It is as unpleasant as it is a powerful story; at not a few points equal in graphic vigour and in harrowing multiplicity of incident to the strong but revoltingly painful descriptions which mark another of Charles Reade’s novels of colonial as well as maritime adventure, Hard Cash. The pictures of goldfield life are suggestive enough as far as they go, but would certainly have been better had not Trollope felt himself under the necessity of having the book finished on his arrival at Cape Town.
Noticeable for the rapidity of its movement, as well as the freshness of its description, this second and last colonial novel contains a study of character, executed with as much power and care as is to be found in any of the later stories. Mrs. Bolton, Hester’s mother, is an object-lesson of evangelicalism, seen, not in the actual teaching, but in its results. Bromley, the Vicar of Folking, Caldigate’s native place, is a typical easy-going clergyman, a favourite with the squire, and, as we are left to conclude, with all his right-thinking parishioners. Mrs. Bolton, unfortunately, has taken her theology from those less genial, and, indeed, Calvinistic teachers, at whom, though no fresh representative of the class is mentioned by name, Trollope deals a farewell blow. Mrs. Bolton, a strong-minded woman, is not in herself bad-hearted. But for the downright inhumanity of her religious principles, she would have been a good and wise parent instead of a bitter Low Churchwoman. It is of course a painful, but an effective picture, because brought out under its author’s pervading and deep conviction in these matters. The increasing bitterness of Trollope’s anti-evangelical temper was not merely an inheritance of the spirit of his mother’s Vicar of Wrexhill, or his early association with F. W. Faber and other Oxford Anglicans already mentioned; it came also from his own disappointing experience of what he considered evangelicalism’s effects on the happiness and character of those he loved. Not later than July 21, 1877, had been the date fixed by the author for sending in the complete manuscript. On that day he had no sooner landed in South Africa than he dropped his packet into the Cape Town Post Office; for at least half the novel was written during Trollope’s voyage to South Africa.
“A poor, niggery, yellow-faced, half-bred sort of place, with an ugly Dutch flavour about it,” was the visitor’s earliest impression of the region in which he had just set foot. It improved a little on acquaintance; but never interested or impressed him in the same way as Australia. He found it, however, equally favourable to pedestrianism and penmanship. “I am,” he said in one of his home letters, “on my legs every day among the hills for four hours, and every day, too, I do my four hours writing about what I have seen and heard, after the fashion of our friend Froude.[32] I then sleep eight hours without stirring. The other eight hours are divided between reading and eating, with preponderance to the latter.” “The one person,” wrote Trollope to a Scotch friend in 1878, “who has most struck me here, is a certain young compatriot of yours, Leander Starr Jameson, who has just started in medical practice at Kimberley, and in whom I see qualities that will go to the making of events in this country.” When free from the influence of personal feeling, Trollope was seldom far out in his estimates of character. This acute presage concerning the then little known future leader of the famous raid was first confided, if I mistake not, to John Blackwood, the sole recipient of many of Trollope’s best sayings, and the friend whom he valued more highly than he did any other member of his own generation. After a really touching and unique fashion, Trollope, nine years earlier, had shown his attachment to the famous Scotch publisher; for, in 1870, he had contributed Cæsar to the Ancient Classics series, the copyright being a free present to “my old friend John Blackwood.”
On the other hand, Blackwood found in Trollope none of the obstinacy about which he had heard from others, but a most pleasant and docile readiness to profit in his work by a publisher’s hints. In his quite affectionate acknowledgment of the Cæsar, he said, “I value it the more because I have looked this gift-horse in the mouth.” “Your new classical venture,” said Blackwood to Trollope, “was in a line so different from anything else you had done, that I scanned it closely; I can, therefore, speak of its merits.”
Long before this, indeed, Trollope had been cited by Blackwood as a model contributor. Charles Reade resented some of Blackwood’s proposed emendations, especially in the case of some interminably diffuse love-making scenes or conversations. “I have,” mildly rejoined the publisher, “but ventured on submitting to you considerations, which other authors of great experience in such feminine matters, for instance, Trollope, willingly received.” Relations between the two novelists were already a little strained because of Trollope’s complaint that Reade had taken the notion of the play The Wandering Heir from his own story Ralph the Heir. Blackwood’s compliments to Trollope must have rankled in Reade’s heart; for about this time Reade alluded to Trollope as a literary knobstick, a publisher’s rat, and other pleasant terms including, I think, his favourite reproach of Homunculus. But peace-making friends intervened, and the matter settled itself almost as amicably as at Bob Sawyer’s supper table in Lant Street borough.
The volumes on South Africa, begun the very day John Caldigate left Cape Town for Edinburgh, were issued by Chapman and Hall. The subject had at least for some time been full of topical interest. In the May of 1875 the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, had proposed to Sir Henry Berkeley, the Cape Town Governor, to confederate the three British colonies, Cape Town, Natal, Griqua Land West, and the two Dutch republics, The Orange River Free State, and The Transvaal Republic. J. A. Froude, the historian, then travelling for his health’s sake after his wife’s death, had, at the Minister’s wish, surveyed the possibilities of the federation on the spot. Local jealousies prevented the scheme from being carried through, or rather reduced a great imperial project to a mere enabling measure in the South African Act of August 1877. During 1874 the popular concern for South African affairs culminated in the Langalibalele rising and the shortly following Zulu War with Cetewayo. Then came Sir Theophilus Shepstone’s annexation of The Orange River Free State diamond-fields, and Sir Bartle Frere’s Cape Governorship and South African High Commissionership followed in 1877.
No two nineteenth century men of letters were personally more unlike each other than James Anthony Froude and Anthony Trollope. “Old Trollope, after banging about the world so long, now treading in my footsteps, and, like an intellectual bluebottle, buzzing about at Cape Town” was the historian’s characteristic comment, made in his softest and silkiest tones on the novelist’s voyage to the country, visited by himself some seven years earlier. Trollope secured his object by getting out his South African book some two years before Froude, in 1880, had published a line on the subject. In the Kimberley district, Trollope, we have already seen, had discovered the historic “Dr. Jim.” He next made the acquaintance and sounded the praises of the clever young lady Miss Olive Schreiner, author of The Story of an African Farm, published on Trollope’s instance by Chapman and Hall.
In 1878, however, no really popular work about the southern parts of the dark continent had appeared before Trollope’s volumes. These drew the Cape provinces, Natal, The Transvaal, and the diamond fields in The Orange River Free State exactly as at the time they were, and liberally relieved their purely historical or descriptive contents with touches often as instructive as they were humorous, revealing scenery and character by the flashlight of a representative anecdote or well-turned phrase. The Transvaal annexation, accomplished before his visit, is called, in a rather Carlylean phrase, one of the “highest-handed acts in history”: “It was,” said Trollope, “a typical instance of the beneficent injustice of the British.” For the rest, diamond-fields and goldmines alike struck him as a “meretricious means of attracting population to the country.” The Boer farmers are very fine fellows of their kind, most unhandsomely treated by all English writers except himself. As for the proposed withdrawal from The Transvaal, it is an idea only worthy of a pusillanimous dunderhead. The reception given to the South African book by the critics and public markedly indicated a recovery of the popularity which a year or two earlier had seemed for the moment on the wane. The Times declared it had not a page uninstructive or dull. The Athenæum found that, coming in the nick of time, it admirably supplied a public want. “Full of freshness and individuality in all its presentations, social and political,” said The Academy. “Always judicious, often very entertaining, and only from sometimes excessive zeal a trifle diffuse,” chimed in The Spectator.
More satisfactory and important to Trollope than the book’s mere success was the attention it secured from colonial readers, both at home and abroad, more particularly with the South African department of the Colonial Office in Whitehall. Lord Carnarvon was then responsible for the government of Greater Britain. Before his retirement from the Beaconsfield administration on the advance of the British fleet to Constantinople early in 1878, he had read or heard enough of the work to find its views of South African federation of more value to a responsible statesman than the details, bearing on that subject, already brought back to him by Froude from the Cape. This fact soon developed into intimacy what had hitherto been only a casual acquaintance. There then lived, at the age of seventy-six, the third Earl Grey; he had been the singularly able and unsympathetic Colonial Minister in the Russell administration of 1846. Trollope and Lord Carnarvon chanced, one day, to come out together from a room in the Athenæum where Lord Grey was. “His mistake,” said Trollope, referring to Russell’s ex-Colonial Secretary, “always seemed to be his domination by the idea of its being possible to give representative institutions and to stop short of responsible government, after the English fashion under Elizabeth and the Stuarts.” It was a casual remark, but associated itself with an episode in Trollope’s life about which something must be said in the next chapter.