CHAPTER IX

IN PERIODICAL HARNESS

Trollope’s one work in the Thackerayan vein--_Brown, Jones, and Robinson_--Its failure--Thackeray’s two efforts to enter official life by a side door--Trollope’s opinion of “untried elderly tyros”--And of Thackeray’s limitations--His _Life of Thackeray_--Philippics against open competition in the Civil Service--A Liberal by profession, but a Tory at heart--Anthony’s _bon mot_--_The Pall Mall Gazette_--Hunting life in Essex--Sir Evelyn Wood to the rescue--Trollope’s cosmopolitanism--_The Fortnightly Review_, an English _Revue des Deux Mondes_--Its later developments.

Trollope’s London course, literary and social, began, as has been already shown, under Thackeray’s ægis. To the first editor of _The Cornhill_ he owed his place in the set with which he soon became, and always remained, a favourite, as well as his earliest profitable connection with periodical letters. Naturally and properly Trollope repaid this debt to the utmost of his power, not only by every possible acknowledgment of lasting gratitude, but by the occasional compliment of literary imitation. The novels of English country life contributed by him to _The Cornhill_--_Framley Parsonage_ in 1860, and _The Small House at Allington_ that began to follow it in 1862, the year before Thackeray’s death--showed no sign of Thackeray’s influence. These were the two books that completed the process, begun by _The Warden_ in 1855, of placing permanently the public he by this time understood beneath the spell of his pen. Before, however, the introduction of _The Cornhill_ readers to Lily Dale, John Eames, and Adolphus Crosbie, Trollope had contributed to the same magazine a loosely written, satirical sketch, _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_, which a hostile critic might be excused for describing as Thackeray-and-water. With a congenial subject, Trollope could always be depended on for abundant humour and irony. Both these qualities in _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_ lack the spontaneity or ease without which the charm of Trollope’s writing disappears. So, in fact, thought Trollope himself; so too, however courteously he softened the expression of his opinion, did the polite and amiable Mr. George Smith. Yet even so, _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_ is not at all poorer than Thackeray’s own mark as seen in many of his earlier pieces for _Fraser_, and in many of the _Roundabout Papers_ which he hurried through for _The Cornhill_ while the printers were waiting for copy. It was Trollope’s single unqualified failure. Never again was he betrayed by his Thackeray homage into the mistake of mimicry.

As a fact, too, no one knew better than did Trollope, not only his own limitations and deficiencies, but Thackeray’s as well. The plums of the Postmaster-General’s department should in every case fall to men already at work in the office. That feeling of _esprit de corps_ had in 1846 made Trollope oppose Rowland Hill’s introductions from outside to St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Two years later, or twelve years before Trollope’s connection with him began, Thackeray himself had, equally to Trollope’s disgust, contemplated an act of intrusion like Rowland Hill’s in the Postal Service. In 1848 the assistant-secretaryship fell vacant. The then Postmaster-General, Lord Clanricarde, the staunchest friend possessed by the novelist among those in high place, let Thackeray know he would do his best to secure him the billet. Lord Clanricarde’s second in command plainly told his chief that the thing was impossible. The Minister at once gave way, and accepted the official nominee, of course not a little to Thackeray’s chagrin.

On this transaction Trollope’s remark was that, had Thackeray succeeded in his attempt, he would surely have ruined himself. No man, he added, could be fit for the management and performance of special work who had learned nothing of it before his thirty-seventh year, Thackeray’s then age. No man, he further insisted, could be more signally unfit for it than Thackeray. The achievement of his ambition in this matter would have summoned him to duties impossible of performance except after a long course of expert training. In some cases, Trollope admitted, an “untried, elderly tyro” might have put himself into harness and discharged after a fashion the first duty of maintaining discipline over a large body of men; but of all men in the world Thackeray was the most egregiously and fatally disqualified for anything of the sort. The whole subject was one on which Trollope felt some difficulty in expressing himself. On the one hand, his grateful admiration of Thackeray made him anxious not to do that great man any injustice in the matter. On the other hand, his loyalty to his brethren of the Civil Service made him resent his idol’s apparent belief that a man may be a Government secretary with a generous salary and have nothing to do. Nor, he adds, did Thackeray consider how inexpressibly wearisome he would have found the details of his work, or in effect how impossible to a man of his habits and intolerance of all ties would have been attendance in the city every day from eleven to five. The conclusion, therefore, however reluctantly reached, is that Thackeray so underrated the intellectual demands made by their employments on the servants of the State as to see no difficulty in combining the mechanical drudgery of a public office with the creative labour of novel-writing and his other literary work. Yes, not without a touch of bitterness Trollope sums it all up: he might have done it had he risen at five, and sat at his private desk for three hours before beginning the day’s grind at the G.P.O. On this subject Trollope could speak with the practical experience of one who had gone through the exhausting monotony of the official mill, and who had taxed almost to breaking point his exceptional strength by combining with it his unceasing commissions for publishers.

Thackeray’s official aspirations were the fond dreams of a literary man who would fain have recalled in the nineteenth century that Augustan age in which, under Queen Anne, Joseph Addison was a Secretary of State, and, under George I, Matthew Prior became British Ambassador in Paris. Again, since the State is still accustomed to reward with money, titles of honour, garters, or stars, Thackeray wanted to know why men of letters should not have their turn as well as politicians and soldiers. Even in our own evil times the great Anglo-Saxon State on the other side of the Atlantic delighted to honour the pen in this way. The United States had sent Washington Irving (1830) as Minister to London; more than twenty years later (1853), it had made Nathaniel Hawthorne its consul at Liverpool. Fired by these precedents, six years after the miscarriage of his Post Office design, Thackeray (November 1854) had applied for the vacant secretaryship of our Washington Legation, with the result that Lord Clarendon, who then controlled the Foreign Office, replied: first, that the place was already filled; secondly, that it would be unfair to appoint out of the service; thirdly, that being a great novelist would not necessarily ensure a man’s being a good Minister.

When, therefore, Thackeray visited the United States, he did so in his own coat, as he himself put it, and not in the Queen’s. Nor, is Trollope’s comment, is there anyone on whom the Queen’s coat would have sat so ill. However that may be, there are few modern cases which could be cited in support of a literary man’s claim to employment in the English service abroad. During the years following Thackeray’s unsuccessful suit the official prospect for English literature somewhat brightened. Grenville Murray had combined diplomacy and authorship before Thackeray applied for Washington. Trollope’s own friend, Charles Lever, was first introduced to the consular service in 1852. Burton’s experiences of the same department date from 1861. In 1868 James Hannay was not too generously rewarded with the Barcelona consulship for his newspaper services to the Conservative cause. Since then Mr. James Bryce’s success at our Washington Embassy has brought us further in the direction of the great novelist’s dream than would have looked possible in Thackeray’s day.

These are not the only manifestations of the candour that blended itself with the warmth of Trollope’s appreciative friendship for Thackeray. His literary master’s defeat by Cardwell in the Oxford election in 1857 suggests a remark on “his foredoomed failure in the House of Commons, had he ever entered it, a failure rendered inevitable by his intolerance of tedium, his impatience of slow work, and his want of definite or accurate political convictions.”[17] More even than this, when Trollope comes to think about it, he feels by no means sure of Thackeray as _Cornhill_ editor having been the right man in the right place. Did not, he implies, Thackeray’s own often-cited article in his magazine about the editorial position, _Thorns in the Cushion_, justify that misgiving? The great man was too perfunctory, could not bring himself personally to deal with all the manuscripts which poured in; he was obliged, in fact, as all editors are, to entrust some of the supervisory work to his subordinates. Worse than that, however, Thackeray actually rejected one of Trollope’s proffered contributions in the shape of a short story, on the ground that it might bring a blush to the cheek of the young person. Nothing could be more curiously characteristic of the man who gives it than the opinion formed by the author of _Framley Parsonage_ of the first editor of _The Cornhill_. Trollope was compounded in nearly equal parts of an enthusiastic impulsiveness that came to him by nature, and of a shrewdly judicial man-of-the-world temper, largely formed and strengthened by his experiences of life in general, and, in a greater degree, of his Post Office experiences in particular. His twofold estimate of Thackeray signally illustrates this balance of opposite tendencies.

John Forster, who, after the fashion already described, had given Trollope his first chance of appearing in print, was one among the latest survivors of those who knew Thackeray intimately. Told in the year of his death, 1876, of Thackeray in the Men of Letters series being allotted to Trollope, he remarked with surprise, “Why, Trollope only knew him as editor of _The Cornhill_.” These things were before my time. Neither to me nor, I think, to any of my day, did Trollope volunteer any remarks about the extent to which circumstances had carried his personal knowledge of Thackeray. That the literary acquaintance of the two men eventually ripened into something like social intimacy was the opinion of Thackeray’s own familiars, such as the already mentioned E. F. S. Pigott and Tom Taylor who, though six years the great man’s junior, had been with him at Cambridge, and whose friendship with him to the day of his death was as unbroken as it was close. The same view on this point was taken also by G. A. Sala, who personally disliked Trollope, and had formerly resented his approaches to Thackeray, as well as by the accomplished and socially omniscient Sir W. A. Fraser, who, from his own independent experience, circumstantially confirmed to me the accuracy shown by Trollope in his rendering of all Thackerayan details. Both these henchmen of the great novelist were book and, incidentally, autograph collectors. Shortly before his death, Fraser and Trollope, each on a separate occasion going to dine with Thackeray at Palace Gate, brought with him a specially bound set of Thackeray’s works that the author might write his name therein. To both men Thackeray excused himself from doing so at the time, promised that he would see to the matter next day, and return the volumes. Meanwhile, the fatal Christmas had come and gone; the great man was no more. The books were punctually sent back to their owners. In neither set had Thackeray’s name been written.

Trollope’s _Cornhill_ experiences, under Thackeray first and, in the case of _The Claverings_, under his successor, marked by far the most important and profitable connection with periodical literature. As a journalist, however, he had begun on the weekly press in 1848, while he was doing Post Office duty in Ireland. In 1859 or 1860 Merivale’s _History of the Romans under the Empire_ excited in him a wish to combat the views expressed in that work about the Cæsars. The result was two articles on the subject, one dealing with Julius, the other with Augustus, in the _Dublin University Magazine_. By that time Charles Lever’s editorship of this periodical had ceased; but his good word helped Trollope with his successor. The articles then written, and just noticed, formed the germ of a future book hereafter to be mentioned. But, at the date of these _Dublin University_ opportunities, Trollope was so entirely overcome with indignant disgust at the prospect of the Civil Service being thrown open to competitive examination, that he could write or think about little else. The _Dublin University Magazine_ allowed him to relieve his overwrought feelings by discharging several pages of furious invective at the proposed change and its authors.

Whatever at different periods Trollope might think and call himself, his natural prejudices were always those of aristocratic and reactionary Toryism. Upon whatever grade, and whatever the work, provided it was not of an essentially plebeian kind, the public offices of this country must be reserved for gentlemen. Examinations might in some degree test brains; they could not ensure breeding. Without the ideas, the antecedents, and the social training which must remain the privilege of birth, mere book knowledge, diligence, and aptitude for drudgery would not of themselves guarantee the State the higher qualities it had a right to expect in its servants. Here spoke the same spirit as that which had impelled Anthony Trollope’s kinsman, the great Conservative squire, Sir John Trollope, in 1846 to place loyalty to his Protectionist principles before loyalty to his leader, Sir Robert Peel. Asseverations of this kind were much in request as arguments with those bent on retaining State employment for the exclusive profit of the privileged classes. Nor beyond these rhetorical commonplaces, with their conventional appeals to a pseudo-aristocratic feeling, did Anthony Trollope’s case against competitive examinations go. He lived long enough, if not cordially to acquiesce in the new system, yet, becoming Sir Charles Trevelyan’s personal friend, to agree with him that competition did not in its working involve more evils than patronage.

While on one of his visits to the Irish capital, about his contributions to the academic periodical, he first made, through the social offices of Charles Lever, one of the friendships that he renewed with special appreciation in his later life. J. S. Le Fanu had succeeded Lever as the editor of the _Dublin University Magazine_; to Le Fanu’s house in Merrion Square Trollope, accordingly, was taken by Lever. Here in the course of the evening a young lady--his host’s niece--asked whether she should read something to them she had written. The budding authoress became celebrated a little later as Miss Rhoda Broughton, and the manuscript in hand was that of a story that established her as a novelist in 1867, _Not Wisely, but Too Well_. Recalling this incident many years afterwards, Lever said: “Never before or since did I see Anthony Trollope so agreeable or so witty as on the evening he listened to the extracts Miss Broughton recited from her earliest book. In fact, the only _mot_ with which I can ever credit him was flashed out on that occasion. The talk, I think, had been brought by W. H. Russell, who was of the party, to some one specially disliked by Trollope. ‘But,’ said Trollope, dismissing the subject, ‘let us hope better things of him in the future, as the old lady said when she heard that F. D. Maurice had preached the eventual salvation of all mankind.’”

Trollope took his place in the social and literary life of London under conditions and at an age that ensured his enjoying these new experiences with a greater zest than had they come earlier, and because they were the deferred, and occasionally the despaired of reward for toil, endurance, exile, equal to the picturing of his fondest dream. At the age of forty-five, with powers of enjoyment, as of work, yet unimpaired, he had in advance guaranteed himself against inconvenience from any possible check in his literary course by the eastern district surveyorship. This raised him above the dependence of a publisher’s hack, and enabled him to make better terms for his books. Its social as well as official experiences might, as he shrewdly foresaw, be trusted to ensure his imagination such a constant supply of fresh material as would preserve freshness and guard him against the sin of self-repetition. Thus, in little more than ten years after his earliest and unsuccessful novel, _The Macdermots_, and in five years after his first success with _The Warden_, he had won a position which rendered it tolerably certain that no new literary enterprise would be floated by men like George Smith, without the invitation of his services and goodwill. In another work[18] I have stated so fully the origin of _The Pall Mall Gazette_ that any references to it here must be confined to the few points of contact between that newspaper and Trollope, whom it did not concern, in his impressions of this journalistic incident, circumstantially to bring out the fact that, beyond its name, _The Pall Mall Gazette_ of real life owed nothing to Thackeray, and, as regards all its details, was the exclusive device of its first owner and its first editor. The announcement of the historical paper, prepared by Frederick Greenwood, who alone planned and who long conducted it, said nothing about a journal written “by gentlemen for gentlemen,” but only that a few men of letters had decided upon starting on a new venture which they thought would be found different from anything then before the public. Contributions of course were invited from Trollope upon any social events or humours of the hour that interested him. By this time he was as well known in certain parts of England as he had begun to be nearly a quarter of a century earlier, on the other side of St. George’s Channel, for an enthusiastic and intrepid rider to hounds.

At Waltham House, where his Post Office duties had made it convenient to settle, he was within practicable distance of several different meets. At Harlow, some ten miles from Waltham, were the kennels of the Essex pack, and with these he soon became a familiar figure. His earliest hunting friend, Charles Buxton, between 1865 and 1871 Member for East Surrey, on Trollope’s re-establishment in the home counties, was himself still a keen rider to hounds; Buxton’s friendship and introduction proved of special service to Trollope in connection with his favourite pastime. During Trollope’s experience of the Essex country, the district opened to him by his friends of the Buxton family was that known as the Roothings, chiefly hunted by the staghounds, but occasionally also the scene of a fox hunt. Famous for its stiff riding, it abounded in formidable fences and in deep ditches. In the sixties Trollope was a very heavy weight, and therefore frequently in difficulties; of these he made light, pulling himself together with surprising speed after a series of spills, and seldom failing to hold a good place at the end of a run. Of his fellow-Nimrods in the East Anglian region, there are still left Sir Evelyn Wood and Mr. E. N. Buxton, from personal experience to testify to the undaunted alacrity with which, after having been lost to view in the field, Trollope scaled the sides of a Roothing dyke, reappeared in the saddle, and pushed on with unabated vigour.

In addition to his weight, fatal, of course, to anything like equestrian elegance, Trollope had to contend against a defect of vision which no artificial relief entirely obviated. Hence some of the difficulties that used to beset him with the Essex pack and with H. Petre’s staghounds. His popularity in the field generally brought him timely relief in answer to his call for help. Such proved the case when, on one occasion, he had been making up lost ground after a fall in the middle of a ploughed field. The fellow-sportsman who then answered to his cry was no less a person than the present Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. “For heaven’s sake,” exclaimed Trollope, “be careful; I am afraid to move lest I should trample on my spectacles which have just fallen off my nose.” Quick as thought, the future Field-Marshal alighted from his horse, and retrieved the glasses. Having fitted them to his nose, Trollope rejoined the hunt with as much serene sturdiness as if the little contretemps had never occurred. Trollope’s sporting performances in the eastern home counties had also a social side he found highly useful for the purposes of his novels. Many of the sportsmen lived at London or elsewhere, renting at local inns a certain amount of stabling for their horses, together with suites of rooms for themselves during the season. They thus formed a club whose members, as often as convenient, dined together, and of which Trollope soon became free. It was a pleasant, cheery life that exactly suited the eminently clubbable Trollope. Glimpses of it are given in those passages of _Phineas Finn_ describing the performances of that novel’s hero on Lord Chiltern’s Bonebreaker.

As Trollope wrote, so did he ride, confident that the animal he bestrode, equally the novelist’s Pegasus as his Irish mare, would in each case carry him successfully from point to point. Whether with the pen or on horseback, he took his own line. Neither checks nor even falls prevented his finishing at the spot and the hour he had from the first fixed. As much as he could desire of the sport he loved, in a good country, and with social accessories just suited to him; a constitution, naturally of iron, as yet practically untouched by years, and revealing no unsound spot; a sense of official importance gratified by the authority delegated to him from St. Martin’s-le-Grand; the inheritance at the London club he most frequented, the Garrick, of something like Thackeray’s own position; ascendency firmly established and wide popularity permanently won in the calling of novelist; freedom from all present anxiety as to his circumstances, and every year bringing a solid addition to his funded savings--all this surely formed a combination, such as might have made him who commanded it the happiest, as he was certainly the most fortunate, of men. And yet Trollope’s life was chronically saddened by recurrent moods of indefinable dejection and gloom. A sardonic melancholy he had himself imputed to Thackeray. In his own case the sardonic element was wanting, but the melancholy was habitually there, darkening his outlook alike upon the present and the future. “It is, I suppose,” he said, addressing the friend to whom, more than to any other, he unbosomed himself, Sir J. E. Millais, “some weakness of temperament that makes me, without intelligible cause, such a pessimist at heart.”

These seizures of despondency generally overtook him as he was riding home from a day with the hounds. They began with the reflection that he rode heavier in each successive season, and that in the course of nature the hunting, repeatedly prolonged beyond what he had fixed as its term, would have to be given up. The vague presentiment of impending calamity, as he himself put it, came, no doubt, from nothing more than an increasingly practical discovery of the Horatian truth:

“_Singula de nobis anni prædantur euntes._”[19]

Against the depressing influences thus engendered, Trollope lacked the natural resources of his two most famous contemporaries. Thackeray, if he had not always at his command spirits as high as Dickens, by an effort of purely intellectual strength could generally secure the enjoyment of life against the intrusion of unwelcome fancies and gloomy thoughts. Anthony Trollope was without Dickens’ perennially boyish zest of existence or Thackeray’s stubborn opposition to the first approach of the “blue devils.” His manner, habitually abrupt and sometimes imperious, concealed an almost feminine sensibility to the opinions of others, a self-consciousness altogether abnormal in a seasoned and practical man of the world, as well as a strong love of approbation, whether from stranger or friend. The inevitable disappointment of these instincts and desires at once pained and ruffled him beyond his power to conceal, and so produced what his physician and friend, Sir Richard Quain, once happily called “Trollope’s genial air of grievance against the world in general, and those who personally valued him in particular.”

The founding of _The Pall Mall Gazette_ and other literary events belonging to the year 1865 were landmarks in Trollope’s progress for social rather than literary reasons. Some very slight sketches, exclusively or for the most part on hunting, were contributed by him to the evening paper which Frederick Greenwood’s experience and inventiveness had been helped by George Smith’s capital to create.[20] In those days more dining than is the habit to-day was considered essential to journalistic enterprise. George Smith’s earliest _Pall Mall_ dinners soon became famous, and found Anthony Trollope a frequent guest. At these hospitalities he greatly extended the literary and political acquaintanceship which he had begun to make at the Garrick and at the Cosmopolitan, as well as added to it specimens of intellectual power, culture, and cosmopolitan knowledge hitherto seldom collected beneath the same London roof. Such were the three survivors among the chief original writers for _The Saturday Review_: H. S. Maine, his former Cambridge pupil and subsequently _Saturday_ colleague, William Vernon Harcourt, and G. S. Venables, about whom it was then, as it still remains, uncertain whether he did or did not sit to Thackeray for the Warrington of _Pendennis_.

The second Lord Lytton, then attached to our Lisbon embassy, Julian Fane, and the eighth Viscount Strangford represented various branches of _belles lettres_, as well as of diplomacy and cosmopolitanism, in the company among which Trollope now found himself. Not the elder alone, but both the two brothers who were successively the seventh and eighth Lords Strangford are reflected, even to their personal appearance, in the Waldershare of Disraeli’s _Endymion_--fair with short, curly, brown hair and blue eyes, not exactly handsome, but with a countenance full of expression, and the index of quick emotions, whether of joy or sorrow. George Smythe, the seventh of the Strangford Viscounts, the reputed original of Coningsby, was no longer alive at the time of these _Pall Mall_ dinners. His brother and successor, Percy, figured among Greenwood’s most important contributors from the first. None of the group now mentioned had the same vivid interest for Trollope as Strangford; but the most distinguished of the others, notably Fitzjames Stephen, William Rathbone Greg, George Henry Lewes, and James Hannay, exercised upon him something of the same educational influence that they did upon Greenwood himself. Many years subsequently to this, Trollope met as a guest at the Cosmopolitan Club the ex-officer of the French Navy, L. M. J. Viaud, who, as Pierre Loti, became famous in 1880. “I could not,” was Trollope’s comment, “amid the many personal dissimilarities of the two, but be struck by a certain resemblance between James Hannay’s breezy picturesqueness in stating his views of history or politics, and the touches, as graphic as they were delicate, that made Viaud’s descriptions, whether in conversation or writing, living things.”

The period now reached was to present Trollope with another new connection in periodical literature, not less noticeable in itself, and more far-reaching in some of its consequences than any of those already mentioned. His first dealings with the publishers Chapman and Hall, while still settled at 193 Piccadilly, were, as has been already said, over _Dr. Thorne_ in 1858. Pre-eminent among the nineteenth century writers as the novelist of English home-life, Trollope possessed, and on occasion showed, as much of international sympathy as Bulwer-Lytton himself, and, by original observation as well as by English and foreign reading, took real pains to keep himself in touch with the higher European thought of his time. Occasionally he took his summer holiday at a pretty little hamlet in the Black Forest, Höllenthal, near Freiburg. Here he sometimes received visits from well-placed continental friends who, in a few hours’ talk, took him effectively behind the scenes of European society letters, politics, or finance. From Höllenthal, too, were made those excursions that not only acquainted him with the most-desired hospitalities of Cologne, Frankfort, and Berlin, but that also brought him into the heart of the Fatherland’s inner life as seen, now in obscure towns or obscurer villages, now in the studies and lecture-rooms of thinkers and writers. Such were the experiences that suggested to Trollope’s active mind the possibility of founding a magazine which should be for England what the _Revue des deux Mondes_ was for France; that periodical, as was happily said by Lord Morley of Blackburn, had “brought down abstract discussion from the library to the man in the street.” Why should not, Trollope asked himself, the like of this be done here. The same idea had occurred almost simultaneously to others of light and learning in contemporary literature. Huxley, E. A. Freeman, Sir R. F. Burton, E. S. Beesly, Mr. Frederick Harrison, and the present poet laureate, Mr. Alfred Austin, promised the enterprise their “vote and interest”; Lord Houghton, without whose counsel and goodwill no undertaking of the sort could then have been carried out, forwarded it not only with his blessing but his purse.

Among others less well known but not less active co-operating to the same end were Danby Seymour, Charles Waring, a shrewd, genial Yorkshireman of intellectual tastes and parliamentary ambitions, whose interest in the project had been secured by one already mentioned more than once in these pages, E. F. S. Pigott. Waring, who subsequently married a daughter of Sir George Denys of Draycote, Yorkshire, and was from 1865 to 1868 M.P. for Poole, became the father of Captain Walter Waring, returned in 1907 for Banffshire. In the sixties, however, he was a man about town, living in The Albany, as generous and eclectic in his bachelor hospitalities as, after his marriage, in the cosmopolitan banquets which during the eighties gave his house, 3 Grosvenor Square, a place of its own in the chronicle of the London season. During that subsequent period Waring once thought of buying back from its possessors, Messrs. Chapman and Hall, the periodical to founding which he had contributed. Then, however, Trollope, at whose instance Pigott’s influence had originally prevailed on Charles Waring to co-operate in bringing _The Fortnightly Review_ to the birth, was dead against the parting of the property to any new purchaser.

At the date now looked back upon, Waring’s Albany Chambers were frequented by other clever and notable men, all of them, in their different ways, highly useful at its beginnings to the literary enterprise. Such were Ralph Earle, who, as Benjamin Disraeli’s private secretary during part of 1859, sat for Berwick-on-Tweed. Soon after this Earle gave up politics, as he had before given up diplomacy. He had the Italian or Spanish genius for statecraft, but no special qualifications for a deliberative assembly. The knowledge of international policy and finance, picked up in the course of his European wanderings, he employed congenially and successfully in negotiating concessions from foreign sovereigns and statesmen for great capitalists engaged in railways and other public works, especially Baron de Hirsch. Earle’s House of Commons contemporary, Danby Seymour, Waring’s predecessor in the representation of Poole, was without the rare intellectual power and subtlety that marked Disraeli’s former secretary. He was, however, a typical specimen of the intellectual and political man about town, with an altogether extraordinary knowledge of high-class periodicals in every European country and language. Be sure, was his advice, to cultivate as an entirely new feature, the best account that can be written for each number of all contemporary movements, foreign as well as domestic, with their tendency and value, whether in the region of politics, letters, science, or economics. Seymour’s suggested article at once became a feature, and received from Trollope himself the title, “Home and Foreign Affairs.” The little conferences in the Piccadilly precinct that preceded the appearance of _The Fortnightly_ proved a valuable experience to Trollope. They took him for the first time in his life behind the political scenes, and brought him into close quarters with men from whom he afterwards drew the political figures that flit through his later novels.

Danby Seymour had held subordinate office in Lord Palmerston’s second administration. His brother Alfred, often with him on these occasions, had been member for Shaftesbury. They both had fine estates in Wiltshire--subsequently disposed of to Mr. Percy Wyndham--as well as Mayfair houses, one in Curzon Street, the other near it, and each possessed a fine collection of pictures. In a word, the Seymour kinsmen, to whom _The Fortnightly Review_ operations alone introduced Trollope, were thoroughly characteristic of the class and period that he introduced in _Can You Forgive Her?_ (1864), and which afterwards he was to describe more minutely in the political novels that began with _Phineas Finn_.

Trollope showed his knowledge of recent and remote history by reminding his company that leading out of the same corridor as Waring’s rooms were those in which Douglas Cook, creator and first editor of _The Saturday Review_, saw, of a Tuesday morning, his contributors, and later in the day dined his great friends or wealthy patrons of the Hope and Pelham name. A generation earlier Trollope discovered, in the same Piccadilly precinct, Lord Althorp had rallied his followers for the attack upon the Conservatives under the Duke of Wellington that was to establish the reform ministry of Grey. Such formed the associations of the four walls within which were completed the arrangements that resulted in the appearance, on the 15th of May, 1865, of the first number of _The Fortnightly Review_, with the cry, “No party but a free platform.” At the same time, the choice of George Henry Lewes as first editor, on the then Mr. John Morley’s recommendation, seemed to promise that the champions of progress were not likely to have the worst of it in any discussions which might enliven the pages of _The Fortnightly_. The title explains itself; the Review was to appear on the first and fifteenth of each month, at a price of two shillings. In 1866 Mr. Morley succeeded Lewes as editor. The October issue of that year announced the suspension for the present of the mid-monthly number. Thus, among the three _Fortnightly_ editors during Trollope’s time, the earliest, George Lewes, was the only one who conducted a magazine literally true to its title. With the number of January, 1867, the present series began; at the same time the price was raised from a florin to half a crown.

Trollope always felt a paternal interest, and sometimes exercised a paternal power, in the periodical that thus at its different stages associated itself with so many well-known names, and that, without any loss of position, had in infancy dropped any etymological claim to the name given it by Trollope himself. When _The Fortnightly_ funds, raised in the manner already described, had been spent, the copyright passed to the publishers. Of these, Frederick Chapman, by his energy and zeal for the enterprise, had already made himself a part of the Review, uniformly co-operating, then and afterwards, in all matters that pertained to it, with Trollope. Thus far, Trollope sympathised with, or did not reprobate, the advanced opinions advocated by its chief writers. He remained, indeed, for many years afterwards, enough of a Liberal to remonstrate with Mr. Alfred Austin on securing for his elder brother, Tom, the Italian correspondence of _The Standard_, at the price, he feared, of his conversion to Conservatism. For though, as has already been seen, Trollope’s inborn prejudices, social training, and personal antipathies were all strongly Conservative, the accidents of later experience, operating on his actively controversial temper; made him pass for a Liberal during those Palmerstonian and early Gladstonian eras when Liberalism took its principles from the reactionary moderates rather than the progressives. He wished to see in power men whose administrative abilities would secure prosperity and a fair distribution of material comforts, as well as civil or political rights at home, and the exercise of English influence to redress international grievances, and to put down oppression abroad. But this was coupled always with the condition of the country being ruled and represented by the privileged classes, to whom no one was more proud of belonging than himself. So long as they were in the hands of gentlemen, he really cared little about the political label borne by those responsible for the conduct of affairs. The demagogue and leveller, whether on the platform or in print, were always the same abominations to his earlier manhood that the professional agitator and the foreign fomenters of Irish disaffection became to his later years.

His favourite intellectual progeny, as he regarded _The Fortnightly Review_, might be trusted, he thought, to reflect his own ideas, and to avoid the falsehood of extremes, at least as much in one direction as in the others. He therefore felt something of a Lear’s paternal pain and indignation when the editor and his self-willed contributors seemed bent on converting the periodical from a platform for the discussion of all questions by the light of pure reason, on lines agreeable to impartial intellect alone, into a pulpit, as it struck Trollope, for maintaining the most audacious and subversive neologies, social or political, civil or religious. His misgivings were exchanged for certainty during the course of 1867. In that year the war between labour and capital reached its height. The public had not recovered from the horror and disgust it had received from the trades union excesses which Broadhead had instigated at Sheffield, when Mr. Frederick Harrison came out with his famous defence of strikes and unions in _The Fortnightly Review_. Nor was it the industrial question only on which _The Fortnightly_ articles excited Trollope’s apprehension. To the end of the sixties and to the first year of the next decade belonged the acutest phase of the perennial dispute whether national elementary teaching should rest on a purely secular, on a chiefly religious basis, or should be supported on the result of a compromise between the two. That last was the ministerial view which, in his pending Elementary Schools Bill, W. E. Forster, as vice-President of the Council, and practically Education Minister, aimed at establishing. He thus, of course, satisfied neither side. The religious educationalists of the National Union, with Manchester for its headquarters, charged the author of the 1870 Bill with indifference whether the rising generation was brought up in the Christianity of its forefathers, or victimised to the heathenish fads and godless crotchets of the secularist and agnostic education-mongers, looked upon with the same horror by Trollope as all other radicals or revolutionaries. On the other hand, the Birmingham League, with Mr. Joseph Chamberlain for its political champion, and the unimpeachably Christian Congregational minister, R. W. Dale, for its prophet and guide, held that, in the long run, both learning and religion would fare best if in State schools religion formed no part of the official curriculum. So, too, thought, or as Trollope fancied, seemed to think, the leading spirits of _The Fortnightly Review_. Against these Anthony Trollope was up in arms. The articles advocating the League’s policy suggested a deliberate plot to suppress the Holy Scriptures in the National schools.

His disapproval of the political school whose ascendency _The Fortnightly_ confessed did not prevent him from being one of its contributors. In addition to the novel he ran through it, _The Belton Estate_, presently to be dwelt on, he made the Review an arena for a struggle with E. A. Freeman about the morality of field sports in general, and of his own greatly enjoyed hunting in particular. This controversy, marked on both sides by prejudice rather than argument, and by vigour instead of subtlety, was, as might have been expected, no better than a waste of time, temper, and space. Had it been possible to bring forward any new pros or cons, neither Freeman nor Trollope was the man to do it. Ouida and her friend, Sir Frederick Johnstone, talking over the matter at one of her Langham Hotel _causeries intimes_, “where cigarettes and even cigars were permitted,” said: “I think if these two pundits had handed the matter over to us, we could have put a little more life into it, and perhaps sent up by a few copies the periodical which is the pasture-ground of professors and prigs.” Trollope was as far from being a prig as from being a philosopher. But he had equally few qualifications for a controversialist likely to freshen up an ancient theme, and in this disability he was well matched with Freeman.

Meanwhile, he had invested capital in the house of Chapman and Hall; after the publishing business had been turned into a limited company he remained one of the shareholders, and transmitted his interest in it to those in whose favour he drew his will. He was, from its foundation to the end of his life, a director of the company, but besides this, his intimacy with the manager of its publishing business, Frederick Chapman, as well as with that gentleman’s well-to-do relatives with a large share in the concern, gave, and kept for Trollope to the day of his death, the position of an _amicus curiæ_, whose literary advice was asked and taken on important matters. But the sensational stage of the development of _The Fortnightly_ was not fully reached during his life. He survived, however, to witness the first signs of its advent in an article which, under the signature “Judex,” appeared in the spring of 1880, after Beaconsfield’s final overthrow, and the formation of Gladstone’s second Cabinet. “It was,” said the writer of the article now recalled, “an extraordinary victory won by the nation against an extraordinary man, in some of his powers never surpassed, whose life was the most astonishing of all careers in the annals of parliament, and who, though decisively vanquished, would not, it was to be hoped, retire, because a Liberal Government, more than any other, imperatively needs a strong Opposition for the due and sane performance of its work.” This composition was at once discovered to have the importance of a State paper. The editor, Mr. John Morley, had not then entered parliament as member for Newcastle-on-Tyne. Previously, however, to that he had fought not only Blackburn but Westminster under the Gladstonian flag. He was known to stand high in the Liberal leader’s confidence. It was generally asserted, without contradiction then or since, that the pseudonym at the end of the piece veiled the identity of no less a person than W. E. Gladstone himself. Trollope, at the most, did not think much of it, and drily remarked that fictitious pen names violated one of the principles of the Review. He had consistently protested, and indeed actively struggled against, the conversion of an impartial and philosophical magazine into the mouthpiece of men to whose opinions he could not reconcile himself, though their expression was judiciously revised by an editor not only as able, but as fair-minded as any periodical was fortunate enough to possess. Having retired from practical opposition, and accepted what he thought was the inevitable, he remarked: “The whirligig of time brings its own revenges, and wisdom is justified of her children. I shall not live to see it, but a generation or so hence _The Fortnightly_, recovering from these its earlier excesses, will revert to its original mission, and give the world the best which can be written for or against any school of politics and philosophy in Church or State.” This characteristic prediction has at least, in the twentieth century, fulfilled itself to the letter. Under its present accomplished editor, as under his latest predecessors, irrespectively of party position or personal proclivities, the periodical has been opened to all competent writers with a message to deliver.