Trollope’s two greatest contemporaries, Thackeray and Dickens, did not live to finish their last novels, Denis Duval and Edwin Drood respectively. So, too, it was with Trollope himself. After a journey to Italy about a year before his death he prepared himself for writing The Land Leaguers by two tours in Ireland. This was one of the only two books—Framley Parsonage having been the other—whose publication began before the closing chapter had been written; it was therefore destined to remain a fragment.
Of the practically unknown stories belonging to this period, the only one which it would be fair, however briefly, to recall is Dr. Worth’s School (1881). That contains a last addition to the long clerical portrait gallery—a pedagogue in holy orders, in whom, to judge from his temperament, the artist must have taken an autobiographical interest. For Dr. Wortle has the same reputation as Trollope himself for blustering amiability, an imperious manner and a good heart. With the rectory of Bowick he combines schoolmastering of a very select and remunerative kind. Of course Dr. Wortle himself is too busy, and his wife too preoccupied with parochial or social duties to bestow much personal attention upon the boys. All this is therefore left to the assistant master, Mr. Peacocke, and his wife.
Peacocke, an ex-Fellow of Trinity, has spent much time in America. Here he first met Mrs. Peacocke, a young and beautiful woman, married while a mere girl to a worthless and cruel profligate, Ferdinand Lefroy, who soon afterwards disappears, killed, it is said, in a drunken brawl. The first husband, as will at once be guessed, is not dead but, as he soon shows, very much alive. Peacocke has thus to choose between deserting the defenceless woman, whom, however vainly, he has done all he could to make his wife, or brazening it out, risk the consequences, and refuse to give her up. Adopting that latter course, he makes much trouble for himself, even in such a paradise of matrimonial laxity as the United States. He therefore recrosses the Atlantic with the hope of beginning a new life in his native land. At Dr. Wortle’s, Peacocke is doing well when the story of his own and his wife’s past becomes known. Pressure is now placed on Dr. Wortle to dismiss his immoral usher. His generous refusal to do so loses him nearly all his pupils, and determines Peacocke to search America for evidence that, by conclusively establishing Lefroy’s death, will clear both Dr. Wortle and himself. His errand succeeds. Peacocke brings back with him proof of his having violated neither the marriage law nor the decalogue. The way is therefore open for an indisputably legal union with Mrs. Peacocke. That is followed by the return of prosperity to all persons concerned. The parents who have withdrawn their sons rally round Peacocke’s loyal chief. The curtain falls on the entrance upon the new lease of prosperity of Dr. Wortle’s school and all connected with it.
Few novelists have beat out their gold leaf so thin as was systematically done by Trollope. None but himself have persisted in the practice for years without encountering signs of weariness in their public that have caused them to change their ways. Trollope never felt, or, at least, practically acknowledged such a compulsion. Dr. Wortle’s School only attained to the dimensions of a book, because the story that gives the title to the volume receives the addition of incidents and characters, organically quite unconnected with the central personages and plot. Trollope, therefore, consistently and to the last, in the structure of his novels persevered with a method somewhat apt to try his readers’ patience. In other words, by distracting attention from the creatures of his imagination originally placed in the foreground, he weakens their hold upon the mind. The legitimate or the most serviceable purpose of an underplot is to illustrate from another part of the stage, or on a stage entirely different, those evolutions of character or course of action belonging to the maiden narrative. This was almost as entirely ignored by Trollope as it was thoroughly understood by Dickens.
In Dombey and Son the gipsy underplot is a close parallel to, as well as an apposite commentary on, the principal theme of Mr. Dombey and his second wife. Like Edith Skewton, Alice Brown is a tall, handsome girl, out of whose beauty a grasping and worthless mother makes what capital she can. Alice’s outlook on life is in every particular Edith’s also; one of scorn for herself and her mother, and a weary defiance to the world. Alice, too, resembles Edith in being a much less strong-willed mother’s passive instrument, not from any sympathy with her, but from an utter indifference to good or ill. Further, the personal likeness between the two is explained by the fact of Alice Brown’s being Edith Dombey’s illegitimate sister. Again, it is through Alice’s mother, Mrs. Brown, that Dombey discovers the continental whereabouts of the defaulting Carker and of his own wife. The analogy appears still closer when one remembers that, after the mother’s death, Alice rises above the level to which she had been degraded, without knowing what happiness means. With Dickens, the whole episode is not the less significant because it is shadowy, and its vagueness at no point interferes with the central narrative.
Another quality distinguishing Trollope from most other novelists is a literary style, shown from the first and retained to the last, exactly suited to his subject-matter, appealing at once to the cultivated and the general reader. Writing not for a limited circle—like his junior in years, but, in work, almost his contemporary, Meredith, or his avowed master and idol, Thackeray—with his pen, as in his pursuits, habits, and tastes, he was, after the English manner, essentially masculine. Yet he knew more of the feminine mind and nature than any author of his generation. His descriptions of mixed society in drawing-room or Club may occasionally lack lightness in handling, polish and point. His scenes, humorous or pathetic, serious or trivial, between women alone in seaside lodgings or in country houses, unite with a vividness of presentation a fineness of touch, unique in English fiction. That was the quality apropos of which a London hostess once said to him, “Mr. Trollope, how do you know what we women say to each other when we get alone in our room?” A few hours before this question, being at the Athenæum, he had heard a member of the Club complain that in The Last Chronicle of Barset Mrs. Proudie was still allowed to live. “Feeling sure,” said Trollope, “from this, that the bishopess was beginning to pall on the public, I went home and killed her.” Add to this width, depth, and variety of the interest he excited the fact that he never risked being dull in the affectation or effort of being profound and that, from first to last, his bold, clear, if sometimes diffuse style was tainted by no symptoms of the modern euphuism known as preciosity, Trollope’s claim to the description of a national novelist cannot be denied.
The advance of the story, prose or verse, narrative or dramatic, from the Attic stage to Samuel Richardson, as from the creator of Clarissa to the creator of Hetty Sorrel, has been from incident to character. Character analysis and character casuistry naturally go together. Hence, to some degree it has been already possible to see in Trollope the progenitor of the twentieth-century problem novel. From that point of view, the man, whose development has been traced in these pages, was the typical product, not of a great creative, but of a reflective and critical age. Thus he illustrated, in however different form, the same influences of his age as showed themselves, among prose writers, not only in Meredith, but in Matthew Arnold or Carlyle, in A. W. Kinglake or in Laurence Oliphant; and among poets, in Browning.
The turn for psychological puzzles together with the dissection of human motive and action common to the two men made Trollope Browning’s favourite among contemporary writers. Socially, during the last half of their careers the novelist and the poet led much the same lives, visiting at the same houses and most easily unbending in the same company. One of the latest occasions on which the two met each other was in the grounds of Lambeth Palace in 1882. Their host upon that occasion was Archibald Campbell Tait. By something of a coincidence, before the year was out both the archbishop and that literary guest who was more closely associated by his writings than any English author with the higher and lower orders of the Anglican clergy were dead. Tait died on December 3rd, Trollope on December 6th.
During the two years passed by him at Harting there had been no great decline in his health. After leaving his Sussex home, he saw little again of Montagu Square. With that place, however, those who knew him best always most pleasantly connected his name. There the book-room or study, the scene of nearly all his literary toils, with Miss Bland for his amanuensis, was on the ground-floor behind the dining-room. Above that his books had overflowed into a double drawing-room; one of its chief features was a capacious recess at the north end, fitted with some book-shelves, but chiefly used by him for visitors with whom he wished some special talk. The contents of the shelves now mentioned had a history highly characteristic of their owner. Robert Bell, the once universally known book-lover, critic, and author, had left to his widow a smaller estate than was expected. His library was announced for sale at Willis and Sotheran’s. “This,” said Trollope, “must not be. We all know the difference in value between buying and selling of books.” He at once saw the executors; the auction arrangements were cancelled. Trollope bought all the volumes at a price, fixed by himself, much above their market worth.
This was only one instance of the kindly and unselfish actions unostentatiously performed by one among the broadest-minded, kindest-hearted of men. Not unreservedly a man of peace himself, he more than once acted as peacemaker, in reconciling to each other friends of his long at variance. Thus a difference originating in the newspaper office (The Daily News) with which they both had to do, kept apart for nearly a generation two of his intimates, Edward Pigott and Edward Dicey. Neither would probably have spoken again to the other but for Trollope’s genial and tactful intervention. This happened during the last eighteen months of his life. His manner in doing it reminded both men of a sixth-form boy who, separating two juniors engaged in fisticuffs, bids them, with a gentle kick, go about their business.