CHAPTER III

THE IRELAND THAT TROLLOPE KNEW

A fresh start--Off to Ireland--The dawn of better things--Ireland in the forties and after--The Whigs and Tories in turn make vain efforts to remove the nation’s chief grievances--The most deep-seated evils social rather than political--Trollope’s bond of union with the “distressful country”--Sowing the seed of authorship on Bianconi’s cars and in the hunting-field--“It’s dogged as does it”--Ireland’s hearty welcome to the Post Office official--Trollope and his contemporaries on the Irishman in his true light--The future novelist at Sir William Gregory’s home--The legislation of 1849--The history and race characteristics of the Irish and the Jews compared--Irish novelists of Trollope’s day--Marriage with Miss Heseltine in 1844--His social standing and hunting reputation in Ireland--Interesting notabilities at Coole Park--Triumphant success of Trollope’s Post Office plot--Scoring off the advocate.

In his periodical murmurings at the dispensations of fate, Anthony Trollope spared himself at least as little as he did others. In the retrospective censures upon Colonel Maberly and any others in authority over him during his initiation into the Government service, he magnified rather than extenuated his own shortcomings. Private letters about him to his own relatives from those of the Freeling family, who long remained in more or less close touch with the Post Office, show the low esteem in which he complains of having been held by his official masters to have been for the most part imaginary. The impression, even in its most unfavourable aspects, left behind him at St. Martin’s-le-Grand on his transfer to Ireland in 1841 was not so much one of incapacity for work as of indisposition to it. If he showed himself to be unpunctual, spiritless, and untidy, that was generally put down to want, not of power, but of proper training for his duties. According to the habit of the time, all subjects not classical had been “extras” at Anthony Trollope’s schools. Thanks to his home lessons, from the beginnings of his official course he could express himself clearly and tersely; he had inherited and retained throughout life his mother’s clear, flowing calligraphy. Of arithmetic, however, he knew little or nothing. Here, as in other respects, he improved as he went on. A spruce and finished official in his youth he never indeed became; but, on landing at Dublin in the September of 1841, he had outgrown the unpunctuality, the want of method, and the _gaucheries_ which so often opened against him the vials of Colonel Maberly’s wrath. Thrown on his own resources in dealing with all sorts of people, from departmental overseers in St. Martin’s-le-Grand to lodging-house landladies in Marylebone, he had picked up enough worldly wisdom and insight into character to compensate for any failing of personal or official equipment.

Once in Ireland, he had no sooner looked round him than he fancied he could see a resemblance between the condition of the country and his own state and prospects. This inspired him with a kind of sympathetic affection for the Irish people. In the June before Trollope landed at Dublin, Queen Victoria’s first Parliament had come to an end, with the result that, of the long-promised Whig reforms for Ireland, the only instalments actually carried into effect were an unpopular Poor Law of doubtful efficacy, and certain measures, largely dictated by the Conservative opposition, for dealing with the inveterate evils of tithe collection as well as with municipal corporations. It was the Irish tithe abuses which had caused a literary admirer of Anthony Trollope’s mother, Sydney Smith, to say: “There is no cruelty like it in all Europe, in all Asia, in all discovered parts of Africa, and in all that we have ever heard of Timbuctoo.” For centuries Ireland had been not only the object of English misrule and neglect, but the victim of the English party system. The exigencies of that party system secured periodical surrenders to Irish agitators, which were called concessions, and spasmodic outbursts of eleemosynary lavishness, which were in reality merely part payments of long overdue debts. Three years before the Victorian era began, the Tories, led by Peel, had made way for the Whigs under Melbourne. Whoever was out or whoever was in, O’Connell remained master of the position. Without truckling to that dictator, neither Whig nor Tory minister thought of moving a step. The habit of English surrender to Irish importunity, when sufficiently persevering and acute, had, when Anthony Trollope crossed St. George’s Channel, produced the feeling that agitation and outrage were the two infallible instruments for wresting the demands of the moment. Neither of the two great political connections had shown more statesmanship than its rival in its Irish policy. But for the three months nominal tenure of office by Peel in 1835, the Whigs had enjoyed unbroken control of affairs during more than a decade.

Now, in the month of Anthony Trollope’s first crossing the Irish Channel, a change had come, and the Tories were to have their turn. When therefore Trollope passed his first night in Dublin, the Castle was enjoying the novel experience of a Conservative Viceroy, Lord de Grey. His official term coincided with some attempt at improving the state of the country from which much was hoped. The most important and promising project recommended by his predecessors Peel, however, had shelved. Five years before Trollope’s departure from St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the Whig ministers had contemplated introducing railways into Ireland. Peel’s opposition to that proposal precluded him from himself adopting it, notwithstanding his private conviction of its usefulness. Instead he took the earliest step towards that Roman Catholic endowment at which, when out of office, he had so often shied. In the early future, he let it be understood, he would increase the education grant and qualify the Roman Catholics for receiving gifts and holding property for charitable and religious uses. At the same time, he promised an extension of the county franchise, and votes in boroughs to all who paid poor rates. The great feature in the Conservative surrender to popular Irish feeling was the abandonment of Protestant ascendency as an administrative principle. There was now appointed for dealing with charitable bequests a new Commission, half of whose members were Irish Papists, and whose secretary belonged to the same denomination. The new policy secured a permanent endowment for paying Roman Catholic priests and building Roman Catholic chapels.

But these measures of Irish relief, however well received, attracted less attention than the personality of the man who, as Trollope settled down to his Post Office work, had just been installed at the viceregal lodge. The magnificent presence, the great wealth, the fine temper, and the impartial sympathies of Lord de Grey had not yet, and indeed never did, endear him to the Irish heart; but they had really impressed the Irish imagination. The _personnel_ of Peel’s whole administration was marked by two characteristics: first, its deference to the principle of aristocratic connection; secondly, its recognition of past official services. The chief Irish secretary under Lord de Grey, Lord Eliot, was, like Grey himself, the subject of Orange criticism. Such censure in the circumstances of the time was looked upon as a recommendation, while as for Lord de Grey, the only doubt felt about him was whether he might not prove somewhat too much of the _beau sabreur_ to labour only for peace. Never since the introduction of constitutional government could Ireland have been more under the control of an individual ruler than when Trollope made his acquaintance with the country. Neither his Tory supporters nor the most influential of his personal adherents, Stanley and Graham, had been consulted in the appointments made. If further proof were needed of the Prime Minister’s determination to dominate the administration, it would be found in the fact that, to make sure of crossing swords himself with Palmerston in the Commons over imperial policy, he dispensed with a Foreign Under Secretary in the Lower House. To the Irish people therefore, as Trollope discovered directly he began to know something of the country, Peel was not only the head of the new Government, but concentrated in himself its most decisive authority and its highest prerogatives.

The educational reforms and the Roman Catholic educational subsidies to which Peel had early given the Conservative sanction were not to be carried out in Grey’s time, and did not come within Trollope’s observation. “Property has its duties as well as its rights.” So in 1838 had said Thomas Drummond, the engineer officer who filled for five years the chief secretaryship. The words dwelt in the Irish mind long after their echoes had died away from the Irish ear. In his new quarters, Anthony Trollope had no sooner time to look round than he descried everywhere detailed proof of Drummond’s remark having lost none of its force since it was first made. Excessive population and deficient production were the two great evils, each social rather than political, of the land from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear. In England there was at this time an average of one agricultural labourer to every thirty-four cultivated acres. In Ireland the average was one to every fourteen. One-third of the entire population depended for food on the little plots round their cabins on the barren hillside or on the uncertain moor. The great monument of English enterprise for relieving Irish need was the large workhouse in each new Poor Law district, execrated by the masses, and only acquiesced in by those who were better off. Within two years of Trollope’s arrival in Dublin, there had set in a steady increase of crime, and an addition, visible on all sides, to the chronic distress. Nor did the lot of those who owned the soil display to Trollope much that raised them greatly above its industrial occupants. His boyish acquaintance with his father’s agricultural failures in Harrow Weald seemed to repeat themselves, as he observed the struggles of the Irish squireens, in the dilapidated tenements that they still called their country houses, to postpone indefinitely the evil day of being sold up by the attorney and the usurer. The urban neighbourhoods were no better off than the rural. Most of the towns within Trollope’s district had once been the seats of some small industries. Many if not most of these had now declined into a languor which had often caused them to be entirely abandoned, and had sometimes withdrawn the bulk of the population they had formerly supported from their homes.

On all sides, therefore, melancholy and desolation were in the foreground on which Trollope daily gazed. In the desponding moods of which he had naturally many after first realising his loneliness in a strange country, Trollope’s fancy could not but detect a certain congeniality between his own lot, present or future, and the dismal destinies, the depressing sights and sounds surrounding him. The distressful country thus found, in its newest comer, one who at heart was as distressful as itself. The social and political atmosphere of the country, even before Trollope came, had begun to be stirred by the note of Celtic preparation for throwing off the Saxon yoke. Trollope’s apprenticeship to his Irish work corresponded with the birth of the Young Ireland movement. In that, however, there could be nothing which appealed to his imagination with anything like the force of the human wastage, daily in some new form presented to his eye.

But if his surroundings seemed saddening, almost, at times, to stupefaction, Trollope gradually extracted from them food for honest and severe thought, as well as a stimulus for invigorating exertion, both of body and mind. In Ireland for the present he had to live. Ireland therefore should yield him the material out of which he should make for himself a name among State servants, as well as reputation and perhaps fortune with his pen. When the forties were drawing to a close, railway development was among the specifics periodically applied to the healing of Irish distress. But when Trollope first knew the country that mode of treatment belonged to the future. The popular method of locomotion was that begun in the year of his own birth, 1815, by an Italian settler, who thought he saw the beginnings of a fortune. Charles Bianconi started his operations in 1815 by running cars from Clonmel to Cahir. Of these conveyances he had travelling in 1841 as many as sufficed regularly at short intervals to touch all the more important southern and western towns. The daily total of the collective miles covered by them was three thousand six hundred. The animals used would have been enough to mount a cavalry regiment. Half the secret of Bianconi’s success was, as he explained to Trollope, the discovery of short cuts between the different stages, and ensuring to his vehicles a maximum of speed with a minimum expenditure of motive power. Trollope was not slow to profit by the hint, nor would he ever have done so well as he did in the capacity of surveyor but for Bianconi’s itinerary instructions. The shrewd Milanese also took him behind the scenes of the Irish people in their daily life. “The most apparently poverty-stricken of the peasant farmers for whom my cars have found fresh markets,” he said, “are very often, notwithstanding their dirty and dilapidated dwellings, comparatively well-to-do. And when, filled with pity for a man looking sadly out-of-elbows, you drop some sympathetic word, you must be prepared to hear that his cows and sheep upon the mountains are to be reckoned by tens and scores, and to be told that he is, maybe, richer than your honour.” Thus early in his Hibernian apprenticeship did the new surveyor, as regards the state of the people among whom he was to live, receive the extra official lessons that, supplemented by his own later observation, made him a sounder authority on most Irish subjects than nine-tenths of the statesmen legislating for them at Westminster.

The way of business was also to prove with Trollope the way of amusement and sport. Anthony Trollope had learned to sit a horse in the Spartan severity of the Harrow Weald days. Dared or commanded by his brother Tom to put, bare-backed, a half-broken steed at hedges or ditches in the biggest field of the paternal farm, he was taught at least how to stick on, and never forgot the lesson. “It’s dogged as does it” was often in the mouth of a smaller personage in _Orley Farm_; and, as will presently be seen, it was doggedness which made Trollope both a sportsman and a novelist.

During his clerkly days at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the already mentioned visits to his sister, Lady Tilley, in Cumberland, and to other houses which had stables, helped him to complete his equestrian education. When therefore, at the age of twenty-six, he began in Ireland, he knew all about riding to hounds, could take up his own line across country, and hold his own against the rest of the field. To create the nucleus of a hunting stable, and secure a really good single mount to begin with, Trollope found easy enough. For some time before the end of his Irish term the one hunter had grown into three, each equally serviceable and creditable to its owner’s judgment of horseflesh. The only trouble at the beginning of his Irish hunting days was a misgiving as to the welcome waiting him from his fellow-sportsmen. Already he had been disappointed at the little notice of his workmanlike turnout, as he flattered himself, taken in the village where he was staying. He had, however, no sooner taken his part in a forty minutes’ run, with a good scent and over a stiffish country, than his sporting, and consequently his social fortune was made. Adventures are to the adventurous. The bustling novelty of his Irish situation had effectually roused Trollope from his moody reveries, had taken him out of himself, and wakened to new life dormant energies of mind as well as body.

On all sides, without any efforts of his own or introductions from others to smooth the way, sprang up acquaintances, soon to develop into lifelong friends. On one of these occasions the chase for the day had come to an end; the fox was killed, and Trollope, finding himself some dozen miles farther from home than he had reckoned, was meditating how to make his way back to the little inn where he put up before the darkness had descended upon a country of which he knew nothing. “My house,” said a friendly voice at his elbow, “is close here, and with us you must stay till to-morrow, and perhaps, when you know what sort of people we are, for some little time after.” The next morning he saw his hosts were in the thick of preparations for a ball that night. Gentlemen partners were sadly wanted for the dance. The visitor surely would not refuse his presence at a pinch, and would let his new friends send for his evening clothes, which were of course with his other things at his temporary headquarters on the other side of the moor. At the age of five-and-twenty Anthony Trollope, if even then something of a heavy weight, was not the less a dancing man, and in favour with lovely young ladies. “Be sure to send my pumps with the rest of my things,” was the message he emphasised to the raw Irish factotum whom he had just taken into his service. The portmanteau thus commanded duly arrived, and, when unpacked, proved to contain in the way of footgear only a pair of bedroom slippers and some boots, double-ironed on the soles, waterproof, absolutely impervious to cold or wet, and made before he left London according to their purchaser’s special instructions, for the roughest sporting use. Beneath the roof where he was staying no foot was so near Trollope’s as to yield it a covering which would safely carry him through the evening’s evolutions. To trouble his host further was quite out of the question. There was, therefore, nothing to do but to take the manservant into his confidence. “Do not,” came that person’s comforting reply, “make yourself uneasy. I will send on a quick pony a boy who knows all the short cuts. The dance shall be kept back an hour or so. By the time it fairly begins, your pumps, I engage, will be waiting before your dressing-room fire.” All of which things, as Trollope in one of his short stories has related, came to pass.

Trollope’s early experiences in Ireland were of the priest as well as of the squire. Once at least he found in the popish vicar of a remote Galway village an ex-Guardsman with whose fashionable escapades, a few years earlier, Mayfair and St. James’s had rung. All that, at first hand, he now saw and heard confirmed him in an impression which had gradually been deepening ever since he set foot in the country. The Irish traditionally had the reputation of being a pastoral and agricultural people. What Trollope now learned and saw for himself of their real characteristics, especially of their keen business instinct, and insistence in their purchases on getting full value for their money, showed him a race qualified above all things to excel in trade. “Old Trollope banging about,” was Froude’s description of Trollope when engaged in his study of mankind. He confessed, however, the accuracy of Trollope’s Irish impressions, and with his own pen several years later illustrated the Irish aptitudes from the same point of view as Trollope had taken. In 1889 appeared Froude’s only novel, an Irish one, _The Two Chiefs of Dunboy_. Its central idea was the permanent ruin of the Irishman at home by centuries of anarchy, of misrule, and by all the evils that followed in their train. Only transplant him sufficiently far from his native soil to conditions that give scope for his keenness in bargain making and his shrewd instinct when to take and when to avoid commercial risks, and he becomes the wariest and surest builder up of fortunes on the face of the earth. Thus, the hero of Froude’s story, Patrick Blake, with his warehouses and his shipping on the Loire, develops not only into a leader of men but a prince among capitalists, and yet, at every turn of his fortunes, in thought, word, and deed, remains a genuine Celt.

Much the same idea, notwithstanding the difference of its setting forth, was present to another writer, whom Froude may not have known, but who was among the most intimate of Trollope’s comrades of the pen. Charles Lever’s college scapegraces or hard-riding, hard-drinking subalterns have but to leave the old home behind them, and then, as surely as they do so, achieve military or diplomatic fame. The spirited and accurate description of Waterloo in Lever’s most popular novel is but the culminating point of Charles O’Malley’s march from one success to another, since the day on which the Duke of Wellington, then Sir Arthur Wellesley, had embarked at Cork his contingent for the Peninsula. Trollope, indeed, never elaborated this thought as deliberately and circumstantially as was done by Froude in _The Two Chiefs of Dunboy_, or even as Lever in his short stories and O’Dowd papers. The fact itself, however, had been perceived by Trollope long before it had been put down in his note-book by Froude, who, by the way, lived long enough to take Trollope more seriously than he had at first been disposed to do, and to acknowledge that his breezy or boisterous exterior veiled unsuspected gifts of sagacious insight and accurate inference. Galway was known by Trollope even better than Dublin. Again and again in his smaller pieces are reminders that the most prosperous business houses in Cadiz and Madrid were founded by men who went forth from Connaught to seek their fortunes in the sunniest South, and whose descendants still kept a hold on the concerns founded by their sires.

Once he had fairly settled down to his Irish work, Trollope’s manner took on the official veneer which it never afterwards quite lost, but which no more suppressed than it entirely concealed the genuine, genial nature which won him friends thick and fast in the hunting-field and on his daily rounds. There was one social centre, whose owners and whose guests made it a second home for the visitor, and a most instructive school for the study of Irish life and character. Immemorially belonging to successive generations of Gregorys of official rank and great local consideration, Coole Park, near Gort, then had as its master, Trollope’s old Harrow schoolfellow, Sir William Gregory, who lived till 1892, and who had entered Parliament as member for Dublin shortly after Trollope’s Irish course began. Here the novelist found himself in a hotbed of social varieties, and in the heart of a district literally overflowing with the local colour, incidents, and personages enriching his earliest novel. The period was that in which the old picturesque, lawless _régime_ of Sir Jonah Barrington’s memoirs had not been effaced by the modern Anglicising dispensation. In his little park, full of retainers who would have risen as one man to repel any invasion of his ancestral roof, William Gregory lived a patriarchal life simple enough in its ordinary course, but fringed with some of the circumstance proper to a stock rooted in the soil from mythical times. Few visitors of consideration passed any time in Connaught without Coole Park’s hospitable doors opening to them.

The earliest year of Trollope’s Irish residence saw him an _habitué_ of the place, and introduced him to the home life, not only of the local magnates, but of the surrounding peasantry, then generally in the clutches of the “gombeen man,” sometimes a peasant himself, sometimes a shopkeeper or fifth-rate solicitor, who, at usurious rates of interest, used to advance the tenants money to make up their rent. Gregory, if not Trollope, lived to see all this changed, and the “gombeen man’s” occupation taken from him by the fixing of those fair rents which have created a race of peasant proprietors that shrink from no sacrifice to keep their instalments fully paid up. The master of Coole Park shared with his visitor most of his literary, political, and especially classical tastes which had survived the bodily ill-usage of Harrow and Winchester, as well as the subsequent privations of Harrow Weald. Gregory and Trollope had both kept up a trifle of their Greek, as well as a little more of their Latin. They could cap with each other quotations from Virgil or Horace, or the more familiar passages of less known authors. Each of them read the old authors with tolerable ease and therefore with some real enjoyment, not as subjects crammed for examinations, but as literature. Coole Park in these days had declined a good deal from the glories of its social gatherings and of its convivial junketings in the ancestral past. But, to quote Charles Lever, met here among others by Trollope, the Coole Park hosts set a noble example to the whole countryside in not letting the gaieties of their well-appointed roof be interfered with by irregularly paid rents. The declining prosperity of the territorial class, however reluctant Trollope and others may have been to forecast such a prospect, was manifestly destined to result in the legislation actually brought by the year 1849. Of course, when the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849 actually came, Trollope, or those who saw things through the same spectacles as himself, had no good to say about it.

The pauper landlords, who had not the means to put their tenants in the way of doing justice to the land they occupied, were never so personally odious to the tillers of the soil as the new men brought in after 1849. “Down at heels, out at elbows, with no clothes in his wardrobe, and nothing but an overdraft at his bankers, the landlord of whom I saw so much in the early forties was yet in a way the father of his people, and, in his rough, thriftless way, had real care for his tenantry. Heaven protect the Irish tenant from the territorial speculator whom the Encumbered Estates Act could not but instal in his place.” Nothing in its way could be more shrewd or sensible than Trollope’s view of the national results likely to flow from the legislation of 1849. “True,” he said, “these measures will bring fresh capital into the country, but at what a price. The new and improved owners, urged on by their scientific bailiffs, will promptly put up rents all round. The old vicious circle will once again begin with a changed centre, and under fresh conditions. There will be the old poverty. Another land question of a more acute sort will thus have been prepared for. It will, unless I am greatly mistaken, be managed by agitators of a kind yet unknown who will work the business entirely for their own venal ends.” How far this prediction had its fulfilment was exemplified by Trollope in the last of his Irish novels, _The Land Leaguers_, left unfinished because of his death. This, however, by the way.

It is enough here to point out that Ireland was the country in which Trollope first showed the literary value of the observant habits that his Post Office work had caused him to pick up and gradually to perfect. The mental alertness and the inquisitorial searching below the surface and behind the scenes for the causes of whatever met his eye were essentially the products of his official training. Their exercise upon the facts and characters of daily life was due to the happy chance that sent him across St. George’s Channel; and his Irish experiences first called into activity all the more important powers that were afterwards to bring him fame and fortune in the Barchester novels.

For the rest, Trollope well repaid the warmth of his Irish welcome by combating the traditional misrepresentation of the Irish character. Racial generalisations, he saw, must always suggest so many exceptions as to be practically worthless. Nations exhibit largely prevalent tendencies rather than fixed and universal traits. To quote from Trollope’s table-talk: “As well call all Welshmen thieves because of the nursery lines about Taffy as pronounce thriftlessness a peculiarly Irish fault on the strength of Samuel Lover’s caricatures in _Handy Andy_, Lever’s portrait of an Irish dragoon, or the casual impressions of a holiday trip in Kerry and Connemara.” So far back as 1780, Arthur Young, in his _Tour in Ireland_, had touched on the fallacies besetting the popular conception of the tendencies and aptitudes specially distinctive of the exceedingly mixed races that inhabited the country. During the nineteenth century, however, Trollope, among Englishmen, was the earliest observer and writer to bring the same truth out in prominent relief, and so to impress it upon an acute student of his countrymen like Lever as to cause him, in his later stories, to modify his own opinions about the essentially representative features of his Irish types. A clever Dublin lady, under whose eye Trollope made his earliest Irish observations, told me his close looking into the commonest objects of daily life always reminded her of a woman in a shop examining the materials for a new dress. He could therefore not fail to have been struck, while on his official rounds, by the frequent signs in the local physiognomy and temperament in Galway and, indeed, throughout all Connemara, of a Jewish as well as Spanish strain largely mingled with the aboriginal Celtic.

Trollope, it has been seen, had entered on his Irish employment with a firm persuasion of being destined to follow the maternal example, and to commence novelist as soon as he had got together enough material for his first chapter. The resolve of devoting himself to fiction gained fresh strength from his early visits, already described, to Coole Park. The beginning there of his acquaintanceship with Charles Lever was in itself to Trollope a literary event. Lever’s earliest novel, _Harry Lorrequer_, had at that time been recently running through the _Dublin University Magazine_. With the exception of his mother, the creator of _Charles O’Malley_ was the earliest writer of fiction whom Trollope had ever known. Of Fenimore Cooper he had heard much from his mother, who often saw him in Paris. Walter Scott, it occurred to him, had by his genius thrown the glamour of romance over the Highlands; he who wrote _The Last of the Mohicans_ had rescued the Red Indians from the commonplace. In like manner too the Irish romancist to whom Gregory had made him known had comically idealised the mess-room and parade-ground. Why, in the fullness of time should not Anthony himself find some class of the community from which to extract literary entertainment for readers on the lookout for novelty? Pending that, it would not be waste of time to found a preliminary essay upon the daily doings of the people among whom for the present his lot was cast. Miss Edgeworth’s _Castle Rackrent_ and _The Absentee_ he had read about the same time as he first pored over the pages of Jane Austen’s _Pride and Prejudice_. Then, at the close of the eighteenth century, and before the middle of the nineteenth, had come from various hands many Irish stories racy of the soil with which Trollope first made acquaintance in Gregory’s library.

Mrs. S. C. Hall’s masterpiece, _The Whiteboy_, did not come before 1845. Long before then, however, she had made hits on both sides of St. George’s Channel with, to name only a few in a long list, _The Buccaneer_ and _The Outlaw_. Two years Mrs. Hall’s senior, but like her then still living and flourishing, was William Carleton; his _Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry_, having first appeared in _The Christian Examiner_, was republished as a book in 1830. Nine years later appeared Carleton’s longest, most ambitious and, as Trollope found it, really stimulating story, _Fardorougha the Miser_. So far as Lever himself had been under any obligations to his predecessors, it was rather to the ideas and incidents, than to the personages scattered through Lady Morgan’s vivacious pages. Far the most famous Irish novel of the time was Gerald Griffin’s _The Collegians_, which owed most of its later fame to its having formed the foundation of the popular Irish melodrama, _The Colleen Bawn_. The forties were too early for Trollope to meet, at Coole Park or elsewhere, a writer born in 1830, and so exactly fifteen years his junior. This was the now little known, if not entirely forgotten, Charles Joseph Kickham, who, dying in 1882, had lived long enough, as the writer of _Sally Cavanagh, or The Untenanted Graves_, and _Knocknagow, or The House of Tipperary_, to be acclaimed the Irish Dickens. None of the writers nor their books now mentioned proved so useful to Trollope as one or two from William Carleton’s pen. The first of these was a volume that had followed _Fardorougha the Miser_ in 1839, and that, under the title of _Tales of Ireland_, was always compared by Trollope to Dean Ramsay’s _Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character_. Three more of Carleton’s books completed Anthony Trollope’s literary training for the work of an Irish novelist. These were _Valentine M‘Clutchy_, _the Irish Agent_, _The Tithe Procter_, and _The Squanders of Castle Squander_.

Going to Ireland as a bachelor, Anthony Trollope had been naturally expected, by the public opinion of the localities where he became known, to find a wife among its residents. It was indeed on Irish soil, at a well-known seaside resort, that he first met the lady to whom he in 1842 became engaged, and who in 1844 took his name. Her home, however, was in Yorkshire, at Rotherham, near Sheffield, where her father, Mr. Heseltine, had the management of a bank. With his marriage closes the earliest instalment of Anthony Trollope’s Irish experiences. He had begun his abode in the country as a man entirely unknown except to the few who had heard of his mother’s books. That did not always prove a recommendation, for from the day of her having found, as was said, in the Harrow clergyman named Cunningham, the Vicar of Wrexhill’s original, Mrs. Trollope had been charged with putting her friends or enemies into her stories. To such an extent was this supposed to be the case that when, several years afterwards, Charles Lever was thrown into her society at Florence, he markedly avoided her, whether as a partner at a whist-table or a next-door neighbour at dinner. Anthony Trollope’s friendship therefore with Lever, so far from originating in his acquaintance with Mrs. Trollope, would have been rather hindered by it, and was indeed a very gradual growth that had not reached maturity even when Trollope’s novels had become at least as popular as those of Lever himself.

But, during the earlier years of his long sojourn amongst them, the Irish classes and masses knew Trollope, not as a writer, but as the impersonation of the severest officialism. Not having gone to a University after school, nor even since his school-days having had time to move in society and assimilate its easier ways, he long combined much of youthful crudity with civilian stiffness. He had, in fact, unconsciously formed his manner upon that of the men who were around him and above him at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. As a companion and conversationalist he lacked the lightness of touch, the elasticity and ease communicated to each other by young men of his station in life, at college, at the club, or in the companionship of travel. At Harrow, none of his school-fellows had done him a better turn than William Gregory, his later friend of Coole Park, by disposing of a rumour, which local invention had not been slow to embroider with more sinister legends, that Trollope’s father was an outlaw. Hence, of course, the discreditable appearance of the boy himself. What an outlaw meant, none of them exactly knew. But the word had an evil sound. Doubtless the person whom it indicated must, by certain misdemeanours, have made himself the enemy of his species. This is the kind of defamatory gossip which pursues its victim long after the incidents that have given rise to the lie are forgotten. Gregory therefore sometimes found occasion for repeating to his Connaught neighbours the contradiction by which he had so signally served his friend at school.

The best idea of Trollope’s sporting life in Ireland during these years is to be gathered, not from any of the rather bald entries in his characteristically honest autobiography, but from certain passages in his book, _The Macdermots of Ballycloran_, presently to be mentioned. Roscommon county was credited by Trollope with the best gentlemen riders to be met with throughout Ireland.[4] But, in truth, during the forties Trollope could enter no Irish hunting-field without finding himself before a picked tribunal of experts in horseflesh and horsemanship. To these judges his performances in the saddle soon approved themselves. Courage and perseverance he never wanted; he soon acquired notable skill in shaping his course to the point for which quarry and pack were likely to steer. He knew also how to get out of his mount the utmost performance with the least exhaustion. Between himself and the animal he bestrode there existed a real sympathy. Still it was some time before the critics of the covert-side allowed his hands on his horse to be as good as his seat was firm. On the whole, however, he gradually won among sportsmen something like the reputation in the Connaught chase that was afterwards to be secured by his own Phineas Finn for the management of Lord Chiltern’s “Bonebreaker” on the broad pastures and the awkward banks and ditches of Northamptonshire. His taste for the stage made him also a real country-house acquisition when private theatricals were going on.

In the ball-room he showed the same inexhaustible vigour and energy as in the hunting-field. In this way his own feats and accomplishments, to the speedy extension of his visiting-list, justified in all quarters the introductions given him by his friends at Coole Park. Galway has been immemorially pre-eminent among Irish counties for its hospitality. The entertainments of Lord Clancarty at Garbally had secured European fame, before Trollope’s day, for the best known, most cosmopolitan and convivial of its owners--British Ambassador successively at the Hague and at Brussels, as well as for a short time English representative at the Vienna Congress. The Garbally festivities, however, were rather stories of which Trollope had heard than scenes in which he had played a part. His introduction behind the scenes of Irish politics and journalism grew out of no other cause than his intimacy at Coole Park. In 1842 his friend Gregory became Member for Dublin. Had Trollope chosen to do so, he could have said a great deal about this electoral contest, and could have acquainted us with some among the most typical and miscellaneous Irish notabilities of the time. Those in whose company we should have found ourselves would have included Sir John and Lady Burke, a host and hostess of the patrician and joyous old school; their handsome son, about whose wavy golden hair the maidens of his native land went wild; Granby Calcraft, a broken-down Irish swell whom Thackeray had seen and satirised; a gentleman named Nolan, but universally known as “Tom the Devil”; as well as the little group whose members, next to the candidates themselves, were active combatants in the Dublin election. These included two academic clergymen, one Tresham Gregg, the other Professor Butt, both of them Protestant patriots, vying with each other in the strength of their lungs and in the exuberance of their spoken or written rhetoric. The company would have been incomplete had it not included the greatest character of his time, Remy Sheehan, with a figure like a peg-top, but brimful of the finest Irish brains, who reinforced by the pen in his paper and by his speech on the platform the Castle power that promoted Gregory’s triumph, and that was exercised throughout by the Viceroy, Lord de Grey, through his chief secretary, Lord Eliot.

By 1850, though with his literary spurs still to win, Trollope had risen from the surveyor’s clerkship to the position of Post Office inspector. In that capacity he found himself intellectually pitted against the shrewdest and most popular of Irish advocates then living. This encounter of wits ended in a victory for Trollope. At that time, it must be prefaced, Post Office orders were as practically unused as postal notes were unknown. Small sums, when transmitted by post, were sent in coin of the realm. These enclosures occasionally went wrong. Trollope made it part of his duty to rectify, by tracing, these miscarriages. Such a quest he once pursued, after a method of his own, in county Cork. He marked a sovereign, and, carefully wrapping it up in a sheet of notepaper, enclosed it in a stamped envelope, addressed by him to the furthest post-town in the district. Having posted this in the ordinary way, he began his operations. Riding on horseback, he timed himself to reach every stage on the road taken by the vehicle carrying the post-bags, just before the coach or mail-cart came in. At every successive stoppage he practically asserted the right of a Government inspector to search the mail-bags. The process was continued throughout the journey till the stage at which the inspector, looking into the bag, found his letter had been opened, had been re-sealed, and the decoy coin it contained abstracted. His next move was to retrace his way to the village most recently passed through.

The police now conducted the search, and found the marked sovereign in the postmistress’s possession. That lady, a great local favourite as it happened, was placed on her trial shortly afterwards at the Tralee Assizes. Her many friends co-operated to secure for her defence Isaac Butt, then one of the chief counsel on the circuit, afterwards C. S. Parnell’s predecessor in the Home Rule leadership at Westminster. Butt no sooner got Trollope into the witness-box than he began to cross-examine him after the fashion for which he was famous. In this case the barrister’s object was to play upon the inspector’s notoriously choleric sensibilities, to worry him into some contradiction or blunder of testimony, and thus hold him up before the jury as a reckless circulator of libels and sarcasms about Irish things and persons, for the amusement of an English audience. Reading aloud or describing certain passages alleged to have been penned by Trollope concerning Ireland, Butt asked whether a man who wrote thus loosely could be trusted in his assertions about the truth and honesty of others.

Never did the ingenious and ably executed plan of an eminent advocate more completely miscarry. Trollope never once lost his temper or his head. Instead of being bewildered, he remained clear and exact from first to last. Was he, asked Butt, perfectly certain that he had marked in a particular way one side or both sides of the coin? Yes, he was; and with overwhelming politeness he again described, for the benefit of the jury, the secret meaning of the mark he had chosen, and the instrument with which he had made it. At one point, indeed, he showed the faintest sign of hesitation. Just then he remembered that a witty Scotsman in the House of Commons had recently called the Irish members, Isaac Butt among them, “talking potatoes.” The thought of the simile at once smoothed out the frown on Trollope’s face. As a fact, it was a duel between two men not, upon the whole, ill-matched. Butt knew of Trollope’s rasping manner and proneness to passionate explosion. Nothing of that sort showed itself now. The witness maintained his composure unruffled throughout, disarming, as to some extent it seemed, even his legal adversary by his urbane good-humour. The two, however, found the opportunity of exchanging Parthian shots at each other, just before they separated. “Good-morning, triumphant Post Office Inspector,” was Butt’s farewell utterance. Trollope’s amiably satirical, if rather baldly _tu quoque_ rejoinder, was, “Good-morning, triumphant cross-examiner.”