T. H. S. Escott

“ Such a discipline as she had gone through developed the sterner rather than the gentler qualities of womanhood. Adversity and bereavement had pointed her pen with a sarcastic sharpness, inherited only in a very moderate degree by her son, as much above her in humour as he is below her in satire. Of that Mrs. Trollope showed herself aware, when during the last eight years of her life, having read The Warden, she impressed on her son the wisdom of working the peculiar vein of narrative comedy it disclosed. ”

“ For the moment, however, the effect of Miss Wright’s visits to Julians or to the other Harrow abodes was to fill Thomas Anthony Trollope with dreams of regaining in the new world what he had lost in the old; and the rest of that clever but self-deluded good man’s record really suggests an exaggerated version, from which Dickens’s genius shrank, of the money-making experiments resorted to by Wilkins Micawber. America was a young country, just acquiring a taste for the prettinesses and elegancies of life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He is neither a profligate nor a drunkard, but the poverty, squalor, and ignorance in which he has been brought up have starved the energies that, in happier surroundings, might have retrieved the fortunes of a race whose degradation, never out of his sight or mind, keeps him in a chronic condition of grievance and discontent. By a few quiet but skilful touches in Trollope’s best manner, signs in Thady of sensitiveness to the jeopardised Macdermot honour gradually reveal themselves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Irish society leaders of the good old days, when the sporting season did not keep them to their castles in Connaught or Ulster, used on a grand scale to keep up their houses in Fitzwilliam or Merrion Square in their native metropolis. All that had gone. Huge, overgrown, vulgar London had snuffed out select, elegant, and refined Dublin, whose stately quadrangles and picturesque avenues were deserted by their proper occupants for some spick-and-span new mansions which stared one out of countenance in Tyburnia, or some more modest tenement in a dingy angle of Mayfair. ”

“ The feast of reason that followed the beheading of the king proved the introduction to the long-drawn-out orgy of fiends lasting till Robespierre’s death in 1794. What refuge could there be for the now undeceived dupes of their own fond expectations but in flight? Those who from the first had remained courtiers or royalists, and those whom a spurious philanthropy had caused to dally with wholesale homicide, hastened to put the English Channel between themselves and a capital and country from which had vanished all hope of personal safety or service to their fellow-men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the fifties, not less than they had done in the forties, the poets, prophets, preachers, and teachers of The Nation still expatiated in glowing terms on the good time coming when, with the aid of republican France, Ireland should receive from the statesmen who were her sons the glories of a new birth, and Dublin should once again be as it was when it had its own parliament sitting in St. Stephen’s Green. Like expectations had been encouraged in Feemy by the literature she loved. ”

“ He had, however, no sooner taken his part in a forty minutes’ run, with a good scent and over a stiffish country, than his sporting, and consequently his social fortune was made. Adventures are to the adventurous. The bustling novelty of his Irish situation had effectually roused Trollope from his moody reveries, had taken him out of himself, and wakened to new life dormant energies of mind as well as body. ”

“ As a companion and conversationalist he lacked the lightness of touch, the elasticity and ease communicated to each other by young men of his station in life, at college, at the club, or in the companionship of travel. At Harrow, none of his school-fellows had done him a better turn than William Gregory, his later friend of Coole Park, by disposing of a rumour, which local invention had not been slow to embroider with more sinister legends, that Trollope’s father was an outlaw. ”

“ With the light heart, that, in the case of Trollope’s young ladies, no amatory perplexities or cares seem to depress, Marie throws over the new love for the old, and the slight series of episodes ends in happiness, not only for a family, but the entire neighbourhood, marred, however, by something more than misgivings that the niece and ward of my host of the Lion d’Or may yet have to pay the penalty for having played so fast and loose with two such blameless and desirable competitors for her hand. ”

“ As in other upper middle-class households of the time, so beneath the Trollope roof it became the rising generation’s fixed idea that Low-churchism must be a mark of vulgarity, a sort of spiritually parasitic growth, flourishing, alas, among the small tradesmen, whose sons were educated at some private venture schools, but happily unknown in the superior educational or social soil, which grew something better than English grammar and arithmetic. ”

“ In Ireland the average was one to every fourteen. One-third of the entire population depended for food on the little plots round their cabins on the barren hillside or on the uncertain moor. The great monument of English enterprise for relieving Irish need was the large workhouse in each new Poor Law district, execrated by the masses, and only acquiesced in by those who were better off. Within two years of Trollope’s arrival in Dublin, there had set in a steady increase of crime, and an addition, visible on all sides, to the chronic distress. ”

“ So in 1838 had said Thomas Drummond, the engineer officer who filled for five years the chief secretaryship. The words dwelt in the Irish mind long after their echoes had died away from the Irish ear. In his new quarters, Anthony Trollope had no sooner time to look round than he descried everywhere detailed proof of Drummond’s remark having lost none of its force since it was first made. Excessive population and deficient production were the two great evils, each social rather than political, of the land from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear. ”

“ Once exterminate by wholesale bloodshed all who embodied the debasing influences of a corrupt aristocracy, the masses would rise to the full height of their native greatness. Thus a triumphant democracy, enthroned upon mountains of patrician corpses, would wield its beneficent sceptre over a purified and reanimated society. Here as elsewhere agreeing with, perhaps indebted to, Alison, Trollope also speaks of Robespierre as omnipotent in Convention and in the Committee, but as having, too, his master, the will of the populace of Paris. ”

“ Alfred de Musset’s title might really serve as a motto to Trollope’s book. The beautiful girl who, from being nobody, becomes Countess of Desmond, has persuaded, or tried to persuade herself, that the marriage which brings position and title can very well dispense with love. She has no sooner acted on this principle than she finds her mistake; whether as wife or widow, to the last page of the book the misery of her desolation is unrelieved. ”

“ The life at Waltham Cross had been more that of an Essex squire with sporting tastes than of a hard-working author or a busy official. It was an existence whose charm, as years went on, Trollope found himself bent on tasting once more. ”

“ This American beauty combines high intellectual power with absolute perfection of face and figure. Still more arresting is her English counterpart, Lady Mabel Grex. That heroine, an impoverished and profligate nobleman’s daughter, had passed scathless through the trying ordeal of her earlier days. Neither the keenness of her insight nor the strength of her will is impaired; her capacity of entire devotion where her heart is really touched has not suffered from any hardening experiences of life’s seamy side. ”

“ The master-mind of George Smith still ruled the house to which Trollope had introduced himself. Smith at least had carefully read, and was favourably impressed by, Trollope’s fresh and minute insight into provincial life and character, whatever its phases, ecclesiastical indeed first, but almost equally lay. “The man,” he said, “who can draw so well country society in cathedral towns, being himself a rider to hounds, can have nothing to learn from Surtees if he touches it occasionally from the sporting side.” ”

“ Gloom pervades the atmosphere of each. But whereas the sombreness of Wuthering Heights lacks relief throughout from any gleam of humour or even light, the tragic effects of The Macdermots are heightened by the social incidents and conversational by-play that form the staple of successive pages or even chapters, amid the squalor, the misery, the sin, and the horrors following each other thick and fast as the story approaches its blood-stained climax. ”

“ This kind of courage is shrewdly declared by Trollope to be that by far the most generally met with, as well as fully sufficient for the life Captain Ussher had to lead. The quality that chiefly gave Ussher some vogue with the better classes of his district, was his unfailing self-confidence and unconcealed belief in his ability, whether in war or love, to carry through any purpose he had taken up. His keen, calculating Irish brain had taught him the universal readiness to accept men at their own valuation of themselves. ”

“ Not unworthy of Dickens, is the praise deserved by the simple and graphic drollery of Trollope’s description of Sexty Parker amid the mean surroundings of his suburban home, with his poor wife’s affrighted protests at the dangerous degree to which he is being made the tool of Lopez, or Parker’s picture on his seaside holiday, smoking his pipe and drinking his gin and water in the shabby villa’s porch, while his ill-clad and ill-nourished children make mischief of every kind in the stony and almost flowerless garden. ”

“ Only the iron creed, which makes her whole being so grievous a burden to herself and to those about her, constrains her to see wickedness in joy; in every form of pleasure a species of profligacy; in all love for children a pernicious indulgence endangering their eternal welfare; and, in every woman, Satan’s easy prey, until guarded by a middle-aged, respectable, unlovable and austere husband. ”