CHAPTER X

THE BROADENING OF THE LITERARY AND GEOGRAPHICAL HORIZON

Trollope as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. G. H. Lewes among the lions of literature and science at The Priory, Regent’s Park--Charles Dickens present in the spirit, not in the flesh, thinks Adam Bede is by Bradbury or Evans, and doesn’t fancy it is Bradbury--Was there any exchange of literary influence between George Eliot and Trollope?--Trollope’s new departure illustrates the progress from the idyllic to the epic--_Orley Farm_--Its plot--Trollope’s first visit to the United States, in 1860.

Thackeray’s death in 1863 had left Trollope without any special intimate among his fellow-craftsmen. Several years later, indeed, his success as a novelist brought him, after the manner to be duly mentioned in its proper place, into business relations with Dickens, his mother’s rather than his own old friend. John Forster, it has been seen, may be said first to have brought him out in print. With that ex-editor of _The Examiner_, Trollope always maintained some social intimacy, visiting him first in the Lincoln’s Inn Chambers, where he so long lived, and afterwards more frequently at his house in Queen’s Gate. Here the chief new literary acquaintance formed by Trollope was with the second Lord Lytton, who snatched from his diplomatic employments abroad enough time for constant reappearance in literary circles at home. Between 1865 and 1875, however, the most interesting and eventful visits paid by Trollope to any host among contemporary writers were those to Mr. and Mrs. G. H. Lewes at The Priory, North Bank, Regent’s Park. At these well-known Sunday afternoon receptions, Trollope first found himself at the social heart of the highest nineteenth century culture. G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope were all nearly of an age. How far Lewes and his scientific tastes affected George Eliot’s literary style may be an open question. There is no doubt that George Eliot in her turn influenced Trollope’s views of life and character. In Trollope’s time, the regular Sunday _habitués_ of the double drawing-room at The Priory, for the most part men, seldom failed to number among them Frederick Leighton, whose drawings for _Romola_ decorated the walls; E. S. Beesly, History Professor at London University College; Robert Browning always; sometimes, on his rare visits to London, Alfred Tennyson; the philosophers Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, E. F. S. Pigott invariably; occasionally Owen Jones, to whose decorative art The Priory owed scarcely less than the Crystal Palace itself; some men of note from the Universities; and generally one or two foreigners of distinction in letters, science, or art.

Of all this company, none more frequently than Trollope obtained a seat near Mrs. Lewes’ armchair on the left of the fire-place. The two novelists never talked publicly about themselves, but among the guests there were some who noticed a kind of parallel in George Eliot’s and Anthony Trollope’s literary courses. The earliest successes of both with the general public won the favour also of their most famous fellow-authors. Thackeray pleasantly complained if, after the day’s work was done, he could not at once refresh himself with _The Three Clerks_. George Eliot’s _Scenes of Clerical Life_ had no sooner appeared in _Blackwood’s_ than Dickens conjured all those about him to read them, saying, “They are the best things I have seen since I began my course.” A little later, Miss Marian Evans, to recall for a moment the name which never, by the by, appeared on the title-page of any of her books, set the literary world speculating about the identity veiled by the George Eliot pseudonym. Dickens alone penetrated the mystery, after reading the description of Hetty Sorrel doing her back hair. Only a woman, and one of first-rate genius, could have written that, he said. Hence his oracular reply, through his daughter, to a letter asking his opinion on the subject: “Papa wishes me to say he feels sure _Adam Bede_ is either by Bradbury or Evans, and he doesn’t think it’s Bradbury.”[21]

George Eliot, like many other great writers, avoided, so far as possible, reading the periodical reviews of her books. Love of approbation was with her a phrenological organ strongly developed; as all writers cannot but do, she found sweetness in the appreciation of her work by other labourers in the same literary field as her own. During the later fifties she made more than one visit to Florence and its neighbourhood in quest of materials and local colour for _Romola_, published in 1863. On those occasions she saw much of Anthony Trollope’s elder brother, Thomas Adolphus, who had made the Tuscan capital his home, and who never left it save on a short and rare visit to England. Anthony Trollope’s familiarity with the place dated, as has been seen, from the visit paid by him to his mother during her residence there. Those early reminiscences naturally increased Anthony Trollope’s interest in _Romola_. “A delightful generous letter from Mr. Anthony Trollope about _Romola_” brightened and encouraged the authoress in one of those moods of passing depression that sometimes beset the most intellectual toilers. “The heartiest, most genuine, moral and generous of men.” Such, at an earlier state of their acquaintance, had been the impression given by the author of _The Small House at Allington_ to the hostess of The Priory at those Sunday afternoon receptions. In common with his fellow-guests Trollope felt to the full the austere charm of George Eliot’s grave urbanity, and of her conversation--brightened indeed by no flashes of humour, but occasionally seasoned with utterances of penetrating sagacity condensed into epigram. With this woman of genius Trollope became a personal favourite. More than that, the two novelists appreciably, to some extent, influenced each other. “I am not at all sure,” George Eliot told Mrs. Lynn Linton, “that, but for Anthony Trollope, I should ever have planned my studies on so extensive a scale for _Middlemarch_, or that I should, through all its episodes, have persevered with it to the close.”

Trollope’s progress as a novelist owed something to his acquaintance with the two chief literary women of his age. Mention has already been made of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s preference over all his earlier stories for _The Three Clerks_. Nothing else of his, she said, had thus far combined so happily pure romance with realistic incident. This praise, he told the present writer, had the effect of doubling his care with the labour of plot-weaving in connection with character-drawing. This was in 1858. In 1862 _Orley Farm_ produced nearly the same compliment to him from the author of _Adam Bede_. Ten years after Mrs. Browning’s hints came the inspiring and instructive intercourse with George Eliot. Fresh from that association Trollope began to deal less superficially than his earlier stories had required with feminine problems. Into his comedy narrative of manners were now introduced questions of social casuistry, involving moral issues of a graver kind than those which so far had charged his atmosphere. Among the most marked of Trollope’s mental features was his receptivity. This had been already shown by the literary account to which he successively turned his Post Office experiences at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, in Ireland, and again after that in England, provincial as well as metropolitan. His admiration of George Eliot’s art generally, particularly of those qualities in her work that secured her the compliment of comparison with Shakespeare, did without affecting his literary style and method to some degree influence, as he himself felt, his views of character and life.

_Can You Forgive Her?_ (1864), as will presently be shown, marked a fresh stage in the novelist’s evolution. In the manifestation of poetic gifts the natural order of advance has always been from the idyllic to the epic. Whether with the founder of pastoral poetry this may have been the case we do not know, since from Theocritus there have come down to us from him no strains more militant than those in which he celebrated the rivalries, the loves, the alternate fears and hopes, not of a purely ideal Arcadia, but as those sentiments existed in everyday life among the Syracusan swains and shepherds whom in real life he knew. The Virgilian Bucolics were in wide circulation before, at the wish of Augustus, the Æneid was begun. So with English poets. Milton’s shorter and gentler compositions preceded _Paradise Lost_ by the best part of a generation. Alexander Pope’s Pastorals soothed pleasantly the popular ear while their author still meditated in his Twickenham grotto the English presentation of the Greek and Latin heroic masterpieces. So too with Trollope. The broader canvas, the greater variety of personages, and the swifter sequence of stirring incident exemplified a progress corresponding with that just explained.

Something of the same sort had already happened, or was about to take place with a literary ornament of the Victorian age, of an order more illustrious than Anthony Trollope. The greatest, probably, of modern English poets who have ever filled the office of laureate made his first successful appeal to the public with compositions that were in metre much what Trollope’s _Cornhill_ stories were in prose. Six years older than Anthony Trollope, Alfred Tennyson had first caught the English ear with his rural lays and lyrics of English home life. The taste thus gratified, as well as to some extent created, demanded prose fiction possessing domestic interest of the same kind. The public had delighted in _The Miller’s Daughter_, _The Sisters_, _The Gardener’s Daughter_, _Dora_, _Audley Court_, and _Edwin Morris_ from the poet. It, therefore, found what exactly suited its mood in _Framley Parsonage_, and _The Small House at Allington_ from the novelist. The way for Trollope’s popularity had also been prepared, not only by writers of his own period, but by the gradual evolution of the English novels at the hand of its earlier masters. His stories of everyday life began to appear while Jane Austen’s novels were still in the highest favour and Maria Edgeworth’s still retained much of their original vogue. Charlotte Yonge had first extended her fame from the High Church circles to the general public a little later, and retained her position well into the nineteenth century’s second half. But the well-to-do and more or less cultivated English households that read and discussed _The Heir of Redclyffe_ had by no means ceased to care for the analysis of feminine character as illustrated by English fiction’s earliest master of that art, Samuel Richardson. There were, too, Richardson’s less famous or now almost forgotten successors; these numbered not only Thomas Holcroft, but Robert Page, whose _Hermsprang_ contains studies of girlhood and womanhood as effective, and, in their day as much admired, as any of the portraits in “those large, still books,” to apply to them Tennyson’s description. The welcome given to those heroines on their first appearance before the public presaged in its warmth and universality the reception awaiting the latter-day descendants of the men, the matrons, and widows whom Richardson’s example had encouraged Trollope to think no labour of observation or of pen too great, if, as he had seen them, he could in his stories, to the life, reproduce, not only them, but their social atmosphere and surroundings. This Trollope did, and an older generation, which knew Richardson first-hand, encouraged its juniors to see in Lily Dale and Lucy Robarts most of what an earlier age had found in Clarissa Harlowe and Pamela.

Such were the earlier among the literary labourers in something like his own path of industry who undoubtedly, as no one saw more clearly than he did himself, acted as the pioneers of Trollope’s particular industry. In what relation did he stand to his own contemporaries? More than any other of these George Eliot disciplined and developed personages in themselves often commonplace, by means of abnormal experiences and exceptionally dramatic situations. Trollope, on the other hand, before the season of his personal intercourse with George Eliot during the early sixties and thereafter, found the familiar conjunctures of everyday life abundantly rich in all the opportunities he needed for the evolution of those characters--daughters, mothers, and sweethearts--to whom his readers had no sooner been introduced than they began to share Trollope’s own love for these, the novelist’s own creations. It was during 1862, the year of his first visit to America, that Trollope first acquainted his readers with feminine types whose display and development required another set of surroundings as well as incidents somewhat outside the common routine. The earliest of the fresh ventures belongs to 1862. The monthly parts in which _Orley Farm_ then appeared, as several of Dickens’ and Thackeray’s novels had already been issued, were not the only detail wherein Trollope conformed to the great examples of his time. During the early sixties the popularity of the sensational novel, introduced by Mrs. Henry Wood, was confirmed by Wilkie Collins and was still further increased and extended by Miss Braddon. No one, as will be more fully seen on a later page, mirrored more promptly and faithfully than Trollope the literary tendencies of this time. Always quick to take a hint, Trollope therefore introduced the sensational element into the novel _Orley Farm_, and, by its successful appeal to interests, which it had not yet fallen within his scope to touch, completely justified the new experiment.

The seeds of the plot for the story now to be considered had been long sown in Anthony Trollope’s mind. He himself partly attributed their promise of fruitfulness to conversations on the subject with his brother Thomas Adolphus. When their father removed his household gods from Bloomsbury to Harrow Weald he became, it may be remembered, successively the occupant of two houses. The first, a convenient and even handsome building, had been raised by himself under the name of Julians. The second roof that sheltered him and his family was a farmhouse he had found standing on the ground he rented. This formed the original of the structure in which Trollope laid the scene of a novel that had engaged him earlier than his _Cornhill_ stories. Some of the most stirring incidents in _Orley Farm_ grow out of events which took place several years before the opening of the narrative.

The Johnsons were a family that had done well in the hardware business. They had, indeed, almost attained the dignity of county standing. Suddenly they fell upon evil times. As a result, Mr. Johnson’s name appeared in _The Gazette_. He had, however, one valuable asset in the person of his handsome daughter Mary. This young lady’s calm and dignified beauty eventually attracted, among her father’s north-country acquaintances, old Sir Joseph Mason, a desolate widower of Groby Park, Yorkshire, whose ambition it had always been to become the founder of a territorial line. His three daughters had all married well; each of them, together with their husbands, shared their father’s social aspirations. Such were some of the ready-made relatives by whom Mary Johnson, on giving her hand in marriage to Sir Joseph Mason, was to find herself surrounded. Though Sir Joseph Mason’s chief estate and principal country house lay to the north of the Trent, his favourite residence had long been the modest building in one of the home counties known as Orley Farm situated between twenty and thirty miles from London. At the time of his settlement at Orley Farm, Sir Joseph Mason’s son and heir by his first marriage, Joseph Mason junior, had almost reached the age of forty, when, to his chagrin and his nearest kith and kin’s disgust, his father’s second marriage bore fruit in the birth of a brother, Lucius Mason. The undoubted inheritor of the chief Mason property, Groby Park, Joseph Mason had always counted on possessing, on his father’s death, Orley Farm as well. When, however, old Sir Joseph’s will came to be read, it disclosed a codicil bequeathing Orley Farm to his infant son, Lucius. Another testamentary disposition equally unexpected was that of £2000 to Miriam Usbech, the daughter of that attorney, Jonathan Usbech, employed by Sir Joseph Mason to draft the Will with the codicil, round which the interest of the story centres. The provisions of that document, contested by the eldest son, had formed the subject of an action which he brought against Lady Mason before the novel begins. That had been decided in Lady Mason’s favour. The curtain thus rises on the late Sir Joseph’s eldest son, baffled by his step-mother in the effort legally to assert his ownership of the entire Mason property, and, by this failure, more keenly even than his sisters embittered against her. His half-brother, Lucius, now between twenty and twenty-five, having finished his education in a German university, has brought home with him scientific ideas of farming, and of land improvement generally, which are greatly to increase the value of the Orley Farm, whose master, on attaining his majority, he became. Meanwhile his half-brother, settled at the Yorkshire headquarters of the family, Groby, has held no intercourse with him. Sir Joseph Mason’s two sons have indeed always been strangers to each other.

By this time also, Miriam Usbech, a beneficiary, as has been already mentioned, under Sir Joseph’s Will to the extent of £2000, has become the wife of a local solicitor, Dockwrath, whose practice lies near Orley Farm. This man had received from Lady Mason, during the minority of her son Lucius, a grant of land on the understanding that it should remain in his hands until it might be wanted by her son, as possessor of the farm. Lucius has no sooner arrived at his majority than the contingency thus forecast is realised. The ground in question has become, he finds, essential for the improvement he is bent on introducing into the estate. Dockwrath, therefore, has, in the earlier chapters of the book, conceived a grudge against Lucius Mason, as well as a strong suspicion of his mother. A search among the papers of his father-in-law, Jonathan Usbech, discloses the fact that the alleged witnesses to old Sir Joseph Mason’s signature of a codicil devising Orley Farm to Lucius must, on the same day, have witnessed also the execution of another legal instrument. That strikes Dockwrath as, to say the least of it, odd; he therefore hunts up these witnesses and puts to them the question: Did they, on the date of certifying Sir Joseph Mason’s signature of the codicil, certify also in a like capacity his signature of the other paper? So far from thinking she did anything of the sort, the interrogated witness felt quite certain that she had only seen Sir Joseph writing his name once.

The results of this inquiry are communicated by Dockwrath to the master of Groby Park, who forthwith commences a second suit against his step-mother on the charge of perjury committed at the first trial. At this point begins the real action of the novel under conditions so sombre, and in an atmosphere loaded so depressingly with a sense of coming evil, that considerations of art and nature imperatively demand some relief. This lighter element is supplied by expedients resembling those which, for a similar purpose, were adopted so skilfully in Trollope’s first book, _The Macdermots_. The humorous passages, now following in brisk and varied succession, without actually advancing the movement of the story are no mere excrescences upon it. They give life and reality to the figures in the central episode, and in their place are perfectly natural as being Dockwrath’s experiences on his momentous journey to Groby Park. Their drollery relaxes the nerve tension at a painful point, but deepens, by the force of contrast, the dark presentiment of the tragic catastrophe to which the freakish fun of the commercial-room visited by Dockwrath forms a comic prelude. Humorous criticism or witty dialogue, seasoned with incisive repartee, was not Trollope’s strongest point. He is, however, seen at his best in these laughter-moving descriptions of bagmen’s buffoonery or in the sketches of platitude-mongering vulgarity, which his fresh and vigorous seizure of slight personal distinctions redeems from commonplace.

Samuel Dockwrath was a little man with sandy hair, a pale face, and stone-blue eyes. Those who knew Anthony Trollope in the flesh saw in him one who, at his prime, had stood some six feet in his socks, with the other parts of his person on a corresponding scale. It was not, however, his goodly proportions of body that so much impressed the judicious observer as the penetrating fire of the quick blue eyes. This was intensified rather than concealed by the large, heavy spectacles which so entirely remedied any natural infirmity of vision that, after he had taken to wearing them, his eyes never missed a single characteristic feature of his fellow-creatures, or failed accurately and at once to stamp the impression they received on the retentive brain. Those were the eyes that had themselves seen on his Post Office doors--for the most part those in England--each one of Dockwrath’s companions in the commercial-room of the Bull Inn at Leeds. Dickens himself, unsurpassed in sketching the humours of the road as well as the outer and inner life of its travellers’ houses of call, paid Trollope a special compliment on the rapid successions of life-like touches with which he draws a contrast between the arrival at an inn of regular _habitués_ and strangers--the former loud, jocular, assured, or, in case of deficient accommodation, loud, angry, and full of threats; the strangers shy, diffident, doubtful, anxious to propitiate the chambermaid by great courtesy. To the latter belonged Dockwrath. To the former belonged another arrival by the same train, called Moulder, whose salutation to the girl at the bar, “Well, Mary, my dear, what’s the time of day with you?” is met with the reply, “Time to look alive and keep moving.” This has been introduced by a living picture of Dockwrath’s effort to make himself as much at home as the freest and easiest frequenters of the place by calling for a pair of public slippers, while solacing himself with a glass of mahogany-coloured brandy and water and a cigar. Here end the comic preliminaries.

The tragic realities that have brought Dockwrath from London to Yorkshire are opened by the solicitor’s call on Joseph Mason at Groby Park. The £2000, it must be remembered, which old Sir Joseph had left to Dockwrath’s wife were devised to her in the codicil that it is the real object of Dockwrath’s interview with Lady Mason’s stepson to upset. Ostensibly, therefore, as Dockwrath reminds the squire of Groby, the solicitor’s own interest lies in maintaining, not invalidating the supplementary bequests. Duty, however, has first claim upon the man of law, who begins his conversation by hinting that Joseph Mason’s representatives, Round and Crook, have been slack in guarding their clients’ interest. Will not Mr. Dockwrath, Mr. Mason suggests, see Round and Crook themselves, and so save time and trouble by imparting to them his tale of misgivings and suspicions? No, Dockwrath will do nothing of the sort. His message is for Joseph Mason alone. Then comes the decisive conversation in which Dockwrath’s shrewdness tells him that his cue is only to begin with piquing Mason’s curiosity and emphasising by a significant reserve the imputations against his stepmother. At last, he sees reason to fear he may be irritating and offending rather than interesting the squire of Groby by his prolix exordium. He therefore concentrates all his damning suggestions into the one word, forgery. Even this only elicits from Joseph Mason the remark: “I always felt sure my father never intended to sign such a codicil as that.” The question about the line of action to be now taken is the more difficult because the children of Sir Joseph Mason’s first marriage have already disputed the will with the result that a Court of Justice has given its award in Lady Mason’s favour. Before deciding on further litigation, Joseph Mason must consult his men of business in London. Meanwhile, what is likely to be said by the undoubted witnesses to the will and the alleged witnesses to the codicil--did they or did they not upon the same day attest the signatures to separate documents?

When the conference arranged between Mason and Dockwrath takes place, Bridget Bolster, who is known to have been a witness to the Will, and alleged to have witnessed also a codicil, in an interview with Messrs. Round and Crook has most positively declared her certainty that she never attested more than one document on the same day. Still, Messrs. Round and Crook are against prosecuting Lady Mason. Joseph Mason’s emphatic rejoinder, “I will never drop the prosecution,” encourages for a moment Dockwrath’s hope of getting the business. On that point Mason is as obstinate as on the other. The case, therefore, goes forward under the London attorney’s management. Trollope justly prided himself on the accuracy with which, thanks to the experts he consulted, are presented the legal details in the trial and in all the business connected with it. The entire episode is, like the characters that figure in it, a piece of skilfully contrived realism. The Old Bailey barrister, Chaffanbrass, who rises to his work so meekly, smiling gently while he fidgets about with his papers as though he were not at first quite master of the situation; Sir Richard Leatherham, the Solicitor-General and the leading counsel for the prosecution, are none of them full-length sketches from life. Each is a composite of many originals. Nor is there a single member of the group who does not recall, by some trick of manner, of voice, or by some other distinctive peculiarity, the qualities of advocates well known in the era during which Cairns, Coleridge, and Ballantine were in the full flush of their forensic fame.

Dickens, in _A Tale of Two Cities_, notoriously found his model for Darnay’s counsel, Stryver, in Edwin James. Of James I can recall Trollope’s remark: “I had scarcely ever seen him, out of court or in it, but I have been told he had Chaffanbrass’s habit of constantly arranging and re-arranging his wig, and of sometimes, for effect, dropping his voice so low that it could scarcely be heard.” The other court scenes form a little series of artistically disposed photographs. More skilful even than these clever descriptions is the manner in which a few simple and well-chosen words, remarkable for their power, less of expression than suggestion, bring Lady Mason’s anguish and agony home to the reader as vividly as could be done by any minute and harrowing details of her countenance and carriage. Even so, the suspense caused by these Acts in the drama called for mitigation by Trollope’s favourite device of entertaining interlude. The by-play of the under-plot now introduced shows throughout the true mastery of his art here reached by Trollope.

Lady Mason’s good looks, noble bearing, and painful position, have deeply interested her leading counsel, Furnival, her acquaintance in society long before he became her advocate in Court. Hence, the one deviation from exact verisimilitude in this part of the book. The commencement of the proceedings finds Lady Mason without a solicitor of her own, and anxious above all things to dispense with one. After the service of the writ upon her, she consults her admiring neighbour, the chivalrous Sir Peregrine Orme, who naturally pronounces the solicitor a necessary evil. To that, her objection still remains. Assured that she has a warm friend in Furnival, a barrister of high repute, she visits him at his chambers, Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn. On his advice she places her affairs in the hands of a solicitor he recommends, Solomon Aram, as the cleverest criminal solicitor known to Furnival. Meanwhile, the presence at her husband’s business rooms of so attractive a client excites Mrs. Furnival’s suspicions in such a degree that a series of domestic scenes is only closed by the lady leaving the family roof in Harley Street. The immediate sequel is given with Trollope’s happiest humour. The housekeeper predicts misery for the barrister if his wife remains inexorable, but is at once told by the butler that their master would live twice as jolly without her, and that it would only be “the first rumpus of the thing.” Is it not, reflectively asks the novelist, the fear of the “first rumpus” which keeps together many a couple. Even the special and manifest pains taken with them do not, as Trollope himself felt, entirely redeem the trial chapter from the charge of anti-climax.

The already-mentioned Sir Peregrine Orme belongs to the class of county _preux chevaliers_, of which one situation in a later novel--_Phineas Finn_--displays for a moment the Duke of Omnium as another specimen.

The trial had been fixed, but not begun, when Lady Mason finds herself at the house of the baronet whom she had first known years ago as a county neighbour, and one of her husband’s colleagues at the Quarter Sessions. More recently, the widow of _Orley Farm_ and the daughter-in-law of the baronet who resides at The Cleeve have become close friends. Still fair, tall, graceful, and comely, Lady Mason retains enough of her original beauty to have won this fine old gentleman’s heart. To his daughter-in-law he confides his intention of offering the widow his hand. For that purpose the call at The Cleeve has been arranged. To stand by her throughout the approaching ordeal, to defend her against the tongues of wicked men and against her own weakness, is the duty that the widow’s mature and knightly lover would now perform. All this is said while he gently strokes the silken hair of the lady who, having sunk to the ground, is kneeling at his feet. The agonised recipient of the old man’s chivalrous proposal mingles, with her murmured reply, some words deprecating the shame and trouble she might bring upon him and his. The offer, however, is not rejected, and the conversation ends by Lady Mason becoming Sir Peregrine Orme’s bride-elect. The next meeting between the pair is of a very different kind. Not that even this opens with any approach to self-incrimination on the lady’s part. Greetings, however, had been scarcely exchanged when she shows her desire to break off the engagement. “If,” pleads Sir Peregrine, “we were to be separated now, the world would say I had thought you guilty of this crime.” After this, no more of the sweet smiles, which have been so much admired, play over Lady Mason’s face. “Sir Peregrine,” she says, “I am guilty, guilty of all this with which they charge me.” That admission seals, of course, Lady Mason’s social fate, and withdraws her from any active part in the rest of the narrative. What remains, however, is saved from the reproach of mere supplementary padding by the really surprising skill and resourcefulness in which the rest of the story abounds. All that concerns Lady Mason herself has been, and remains to the end, of a uniformly depressing hue. But among the junior counsel for the defence is a young barrister, Felix Graham, enamoured of a judge’s daughter, Madeline Staveley. This young lady is much after the pattern of Trollope’s earlier heroines; while her lover prefigures a youthful variety of the sort to be met with in one, at least, of his later stories, but with more originality of character and view than had so far been shown by most of his young men. The clearness and freshness of Felix Graham’s portrait stand out the more boldly by reason of the complete contrast to him forthcoming in Madeline Staveley’s other lover, old Sir Peregrine Orme’s grandson. In all moral and social qualities, he worthily reproduces the old baronet’s character, but reflects too truly the conventional young country squire to present the union between intellectual gifts and high principles forthcoming in his rival, the young barrister.

This is only one among several passages that by expedience, which might be described as Trollope’s speciality, sustain the novel’s interest to the end. “None but himself can be his parallel.” And really the dexterity with which Trollope winds up the characters and incidents of _Can You Forgive Her?_ suggests a comparison with his equestrian perseverance in the hunting field. That quality records itself in Phineas Finn’s management of Lord Chiltern’s Bonebreaker. For a minute or two the horse has got manifestly out of control; the spectators think it is infallibly heading and leading its rider to irrecoverable grief, when the Irish Nimrod suddenly, not less than surely, recovering himself, regains authority over the beast, and sends him and his rider straight as a die over the brook with those impracticable sides. When riding among the first flight, side by side with Sir Evelyn Wood or Mr. E. N. Buxton, after the Essex, or with Mr. H. Petre’s staghounds, Trollope, we have seen, like others, sometimes found himself at the bottom of a Roothing ditch, only in a twinkling to pull himself together, reappear in the open, regain his saddle, and finish in the field that saw the end of the chase. The adroitness of the horseman, Phineas Finn, displayed by the novelist of _Orley Farm_, prevented what in less skilful hands would have been the evaporation of the story’s interest after the tragic _dénoûment_ of Peregrine Orme’s courtship. But, by this time, the bluff, artless sportsman, which was all that many of his country neighbours and some of his London acquaintances saw in Trollope, had mastered every portion of the novelist’s technique as thoroughly as he had long since done all departments of Post Office business. To the spectators, Trollope’s Irish Nimrod on Lord Chiltern’s Bonebreaker may have seemed doomed to mishap, but without, thanks to his skill and coolness, having been in actual peril. So with Trollope in _Orley Farm_. The apparently inevitable dullness of reaction from painfully exciting incidents threatened, as many a reader thought, to spoil a first-rate novel’s close. These had not estimated at its true value the author’s rare resourcefulness in his art.

Other fortunes than those of Madeline Staveley and her two lovers have to be advanced a stage. The finishing touches have not, so far, been given to Lady Mason’s loyal friend of her own sex, Sir Peregrine’s daughter-in-law. In person, if not altogether in experience, Mrs. Orme presents a picturesque contrast to her unhappy friend. Lady Mason, tall and stately, makes the journey every day to the Court in one of The Cleeve carriages. Seated by her side is Mrs. Orme, small in size, delicate in limb, with soft, blue wondering eyes and a dimpled cheek. Apart from the present calamity, a past sorrow has forged a sympathetic link between the two. The châtelaine of The Cleeve has suffered a blow only less terrible than that which has crushed her companion. After a year of happy wedlock, her husband, Sir Peregrine’s only child, the pride of all who knew him, the hope of his political party in the county, had fallen one day from his horse, and was brought home to The Cleeve a corpse. The delicacy and strength of genuine pathos make themselves felt throughout every page describing the intercourse between these two ladies, after Mrs. Orme knows her friend’s guilt, before or during the trial itself. Nor, even here, is it all untempered melancholy. The character sketches thrown off in a few sentences people the scene with figures all entertainingly appropriate to the judicial drama like that now begun. The witness, Bridget Bolster, we see preparing for action, with the perfect understanding of her claim to be well fed when brought out for work in her country’s service, to have everything she wanted to eat and drink at places of public entertainment, and then to have the bills paid behind her back. “Something to your tea” is the promise she has received from Dockwrath, interpreted by Moulder as a steak, by Dockwrath himself as ham and eggs, and by Bridget, as an amendment, as kidneys. Close upon the bold witness, Bridget, comes the timid witness, Kenneby, whose utmost hope and prayer are that he may leave the box without swearing to a lie, who replies to Dockwrath’s suggestion of refreshment: “It is nothing to me; I have no appetite; I think I’ll take a little brandy and water.” By way of moral sustenance to the nervous Kenneby, Moulder relates a legal reminiscence of his youth: It was at Nottingham; there had been some sugars delivered, and the rats had got at it. “I’m blessed if they didn’t ask me backwards and forwards so often that I forgot whether they was seconds or thirds, though I had sold the goods myself. And then the lawyer said he’d have me prosecuted for perjury.” Mr. Moulder himself fancies something hot, toasted and buttered, to his tea, openly asserting, while refreshing himself, that Lady Mason has no better chance of escape than--“than that bit of muffin has,” with which words the savoury morsel in question disappeared from the fingers of the commercial traveller into his throat.

To turn from the doings of Trollope’s _personæ_ to those of Trollope, himself. Before finishing _Orley Farm_ he had arranged a trip across the Atlantic, which, as usual, was to combine industry with amusement. The first thing, therefore, had been to obtain a commission from his publishers, Chapman and Hall, for a book about his journey and experiences. The settlement of that business, on his own terms, was effected without a hitch. The other preliminary, involving a reference to his Post Office superiors, threatened recrudescence of the immemorial and inveterate feud with Rowland Hill, now the Post Office Secretary. Nine months leave of absence formed the application made by the surveyor of the eastern counties to the Postmaster-General, then Lord Stanley of Alderley, direct instead of through the active head of the department, his enemy Hill. “Is it,” rejoined the Minister, with a look of bland cynicism as he eyed Trollope’s particularly vigorous form and country squire’s face, “on the plea of ill-health?” “No,” came the answer, “I want a holiday, and to write a book about it, and I think, my lord, my many years labour in the public service have earned it for me.” The forms on which the leave was granted were, at Hill’s instance, that it should be considered a full equivalent for any special services rendered by the surveyor to the department. To that condition, suggested, as he knew it had been, by the Post Office Secretary, Trollope demurred. It was therefore withdrawn at the Postmaster-General’s order.

Anthony Trollope’s first sojourn on the other side of the Atlantic began in the August of 1861, and lasted to the May of the following year. The occurrences between these dates included the earlier battles of the American Civil War, and to some extent decided his route. Travelling for recreation and rest as well as profit, he purposely avoided the dangers and discomforts of the seceding states, but, even thus, frequently found himself in the direct line of fire. For the time he allowed himself, he went too far and too fast. An atmosphere loaded with the din and smoke of conflicting armies did not promote the calm and close study of the nation’s social or political life and institutions. These, however, were surprisingly little interrupted by the conflict. The comparative regularity with which the routine of peace in the forum, in the Law Courts, in the State Assemblage, and beneath the private roof, preserved their continuity practically undisturbed by the shocks and convulsions of war, may have struck other English travellers at the time. By Trollope they were brought to bear with a force and freshness that imparted special interest and value to the book on North America, begun by him after his accustomed fashion, in the midst of his transatlantic travels, and carried some way towards completion before he had returned to England.

The work suffers from its author’s laborious attempts to impress the reader with a sense of its variety and fullness. It is neither a record of travel nor history; Trollope, had he taken more time about it, would have seen the mistake of trying to make it both. His impressions of the country are wanting less in animation and accuracy than in literary methods and logical arrangement of ideas. Before landing from his outward voyage he had persuaded himself that the final victory would rest with the North. This belief had not been shaken by the news of the Confederate success at Bull Run (July 21, 1861); which had created among all sections of English society, and elicited from the English Press, much of the exultant enthusiasm for the Secessionists, of whom Gladstone himself said that Jefferson Davis had called into existence a new nation. “Nothing,” were Trollope’s words to the present writer, “impressed me more during this troublous time than the immensity of the strength in reserve at the Union’s command. Moreover,” he added, “I was kept well abreast with the latest political news from Europe.” The Southerners’ only chance, as none knew better than themselves, or rather, than their leading spirits, had always been European intervention on their behalf. Napoleon III might have moved in that direction, had Palmerston given the signal, but no one really doubted either that France had resolved to follow the English lead or that England, whatever her irresponsible personal sympathies here and there, would take no real part in the quarrel. One international incident belonging to the struggle first became known to Trollope when dining at the White House, November 1861. The Federal seizure of the Southern agents, Mason and Slidell, on board the British West Indian mail steamer, had caused the diplomatic crisis that made their Washington post first acquaint Trollope and his other guests with the possible necessity of all English subjects at short notice leaving the States.

Exactly a generation before her third son’s visit to the New World, Trollope’s mother was thought, by her son, to have wounded the national susceptibilities in her _Domestic Manners of the Americans_. As a fact, except in Ohio, that book did not attract as much attention, even at the time of its publication (1832), as Anthony Trollope himself believed. It had been quite forgotten by, or rather had never been known to the generation that had welcomed her son as its guest. Indeed, by 1861-2 Dickens had long since received plenary forgiveness for offences in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ and the _American Notes_ much more serious than those of Mrs. Trollope. Nor did Anthony Trollope’s on the whole complimentary estimate of his American hosts, in his own forthcoming book, however pleasantly received at the moment, live much longer in the popular remembrance than his mother’s rather thin satire. Already the novels which had won him popularity in England were favourites in the United States. Then, as to-day, what the American public valued from him was the qualities which had endeared to the whole of the Anglo-Saxon race his Barchester books.

Trollope’s subsequent visits to the States may have left some mark on his writings, and have given him an occasional suggestion for stories like _The American Senator_, but had no influence upon the place filled by him in the New World as in the Old. On both sides of the Atlantic, the amiable motive of his _North America_ was recognised, but its warmest welcome was not found in the land that it described. A subsequent chapter will contain specific facts and figures enabling the reader to form an accurate idea of Trollope’s progress to popularity with the United States Republic. Meanwhile we return to the novelist’s new departure in fiction, opened to some extent in _Orley Farm_, but beginning more decidedly with _Can You Forgive Her?_