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In a certain sense, however, the last of the three, though he may give less impression of genius than the other two (or even the other four whom we have specially noticed), is the most interesting of all: and qualms may sometimes arise as to whether genius is justly denied to him. Anthony Trollope, after a youth, not exactly orageuse, but apparently characterised by the rather squalid yet mild dissipation which he has described in The Three Clerks and The Small House at Allington , attained a considerable position in the Post Office which he held during great part of his career as a novelist. For some time that career did not look as if it were going to be a successful one, though his early (chiefly Irish) efforts are better than is sometimes thought. But he made his mark first with The Warden , and then, much more directly and triumphantly, with its sequel Barchester Towers . When the first of these was published Dickens had been a successful novelist for nearly twenty years and Thackeray had "come to his own" for nearly ten. The Warden might have been described at the time (I do not know whether it was, but English reviewing was only beginning to be clever again) as a partial attempt at the matter of Dickens in a partial following of the manner of Thackeray. An "abuse" the distribution in supposed unjust proportion of the funds of an endowed hospital for aged men is its main avowed subject. But Trollope indulged in no tirades and no fantastic-grotesque caricature in fact he actually drew a humorous sketch of a novel
"The Warden," published in 1855, was the first and in many ways the best of the famous six Barsetshire series that caused Trollope to attract the notice of the reading public. Henry James says, "'The Warden' is simply the history of an old man's conscience, and Trollope never did anything happier than the picture of this sweet and serious little old gentleman."
It has been said that Trollope is a typical novelist, and the type is of sufficient importance to receive a little attention, even in space so jealously allotted as ours must be. And everything that he saw he could turn into excellent novel-material. No one has touched him in depicting the humours of a public office, few in drawing those of cathedral cities and the hunting-field.
The conscious sinking, at all events, and the awfully good manner, the difference, the bridge, the interval, the skipped leaves of the social atlas these, it was to be confessed, had a little, for our young lady, in default of stouter stuff, to work themselves into the light literary legend a mixed, wandering echo of Trollope, of Thackeray, perhaps mostly of Dickens under favour of which her pilgrimage had so much appealed.
Here he could, Mæcenas-like, entertain his literary friends of all degrees, with a vast number of other friends and acquaintances, notable in their walks of life. With these, such as Anthony Trollope, he was on the friendliest terms, though he did not "grapple them to him with hooks of steel."
Trollope in the crowd, shouting, "oh, the wretch! oh, the abominable harlot! kill her, by all means stoning is really too good for her!" But what did the Divine Teacher say? He was quite as anxious to prevent the crime as any Mrs.
Last evening, we went to pass the evening with Miss Blagden, who inhabits a villa at Bellosguardo, about a mile outside of the walls. The situation is very lofty, and there are good views from every window of the house, and an especially fine one of Florence and the hills beyond, from the balcony of the drawing-room. By and by came Mr. Browning, Mr. Trollope, Mr.
For readers would not have stood this in instalments: you had to provide some bite or promise of bite in each if possible indeed to leave each off at an interesting point. But this itself rather tended to a jumpy and ill-composed whole to that mechanical shift from one part of the plot to another which is so evident, for instance, in Trollope: and there was worse temptation behind.
Trollope set out in the most systematic way to produce a series of novels illustrating certain sections of England, certain types of English society; steadily, for a life-time, with the artisan's skilful hand, he labored at the craft. He is the very antithesis of the erraticisms and irregularities of genius.
It was impossible to help liking such a man at first sight; and I believe that no man in London society was more generally liked than Anthony Trollope. There was something pathetic in his attitude as above indicated; and a fresh and boyish quality always invested him. His artlessness was boyish, and so were his acuteness and his transparent but somewhat belated good-sense.
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