors. Thackeray pleasantly complained if, after the day’s work was done, he could not at once refresh himself with The Three Clerks. George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life had no sooner appeared in Blackwood’s than Dickens conjured all those about him to read them, saying, “They are the best things I have seen since I began my course.” A little later, Miss Marian Evans, to recall for a moment the name which never, by the by, appeared on the title-page of any of her books, set the literary world speculating about the identity veiled by the George Eliot pseudonym. Dickens alone penetrated the mystery, after reading the description of Hetty Sorrel doing her back hair. Only a woman, and one of first-rate genius, could have written that, he said. Hence his oracular reply, through his daughter, to a letter asking his opinion on the subject: “Papa wishes me to say he feels sure Adam Bede is either by Bradbury or Evans, and he doesn’t think it’s Bradbury.”[21]

George Eliot, like many other great writers, avoided, so far as possible, reading the periodical reviews of her books. Love of approbation was with her a phrenological organ strongly developed; as all writers cannot but do, she found sweetness in the appreciation of her work by other labourers in the same literary field as her own. During the later fifties she made more than one visit to Florence and its neighbourhood in quest of materials and local colour for Romola, published in 1863. On those occasions she saw much of Anthony Trollope’s elder brother, Thomas Adolphus, who had made the Tuscan capital his home, and who never left it save on a short and rare visit to England. Anthony Trollope’s familiarity with the place dated, as has been seen, from the visit paid by him to his mother during her residence there. Those early reminiscences naturally increased Anthony Trollope’s interest in Romola. “A delightful generous letter from Mr. Anthony Trollope about Romola” brightened and encouraged the authoress in one of those moods of passing depression that sometimes beset the most intellectual toilers. “The heartiest, most genuine, moral and generous of men.” Such, at an earlier state of their acquaintance, had been the impression given by the author of The Small House at Allington to the hostess of The Priory at those Sunday afternoon receptions. In common with his fellow-guests Trollope felt to the full the austere charm of George Eliot’s grave urbanity, and of her conversation—brightened indeed by no flashes of humour, but occasionally seasoned with utterances of penetrating sagacity condensed into epigram. With this woman of genius Trollope became a personal favourite. More than that, the two novelists appreciably, to some extent, influenced each other. “I am not at all sure,” George Eliot told Mrs. Lynn Linton, “that, but for Anthony Trollope, I should ever have planned my studies on so extensive a scale for Middlemarch, or that I should, through all its episodes, have persevered with it to the close.”

Trollope’s progress as a novelist owed something to his acquaintance with the two chief literary women of his age. Mention has already been made of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s preference over all his earlier stories for The Three Clerks. Nothing else of his, she said, had thus far combined so happily pure romance with realistic incident. This praise, he told the present writer, had the effect of doubling his care with the labour of plot-weaving in connection with character-drawing. This was in 1858. In 1862 Orley Farm produced nearly the same compliment to him from the author of Adam Bede. Ten years after Mrs. Browning’s hints came the inspiring and instructive intercourse with George Eliot. Fresh from that association Trollope began to deal less superficially than his earlier stories had required with feminine problems. Into his comedy narrative of manners were now introduced questions of social casuistry, involving moral issues of a graver kind than those which so far had charged his atmosphere. Among the most marked of Trollope’s mental features was his receptivity. This had been already shown by the literary account to which he successively turned his Post Office experiences at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, in Ireland, and again after that in England, provincial as well as metropolitan. His admiration of George Eliot’s art generally, particularly of those qualities in her work that secured her the compliment of comparison with Shakespeare, did without affecting his literary style and method to some degree influence, as he himself felt, his views of character and life.

Can You Forgive Her? (1864), as will presently be shown, marked a fresh stage in the novelist’s evolution. In the manifestation of poetic gifts the natural order of advance has always been from the idyllic to the epic. Whether with the founder of pastoral poetry this may have been the case we do not know, since from Theocritus there have come down to us from him no strains more militant than those in which he celebrated the rivalries, the loves, the alternate fears and hopes, not of a purely ideal Arcadia, but as those sentiments existed in everyday life among the Syracusan swains and shepherds whom in real life he knew. The Virgilian Bucolics were in wide circulation before, at the wish of Augustus, the Æneid was begun. So with English poets. Milton’s shorter and gentler compositions preceded Paradise Lost by the best part of a generation. Alexander Pope’s Pastorals soothed pleasantly the popular ear while their author still meditated in his Twickenham grotto the English presentation of the Greek and Latin heroic masterpieces. So too with Trollope. The broader canvas, the greater variety of personages, and the swifter sequence of stirring incident exemplified a progress corresponding with that just explained.

Something of the same sort had already happened, or was about to take place with a literary ornament of the Victorian age, of an order more illustrious than Anthony Trollope. The greatest, probably, of modern English poets who have ever filled the office of laureate made his first successful appeal to the public with compositions that were in metre much what Trollope’s Cornhill stories were in prose. Six years older than Anthony Trollope, Alfred Tennyson had first caught the English ear with his rural lays and lyrics of English home life. The taste thus gratified, as well as to some extent created, demanded prose fiction possessing domestic interest of the same kind. The public had delighted in The Miller’s Daughter, The Sisters, The Gardener’s Daughter, Dora, Audley Court, and Edwin Morris from the poet. It, therefore, found what exactly suited its mood in Framley Parsonage, and The Small House at Allington from the novelist. The way for Trollope’s popularity had also been prepared, not only by writers of his own period, but by the gradual evolution of the English novels at the hand of its earlier masters. His stories of everyday life began to appear while Jane Austen’s novels were still in the highest favour and Maria Edgeworth’s still retained much of their original vogue. Charlotte Yonge had first extended her fame from the High Church circles to the general public a little later, and retained her position well into the nineteenth century’s second half. But the well-to-do and more or less cultivated English households that read and discussed The Heir of Redclyffe had by no means ceased to care for the analysis of feminine character as illustrated by English fiction’s earliest master of that art, Samuel Richardson. There were, too, Richardson’s less famous or now almost forgotten successors; these numbered not only Thomas Holcroft, but Robert Page, whose Hermsprang contains studies of girlhood and womanhood as effective, and, in their day as much admired, as any of the portraits in “those large, still books,” to apply to them Tennyson’s description. The welcome given to those heroines on their first appearance before the public presaged in its warmth and universality the reception awaiting the latter-day descendants of the men, the matrons, and widows whom Richardson’s example had encouraged Trollope to think no labour of observation or of pen too great, if, as he had seen them, he could in his stories, to the life, reproduce, not only them, but their social atmosphere and surroundings. This Trollope did, and an older generation, which knew Richardson first-hand, encouraged its juniors to see in Lily Dale and Lucy Robarts most of what an earlier age had found in Clarissa Harlowe and Pamela.