Trollope on the third Earl Grey, the fourth Earl of Carnarvon and the Colonies—Intimacy at Highclere and its literary consequences—Trollope and Cicero 1879—Fraternally criticised by T. A. Trollope and others—Fear of literary fogeydom produces later up-to-date novels beginning with He Knew He was Right—A similarity between Trollope and Dickens—Trollope and Delane—The editor’s article and novelist’s book about social and financial scandals of the time—Mr. Scarborough’s Family, Trollope’s first novel for a Dickens magazine—Retirement from Montagu Square to North End, Harting—Last Irish novels, An Eye for an Eye (1879), The Land Leaguers (1883), Dr. Wortle’s School—General estimate—Last London Residence—Seizure at Sir John Tilley’s—Death in Welbeck Street—Funeral at Kensal Green.
THE intimacy with the fourth Lord Carnarvon, and the warm welcome awaiting him, on his frequent visits to Highclere in or after 1878, were the direct social results of Trollope’s colonial travels and books, especially of his South African experiences. “My own Post Office work,” Trollope once said to me, “together with my own ideas of colonial administration, naturally attracted me to a colonial Minister who, before becoming the head of the department, had a hand in abolishing the old Australian mail service, in creating the Encumbered States Act for the West Indies, in improving England’s African relations with France by the exchange of Albuda for Portendic, in terminating the Hudson Bay monopoly, and of creating British Columbia as an imperial dependency. I could not but contrast Lord Grey’s colonial policy between 1846 and 1852 with Lord Carnarvon’s, which immediately followed. To do this was to see that Carnarvon understood what Grey had always missed,
HARTING GRANGE. SOUTH ENTRANCE.
the vigorous aspiration for self-government natural to an Anglo-Saxon community side by side with the weakness that must beset an executive representing a democracy.” Like other colonial observers, Trollope had been struck by certain resemblances between the condition of New Zealand and the Cape, in that they both required English protection from the natives. “In New Zealand,” continued Trollope, “I saw enough to be sure that there could never have been any chance of quiet for ourselves or safety for the natives until our troops were recalled, and the colonists, forced to rely on their own resources, tried mild and just measures instead of violent ones.” In due time the last regiment was withdrawn, and the trouble with the Maoris ceased. “Generally,” maintained Trollope, “a colony soon becomes a nation, and a spirited nation will not tolerate the control of its internal affairs by a distant Government.” Admitting this in the course of their many conversations on the subject, Carnarvon accepted Trollope’s view that the first business of the Colonial Office was to secure a maximum of profit from the connection. This, the Minister and the novelist agreed, must constitute a moral guarantee that separation, when it comes, will be on mutually amicable terms.
The fourth Lord Carnarvon’s Hampshire hospitalities during the nineteenth century’s last quarter were the social expression of an intellectual idea. Without any parade of preparatory effort, they seemed naturally to reproduce something that was characteristic of Cicero’s country-house parties at his Tusculum and much more that reminded many, Matthew Arnold included, of Falkland’s week-end feast of reason and flow of soul at Great Tew. At Highclere, Trollope frequently met not only the leading colonial politicians of the period, but scholars, lay or clerical, as J. R. Green, J. R. Seeley, Charles Kingsley, H. P. Liddon, as well as representatives of the rising talent and the new learning from Oxford and Cambridge, and sometimes from the foreign Universities. On these occasions he took an innocent boyish pleasure in displaying the Wykehamist hall-mark, liked to feel, and quietly letting it be known that he could read at least Roman authors otherwise than after Colonel Newcome’s manner—in a translation, you know, in a translation. It was in the Highclere smoking-room that, capping one of Trollope’s familiar quotations, Robert Browning added, “My dear Trollope, this display of classical lore really reminds one of Thackeray’s scholar who had earned fame and the promise of a bishopric by his masterly translation of Cornelius Nepos.” Trollope’s earliest magazine work—for the Dublin University—had given him the opportunity of rubbing up and trotting out his juvenile acquaintance with Cæsar. This afterwards expanded itself into the volume gratuitously contributed, as already described, to Blackwood’s series. Rather less than ten years later, some classical small talk with his host, Robert Herbert, Robert Browning, and an Eton master, Mr. Everard, at Highclere recalled to him his early interest in Cicero, as well as of certain notes made from much miscellaneous reading on the subject. These Ciceronian studies furnished forth the two volumes issued by Chapman and Hall in 1880.
“An unconventional attempt to clothe an ancient Roman with modern interest,” were the words aptly used by Sir William Gregory, Trollope’s old Harrow contemporary, himself a Ciceronian student, to characterise this book. Approaching his subject, not as a scholar or historian, Trollope treats it in a style lively and amusing throughout. The sympathy with Cicero, especially in exile, is as delightful and refreshingly genuine as if Trollope were describing the difficulties of Phineas Finn or the troubles, during his wife’s absence, of Mr. Furnival in Orley Farm. There are the same enlightening good sense and shrewdness in the description of Roman political parties and their leaders as form the best portion of the novels describing the rivalries of Daubeny and Gresham, and analysing the personal or political situations so severely testing the wisdom and the patience of Mr. Palliser and the Duke of Omnium. Of course, Cicero brought criticisms from a few experts. T. A. Trollope, Anthony’s elder brother, as well as severe disciplinarian in their Winchester days, had been a classical master under Jeune at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. He had therefore cultivated a more exact kind of learning than Anthony. “You ought,” he said after Cicero came out, “to have let me correct the Latin words in your proof. As it is, having, in your first volume, tried successively Quintillian and Quintilian, in your second you finally relapse into Quintillian. In another error you are at least consistent; for Pætus is always given for Pœtus. Indeed,” he continued, “these diphthongs have been among your worst enemies, because œdile is your standing version for ædile, while by Œschilus I know—what others could only guess—that you mean Æschylus.” More sympathetic censors ignored these literal slips, but could not be blind to so serious an error as occurs in vol. ii. 20, placing the Rostra in the Senate instead of the Forum. It was to be expected also that so keen a censor as Trollope’s Winchester contemporary, Robert Lowe, Lord Sherbrooke, would have had something to say about the proprætor Verres being loosely described as invested with prætorian or consular powers.
Whatever its merits or defects, Cicero at least resembled most of Trollope’s books in being the literary expression of his personality. From The Warden in 1855 to Cicero in 1880 nearly everything in Trollope’s work—character, incident, description, dialogue—was a natural emanation from the man himself, fresh, spontaneous, and unforced. If, by comparison with those which preceded them, there seems something artificial in the stories still to be mentioned, the reason is that he had never lived in the same intimacy, as he himself put it, with his new personages as he had done with the old. He had set himself to describe no longer friends, but strangers. Since he began with The Macdermots in 1847, he had seen many changes in the popular taste for fiction. He had himself encountered successfully many rivals. Wilkie Collins, Whyte-Melville, Miss Braddon, and Shirley Brooks had successively come on. Against all he held his own; he did not even suffer from Charles Lever’s competition. The creator of Harry Lorrequer and Charles O’Malley began writing books that took ground, and were in a vein, which Trollope had already made his own. The later Leverian novels, beginning with The Daltons and continuing with Sir Brook Fossbrooke, seemed to many, if actually they were not, bids against Trollope’s The Claverings, Orley Farm, and Can You Forgive Her? They did not diminish the demand for those of Trollope’s books that were variations upon the Barchester series.
Meanwhile, the social conditions of the time had changed as well as the writers. The old exclusive régime in which Trollope had been born and bred was already doomed. The time-honoured class and caste barriers were broken down. The new social fusion was all but complete. The Stock Exchange and Lombard Street had overflowed into St. James’s. The new wealth had possessed itself of the same acres, and the typical country-house was a glorified edition of the Piccadilly palace. At the same time domestic and social scandals, to be particularised hereafter, semi-detached couples, elderly bucks, being also professional lady-killers, and loveless marriages with all their tragic results, became so common as no longer to attract notice.