Trollope and Millais succeed in their different spheres of life by working on similar principles—The ideas which led Trollope to write Can You Forgive Her?—Lady Macleod’s praises induce the heroine to dismiss John Grey while Kate Vavasor’s devices draw her to her cousin George—Alice’s spiritual and social surroundings take a great part in moulding her character—Mrs. Greenow’s love affairs relieve the shadow of the main plot—Burgo Fitzgerald tries to recapture Lady Glencora—Mr. Palliser sacrifices his political position to ensure her safety—He is rewarded at last—Other novels, both social and political.
DURING the years in which Trollope’s industry and fame both reached their height, J. E. Millais and Sir Henry James, afterwards Lord James of Hereford, were among the friends of whom he saw most, and who knew him best. About the former’s hospitalities something will be said presently. As regards his connection with the latter, Millais in my hearing once attributed his rare success as an illustrator of Trollope’s novels to the writer and the artist both setting about their different work in the same way. “As it proceeds,” he added, “each creative or inventive stroke is inspired and stimulated or corrected as the case may be, by mental reference to the unseen models of memory.” This was Millais’ way of putting it. Trollope’s own words on the subject were, “A right judgment in selection of personal traits or physical features will ensure life likeness in representation. Horace, as Englished by Conington, talks of ‘searching for wreaths the olive’s rifled bower.’ The art practised by Millais and myself is the effective combination of the details, which observation has collected for us from every quarter, and their fusion into an harmonious unity.”
Politics and sport colour and dominate a large proportion of the novels belonging to the Can You Forgive Her? period. For the personal studies those works implied, author and artist alike found all they wanted during their summer visits to Millais’ Highland home, or in the autumn at the Kent or Wiltshire shooting-box of Henry James. Here they collected representatives of the polite world in all its aspects of pleasure or business, from the heir apparent to the latest Junior Lord of the Admiralty and the most recent importation in the way of popular sportsmen or reigning beauties from the other side of the Atlantic.
Later on, Trollope occasionally induced Millais to witness the hounds throw off in those East Anglian pastures where he had placed the Roebury Club’s headquarters, to which the author of Can You Forgive Her? had wished personally to introduce his illustrator. The similarity of Millais’ and Trollope’s methods now considered will be best understood from a concrete instance. Of the artist’s academy paintings in 1887, one was reproduced as a coloured supplement to The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News by the name of “Portia.” Without being exactly a portrait, the painting, like the coloured engraving after it, recalled to every one a well-known man’s pretty daughter who had then just come out. This young lady, indeed, had never sat to the artist; but she had given him unconsciously the central idea for his work, into which, during its progress, he introduced features or touches, whose suggestion came to him from other faces.
So was it exactly with the creations of Trollope’s pen in their companionship with those of Millais’ pencil. The literary period which, actually opening with Orley Farm, produced nothing so significant of Trollope’s advance in his craft and in his views of feminine character, as Can You Forgive Her? This was published in 1864. Much of it, however, had been written some years previously, even so far back as when the stories that first established him in favour with every class were the great attraction of The Cornhill. We have already seen how many manor houses and parsonages disputed with each other in the alleged possession of the originals from whom the novelist had drawn Lily Dale, Lucy Robarts, and their belongings. Trollope’s creative power reached its height as he approached early middle age. His Post Office rounds, throughout the whole country south of the Trent, had acquainted him first-hand with every phase of womanhood, from sweet seventeen to full-blown and flirting forty. Were some readers beginning to talk about a satiety of bread and butter misses? Orley Farm had at least reminded such critics of its author’s capacity to be something more than the prose laureate of virginal varieties like those to be met with in every English village during the sixties beneath the manor or the parsonage roof. Can You Forgive Her? realised the higher expectations first raised by Orley Farm as to the literary results that might be produced by the bolder conceptions of the sex, the broader and deeper outlook upon the tragi-comedy of daily life that Trollope had begun to exhibit.
The Barchester series had been comedy narrative, pure and simple. The later stories with which we are now concerned belong more or less to melodrama. This progress of the novelist’s development possesses an interest biographical not less than literary. Not only were Trollope’s intellectual gifts largely inherited from his mother; to her also he was indebted for the circumstances that supplied them with the material on which they exercised themselves, as well as the experiences that gave them colour and discipline. Thus Archdeacon Grantly was his maternal grandfather, the Rev. William Milton, suave in manner, nice in person, always doing his duty according to his lights, a former Fellow of New College, vicar of Heckfield. As his youthful guest, the author of Barchester Towers had been introduced to clerical life on its social side, and had observed the personal germs that afterwards grew into the Warden, Mr. Harding, and Dean Arabin. Much also of his earliest interest in feminine character he owed to his generally affectionate reminiscences of his mother—her sustained courage in domestic adversity, her cheery helpfulness to all around her, and the reserve fund of strength and resourcefulness, which never failed her for each fresh trial, as it came.
Trollope’s time in Ireland was the making of him, not only as a public servant and writer, but as a social student. His boyhood in Harrow Weald had familiarised him with the Orley Farm of his story, and with elements of his characters in it. But, at the same time that his experiences on the other side of the St. George’s Channel were shaping themselves in Castle Richmond, they were preparing him to people with suitable figures the pages not more of Orley Farm than Can You Forgive Her? Before Trollope was despatched from St. Martin’s-le-Grand on duty to Ireland, he knew, naturally enough, very little of men, women, and horses. In the second, at least, of those subjects, he had acquired proficiency at the date of his final return to England. His estimate of the sex, based on an extensive and careful generalisation, used to come out in conversational fragments which may now be pieced together. Thackeray and Bulwer-Lytton, here for once in agreement, and both, perhaps unconsciously, under the Byronic influence, might have professed a doubt whether women as a class could be considered reasonable creatures, in the same sense as men. Trollope never went so far as this. He did, however, admit that their ruling passion, a love of power, habitually neutralised the tact imputed to them as an instinct, and might obscure their intellectual perceptions, and impair their common sense. “Hence,” he would add, “the inquisitorial officiousness which makes my Mrs. Proudie not in the least a caricature, but, stripped of her Episcopal surroundings, the commonplace of most English households.”
Throughout the whole period of his literary activity, Trollope was a diligent reader of history, finding in its revelations of human character the best supplements to his own studies from life, as well as the most fruitful hints for the creation of the leading ladies in his own romance. He never pursued these historical studies more diligently, or with more definite result, than while engaged on the preparation of Can You Forgive Her? They had brought him to the conclusion that in love affairs women are generally without discrimination. “If,” he said, “of royal rank, they almost invariably choose their favourites ill. Thus Elizabeth of England, Catherine II of Russia, Queen Christina of Spain, and her daughter Isabella had the pick of great, brave, wise, and witty men. So far from turning their opportunities to profit, they all took dunderheads for their rulers.” How wide, therefore, the mark was that paradoxical pundit who declared it better for a country to have a king than a queen as its nominal head, because a king always became the creature of women, while a queen had to put herself in the hands of men. To make the same true, we must assume that queens always chose their lovers well, which, being women, as a fact they seldom do.
The origin and cause of women’s troubles in nine cases out of ten are their constitutional indisposition to compromise, whose necessity they ought to have learnt, if not in the experience of life generally, yet from the special example of the politicians to whom they invariably incline. For nowadays all women are Conservatives, and Conservatism, as we know it to-day, having political surrender for its essence, is ever a compromise with Radicalism. In the seventeenth century they used to be Jacobites. And that, most properly; for the special foibles of the sex are identical with the traditional perversities of the Stuarts. “Mankind,” said Lord Palmerston, “are, for the most part, good fellows enough, but rather conceited.” So the Duc de Sully thought James II not a bad sort of man, but incurably given to doing the second thing before the first. And that is the invariable feminine tendency. We can all sing, or say:
“It is good to be merry and wise,
It is good to be happy and true.
It is good to be off with the old love before one is on with the new.”