As Bacon took all nature for his province, so Trollope had no sooner overpassed the limits of country-house and rectory than he began to make his novel a complete mirror of English life on all levels up-to-date. He may have been occasionally mortified by a passing decline in the demand for Christmas stories and for magazine serials from his pen. He never thought much about the posthumous vitality of his works; although nineteenth-century pictures, clerical or secular, of town or country, of club or drawing-room, of the covert side, of the Government office, of barrister’s chambers, and of the law courts, could not but have, at some future time, the same value for the historian as Fielding and Smollett possessed for Macaulay and Lecky. He realised the necessity, above all things, of guarding himself against the charge of literary old-fogeydom. Before completing his sixtieth year he had been continually at work during more than a generation. He must therefore show that he had moved with the times by modernising his themes and their treatment. The anxiety to convince the public that he had as keen an eye as ever for the very newest actualities of the time is especially noticeable in He Knew He Was Right (1869)[33] and The Way We Live Now (1875).[34]
The former of these first came out in sixpenny parts during 1867. As originally designed by Trollope it was intended, on something the same scale as had been done by Dickens in the Steerforth episode of David Copperfield, to illustrate the tragical results, to social life and personal character, of unbridled and obstinate self-will—a quality, be it noted, equally characteristic of both novelists. Dickens, however, pointed his moral by the single case of Steerforth. In Trollope’s story, each of the chief personages is opinionated and dictatorial to the same degree; in other words, all go wrong simply because all in turn know they are right. So, it has been seen, in Can You Forgive Her? the heroine’s need of pardon was shared by more than one other lady, as well as by at least two men.
In He Knew He Was Right, Colonel Osborne, the wealthy, middle-aged rather than elderly, Conservative M.P. and professional lady-killer, has known Mrs. Trevelyan from girlhood. He therefore thinks it the correct thing to laugh at old Lady Milborough’s description of him as a serpent, a hyena, or a kite, and, by his attentions to attractive young maidens, to provoke, in Lady Milborough’s phrase, such domestic break-ups as he brings about under the Trevelyans’ roof. On the other hand, Mr. Trevelyan feels convinced beyond a doubt that, while wronging his wife by no suspicions of the worst kind, it is his duty to warn her strongly against the Colonel, and risk one of Lady Milborough’s break-ups, rather than allow Osborne’s visits.
The best piece of character drawing is Colonel Osborne. After this the neatest touches come in the Devonshire scenes describing Mrs. Trevelyan’s movements after the flight from Curzon Street. The pictures of the quiet home life, in or near Exeter, reproduce as regards places and persons the same originals which were used in Rachel Ray. In the later, as well as in the earlier novel, are reflected the same central figure, the old-world maiden lady, and some of the same young people whom in real life she gathered about her. The hostess, known by Trollope from his childhood, was Miss Fanny Bent. Her youthful visitors were Rachel Hutchinson, the doctor’s daughter, and Lucy Bowring, with perhaps one or two schoolfellows brought by her from the neighbouring paternal roof known as Claremont. Here Sir John Bowring passed his closing years. Here, too, Anthony Trollope first studied the feminine types who afterwards grew into Lily Dale, Lucy Robarts, Grace Crawley, Florence Burton, and Julia Brabazon. The last of these characters, as she appeared in the first chapter of The Claverings, was, indeed, no other than Lucy Bowring herself, photographed from life. Without exception probably, the portraits of English girls that have made half Trollope’s fame are from Devonian or other West of England models. Stiffness and wrong-headedness were infirmities to which Trollope himself frankly confessed. Of those defects he has entirely compacted the brilliant, wealthy, but suicidally perverse and obstinate Oxonian, Louis Trevelyan. The gloomy and painful plot derives no pleasant relief from the comic or lighter business, centred round the irritatingly vulgar detective, Bozzle. This debased descendant of Inspector Bucket in Bleak House fools the miserable and infatuated husband to the top of his bent; at times he shows off his sharpness by insinuations so fanciful and odious against the runaway wife, that, without the novelist saying so, one knows it is as much as Trevelyan can do to keep from knocking him down.
Like one or two other of Trollope’s feminine characters, who show their independence by sailing dangerously close to the wind, Mrs. Trevelyan is thoroughly equal to taking care of herself, and, from the ethical point of view, never comes near reproach. With a little more tact, patience and wisdom, on her husband’s part, she would never have been piqued into allowing Osborne’s attentions. She has been exasperated by Trevelyan’s unreasonable exactions. So too, in Phineas Finn, Kennedy’s conjugal accusations make Lady Laura return to her father; but Emily Trevelyan has not been really compromised by her mature admirer. Had her lord and master been less self-conscious and more a man of the world than he is, he would not have fallen a victim to his own groundless jealousy.
When treating feminine subjects, Dickens and Trollope are equally given to represent their subordinate heroines as playing with fire, or forced by circumstances into situations calculated to soil virtue itself or to set malicious tongues wagging against purity incarnate. Sometimes, as with Sir Leicester Dedlock’s wife, and Sir Joseph Mason’s widow, the case is that of a lady with a past. Punishment when due is not escaped entirely, but the wind is generally tempered to the shorn lamb, while both novelists upon occasion invoke special providences for mitigating, if not averting the penalty due to the actually fallen. Thus, in David Copperfield, ruin comes indifferently to little Em’ly and Martha; but it seems only in accordance with the fitness of things that the catastrophe should not be equally full of horror in both cases. Poetical justice, therefore, and the kindlier influences of her early nurture ordain Em’ly’s partial rescue from the hideous blackness of poor Martha’s fate. Trollope’s later and less known novels contain no better character than Lady Mabel Grex in The Duke’s Children. But for her own fine nature and great qualities she would assuredly have been doomed to the irreparable ruin, her deliverance from which comes equally from superhuman guidance and her own heroic self-discipline. Edith Dombey cannot be said to have been allowed by Dickens a narrow escape, because she was never in any real danger. Her mother’s training could not but make her an adventuress; her husband’s short-sighted pride had to be humbled by an elopement which would indeed disgrace his name, but whose circumstances could bring no stain on her. In chastising, by their flight, their respective husbands, Dickens’ second Mrs. Dombey and the Mrs. Trevelyan of He Knew He Was Right, to some extent, resemble each other; while in both cases the wifely vengeance recoils with nearly equal severity upon the lady. Generally, however, Trollope lets off more easily than does Dickens his fair triflers with the hearts of men. Thus, in Great Expectations, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, Estella, is punished as she deserves for trifling with Pip’s affections by being paired off with the surly and ill-conditioned Bentley Drummle. The arch-jilt of Can You Forgive Her?, Alice Vavasor, issuing scatheless from all her escapades, is not punished at all, but may well thank her stars in becoming the mistress of a comfortable Cambridgeshire country-house as the talented, well-to-do and long-suffering John Grey’s wife.[35]
Trollope’s next attempt at satirising the most malignant social tendencies of the time exposed the idolatry of the golden calf, and in its conception owed something to the pregnant remarks of one of the most influential among his contemporaries. During the season of 1875, Trollope’s hitherto slight acquaintance with Delane of The Times matured into intimacy. At this time the great editor was much impressed by the growth of extravagance and the increase of reckless speculation in the overgrown and mischievously mixed conglomerate of London society. The subject was one on which he and Trollope thought exactly alike. With equal disgust and indignation both observed the acceptance of mere wealth as a passport to the company of men and women who were social leaders by right of birth. In their many talks about these subjects originated both Trollope’s The Way We Live Now and a certain Times article presently to be mentioned. On resettling in London after his colonial expeditions, Trollope had established himself in Montagu Square. The first piece of work he did here was the novel in whose most prominent figure, Melmotte, a grotesque and nauseating monstrosity, he personified the commercial corruptions of the time with all their brutalising effects upon character, as in private, so in public life.
Grouped round, and more or less associated with the over-coloured financier, Melmotte, were many smaller personages representing or suggesting other vicious propensities of the period. The bloated and ferocious plutocrat has a vulgar but otherwise unobjectionable daughter whom, when she dares any details to cross his will or stand in the way of his villainies, he cuts into pieces—in plain English, horsewhips within an inch of her life. There are other young ladies as unattractive as Marie Melmotte, but less inoffensive. These are the girls who expend their energies and innocence in intrigues to get husbands, not for love, but for the enjoyment of greater freedom and more pocket-money. Melmotte himself carries about him a certain suggestion of Baron Albert Grant in the past, and of Whitaker Wright in the days that were then yet to come. The deterioration of Club life is shown by the blackguard interior of the Beargarden, where stripling debauchees, who sponge on their polite paupers of mothers, and venal and pretentious newspaper hacks eat, drink, and rampage at unholy hours.
Chronology might deny the statement that the Printing House Square manifesto already referred to supplied Trollope with a brief for this book; but both the novel and the article came out in the same year. Each, in its different way, was a commentary on a state of things in which the editor and the novelist would have willingly co-operated in bringing to an end. Trollope’s Melmotte was an exaggerated type of the French, German, and American adventurers who, in Delane’s words, gorge like vultures on the country. These, said the editor, were the men whom English gentlemen of family and station competed with each other in helping to fleece society. These, too, were the qualities concentrated by the novelist in the mammoth speculator of Grosvenor Square, who, before the crash, made himself the demi-god of the season by his splendid hospitalities to no less a person than the “Emperor of China.”
One of the incidents which had chiefly moved Delane, breaking through his editorial custom to pen with his own hand his lay sermon, was this. During the early seventies an English nobleman of ancient title and descent, but of diminished territorial wealth, partly by games of chance in which there seemed some suspicion of foul play, and partly by City speculation into which he was enticed, had lost something like £10,000 to a Californian colonel, long since kicked out of all decent company. This swindling Midas, who had winged Delane’s pen, gave Trollope more than a hint for Melmotte in The Way We Live Now. Any resemblance borne by Melmotte to another fraudulent and glorified capitalist, the Merdle of Little Dorrit, is purely fortuitous. Trollope’s intimate friend Sir Henry James once, in my hearing, mentioned the matter to him, to be told “The Way We Live Now appeared in 1875; I only read Little Dorrit for the first time on my way to Germany in 1878.”