Born, in London, 1815. Educated at Harrow, 1822–25; at Sunbury, 1825–27; at Winchester, 1827–30; at Harrow again, 1830–33. Master in a school at Brussels for a short time. Held Post-Office appointment in London, 1834–41; in Ireland 1841–59; in London, 1859–67. Married Rose Heseltine, 11 June 1844. Edited “St. Paul’s,” 1867–71. Visit to U.S.A., 1868; to Australia and America, 1871–73. Settled in London, 1873. Active literary life. Frequent contributor to periodicals. Visit to S. Africa, 1877; to Iceland, 1878. Removed to Hastings, Sussex, 1880. Visit to Italy, 1881; to Ireland, 1882. Died, 6 Dec. 1882. Works: “The Macdermots of Ballycloran,” 1847; “The Kellys and the O’Kellys,” 1848; “La Vendée,” 1850; “The Warden,” 1855; “Barchester Towers,” 1857; “The Three Clerks,” 1858; “Doctor Thorne,” 1858; “The West Indies and the Spanish Main,” 1859; “The Bertrams,” 1859; “Castle Richmond,” 1860; “Framley Parsonage,” 1861; “Tales of all Countries,” 1st ser. 1861; 2nd ser. 1863; 3rd ser. 1870; “Orley Farm,” 1862; “North America” (2 vols.), 1862; “Rachel Ray,” 1863; “The Small House at Allington,” 1864; “Can You Forgive Her?” (2 vols.), 1864–65; “Miss Mackenzie,” 1865; “Hunting Sketches” (from “Pall Mall Gaz.”), 1865; “Clergymen of the Church of England” (from “Pall Mall Gaz.”), 1866; “Travelling Sketches” (from “Pall Mall Gaz.”), 1866; “The Belton Estate,” 1866; “The Claverings,” 1867; “The Last Chronicle of Barset,” 1867 [1866], “Nina Balatka” (anon.), 1867; “Lotta Schmidt and other stories,” 1867; “Linda Tressel” (anon.), 1868; “Phineas Finn,” 1869; “He knew He was Right,” 1869; “The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson,” 1870; “The Vicar of Bullhampton,” 1870; “An Editor’s Tales,” 1870; “Cæsar,” 1870; “Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite,” 1871 [1870]; “Ralph the Heir,” 1871; “The Golden Lion of Granpère,” 1872; “The Eustace Diamonds,” 1873 [1872]; “Australia and New Zealand,” 1873; “Phineas Redux,” 1874; “Harry Heathcote of Gangoil,” 1874; “Lady Anna,” 1874; “The Way We Live Now,” 1875; “The Prime Minister,” 1876; “The American Senator,” 1877; “How the ‘Mastiffs’ went to Iceland” (priv. ptd.), 1878; “Is He Popenjoy?” 1878; “South Africa,” 1878; “John Caldigate,” 1879; “An Eye for an Eye,” 1879; “Cousin Henry,” 1879; “Thackeray,” 1879; “The Duke’s Children,” 1880; “Life of Cicero,” 1880; “Ayala’s Angel,” 1881; “Doctor Wortle’s School,” 1881; “Why Frau Frohmann raised her Prices, etc.,” 1882 [1881]; “Lord Palmerston,” 1882; “The Fixed Period,” 1882; “Kept in the Dark,” 1882; “Marion Fay,” 1882. Posthumous: “Mr. Scarborough’s Family,” 1883; “Autobiography,” ed. by H. M. Trollope (2 vols.), 1883; “The Land Leaguers,” 1883; “An Old Man’s Love,” 1884; “Thompson Hall, etc.,” 1885.

Personal

  Nobody could see anything of him without feeling that he was in the presence of an exceptionally high-minded as well as an exceptionally gifted man, a man of strong feelings as of strong sense, but a man who well knew how to keep his feelings in check, and a man whose practice as well as his theory was Christian…. To younger men his ways and manner had the special charm that, without for a moment losing dignity, he put them on an equality with himself. He happened to be older, and therefore more experienced, than they were—I do not think it ever occurred to him that he was more clever or more gifted—and whatever help might come to them from his greater experience was at their service as between comrade and comrade…. He loved fun; he loved laughing; he loved his kind. There was not one scrap of sentimentality about him, but there was plenty of sensibility, as well as sense.

  At the first glance, you would have taken him to be some civilized and modernized Squire Western, nourished with beef and ale, and roughly hewn out of the most robust and least refined variety of human clay. Looking at him more narrowly, however, you would have reconsidered this judgment. Though his general contour and aspect were massive and sturdy, the lines of his features were delicately cut; his complexion was remarkably pure and fine, and his face was susceptible of very subtle and sensitive changes of expression. Here was a man of abundant physical strength and vigor, no doubt, but carrying within him a nature more than commonly alert and impressible. His organization, though healthy, was both complex and high-wrought; his character was simple and straightforward to a fault, but he was abnormally conscientious, and keenly alive to others’ opinion concerning him. It might be thought that he was overburdened with self-esteem, and unduly opinionated; but, in fact, he was but over-anxious to secure the good will and agreement of all with whom he came in contact. There was some peculiarity in him—some element or bias in his composition that made him different from other men; but, on the other hand, there was an ardent solicitude to annul or reconcile this difference, and to prove himself to be, in fact, of absolutely the same cut and quality as all the rest of the world. Hence he was in a demonstrative, expository or argumentative mood, he could not sit quiet in the face of a divergence between himself and his associates; he was incorrigibly strenuous to obliterate or harmonize the irreconcilable points between himself and others; and since these points remained irreconcilable, he remained in a constant state of storm and stress on the subject.

  His life, in spite of its incessant toil, was an exceedingly happy one, and he recognized its happiness to the full. His duties offered him the opportunity of travelling extensively. Egypt, the West Indies, America, Australia, South Africa, became familiar ground to him. When at home he had his four hunters ever ready to carry him to the covert side, and (what was more difficult) to carry a rider across country who was so short-sighted that he could never form a judgment of fence or ditch, and who boldly rode straight at everything. From his habit of rising every morning at 5.30 A.M., he was able to have his literary work over in good time, and the day free for any other duty or amusement. Loving his own fireside, he yet enjoyed going into society, and seldom in his later life did he miss, when in town, the afternoon visit to the Garrick, and the afternoon rubber at whist there. Never making any very loud professions of religion, and regarding all that was innocent in life as open to his free enjoyment, all his friends knew him to be a reverent and sincere Christian.

  Work to him was a necessity and a satisfaction. He used often to say that he envied me the capacity for being idle. Had he possessed it, poor fellow, I might not now be speaking of him in the past tense. And still less than of me could it be said of him that he was ever driven to literary work deficiente crumena. But he labored, during the whole of his manhood life, with an insatiable ardor that (taking into consideration his very efficient discharge of his duties as post-office surveyor) puts my industry into the shade.

  The charming “Last Chronicle of Barset,” surely as sunshiny a picture of English country life as ever was written, was then delighting us all. While preparing for dinner, I had stuck up the work where I could read it: and I glanced at several of the most beautiful passages, and at one or two of the most powerful. Filled with the enthusiasm of one who had very rarely met a popular author, I entered Strathtyrum that day. The sight of the great novelist was a blow. He was singularly unkempt, and his clothes were very wrinkled and ill-made. His manner was a further blow. We listened for the melodious accents which were due from those lips: but they did not come. Indeed, he was the only man I had heard swear in decent society for uncounted years. The swearing, which was repeated, was the most disagreeable of all: the actual asseverating, by the Holiest Name, of some trumpery statement. How could that man have written the well-remembered sentences which had charmed one through these years? Then, by way of making himself pleasant in a gathering of Scotsmen, he proceeded (the ladies being gone and we all gathered to hear him) to vilipend our beloved Sir Walter.

  In physique, manner, and speech he might have been taken for a dragoon in mufti, or a sportsman fresh from an invigorating run in the fields; certainly not for a novelist whose forte lay in depicting the salient traits of English clergymen, the delicate shades of character among English maidens, and in composing those inimitable love-letters which so plentifully bestrew the pages of his life-like romances. During his visit to New York, Trollope was introduced to many of our literary men, and to such social gatherings as might interest a man of his pursuits. He wore spectacles, through which he seemed to inspect men and things with a quiet scrutiny, as if making perpetual mental memoranda for future use. In conversation he would sometimes ask a question, or make a suggestion respecting people to whom he had been introduced, which indicated a keen perception of the weak spots in their characters; but this was always said in a good-humoured way that left no sting behind it.

  I knew him well, knew his subjects, and his stage. I have seen him at work at the “Megatherium Club,” chatted with him at the “Universe,” dined with him at George Eliot’s, and even met him in the hunting-field. I was familiar with the political personages and crises which he describes; and much of the local colouring in which his romances were framed was for years the local colouring that I daily saw around me…. To re-read some of his best stories, as I have just done, is to me like looking through a photographic album of my acquaintances, companions, and familiar reminiscences of some thirty years ago. I can hear the loud voice, the honest laugh, see the keen eyes of our old friend as I turn to the admirable vignette portrait of his posthumous Autobiography, and I can almost hear him tell the anecdotes recounted in that pleasant book.

  Anthony Trollope, like his ancestor of old, was combative, and he was boisterous, but good-naturedly so. He was abrupt in manners and speech; he was ebullient, and therefore he sometimes offended people. I suppose he was a wilful man, and we know that such men are always in the right; but he was a good fellow. Some of Trollope’s acquaintance used to wonder how so commonplace a person could have written such excellent novels; but I maintain that so honourable and interesting a man could not be commonplace. Hirsute and taurine of aspect, he would glare at you from beyond fierce spectacles. His ordinary tones had the penetrative capacity of two people quarrelling, and his voice would ring through and through you, and shake the windows in their frames, while all the time he was most amiably disposed towards you under his waistcoat. To me his viso sciolto and bluff geniality were very attractive, and so were his gusty denunciations, but most attractive of all was his unselfish nature. Literary men might make him their exemplar, as I make him my theme; for he may quite well have been the most generous man of letters, of mark, since Walter Scott.

  Trollope’s literary fame certainly went through the three stages of slow growth, splendid maturity, and steady decline. In his later days his readers fell off to an astonishing degree, and time almost seemed to have come round, as in the case of Cassius, and where he did begin, there did he end, with a sadly limited circulation. He took his decaying popularity with as much composure as he had taken his early lack of popularity, as doggedly and umcomplainingly as he took his frequent falls in those hunting-fields which at one time he loved so well. He had made his name, however, in the meantime; and his best novels have a secure place in the literature of Queen Victoria’s reign.

  The man, in external things, was largely the creation of his environment. He was a bluff, self-assertive, dogmatic, thoroughly aggressive Englishman, brusque, burly, money-loving, and singularly matter-of fact, so that even among his own countrymen and the men of his own set he was never generally popular. The man who dwelt within, however, and whom only his most cherished intimates ever really knew, was genial, tender-hearted, kindly, and, more than that, intensely sensitive to all the pain and all the pathos of human life. Both sides of his nature are felt in what he wrote, and both are necessary to his greatness as an author. He had power and force; he had humour and a rich vein of wholesome English fun; he had insight into character and motive; and, finally, he had a wide and accurate first-hand knowledge of men and women, gained from the circumstances of his various vocations.

  Henry VIII, we are told—and it is one of the few statements which make that monarch attractive—“loved a man.” If so, he would clearly have loved Trollope. In person, Trollope resembled the ideal beef-eater; square and sturdy, and as downright as a box on the ear. The simple, masculine character revealed itself in every lineament and gesture. His talk was as hearty and boisterous as a gust of a northeaster—a Kingsley northeaster that is, not blighting, but bracing and genial. The first time I met him was in a low room, where he was talking with a friend almost as square and sturdy as himself. It seemed as if the roof was in danger of being blown off by the vigor of the conversational blasts. And yet, if I remember rightly, they were not disputing, but simply competing in the utterance of a perfectly harmless sentiment in which they cordially agreed. A talker of feeble lungs might be unable to get his fair share in the discussion; but not because Trollope was intentionally overbearing, or even rough. His kindness and cordiality were as unmistakable as his sincerity; and if he happened to impinge upon his hearers’ sore points, it was from clumsiness, not malignity. He was incapable of shyness or diffidence, and would go at any subject as gallantly as he rode at a stiff fence in the hunting-field. His audacity sprang not from conceit, but from a little over-confidence in the power of downright common sense.

  Personally, Anthony Trollope was a bluff, genial, hearty, vigorous man, typically English in his face, his talk, his ideas, his tastes. His large eyes, which looked larger behind his large spectacles, were full of good-humoured life and force; and though he was neither witty nor brilliant in conversation, he was what is called very good company, having travelled widely, known all sorts of people, and formed views, usually positive views, on all the subjects of the day, views which he was prompt to declare and maintain. There was not much novelty in them—you were disappointed not to find so clever a writer more original—but they were worth listening to for their common-sense, tending rather to commonplace sense, and you enjoyed the ardour with which he threw himself into a discussion. Though boisterous and insistent in his talk, he was free from assumption or conceit, and gave the impression of liking the world he lived in, and being satisfied with his own place in it.

General

  I hope you read that tale going on in the “Fortnightly”—“The Belton Estate.” It is charming, like all he writes; I quite weary for the next number, for the sake of that one thing; the rest is wonderfully stupid.

  We know parsons well, and, upon the whole—though we find them men like ourselves, sometimes not too elevated, not too self-sacrificial, not too noble—we can only think the clerics drawn by Trollope are a disgrace, and almost a libel. We do not say that they are not true. They are photographically true, but they are never so from the highest and noblest sight-point…. If Mr. Trollope paints—and he paints firmly, consistently, and with a quiet obstinate kind of art—all that can be found in English society, the sooner that society is changed for something of a more decided pattern the better. No one can care for the faint and obscure outlines, and the colourless sort of wool, with which Mr. Trollope weaves his human and his faded tapestry.

  I set my reader last night on beginning “The Mill on the Floss.” I couldn’t take to it more than to others I have tried to read by the Greatest Novelist of the Day: but I will go on a little further. Oh for some more brave Trollope; who I am sure conceals a much profounder observation than these dreadful Denners of Romance under his lightsome and sketchy touch, as Gainsboro compared to Denner.

  He has drawn sketches, such as the portrait of Mrs. Proudie, which may stand as representatives of a class; but throughout the whole of his works there is not to be found a single character, such as Colonel Newcome, or Becky Sharp, or Jane Eyre, or Dorothea, which is a permanent addition to the world of English fiction…. Mr. Trollope is essentially a superficial writer and delights to deal with the outside of things. He has never successfully described the working of strong feeling. Whenever he has attempted to depict violent passion, he has always, in fact described, not strong feeling, but the most obvious outward signs of feeling…. The source, in fact, of Mr. Trollope’s success is to be found in the satisfaction which he gives to the almost universal liking for accurate sketches of every-day life, and to the equally universal admiration for the easy optimism, which sees in English society, as it now exists, the best of all possible arrangements in the best of all possible worlds.

  Mr. Trollope is emphatically a “man of the time,” the very antipodes of imaginative writers like George Macdonald. He is a realist, a painter of men and manners of the present day, a satirist within a certain range, ready to make use of any type that may present itself, and seem characteristic as a product of the special conditions of the present century. He is rather conservative and High Church, his best portraitures being those of the clergy. Who can ever forget Mr. Slope, Dr. Grantly, Bishop Prowdie or Mrs. Prowdie? Ladies of rank, aspiring members of parliament (Irish and English), habitués of the clubs, Australian stockmen, female adventurers—all of these, and many more, he has taken up, and so set them in the midst of their surroundings, that his pictures look like photographs, and they seem to be produced as easily as the photographer throws off his scenes and portraits. Mr. Trollope is eminently practical and also public-minded, for his characters frequently refer to great public questions, and suggest political changes. His humour is peculiar to himself, dry, direct, and with no infusion of sentiment.

  I can greatly enjoy Mr. Trollope’s best stories, and even read his worst, for the sake of the glimpses of English life they give me.

  Interesting from its author [“Cicero”] and its evident sincerity, but resting on too small a basis of scholarship for such a task.

  Mr. Anthony Trollope carries to its utmost limit the realism begun by Thackeray. He has none of Thackeray’s genius; none of his fancy or feeling; none of his genuine creative power. He can describe with minute photographic faithfulness the ways, the talk, and sometimes even the emotions of a Belgravian family, of a nobleman’s country-house, or the “womankind” of a dean in a cathedral town. He does not trouble himself with passion or deep pathos, although he has got as far as to describe very touchingly the mental pains of a pretty girl thrown over by her lover, and has suggested with some genuine power the blended emotion, half agony of sorrow, half sense of relief, experienced by an elderly clergyman on the death of a shrewish wife. It was natural that, after the public had had a long succession of Mr. Trollope’s novels, there should come a ready welcome for the school of fiction which was called the sensational.

  An exceedingly vivid portrayal of the life of the great orator. [“The Life of Cicero.”] No one of the numerous biographers of Cicero has succeeded so completely in transplanting him and his surroundings into our own days. The reader is almost led to forget that the events of which he is reading were history before the advent of Christianity. They are made to seem like the events of to-day. The most essential peculiarity of the work is that it is written from what may be called Cicero’s point of view. While Mommsen, Froude, Merivale, and others have looked at the condition and the necessities of the State, and have censured Cicero for not comprehending the nature of the situation, Trollope had studied the problem with a view to ascertaining and showing how it must have appeared to Cicero himself. Thus the volumes become very largely a personal rather than a political life. Whatever may be the reader’s views of Cicero’s political course, he cannot fail to be charmed by the picture here given of the orator’s personal characteristics.

  He abused his gift, overworked it, rode his horse too hard. As an artist he never took himself seriously; many people will say this was why he was so delightful. The people who take themselves seriously are prigs and bores; and Trollope, with his perpetual story, which was the only thing he cared about, his strong good sense, hearty good nature, generous appreciation of life in all its varieties, responds in perfection to a certain English ideal. According to that ideal it is rather dangerous to be definitely or consciously an artist—to have a system, a doctrine, a form. Trollope, from the first, went in, as they say, for having as little form as possible; it is probably safe to affirm that he had no “views” whatever on the subject of novel-writing. His whole manner is that of a man who regards the practice as one of the more delicate industries, but has never troubled his head nor clogged his pen with theories about the nature of his business. Fortunately he was not obliged to do so, for he had an easy road to success; and his honest, familiar, deliberate way of treating his readers as if he were one of them and shared their indifference to a general view, their limitations of knowledge, their love of a comfortable ending, endeared him to many persons in England and America.

  It is exceptionally easy to read any of his best-known novels, easier to read them right through without slurring a page or a line than it is to read even Scott, and by a combination which is far from usual, it was when he had once mastered his art, as easy for him to write these novels, so far as the actual putting pen to paper went, as it is for us to read them. Thus the people who read them swiftly and easily forgot that art such as this must have been acquired with infinite pains, and did not reflect that these meant more than the actual writing down of words to the composition of a masterpiece of fiction.

  If his characters have not the depth of George Eliot’s, they have equal truth. We have seen people like a great many of them, and we feel that we easily might come across people like the others. Mr. Trollope had certainly gone far to write himself out; his later work is far from being so good as his earlier. But after all, his worst work is better than a great many people’s best; and, considering the way in which it was done, it is wonderful that it was done at all.

  His judgments on his great contemporaries and rivals are, on the whole, sensible; but they are not marked by any profound insight, and may be thought to lean a little too hard on Dickens, whose failure in pathos is not greater than his own or Charles Lever’s. His opinions on politics, on hunting, on the conduct of life in general, are not those of a philosopher, but of a hearty, healthy Englishman of far more than average abilities and experience, with no very lofty or enthusiastic views, but with a fixed preference for what is honest, cleanly, and manly, besides liking a good deal of play along with plenty of work. Accordingly, while he could not stomach Exeter Hall, as he divertingly tells us, and found himself expelled from the columns of Good Words because he admitted dancing into a story for its pages, his influence was always wholesomely exerted; and the future student of Victorian England who is wise enough to consult his novels for sketches of ordinary society as it was in the latter half of this century will find no one line that needs to be blotted out on ethical grounds, however he may wish, as Ben Jonson did in the case of a far greater, that he had blotted thousands in the interest of literary excellence.

  Trollope’s position in fiction is not a difficult one to fix. He was essentially a realist, but he was a realist who preferred the agreeable to the disagreeable. He was as true to nature as it is possible for a novelist to be, but he chose to study nature under the forms which please and not under those which shock the sympathies and taste of men. He had none of Scott’s romantic nor of Lytton’s poetical imagination. He had no social evils to expose like Dickens, no philosophical theories to expound like George Eliot. He was not a satirist like Thackeray. He may justly be described as a literary photographer of social life in the upper ranks…. While Trollope will never be studied as a master of art, the future historian will seek in his pages, as Mr. Lecky has sought in those of Fielding, for trustworthy information regarding contemporary social life. Among the novelists of the nineteenth century, the name of Anthony Trollope will be placed in the second rank. Not because the work he aimed at doing was not thoroughly well done; but because he did not aim at the highest excellence. The best photography cannot reach the plane of art.

  He would himself have been the last to claim equality with Thackeray or George Eliot. They had genius; Trollope had talent: but it was talent of rare quality. It seemed exhaustless in productive power, and capable of bringing its full strength to bear on every production, however rapidly executed.

  Fantasy was a thing he abhorred; compression he knew not; and originality and ingenuity can be conceded to him only by a strong stretch of the ordinary meaning of the words. Other qualities he had in plenty, but not these. And, not having them, he was not a writer of Short-stories. Judging from his essay on Hawthorne, one may even go so far as to say that Trollope did not know a good Short-story when he saw it.

  Introduce some art in the plot and some truth in the characterization; keep as close to actual life as a photographer; be as diffused and dogged in details as is consistent with preserving a kind of languid interest; economize material, whether of incident or emotion; realize Carlyle’s sarcasm that England contains twenty millions of people, mostly bores—and you have Anthony Trollope, the most unromantic of romancers, popular in virtue of his skill in reproducing a population.

  Next to “Middlemarch” the future student of nineteenth-century England will derive his best material from Anthony Trollope, scarcely a painter, but a matchless photographer. George Eliot exhibits the world to her reader; Trollope thrusts his reader straight into the middle of it. Unfortunately, he learned the trade of novel-writing too well, and realised Samuel Butler’s ingenious fiction of the men who became the slaves of their own machines. It must be owned that the circumstances of the time were greatly against him.

  A volume [“Life of Thackeray”] neither for information nor discernment quite worthy of that excellent series.

  “The Warden” established him at once in the position which he kept more or less till the end of his life. We do not think that in any of his after works Mr. Trollope ever surpassed this story, or produced anything so perfect in its subdued tones as the picture of the elderly and humbled-minded clergyman, so true, so simple and so mild, yet invulnerable in gentle resolution when his conscience had been awakened and he had perceived his position to be untenable, according to his own high yet completely unostentatious standard of right and wrong. Mr. Harding may take his place among the best and most delicately drawn of those new men and women who have been added to our spiritual acquaintance (and their name is legion) during this age, so wealthy in fiction. He does not come up to the high standard of Colonel Newcome or Esmond, but he is, in his way, as real, and even more unconsciously and gently noble-minded than they…. The “Last Chronicle of Barset” added a stronger note of tragedy to the varied story which began with Mr. Harding, in the person of another clergyman, Mr. Crawley, the poor, proud, learned parson with his overflowing family, and the false accusation which hung over him so long. Posterity, to which we all appeal, will find nowhere any better illustration of the Victorian age than in this series of admirable fiction—if it does not lose its way among the intolerable number of books which put forward a somewhat similar claim.

  His exquisitely comical and conscientiously coxcombical autobiography.

  Trollope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in a manly tone, and if he becomes dull, he is neither ridiculous nor odious…. Sometimes, but very rarely, Trollope, is vulgar—for good old Anthony had a coarse vein—it was in the family:—but as a rule his language is conspicuous for its ease, simplicity, and unity of tone.

  I hold that the best of Trollope’s stories are excellent reading. He has admirable qualities as a writer of fiction; indeed he has helped to ameliorate the asperities of our middle-class existence. He gives enough, sometimes more than enough; but still he has a happy tact of omission. Trollope’s chief excellence is in the portrayal of character; the dialogue is what people naturally use; it is even more than that—they could not well use any other. I am fond of his heroines; they are affectionate and true; one knows pretty well what they are going to do next, one always feels safe with them. His young people are not discouraged by the tedium of la grâce or bezique, or other equally mild amusements: they smile and dance and whisper themselves into each other’s hearts, and, what is so very agreeable about them, they are generally content to remain there. Trollope’s ideal of happiness has nothing in it of the unattainable. We know he had not the distinction of Thackeray, the exuberant genius of Dickens, or the vivid and vehement force of Charles Reade; but not seldom he is worthy of their company; and his tone can compare favourably with that of any of his illustrious contemporaries, from Bulwer and Disraeli to the Geniuses just mentioned.

  You cannot be at perfect ease with a friend who does not joke, and I suppose this is what deprived me of a final satisfaction in the company of Anthony Trollope, who jokes heavily or not at all, and whom I should make otherwise bold to declare the greatest of English novelists; as it is, I must put before him Jane Austen, whose books, late in life, have been a youthful rapture with me. Even without much humor Trollope’s books have been a vast pleasure to me through their simple truthfulness. Perhaps if they were more humorous they would not be so true to the British life and character present in them in the whole length and breadth of its expansive commonplaceness. It is their serious fidelity which gives them a value unique in literature, and which if it were carefully analysed would afford a principle of the same quality in an author who was undoubtedly one of the finest artists as well as the most Philistine of men.

  It has been said that Trollope is a typical novelist, and the type is of sufficient importance to receive a little attention, even in space so jealously allotted as ours must be. The novel craved by and provided for the public of the second period (it has also been said) was a novel of more or less ordinary life, ranging from the lower middle to the upper class, correctly observed, diversified by sufficient incident not of an extravagant kind, and furnished with description and conversation not too epigrammatic but natural and fairly clever. This man Trollope hit with surprising justness, and till the demand altered a little or his own hand failed (perhaps there was something of both) he continued to hit it…. Everything that he saw he could turn into excellent novel-material. No one has touched him in depicting the humours of a public office, few in drawing those of cathedral cities and the hunting-field. If his stories, as stories, are not of enthralling interest or of very artfully constructed plots, their craftsmanship in this respect leaves very little to complain of…. The special kind of their excellence, the facts that they reflect their time without transcending it, and that in the way of merely reflective work each time prefers its own workmen and is never likely to find itself short of them, together with the great volume of Trollope’s production, are certainly against him; and it is hard even for those who enjoyed him most, and who can still enjoy him, to declare positively that there is enough of the permanent and immortal in him to justify the hope of a resurrection.

  Although he had had but few opportunities of knowing clergymen in actual life, and his pictures must therefore be regarded as showing his conception of what they ought to be, rather than his knowledge of what they were, his bishops, deans, archdeacons, and curates were universally recognised to be remarkably true and vivid.

  A writer who followed Thackeray in the systematic confinement of his studies of the “comfortable” classes of society, but who has nowhere displayed the faintest traces of Thackeray’s subtle humour, his genuine though restrained pathos, his unrivalled insight into character, or his admirable prose style. Within certain narrow limits—those for instance, of the cathedral close—Trollope was not without an eye for character, and he has portrayed certain naturally humorous types to be found within these limits with a fidelity which in itself assures for them a humorous effect; but speaking generally, his art, in its mechanical realism, stands related to Thackeray’s as that of the cheap photographer to the masterly portrait-painter’s. It is the commonplace carried to its highest power; and the fact that for so long a series of years he stood unquestioned at the head of his branch of the literary profession and commanded a public so large that the amount of his professional earnings was for his day unprecedented, affords a phenomenon almost as discouraging in itself as the reign of Mr. Tupper in another field of literature. Indeed, if it would be unjust to the novelist to treat the two instances as precisely parallel, it is only because, vast as may be the interval which divides the third-rate in prose fiction from the first-rate, the difference between the poetaster and the poet is one not in degree but in kind.

  With many fine qualities, his nature was slightly tinged with mediocrity. So, naturally enough, he felt more interest in the kind of men and women he saw about him than in unusual characters. He loved to show people in the every-day relations of life,—acting and reacting upon each other,—and in the English setting he best knew. Thus he was a forerunner of our late realism, with its effort to fix contemporary life. Of strong yet simple emotions himself, with a satirically humorous sense of common self-deceptions and foibles, and also an optimistic belief in human nobility, he pictures the world to which most of his readers belong.

  All of that excellent series, “The English Men of Letters,” are interesting books except Trollope’s “Thackeray.”

  Dispensing for the most part with the “wearing work” and the “agonizing doubt” of the skilful plot manipulator, he sits down comfortably and writes about his cathedral folk; men and women come and go; he relates what they said and did, and draws full-length portraits of them. His main regret is “that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description.” With his mind concentrated upon his characters, he looks them full in the face, perplexed by no ethical or philosophical medium. By virtue of this directness, he is the great chronicler of English fiction.

  Whatever else may be said or written concerning Anthony Trollope, one thing at least must be conceded—that of all the writers of English fiction he is the most typically English.

  Trollope’s heroines are as domestic as Clarissa Harlowe. They haven’t a thought beyond housekeeping or making a respectable marriage. We could hardly expect such delineations of the fair feminine qualities as could be given by feminine novelists alone. We could not ask him for a Jane Eyre, or still less for a Maggie Tulliver…. His are so good-natured, sensible and commonplace that he has the greatest difficulty in preventing them from at once marrying their lovers…. The most popular of all was Miss Lily Dale, whom Trollope himself unkindly describes as “somewhat of a French prig.” She will not marry the man whom she loves because she has been cruelly jilted by a thorough snob, and makes it a point of honor not to accept consolation or admit that she can love twice. Readers, it seems, fell in love with her, and used to write to Trollope entreating him to reconcile her to making her lover happy. Posterity, I think, will make a mistake if it infers that English girls were generally of this type; but it must admit though with a certain wonder that the type commended itself to a sturdy, sensible Briton of the period, as the very ideal of Womanhood, and delighted a large circle of readers.

  To begin with his value for the history of manners, he is by far our greatest realist since Fielding. Miss Austen uniformly approaches him in her own field, but that field was a very much smaller one than his. George Eliot approaches him in some passages of some of her books, but in the rest she is in no way his competitor. Lovers of Dickens are apt to attribute to that great master of sentiment and caricature the perfection of every conceivable quality; but I hardly think the well-advised of them would claim for him a literally exact portraiture of manners; and it is in that sense I am speaking of realism, putting any esoteric views there may be about a higher realism on one side. A comparison with Thackeray may perhaps help my estimate. Thackeray was by far Trollope’s superior in the perception of the humours of life and in a humorous presentation of them, but in fidelity to the facts of life, or at least the facts which eye and ear tell one finally, he was by far Trollope’s inferior.

  Mr. Trollope was not an artist, he was a photographer. It was only for the improvement of his style that he subjected himself to discipline. In this he persevered until he developed a narrative style which, for his purpose, could hardly be surpassed: it is lucid and easy, if somewhat commonplace. For the rest of the artist’s work Trollope cared nothing. He did not devise new and startling plots, life as he knows it being sufficiently varied and interesting to satisfy ordinary people. He took pride in remaining an ordinary person himself, and in appealing to everyday emotion and narrating everyday experiences. What he saw he could tell better, perhaps, than anybody else, as Mr. Browning somewhat grudgingly said of Andrea del Sarto. What he did not see, did not exist for him. He had something of the angry impatience of the middle-class mind with all points of view not his own. In “Barchester Towers” he permitted himself to gibe at the recently published novel “Tancred,” and for the author as well as the work he cherished a feeling of contemptuous dislike. There could be no finer tribute to Lord Beaconsfield’s genius. “Tancred” is as far beyond anything that Mr. Trollope wrote as “Orley Farm” is superior to a Chancery pleading; and we have but to lay “Alroy” on the same table with “The Prime Minister” to see where Anthony Trollope stands.

  In his wide survey of social conditions in the middle and upper classes of England, he comes nearer than any other English novelist to fulfilling the vast programmes of the French realists, Balzac and Zola.

  Revert in memory to such a humdrum realist as Anthony Trollope, in order vividly to realize why that fiction-maker, whose class is confessedly not the first, is likely to keep his place in the suffrages of a large, and not undistinguished, constituency. The folk of the “Barchester Chronicles” may be commonplace and unexciting; but they are verifiable and cling to the mind.

  Certainly Trollope, like Balzac, introduced the same characters into more than one novel, which saved the trouble of inventing them; yet the creator does not trouble himself much as to what becomes of his heroes in their new embodiments. In the case of Trollope more than any other writer of a certain importance, we feel that he wrote at random without any artistic plan.

  Perhaps no writer represents more perfectly than Trollope the great development of social and domestic tendencies in the English novel of the middle and third quarter of the last century. A man of real genius, he yet had not genius enough to stand out from and above his time; and for that very reason he portrays it more fully, just as Ben Jonson brings us nearer to the Elizabethan Age than does Shakespeare…. Trollope’s novels deal almost entirely with the author’s own time; no mediæval history, bravos, swordplay, moonlight romance. His people are common people; that is, they are human beings like other human beings before they are anything else. It is this constant detection of ordinary human nature under the disguises of wealth and aristocracy which misleads Mr. Saintsbury into calling Trollope a painter of middle-class life. His painting of middle-class life is good, much better than his painting of low life; but certainly his best work is on the upper classes…. So far as plot goes, in the stricter sense of the word, Trollope confesses that he is weak, and few will be found to differ from him.