Whatever else may be said or written concerning Anthony Trollope, one thing at least must be conceded that of all the writers of English fiction he is the most. typically English. A famous passage written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1860, while Trollope's reputation was still purely British, has been often quoted, because it gives in the fewest possible words the truest estimate of Trollope's literary work. Trollope himself in his Autobiography has cited it, and it may well be repeated here:

Trollope? They precisely suit my taste-solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all the inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of. And these books are just as English as a beefsteak. It needs an English residence to make them thoroughly comprehensible; but still I think that human nature would give them success anywhere.

This marvellously apt and felicitously worded piece of criticism contains two points that are essential to a thorough understanding of Anthony Trollope and of his place in the history of English letters. First of all, it makes clear the intensely national character of his realism; and, in the second place, it recognises the fact that his art can give us something broader and deeper than what is purely national, since it is an art which finds its ultimate source in a profound and comprehensive knowledge of humanity.

In order to appreciate and explain the enduring excellence of Trollope's finest work, one must know something of the man himself, of his training, of his life, of his surroundings, and more especially of his own character and temperament. There is, indeed, a striking contrast to be found between the man as others knew him in the casual intercourse of daily life, and the inner man as he revealed himself

*This paper forms the introduction to the Royal Edition of Anthony Trollope's novels, published by the Gebbie Company of Philadelphia, by whose courteous permission it is here reprinted with some slight additions.

sensitive to all the pain and all the pathos of human life. Both sides of his nature are felt in what he wrote, and both were necessary to his greatness as an author. He had power and force; he had humour and a rich vein of wholesome English fun; he had insight into character and motive; and, finally, he had a wide and accurate first-hand knowledge of men and women, gained from the circumstances of his various vocations.

Anthony Trollope was born in London in the year 1815. His father was a gentleman, a scholar, a former Oxford man, and, at the time of Trollope's birth, a Chancery barrister of much ability in his profession, but one from whom fortune had withheld the successful temperament. Born to a small fortune, he muddled it away; trained to a learned profession; he offended and repelled his clients by his execrable temper. By the time that young Anthony was old enough to enter upon the period of his education, the elder Trollope had been forced to give up his London home and to take shelter in a wretched farmhouse on land which is accurately described for us in Orley Farm. The mother of the future novelist was a clever, jovial, coarse-grained woman, with a natural gift for writing and with no mean powers of observation

powers which are shown in her most unfair yet eminently readable account of the domestic manners of the Americans, and in a number of novels which, though hastily and superficially composed, enjoyed a certain temporary vogue. When Anthony was of an age to be sent to school his mother had not yet begun to write, and the fortunes of the family were

at their lowest ebb. He was sent to Harrow, where he passed three most unhappy years, and where he left a reputation for slovenliness of person and invincible dulness of mind. This reputation was not redeemed at a private school to which he was transferred, nor at Winchester College, where the poverty of his parents made him contemptible not only in the eyes of his fellows, but in those of his masters also. Big, ugly, and uncouth, he skulked about the place, feeling himself to be despised, ill-dressed, and dirty; and ere he left he had acquired a conviction that his life was destined to be an utter failure. The story of his next few years forms painful reading; for it is a story of hopeless effort, of unrelieved dejection, of indignities, of failure. He tried to study, but for study he appears to have had no aptitude. He tried to teach, but he had neither knowledge nor selfconfidence. He endeavoured twice to win. a sizarship at Cambridge and again at Oxford, but failed ignominiously in both attempts; so that he gave up once for all the notion of a university career. It was at this period that a gleam of light appeared, almost for the first time in his life. His mother's book of travels in America having succeeded with the public, so that within a few months she received from her publishers the sum of £800, the family's pecuniary difficulties. were somewhat lightened; yet none the less there was illness and there were debts, and finally there was death; and in the end it became necessary for Anthony Trollope to choose a definite career. The singular offer was made to him of a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment, and he actually set about the study of the German language, so that he might be qualified for this command; but at the end of six weeks he had another offer of a very different character, and immediately accepted a clerkship in the General Post Office, with which branch of the public service he remained connected until 1867-a period of more than thirty years.

During seven of these years he held the office of a junior clerk, with an income. which began at £90 a year and slowly rose to £140. These seven years, at first sight, seem almost a continuation of what had gone before. Trollope was always in debt, he was almost always in trouble, his

superiors disapproved of him, his companions led him into card-playing which he could ill afford, and into the drinking of much whiskey and water, and the consumption of much tobacco. He had trouble with money-lenders, and especially did he have trouble with a certain young woman, whose mother once appeared in the middle of the office demanding of Trollope in a loud voice when he was going to marry her daughter. Nevertheless, there was another side to this life of his which must not be overlooked. He made some friends who were not only an inspiration to him, but who in their own homes gave him a saving glimpse of what was good and wholesome. Partly through their influence and partly from that gradual development of taste which comes slowly to men like Trollope, he began to read; and even in those days it occurred to him that he might at some time write a novel. Though he studied little in a systematic way, he taught himself to translate both French and Latin, he came to know Horace from beginning to end, and he eagerly absorbed whatever was finest in English poetry. His imagination had now begun to stir within him, and the form in which it was first manifested is described by him in an interesting passage:

Study was not my bent, and I could not please myself by being all idle. Thus it came to pass that I was always going about with some castle in the air firmly built within my mind. For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year, I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions, and proprieties, and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced-nor even anything which from outward circumstances would seem to be violently improbable. I myself was, of course, my own hero. Such is a necessity of castle-building. But I never became a king or a duke. I never was a learned man, nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful. Young women used to be fond of me. There can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice; but I have often doubted whether, had it not been my practice, I should ever have written a novel. I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life. In

after years I have done the same,-with this difference, that I have discarded the hero of my early dreams, and have been able to lay my own identity aside.

These years then, in spite of all their shabbiness and their Bohemianism, were in reality the years in which the foundations of the future novelist were laid. He had come to know at least one side of life; he was learning from the great masters of literary style; he had begun, without knowing it, the study of his technique; and, in a way, he had begun also to garner the rich material out of which he was afterward destined to construct so much that is solid and enduring. Even to his

squalid experiences, to his dreary life in lodgings, to his squabbles with his superiors, and to the trouble with the young woman already mentioned, his readers have good cause for gratitude, since upon these things are based some of the most interesting episodes in the story of young Eames, as told in The Small House at Allington.

In 1841 came a gleam of the success which had hitherto appeared to be quite unattainable. In that year, at the age of twenty-six, Trollope accepted a surveyorship in connection with the Post-Office Department in Ireland, which at once removed him from the scene of all his past unhappiness and adversity, and gave him

a position of comparative independence, with an income, during the very first year, of £400. "This," he says, “was the first good fortune of my life." From that time on, he rose steadily in the postal service; and whereas his character in London had been officially regarded as extremely bad, from the day of his transfer to Ireland he never heard one word of censure, and he speedily acquired the reputation of a most efficient public servant. It was in Ireland that Trollope acquired his passion for hunting, which had a most important influence on his literary work; and it was in Ireland also that he married. Finally, it was in Ireland that he wrote his first novel, The MacDermots of Ballycloran, which was begun in 1843 and finished in 1845, but not published until 1847. It was an utter failure, although Trollope himself in after life declared that he had never made another plot so good. The book was never noticed in the reviews; the author never got an accounting from his publisher; and to that publisher he never wrote a single letter with regard to it. Undismayed, however, he tried a second story-again an Irish one-and again he failed; for of The Kellys and the O'Kellys only one hundred and forty copies were sold, and the publisher incurred a loss of something like £60. He now tried an historical novel, La Vendée; and this was, perhaps, the most utter failure of them all. this time even Trollope himself, although still sanguine as to the merits of what he had written, began to disbelieve in the possibility of success. After experimenting with a comedy which was at once condemned by a critic to whom he had submitted it, and after vainly offering to prepare for a London publisher a handbook of travel for Ireland, he turned to his official duties, and for several years put forth no book.

By

These years may well have seemed to be just so much valuable time deducted from the novelist's literary life. Yet nothing is more certain than that to them. and to the experiences which they gave him Trollope owed a lasting obligation. Transferred from Ireland to England, he was assigned to the special service of devising an improved plan for the delivery of letters in the rural parts of England. In the discharge of this duty it became necessary for him to visit personally al

most every nook and corner of Devonshire, Cornwall, Somersetshire, Dorsetshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Hertfordshire, Monmouthshire, and six of the Welsh counties, besides the Channel Islands. For two years he almost lived on horseback, going back and forth continually through this tract of country, which contains some of the most beautiful and romantic scenery of Britain. He came to know it all by heart-the towns and villages, the manors and the granges, even the woods and copses, the lanes and bypaths. And what was infinitely more important, he came to know the people; for the nature of his mission brought him into personal contact with men and women of every type and class. He entered the hovel of the peasant and the mansion of the nobleman, the tradesman's shop, the tap-room of the village inn, the lonely farmhouse, the pretentious villa, the country parsonage, and the bishop's palace. He chatted with the yokels, he made friends with the sturdy, shrewd, hard-headed yeomen and their buxom wives, he visited and rode to hounds with the country gentlemen. He was, to be sure, the government official, but he was also the keenly analytical observer of human nature. He loved to study men. and women, to learn their ways of thinking, to understand their interests and their prejudices, to fathom their motives, to watch the play of their activities; and so the two years of this close contact with the most English part of England were not two years of wasted opportunity or of neglected effort, but rather they were two years of the very richest gain; for he was all the while unconsciously absorbing a minute and sympathetic knowledge of his countrymen and was acquiring that insight into their character which was to make him the most profoundly national of England's novelists.

One midsummer evening, in the Close at Salisbury, as he stood watching the mellow moonlight shimmer on the spire of the great cathedral, there came to him the first conception of a novel that should depict the life of a cathedral city, with all the varied interests and intrigues that gather about the society of such a place. The general plan of such a novel having once possessed his thoughts, the individual details soon worked themselves out