CHAPTER XIV

AMERICAN MISSIONS AND COLONIAL TOURS

Trollope’s third visit to America--That of 1868 about the Postal Treaty and Copyright Commission--Mr. and Mrs. Trollope’s Australian visit (1871) to their sheep-farming son--Family or personal features and influences in the colonial novels suggested by this journey--Trollope as colonial novelist compared with Charles Reade and Henry Kingsley--Why the colonial novels were preceded by _The Eustace Diamonds_--Rival South African travellers--Trollope follows Froude to the Cape--What he thought about the country’s present and future--How he found out Dr. Jameson and Miss Schreiner--John Blackwood, Trollope’s particular friend among publishers--Trollope, Blackwood’s pattern writer--_Julius Cæsar_--Anthony’s birthday present to John--The South African book--What the critics said--Well-timed and sells accordingly.

So far, it has been practicable to follow Trollope’s productions almost exactly in the order in which they came from his pen. The political novels, as has been seen, constitute a series whose successive parts are even more closely connected than the various instalments of the Barchester novels. Thus, _Phineas Finn_ and _Phineas Redux_ form a single story; _The Prime Minister_ and _The Duke’s Children_ contain the underplots or afterplots of what has gone before. The Beverley adventure and its reflection in _Ralph the Heir_, three years afterwards (1871), formed the biographical prelude to the little group of stories in which _Phineas Finn_ came first. The examination of these in the preceding chapter, once begun, had to be completed, or their unity would have been lost. Hence, some unavoidable little interruption of strict chronological sequence and the momentary neglect, now to be repaired, of Trollope’s other doings in the Beverley year. The value set by the Government on Trollope’s Post Office work was shown immediately after he had resigned his post at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Nothing could be more complimentary than the request that he would make a third journey to the United States for the conclusion of a new postal treaty at Washington.[28] That task occupied exactly three months and three weeks; it was begun April 8th and ended July 27th. Then he brought back to England a success more complete than, from the uncongenial variety of the American representatives with whom he had to deal, he had at times feared might prove possible.

The visit also had its literary usefulness. While occupied with the Washington officials he studied the traits subsequently bodied forth in his _American Senator_, and before he went home he made advantageous arrangements with the publishers in New York. During the fourteen years of life, however, which still remained for him he crossed and recrossed the Atlantic twice more; altogether therefore he made no less than five different appearances in the great Republic. Each of them was turned by him to good account not more in business matters than in observing the American-Irish developments described elaborately in _The Land Leaguers_. The United States public and publishers also did Trollope a particularly good turn by appreciating the political novels, less warmly, indeed, than the Barchester books, but far more cordially than had been done by home consumers of these products. The one work that New York readers would not have was _The Cornhill_ reprint, _Brown, Jones and Robinson_, pronounced, not perhaps unjustly, by the first American critic of the day, Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie, the most stupid story ever coming from the same pen. With that exception Trollope’s magazine pieces suited the taste of New York better than they did that of London; during 1860 _Harper’s_ pleased all its friends by publishing his short stories, _The Courtship of Susan Bell_, _The O’Conors of Castle Conor_, and _Relics of General Chassé_. These were produced here in the three volumes entitled _Tales of All Countries_. Trollope’s style, both in his earlier and later days, was occasionally apt to be much influenced by his friend Charles Lever. Of the compositions just enumerated, _The O’Conors_, a transcript of his own early Irish observations, had a remarkable American success, perhaps because a certain adventurous breeziness of movement as of style exactly suited a public whose passing taste had for the moment been more or less formed, not only by Charles Lever, but by those who had been before him, as Fenimore Cooper and Captain Marryat. _Harper’s_ did also more for Trollope than show him as a short story writer at his best; it introduced its readers to _The Small House at Allington_, _Orley Farm_, as well as to several of his less known efforts, such as _Lady Anna_.

Generally, the transatlantic verdict confirmed that of the old country and gave the palm to the pen and ink photographs of provincial home life. In one respect, however, America strikingly showed its independence of English estimates by unanimously crediting the political series from _Phineas Finn_ to _The Duke’s Children_ with a vividness of portraiture, an experience of and an insight into the leading personages, forces, and incidents of British public life such as Trollope’s own countrymen had not then discovered. Why this should have been so it is not difficult to see. In England, those who cared for the political novel were still under the Disraelian spell when Trollope put forth his impressions of public life as he had observed it in the stories that opened with _Phineas Finn_ (1869), and only closed with _The Duke’s Children_ (1880). During all those years the intellectual fascination possessed by Disraeli, whether as writer or politician, for the English public, so far from diminishing, had, upon the whole, deepened. The sustained brilliancy of _Lothair_ (1868), and _Endymion_ (1881), sent readers back to _Coningsby_, _Sybil_, and _Tancred_. Of that literary enchantment the United States knew comparatively little. As a political novelist, Trollope was judged on his own merits, without, as in England, any reference to the dazzling and unapproachable genius who had preceded him. Before Disraeli, Plumer Ward had portrayed statesmen in romances, which were generally forgotten by Englishmen, while Bulwer-Lytton had given something of a political flavour to his best-known novels. By the standard of Ward and Lytton, rather than, as was the case in England, of Disraeli, the Americans judged Trollope. They accordingly found in him an actuality and naturalness at once instructive and refreshing; nor did they miss the verbal fireworks for which the _Coningsby_ novels had accustomed the English reader to look.

It has already been shown how, on other subjects, Trollope stood with the American public; before following him in his overseas movements, some details may here be given of his practical relations with the American publisher. From English publishers, Trollope, according to his own estimate, received in all a little under £70,000. His American receipts were rather more than £3000.[29] Beside his Post Office Commission, Trollope, during his American visit of 1868, also acted as the Foreign Office representative on the subject of International Copyright. That, however, is a question scarcely suitable for treatment here. As regards the primary and Postal errand, he accomplished the purpose for which he had been sent, and obtained the terms asked by the English Government. By the Convention which he negotiated, the postage on a half ounce letter between England and the United States was fixed at sixpence. With respect to the literary relations of the two countries, Trollope brought back no equally definite result, but only failed to do so because, in the nature of things, success was then impossible. In the diplomacy of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Trollope essayed nothing which he did not carry through. The literary monument of his Egyptian journey in 1858 had been no work descriptive of the country, but a novel, _The Bertrams_. For, unless he had found himself so far on his way as Cairo, he would never have pilgrimaged to Jerusalem, or collected the material in local colour for the Syrian scenes and incidents in that novel. His official work had then been a Postal Convention with the Egyptian authorities for our Australian and Indian mails across the Delta. The same kind of duty he had performed so well ten years earlier was repeated after the same fashion in 1868.

Trollope’s various transatlantic trips were the prelude to more extended tours on that other side of the world where his postal rather than literary labours had already made him a name. These Antipodean experiences were, during the last eight years of his life, to give him as a novelist something like a new lease of vigour and freshness. Trollope’s instinctive sympathy with the temper and tendencies of his time, whatever the movement in progress might be, had, as the reader already knows, during his earliest youth, showed itself in the readiness with which he came under the influence of Anglican leaders. A little later the perennial Irish question, in its social as well as political, its sentimental not less than its practical aspects, filled the air, and gave both direction and colour to his initial experiment as a novelist, _The Macdermots_ (1847). Active interest in politics was delayed till the season of youth and enthusiasm had been outlived. But, when a little over fifty, he could not resist the temptation to take a combatant’s part in the battle, then at its height between the two great party leaders of the time. Beaten at Beverley, and so debarred from delivering himself about men and measures at St. Stephen’s, Trollope turned to account the experiences he had gathered and the opinions he had formed, in the _Phineas Finn_ stories.

Meanwhile, however, a new interest in the Greater Britain beyond the seas had deeply stirred the popular imagination, and reflected itself in the writings of his best known contemporaries. Trollope accordingly realised that he had been wasting on party energies meant for the Empire. Natural affection and the conscious need of securing imaginative freshness by entire change of scene and thought were other motives operating in the same direction. Within two or three years of recrossing the Atlantic homewards, Trollope planned a yet more extensive tour with the set purpose of bringing back from the Antipodes materials, not only for history, but for fiction. The earliest writer of Trollope’s day to feel and express the transoceanic inspiration of the new epoch was Bulwer-Lytton, some eight years before he became Colonial Secretary in the Derby Government. The example of _The Caxtons_ soon proved contagious. In 1856 Trollope’s exact contemporary, Charles Reade, published _It’s Never too Late to Mend_, whose dramatised form, in 1866, not only revived the original story’s interest, but infused fresh force into the agitation against transporting English criminals to Australasian colonies. In 1859 Henry Kingsley suffused his spirited romances, _Geoffrey Hamlyn_ and _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ with the local colour he had collected during a short residence under the Southern Cross; thus as a colonial novelist he differed from Reade, and resembled Trollope,[30] in describing, from personal knowledge, the scenes and incidents whose word-pictures bear in every detail the stamp of fidelity to life. The original and chief motive of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Trollope’s expedition, in the May of 1871, to the other side of the world, was that they might see once more a son then sheep-farming in the Australian Bush. Trollope himself would have felt uncomfortable if he had embarked without feeling that, while making holiday in a far country, he was also collecting impressions for at least one new book.

Before actually setting sail, therefore, he had contracted with Chapman and Hall for the Australian volumes published in 1873, and had also found a newspaper opening for certain travel letters, to be incorporated afterwards in the book. This, on coming out in 1873, was pronounced, by _The Times_, “the most agreeable, just, and acute work ever written on the subject.” On the other hand, _The Athenæum_ and _The Saturday Review_ dwelt on the length, the diffuseness, and the want of method of the ponderous volumes, “as dull as they are big.” Perplexity of arrangement, and occasional obscurity of diction, were other charges made by these critics against the work. Good taste in dealing with all personal matters was the chief merit compensating for decline in literary power, which even these censors allowed. The shrewdness of insight with which _The Times_ credited Trollope was praise abundantly justified by events. Indeed Trollope’s one mistake in judgment was his prophecy about the annexation of Tasmania by Victoria. Any movement of this kind he might, with a little more carefulness of enquiry and accuracy of observation, have convinced himself was purely local in its origin, never, in its growth, exceeded the narrowest limits, and was repudiated, even in his day, by responsible Tasmanian as well as Victorian statesmen. It never consequently entered into the regions of practical politics.

His faith in the certainty of Australasian federation rested on much stronger ground. Its fulfilment he did not live to witness. That took place sixteen years after his death when, in the March of 1898, the Australian Commonwealth bill became law. The book, written in his cabin during the homeward voyage, succeeded beyond the author’s or publisher’s expectations. This was due, first, to its happily-timed appearance; secondly, to the convenient compass within which it brought together the best that had been said by other writers, and all, indeed, which the average reader could wish to know about the history, the politics, the society, the resemblances to or differences from the Mother Country noticed by Trollope during his eighteen months’ stay in Melbourne, New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, and New Zealand. The book contained few of the carefully prepared literary effects investing the account of the West Indies with a thoroughly popular charm. But, whenever in his Australasian volumes Trollope dealt with what had struck him as really noteworthy, he showed himself once more nearly at his best; especially in his comparison between sheep-farming and ostrich-farming as careers, in his few mining scenes, and, above all, in his most graphic and informing account of the road system, which he had minutely studied. The first novel resulting from the Australian jaunt had in it many more touches of personal and domestic autobiography than the travel volumes. Like _Phineas Redux_, it first came out in _The Graphic_, and showed the intellectual benefit received by the novelist from his wanderings under the Southern Cross.

_Harry Heathcote of Gangoill_ (1874), marked by no signs of imaginative exhaustion, as well as written throughout in the old picturesque fashion, is based on the industrial fortunes of Trollope’s Australian son, chequered by climatic caprices and ill-minded neighbours, but in spite of all this, by unflagging perseverance, steadily advancing. Most of the Trollopian qualities, the imperious prejudices, and the autocratic independence, combined with more amiable features appear in the hero. He had been one of the original settlers, who acquired their land by the simple process of “claiming” it. After he had made a good start with his work a fresh Government scheme allowed newcomers to buy whatever land they liked, even though it were already bespoke by the earlier settlers. The sole condition of purchase was that the land thus bought must exceed a certain minimum value. Of course the right of compulsory purchase given to the “free selectors,” as they were called, made them at loggerheads with such as had already established themselves before they came.

Heathcote naturally saw in his nearest neighbour, a free selector, Giles Medlicot, a man fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, and of affections dark as Erebus.[31] Soon there comes a great and dangerous drought. The sheep farmers are on the watch day and night against one of those prairie fires that would, in a few minutes, destroy all their flocks’ food. Heathcote, ready to think all evil of the detested interloper, without any reason suspects the free selector, Medlicot, of a design to burn his farm and stock. Of course he is wrong; and no flames, by whomsoever kindled, burst out on his property, at least for the present. Eventually, however, there comes on him the fiery foe, more dreaded by the pastoral squatter than pestilence or famine. Then the gratuitously accused Medlicot proves Heathcote’s true friend; and by his own courage and skill keeps the outbreak within narrower limits than Heathcote had ever hoped. A large portion of the farm buildings and plant is thus saved. The story ends with the reconciliation of the two men so long and irrationally kept apart by mutual mistrust. Medlicot’s marriage to Heathcote’s sister-in-law is the seal and fruit of a new friendship.

The plot is too slight and the narrative too short to afford room for much character creation. To those who follow, as is being done in these pages, Trollope’s industrial course, the book has an interest quite independent of its actual contents. It was written by Trollope in his sixtieth year. Of the other colonial novelists already mentioned, Charles Reade had not long turned forty when he published _It’s Never Too Late To Mend_, and Henry Kingsley was under thirty at the time of writing _Geoffrey Hamlyn_. This is the book whose glowing wealth of local colour, scenic word-painting, and keen appreciation of Antipodean character won for it the praise of an Australian epic. Kingsley’s and Reade’s romances of life on the other side of the world were followed in 1866 by Hugh Nisbet’s Australian stories. These three writers present a spirited and complete panorama of colonial existence, character, and manner. All wrote in the very prime of their powers, but none enlivened his subjects with a stronger glow of fancy or handled them with more sureness and strength than, at the age of three-score, was shown by Trollope in describing the fight with the flames in his _Harry Heathcote of Gangoil_. This novel, like its colonial successor five years later, _John Caldigate_, shows, better than could be done by pages of biographical detail, that, after more than half a century of exacting and incessant work, its author’s power of accurately observing and mastering in their full significance new facts or ideas remained practically unimpaired.

The home and the life to which Trollope returned in England during December, 1872, were not the same as he had left behind him when embarking a year and a half earlier on the _Great Britain_ for his colonial voyage. The pleasant house at Waltham Cross, with its roomy and always well-filled stables, its many hospitalities and its comparative nearness to the meets of the Essex Hounds, was exchanged for the abode in Montagu Square. Here Trollope passed the later portion of his London life. Here too, on settling himself, he began to live with the personages of the Australian goldfields story that was to appear in 1879. Long before then, however, he had become sufficiently intimate with other creations of his fancy to put them into print. An old friend, Lizzie, (Lady Eustace), received his first attention; in 1873 came _The Eustace Diamonds_. This novel, like _The Belton Estate_, had first been written for _The Fortnightly Review_. Its leading figure casually reappears in later works, especially in _The Prime Minister_, where Ferdinand Lopez shows at once his scoundrelism and ignorance of the world in making certain absurd proposals to an attractive, vivacious, but particularly wide-awake lady. What Lizzie Eustace is in _The Prime Minister_, she had shown herself before in _The Eustace Diamonds_.

This rich, personable, and clever heroine labours under one weakness: she can never speak the truth. As Lizzie Greystock, she made a brilliant marriage with an elderly and opulent baronet. She had not passed her first youth when she was left a widow more than comfortably provided for. Amongst her husband’s personal estate is a magnificent diamond necklace worth £20,000, an heirloom which, at his express wish, the lady used to wear. To this precious ornament the dead baronet’s nearest relations disputed her claim, on the ground that as a family possession it was not his to give. “But,” replied her ladyship, “he gave it to me for my very own, telling me that my appearance with it would be the best of all tributes to his memory.” Lady Eustace no more expected this account of the matter to be believed than she believed it herself. To one thing, however, she had made up her mind: no one should take the costly trinket out of her hands. Consequently wherever she goes it accompanies her.

During one journey she believes she has lost it and gives the alarm. Soon, however, she recovers her treasure, but does not impart the fact to the police, whom she has caused to raise a hue and cry. One day the necklace is really stolen, and the constables, having obtained a clue, succeed in placing themselves on its track. Restoration is followed by exposure; Lizzie Eustace’s marriage connections persevere with their purpose of regaining for themselves the late baronet’s alleged gift to his wife. Lady Eustace’s besetting weaknesses do not prevent her good looks and captivating manners from attracting suitors for her hand. Amongst these are Frank Greystock, one of Trollope’s most conventional and least interesting specimens of gilded youth; Lord Fawn, a titled booby, afterwards promoted to a place among the lay figures in the parliamentary sketches; and another sprig of nobility, Lord George de Bruce Carruthers, of doubtful reputation and of a bold, bad, buccaneer appearance. Each of these, however, when it comes to the point, fights off; Lizzie Eustace, to her chagrin, is left without one of the trousered sex in tow. At this extremity, there appears on the scene an ecclesiastical candidate for what she is pleased to call her heart. This white-chokered adventurer is the Rev. Joseph Emilius, partly Jew, partly Pole, and wholly scamp, being, in fact, the popular preacher who in _Phineas Redux_ commits the murder of Mr. Bonteen, on suspicion of which Phineas is arrested. But by that time Emilius, having served his turn, has ceased to be Lady Eustace’s second husband in anything but name.

Unlike Gladstone, Disraeli did not consume much contemporary fiction, parrying any questions on the subject with, “when I want to read a novel, I write one.” Nor, except to Matthew Arnold, did he often talk to authors about their works. But soon after the appearance of _The Eustace Diamonds_, meeting Trollope at Lord Stanhope’s dinner-table, the great man said to our novelist, “I have long known, Mr. Trollope, your churchmen and churchwomen; may I congratulate you on the same happy lightness of touch in the portrait of your new adventuress?” By 1879, some five years after _Harry Heathcote of Gangoil_, there had been completed the process of incubation, resulting in the second of the two colonial stories, _John Caldigate_.

That novel, chiefly written during the voyage to South Africa, presently to be mentioned, had for its scene the Australian gold-diggings. We have long since seen how, during his Harrow days, Anthony Trollope, as a day boy, lived with his father at Julians. Of that there is some reminiscence in the intercourse under the old family roof between the actual owner of the Cambridgeshire estate called Folking and his heir. The two have hot words; the quarrel ends in John’s selling the right of entail to his father for a lump sum in hard cash. With this he pays his debts. Together with an old college friend, Dick Shand, he sets off for the Australian goldfields.

The girl he loves has been left behind him, but on his way out he is ensnared by Mrs. Smith, a mysterious lady with a past, fascinating by her manner rather than her beauty, and now provided by her relatives with a passage out that she may not get into mischief nearer home. Some time after their arrival at the diggings, Dick Shand, whose weakness has always been drink, breaks out and disappears, leaving no trace behind. Caldigate perseveres, finds first one nugget, then another. At this rate he by and by comes back a rich man. The first thing done by the masterful and newly-fledged young Crœsus is to seek and obtain reconciliation with his equally masterful father. Next, having borne down her mother’s fierce opposition, he marries his boyhood’s flame, Hester Bolton, the daughter of his father’s banker.

The young couple’s wedded happiness is interrupted by the appearance of Mrs. Smith, together with John Caldigate’s old goldfield pals, Tom Crinkett and Mick Maggott. These have bought Caldigate’s claim for a large sum, only to find the gold suddenly give out. Hence their demand for half the purchase-money’s (£20,000) return, under threat of a charge of bigamy for having married Hester while an earlier wife, Mrs. Smith, was yet alive. Thoroughly scared, Caldigate places his affairs in a solicitor’s hands, but commits the fatal mistake of paying as hush-money the £20,000 demanded by the conspirators. This, of course, tells heavily against him at the trial, and he has to face other evidence, at least as damning. The charge of bigamy, on which the trial takes place, is supported by an envelope addressed in John Caldigate’s writing to Mrs. John Caldigate. As to this, Caldigate admits having once written the words in jest, but denies having sent the envelope, which, it must be added, bears the Post Office stamp. In the face of such evidence the jury could do nothing but convict. After the verdict, Hester finds herself a wife without a husband; her refusal to return home is followed by her capture, and forcible detention beneath the parental roof. But now there begins a sequence of events, all combining to establish John Caldigate’s innocence and to promise liberation from prison.

In manipulating the official details that are to make John Caldigate a free man, Trollope shows the same painstaking ingenuity as he had done during his term of Irish duty in bringing to light the frauds of the Connemara postmaster. An amusingly acute Post Office clerk proves the stamp on the envelope to have been manufactured after the date recorded in the stamp. It was, therefore, a clear case of fake. Next, Dick Shand surprises everyone by coming home to depose on oath that the alleged marriage could not by any possibility have taken place at the time alleged. Finally, the conspirators quarrel over their respective shares in the £20,000, whose payment so disastrously incriminated Caldigate. One of the gang turns Queen’s evidence; doing so, he secures the release of the prisoner, who returns to his faithful wife.

It is as unpleasant as it is a powerful story; at not a few points equal in graphic vigour and in harrowing multiplicity of incident to the strong but revoltingly painful descriptions which mark another of Charles Reade’s novels of colonial as well as maritime adventure, _Hard Cash_. The pictures of goldfield life are suggestive enough as far as they go, but would certainly have been better had not Trollope felt himself under the necessity of having the book finished on his arrival at Cape Town.

Noticeable for the rapidity of its movement, as well as the freshness of its description, this second and last colonial novel contains a study of character, executed with as much power and care as is to be found in any of the later stories. Mrs. Bolton, Hester’s mother, is an object-lesson of evangelicalism, seen, not in the actual teaching, but in its results. Bromley, the Vicar of Folking, Caldigate’s native place, is a typical easy-going clergyman, a favourite with the squire, and, as we are left to conclude, with all his right-thinking parishioners. Mrs. Bolton, unfortunately, has taken her theology from those less genial, and, indeed, Calvinistic teachers, at whom, though no fresh representative of the class is mentioned by name, Trollope deals a farewell blow. Mrs. Bolton, a strong-minded woman, is not in herself bad-hearted. But for the downright inhumanity of her religious principles, she would have been a good and wise parent instead of a bitter Low Churchwoman. It is of course a painful, but an effective picture, because brought out under its author’s pervading and deep conviction in these matters. The increasing bitterness of Trollope’s anti-evangelical temper was not merely an inheritance of the spirit of his mother’s _Vicar of Wrexhill_, or his early association with F. W. Faber and other Oxford Anglicans already mentioned; it came also from his own disappointing experience of what he considered evangelicalism’s effects on the happiness and character of those he loved. Not later than July 21, 1877, had been the date fixed by the author for sending in the complete manuscript. On that day he had no sooner landed in South Africa than he dropped his packet into the Cape Town Post Office; for at least half the novel was written during Trollope’s voyage to South Africa.

“A poor, niggery, yellow-faced, half-bred sort of place, with an ugly Dutch flavour about it,” was the visitor’s earliest impression of the region in which he had just set foot. It improved a little on acquaintance; but never interested or impressed him in the same way as Australia. He found it, however, equally favourable to pedestrianism and penmanship. “I am,” he said in one of his home letters, “on my legs every day among the hills for four hours, and every day, too, I do my four hours writing about what I have seen and heard, after the fashion of our friend Froude.[32] I then sleep eight hours without stirring. The other eight hours are divided between reading and eating, with preponderance to the latter.” “The one person,” wrote Trollope to a Scotch friend in 1878, “who has most struck me here, is a certain young compatriot of yours, Leander Starr Jameson, who has just started in medical practice at Kimberley, and in whom I see qualities that will go to the making of events in this country.” When free from the influence of personal feeling, Trollope was seldom far out in his estimates of character. This acute presage concerning the then little known future leader of the famous raid was first confided, if I mistake not, to John Blackwood, the sole recipient of many of Trollope’s best sayings, and the friend whom he valued more highly than he did any other member of his own generation. After a really touching and unique fashion, Trollope, nine years earlier, had shown his attachment to the famous Scotch publisher; for, in 1870, he had contributed _Cæsar_ to the Ancient Classics series, the copyright being a free present to “my old friend John Blackwood.”

On the other hand, Blackwood found in Trollope none of the obstinacy about which he had heard from others, but a most pleasant and docile readiness to profit in his work by a publisher’s hints. In his quite affectionate acknowledgment of the _Cæsar_, he said, “I value it the more because I have looked this gift-horse in the mouth.” “Your new classical venture,” said Blackwood to Trollope, “was in a line so different from anything else you had done, that I scanned it closely; I can, therefore, speak of its merits.”

Long before this, indeed, Trollope had been cited by Blackwood as a model contributor. Charles Reade resented some of Blackwood’s proposed emendations, especially in the case of some interminably diffuse love-making scenes or conversations. “I have,” mildly rejoined the publisher, “but ventured on submitting to you considerations, which other authors of great experience in such feminine matters, for instance, Trollope, willingly received.” Relations between the two novelists were already a little strained because of Trollope’s complaint that Reade had taken the notion of the play _The Wandering Heir_ from his own story _Ralph the Heir_. Blackwood’s compliments to Trollope must have rankled in Reade’s heart; for about this time Reade alluded to Trollope as a literary knobstick, a publisher’s rat, and other pleasant terms including, I think, his favourite reproach of Homunculus. But peace-making friends intervened, and the matter settled itself almost as amicably as at Bob Sawyer’s supper table in Lant Street borough.

The volumes on South Africa, begun the very day _John Caldigate_ left Cape Town for Edinburgh, were issued by Chapman and Hall. The subject had at least for some time been full of topical interest. In the May of 1875 the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, had proposed to Sir Henry Berkeley, the Cape Town Governor, to confederate the three British colonies, Cape Town, Natal, Griqua Land West, and the two Dutch republics, The Orange River Free State, and The Transvaal Republic. J. A. Froude, the historian, then travelling for his health’s sake after his wife’s death, had, at the Minister’s wish, surveyed the possibilities of the federation on the spot. Local jealousies prevented the scheme from being carried through, or rather reduced a great imperial project to a mere enabling measure in the South African Act of August 1877. During 1874 the popular concern for South African affairs culminated in the Langalibalele rising and the shortly following Zulu War with Cetewayo. Then came Sir Theophilus Shepstone’s annexation of The Orange River Free State diamond-fields, and Sir Bartle Frere’s Cape Governorship and South African High Commissionership followed in 1877.

No two nineteenth century men of letters were personally more unlike each other than James Anthony Froude and Anthony Trollope. “Old Trollope, after banging about the world so long, now treading in my footsteps, and, like an intellectual bluebottle, buzzing about at Cape Town” was the historian’s characteristic comment, made in his softest and silkiest tones on the novelist’s voyage to the country, visited by himself some seven years earlier. Trollope secured his object by getting out his South African book some two years before Froude, in 1880, had published a line on the subject. In the Kimberley district, Trollope, we have already seen, had discovered the historic “Dr. Jim.” He next made the acquaintance and sounded the praises of the clever young lady Miss Olive Schreiner, author of _The Story of an African Farm_, published on Trollope’s instance by Chapman and Hall.

In 1878, however, no really popular work about the southern parts of the dark continent had appeared before Trollope’s volumes. These drew the Cape provinces, Natal, The Transvaal, and the diamond fields in The Orange River Free State exactly as at the time they were, and liberally relieved their purely historical or descriptive contents with touches often as instructive as they were humorous, revealing scenery and character by the flashlight of a representative anecdote or well-turned phrase. The Transvaal annexation, accomplished before his visit, is called, in a rather Carlylean phrase, one of the “highest-handed acts in history”: “It was,” said Trollope, “a typical instance of the beneficent injustice of the British.” For the rest, diamond-fields and goldmines alike struck him as a “meretricious means of attracting population to the country.” The Boer farmers are very fine fellows of their kind, most unhandsomely treated by all English writers except himself. As for the proposed withdrawal from The Transvaal, it is an idea only worthy of a pusillanimous dunderhead. The reception given to the South African book by the critics and public markedly indicated a recovery of the popularity which a year or two earlier had seemed for the moment on the wane. _The Times_ declared it had not a page uninstructive or dull. _The Athenæum_ found that, coming in the nick of time, it admirably supplied a public want. “Full of freshness and individuality in all its presentations, social and political,” said _The Academy_. “Always judicious, often very entertaining, and only from sometimes excessive zeal a trifle diffuse,” chimed in _The Spectator_.

More satisfactory and important to Trollope than the book’s mere success was the attention it secured from colonial readers, both at home and abroad, more particularly with the South African department of the Colonial Office in Whitehall. Lord Carnarvon was then responsible for the government of Greater Britain. Before his retirement from the Beaconsfield administration on the advance of the British fleet to Constantinople early in 1878, he had read or heard enough of the work to find its views of South African federation of more value to a responsible statesman than the details, bearing on that subject, already brought back to him by Froude from the Cape. This fact soon developed into intimacy what had hitherto been only a casual acquaintance. There then lived, at the age of seventy-six, the third Earl Grey; he had been the singularly able and unsympathetic Colonial Minister in the Russell administration of 1846. Trollope and Lord Carnarvon chanced, one day, to come out together from a room in the Athenæum where Lord Grey was. “His mistake,” said Trollope, referring to Russell’s ex-Colonial Secretary, “always seemed to be his domination by the idea of its being possible to give representative institutions and to stop short of responsible government, after the English fashion under Elizabeth and the Stuarts.” It was a casual remark, but associated itself with an episode in Trollope’s life about which something must be said in the next chapter.