EMINENT VICTORIAN

Evening Star, Issue 19520, 30 March 1927, Page 2

EMINENT VICTORIAN

M BIOGRAPHY OF ANTHONY TROLLOPE A TREMENDOUS WORKER Mr Michael Sadleir, resolute in his championship of the Victorian Age, after years of loving and patient research, at length produced his Irollopo: A Commentary’ (writes Georg® Blake, in ‘ John o’ London’s Weekly ). Some may ask why it should be thought necessary to add anything to that most revealing of personal documents, Irollopo’s own ‘Autobiography/ but we must understand that Mr Sadleir attempts here something more than biography; he seeks to explain a muchmahgncd epoch—the mid-Victorian epoch—as it was perfectly expressed in the personality of the most typical of mid-Victorians. And he has succeeded admirably. Whether he has made that epoch any more attractive to the neo-Georgian is quite, another question. These were fine times, no doubt, but they were somehow not exciting. AN ELEPHANTINE WOOING.

The main facts of Trollope’s career are familiar to most readers. His father was a barrister turned farmer: a stiff, proud, foolish man, who could not handle money and lost everything. Very beautifully does Mr Sadleir tell the tale of his elephantine wooing of vivacious Fanny Milton, who, when the family fortunes ebbed, sailed for America to establish —of all crack-brained schemes!—an emporium in Cincinnati, found there that she could write 5 dip write ‘ Domestic Manners of the Americans/ and became a best seller! She made money—and her husband lost it. They went bankrupt, lied to Bruges, and there encountered tragedy. Thomas Trollope died; a son. died; and when she went back, heartbroken, to England, Fanny’s youngest daughter died. It is an amazing story, the story of Fanny Trollope, but it cannot be told here. Enough that the brave old lady came to happiness and comfort m the end, and saw her fourth son, Anthony, an established novelist before she died. She herself was responsible for some forty successful books of fiction and travel 1

SLOVENLY AND DIRTY

While the family hid in Bruges _ Anthony entered the Post Office service—in 1834, at the age of nineteen. At St. Martin’s-le-Grand he did not shine. All his life ho had been slovenly and awkward. Read Sir William Gregory s description of him as a schoolboy m the unhappy days of the family s penury “ He was a big boy, older than the rest of the form, and without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met. He was not only slovenly in person and in dress, but his work was equally dirty. His exercises w&re a mass of blots and smudges. These peculiarities created a great prejudice against him, and the poor fellow was generally avoided.” . He did not improve in London. Mr Sadleir reminds us:—-“How he fared as junior Civil Servant; how he ragged his immediate superiors, was late, idle, disorderly, and in perpetual danger of dismissal; how he played cards with his fellows after lunch and smoked and drank with resident clerks on such evenings as he was not up to graver mischief in the London streets; how he splashed ink over the august waistcoat of the P.M.G. himself; how ho was tipped half a crown by an aged German nobleman attending on the Queen of Saxony; how duns pursued and moneylenders swindled him; how an equivalent of breach of promise threat-

ened; and how the “Tramp Society” (composed of Trollope, John Merivale, and another) brought comic terror to the farmers of the Home Counties — all of this is told, directly in the. ‘ Autobiography/ or indirectly in this novel or in that.”

Mercifully ho applied for, and was given, in 1841, the post of Deputy Postal Surveyor at Banagher, in Ireland. (St. Martin’s-le-Grand was glad to see the last of, him.) And in Ireland Trollope found himself, became the master - of his job and his fate, married Rose Heseltine, and began, but nob very successfully at first, to. write. Trollope became an able and influential Civil Servant. The hobbledehoy developed into a masterly surveyor, whom the authorities depended on to organise a delivery system in the West of England, to undertake delicate postal missions to Egypt, the West Indies, and South- Africa, even to go to the United States and attempt to settle the difficult question of international copyright. He did not resign from the Post Office until 1867. By that time he had established himself in fame. ‘ The Three Clerks/ 1 Dr Thorne,’ ‘Framley Parsonage/ ‘ Orley Farm/ ‘The Small House at Allington/ and half a dozen other hooks had beenwritten. A BUSINESSLIKE NOVELIST. How it was done by a busy Civil servant is one of the legends of literature. Trollope worked to schedule, rising early and writing each day a fixed number of words. On his travels he did not break his regular habits of industry: he had his writing desk fixed up in Ms cabin at sea. No editor ever had to complain that his “copy” was late; neither editor nor publisher got an easy bargain with this perfectly, equipped merchant of high-class fiction. “He put the writing of books on a level with the practice of any other trade; he glorified industry and perseverance; he spoke a little sceptically of genius; he reckoned the rewards of literature in pounds sterling, and the calendar of its creation in hours by the clock. It would have been impossible to counter more provocatively the studied attitudes of Paterism, the sour defiance of the Zolaesques, and the proclaimed indifference to pecuniary reward of all the gifted-amoralities, who in the half lights of Parisian studios o’- along the misty parapet of Cheyno Walk chanted the twilit loveliness of decadence.” It remains to be said that. ho enjoyed complete domestic happiness in the authentic Victorian manner. Mr Sadleir gives ns his correspondence with an American lady of “ uplifting ” proclivities, Kate Field, and assures ns that these two were, in love. Perhaps they were, but it seems to have been a decent uncle-and-niece affair. That was Trollope—a fine, hearty, blufl man, honorable as the morning light, but hardly exciting. VALUE FOR MONEY. He wrote something like sixty-five books. About most foreign lands he visited he wrote books. He wrote a biography of Lord Palmerston. For Blackwoods he produced a version of Caesar's commentaries.' He edited ‘ St. Paul’s Magazine ’ for two years. For the rest it was fiction and again fiction, and those were' the days of the threedecker novel, when novelists gave thenreaders at least word-value for their money. It was Trollope’s achievement to be typically English in his person and to express the average of English life perfectly in his fiction. Mr Sadleir gives us a picture of the man in his habit as he lived. “ In personal appearance Trollope was fresh-colored, upright, and sturdy. Although not quite 6ft in height, Ms broad shoulders, fine head, and vigorous power of gesture gave an impression of size beyond his actual inches. Everyone who met him remarked on the extraordinary brilliance .of Ms Mack eyes, which, behind, the

strong lenses of his spectacles, shone (as one mcmorist records) “with a certain genial fury of inspection.” His voice was bass and resonant. Lady Ritchie, in her journal for 1865, speaks of his “deep, cheerful, lispy voice.” His laugh was, at its healthiest, a bellow.

For so largo a man, he was easy of movement, and could sit a _ horse, it not with elegance, at least with monumental certainty. He was a strong walker, a good eater, a connoisseur ot wine, and an insatiable disputant. In everything he did, in his every taste and talent, he was full-blooded and thorough, having the health and strength sufficient for his moderate but manifold enjoyment.” THE MIDDLE WAY. As dn life, so in literature, he took the middle way:—“The sensationalists are thrilled by their own catalogues of crime; 'the reforming realist shudders to read his own exposures of cruelty and bestiality ; the child of Nature makes discoveries as to the shifts and sorrows of humanity _ that have been made in every generation for centuries; the amorist regards his love successes as of a piquancy unrivalled. But Trollope is beyond such elementary stimulus. To him _ everything i is material for observation, nothing for declamation or for vanity. He approves virtue and deprecates vice, but he refuses to become excited either over ugliness or beauty. Like a connoisseur of wine, he sips at this vintage and at that, selects to his taste and lays a cellar down. We, who inherit it, have but to drink at will, and in the novels that he left behind to savour the essence of life as once it was, as still it is, ns—likely—it will remain.”

We shall leave Mr Sadleir there and go back to novels, for it is a great virtue of this ‘ Commentary ’ that it makes us want to do so. We shake hands in these pages with a fine man, a great man, even if. inveferately man, a great man, even if, inveretably mid-Victorian, he refused to follow the will-o’-the-wisp or seek the rainbow’s end. (For me, at least, Mr Sadleir does not quite make out his case tor mid-Victonanisra of the Trollopcan variety. It had its virtues and its decencies, but, Lord! it was apt to be flat.) ‘Trollope,’ however, is a good book, a sound, patient book, full of knowledge and discernment and tendencies. As a specimen of modern biographical art it is in welcome contrast to the coruscations of the school of Guedalla, which touches nothing that it docs not overadorn.