Trollope’s third visit to America—That of 1868 about the Postal Treaty and Copyright Commission—Mr. and Mrs. Trollope’s Australian visit (1871) to their sheep-farming son—Family or personal features and influences in the colonial novels suggested by this journey—Trollope as colonial novelist compared with Charles Reade and Henry Kingsley—Why the colonial novels were preceded by The Eustace Diamonds—Rival South African travellers—Trollope follows Froude to the Cape—What he thought about the country’s present and future—How he found out Dr. Jameson and Miss Schreiner—John Blackwood, Trollope’s particular friend among publishers—Trollope, Blackwood’s pattern writer—Julius Cæsar—Anthony’s birthday present to John—The South African book—What the critics said—Well-timed and sells accordingly.
SO far, it has been practicable to follow Trollope’s productions almost exactly in the order in which they came from his pen. The political novels, as has been seen, constitute a series whose successive parts are even more closely connected than the various instalments of the Barchester novels. Thus, Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux form a single story; The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children contain the underplots or afterplots of what has gone before. The Beverley adventure and its reflection in Ralph the Heir, three years afterwards (1871), formed the biographical prelude to the little group of stories in which Phineas Finn came first. The examination of these in the preceding chapter, once begun, had to be completed, or their unity would have been lost. Hence, some unavoidable little interruption of strict chronological sequence and the momentary neglect, now to be repaired, of Trollope’s other doings in the Beverley year. The value set by the Government on Trollope’s Post Office work was shown immediately after he had resigned his post at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Nothing could be more complimentary than the request that he would make a third journey to the United States for the conclusion of a new postal treaty at Washington.[28] That task occupied exactly three months and three weeks; it was begun April 8th and ended July 27th. Then he brought back to England a success more complete than, from the uncongenial variety of the American representatives with whom he had to deal, he had at times feared might prove possible.
The visit also had its literary usefulness. While occupied with the Washington officials he studied the traits subsequently bodied forth in his American Senator, and before he went home he made advantageous arrangements with the publishers in New York. During the fourteen years of life, however, which still remained for him he crossed and recrossed the Atlantic twice more; altogether therefore he made no less than five different appearances in the great Republic. Each of them was turned by him to good account not more in business matters than in observing the American-Irish developments described elaborately in The Land Leaguers. The United States public and publishers also did Trollope a particularly good turn by appreciating the political novels, less warmly, indeed, than the Barchester books, but far more cordially than had been done by home consumers of these products. The one work that New York readers would not have was The Cornhill reprint, Brown, Jones and Robinson, pronounced, not perhaps unjustly, by the first American critic of the day, Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie, the most stupid story ever coming from the same pen. With that exception Trollope’s magazine pieces suited the taste of New York better than they did that of London; during 1860 Harper’s pleased all its friends by publishing his short stories, The Courtship of Susan Bell, The O’Conors of Castle Conor, and Relics of General Chassé. These were produced here in the three volumes entitled Tales of All Countries. Trollope’s style, both in his earlier and later days, was occasionally apt to be much influenced by his friend Charles Lever. Of the compositions just enumerated, The O’Conors, a transcript of his own early Irish observations, had a remarkable American success, perhaps because a certain adventurous breeziness of movement as of style exactly suited a public whose passing taste had for the moment been more or less formed, not only by Charles Lever, but by those who had been before him, as Fenimore Cooper and Captain Marryat. Harper’s did also more for Trollope than show him as a short story writer at his best; it introduced its readers to The Small House at Allington, Orley Farm, as well as to several of his less known efforts, such as Lady Anna.
Generally, the transatlantic verdict confirmed that of the old country and gave the palm to the pen and ink photographs of provincial home life. In one respect, however, America strikingly showed its independence of English estimates by unanimously crediting the political series from Phineas Finn to The Duke’s Children with a vividness of portraiture, an experience of and an insight into the leading personages, forces, and incidents of British public life such as Trollope’s own countrymen had not then discovered. Why this should have been so it is not difficult to see. In England, those who cared for the political novel were still under the Disraelian spell when Trollope put forth his impressions of public life as he had observed it in the stories that opened with Phineas Finn (1869), and only closed with The Duke’s Children (1880). During all those years the intellectual fascination possessed by Disraeli, whether as writer or politician, for the English public, so far from diminishing, had, upon the whole, deepened. The sustained brilliancy of Lothair (1868), and Endymion (1881), sent readers back to Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred. Of that literary enchantment the United States knew comparatively little. As a political novelist, Trollope was judged on his own merits, without, as in England, any reference to the dazzling and unapproachable genius who had preceded him. Before Disraeli, Plumer Ward had portrayed statesmen in romances, which were generally forgotten by Englishmen, while Bulwer-Lytton had given something of a political flavour to his best-known novels. By the standard of Ward and Lytton, rather than, as was the case in England, of Disraeli, the Americans judged Trollope. They accordingly found in him an actuality and naturalness at once instructive and refreshing; nor did they miss the verbal fireworks for which the Coningsby novels had accustomed the English reader to look.
It has already been shown how, on other subjects, Trollope stood with the American public; before following him in his overseas movements, some details may here be given of his practical relations with the American publisher. From English publishers, Trollope, according to his own estimate, received in all a little under £70,000. His American receipts were rather more than £3000.[29] Beside his Post Office Commission, Trollope, during his American visit of 1868, also acted as the Foreign Office representative on the subject of International Copyright. That, however, is a question scarcely suitable for treatment here. As regards the primary and Postal errand, he accomplished the purpose for which he had been sent, and obtained the terms asked by the English Government. By the Convention which he negotiated, the postage on a half ounce letter between England and the United States was fixed at sixpence. With respect to the literary relations of the two countries, Trollope brought back no equally definite result, but only failed to do so because, in the nature of things, success was then impossible. In the diplomacy of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Trollope essayed nothing which he did not carry through. The literary monument of his Egyptian journey in 1858 had been no work descriptive of the country, but a novel, The Bertrams. For, unless he had found himself so far on his way as Cairo, he would never have pilgrimaged to Jerusalem, or collected the material in local colour for the Syrian scenes and incidents in that novel. His official work had then been a Postal Convention with the Egyptian authorities for our Australian and Indian mails across the Delta. The same kind of duty he had performed so well ten years earlier was repeated after the same fashion in 1868.
Trollope’s various transatlantic trips were the prelude to more extended tours on that other side of the world where his postal rather than literary labours had already made him a name. These Antipodean experiences were, during the last eight years of his life, to give him as a novelist something like a new lease of vigour and freshness. Trollope’s instinctive sympathy with the temper and tendencies of his time, whatever the movement in progress might be, had, as the reader already knows, during his earliest youth, showed itself in the readiness with which he came under the influence of Anglican leaders. A little later the perennial Irish question, in its social as well as political, its sentimental not less than its practical aspects, filled the air, and gave both direction and colour to his initial experiment as a novelist, The Macdermots (1847). Active interest in politics was delayed till the season of youth and enthusiasm had been outlived. But, when a little over fifty, he could not resist the temptation to take a combatant’s part in the battle, then at its height between the two great party leaders of the time. Beaten at Beverley, and so debarred from delivering himself about men and measures at St. Stephen’s, Trollope turned to account the experiences he had gathered and the opinions he had formed, in the Phineas Finn stories.
Meanwhile, however, a new interest in the Greater Britain beyond the seas had deeply stirred the popular imagination, and reflected itself in the writings of his best known contemporaries. Trollope accordingly realised that he had been wasting on party energies meant for the Empire. Natural affection and the conscious need of securing imaginative freshness by entire change of scene and thought were other motives operating in the same direction. Within two or three years of recrossing the Atlantic homewards, Trollope planned a yet more extensive tour with the set purpose of bringing back from the Antipodes materials, not only for history, but for fiction. The earliest writer of Trollope’s day to feel and express the transoceanic inspiration of the new epoch was Bulwer-Lytton, some eight years before he became Colonial Secretary in the Derby Government. The example of The Caxtons soon proved contagious. In 1856 Trollope’s exact contemporary, Charles Reade, published It’s Never too Late to Mend, whose dramatised form, in 1866, not only revived the original story’s interest, but infused fresh force into the agitation against transporting English criminals to Australasian colonies. In 1859 Henry Kingsley suffused his spirited romances, Geoffrey Hamlyn and The Hillyars and the Burtons with the local colour he had collected during a short residence under the Southern Cross; thus as a colonial novelist he differed from Reade, and resembled Trollope,[30] in describing, from personal knowledge, the scenes and incidents whose word-pictures bear in every detail the stamp of fidelity to life. The original and chief motive of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Trollope’s expedition, in the May of 1871, to the other side of the world, was that they might see once more a son then sheep-farming in the Australian Bush. Trollope himself would have felt uncomfortable if he had embarked without feeling that, while making holiday in a far country, he was also collecting impressions for at least one new book.
Before actually setting sail, therefore, he had contracted with Chapman and Hall for the Australian volumes published in 1873, and had also found a newspaper opening for certain travel letters, to be incorporated afterwards in the book. This, on coming out in 1873, was pronounced, by The Times, “the most agreeable, just, and acute work ever written on the subject.” On the other hand, The Athenæum and The Saturday Review dwelt on the length, the diffuseness, and the want of method of the ponderous volumes, “as dull as they are big.” Perplexity of arrangement, and occasional obscurity of diction, were other charges made by these critics against the work. Good taste in dealing with all personal matters was the chief merit compensating for decline in literary power, which even these censors allowed. The shrewdness of insight with which The Times credited Trollope was praise abundantly justified by events. Indeed Trollope’s one mistake in judgment was his prophecy about the annexation of Tasmania by Victoria. Any movement of this kind he might, with a little more carefulness of enquiry and accuracy of observation, have convinced himself was purely local in its origin, never, in its growth, exceeded the narrowest limits, and was repudiated, even in his day, by responsible Tasmanian as well as Victorian statesmen. It never consequently entered into the regions of practical politics.
His faith in the certainty of Australasian federation rested on much stronger ground. Its fulfilment he did not live to witness. That took place sixteen years after his death when, in the March of 1898, the Australian Commonwealth bill became law. The book, written in his cabin during the homeward voyage, succeeded beyond the author’s or publisher’s expectations. This was due, first, to its happily-timed appearance; secondly, to the convenient compass within which it brought together the best that had been said by other writers, and all, indeed, which the average reader could wish to know about the history, the politics, the society, the resemblances to or differences from the Mother Country noticed by Trollope during his eighteen months’ stay in Melbourne, New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, and New Zealand. The book contained few of the carefully prepared literary effects investing the account of the West Indies with a thoroughly popular charm. But, whenever in his Australasian volumes Trollope dealt with what had struck him as really noteworthy, he showed himself once more nearly at his best; especially in his comparison between sheep-farming and ostrich-farming as careers, in his few mining scenes, and, above all, in his most graphic and informing account of the road system, which he had minutely studied. The first novel resulting from the Australian jaunt had in it many more touches of personal and domestic autobiography than the travel volumes. Like Phineas Redux, it first came out in The Graphic, and showed the intellectual benefit received by the novelist from his wanderings under the Southern Cross.
Harry Heathcote of Gangoill (1874), marked by no signs of imaginative exhaustion, as well as written throughout in the old picturesque fashion, is based on the industrial fortunes of Trollope’s Australian son, chequered by climatic caprices and ill-minded neighbours, but in spite of all this, by unflagging perseverance, steadily advancing. Most of the Trollopian qualities, the imperious prejudices, and the autocratic independence, combined with more amiable features appear in the hero. He had been one of the original settlers, who acquired their land by the simple process of “claiming” it. After he had made a good start with his work a fresh Government scheme allowed newcomers to buy whatever land they liked, even though it were already bespoke by the earlier settlers. The sole condition of purchase was that the land thus bought must exceed a certain minimum value. Of course the right of compulsory purchase given to the “free selectors,” as they were called, made them at loggerheads with such as had already established themselves before they came.