Studies in Contemporary Biography Part 3

Bishoprics were in those days regarded chiefly as pieces of rich preferment with which prime ministers bought the support of powerful adherents. But since the middle of the nineteenth century, as the Anglican Church has become at once more threatened and more energetic, as more of the life of the nation has flowed into her and round her, the office of a bishop has risen in importance. People show more interest in the appointments to be made, and ministers have become proportionately careful in making them. Bishops work harder and are more in the public eye now than they were eighty, or even fifty, years ago. They have lost something of the antique dignity and social consideration which they enjoyed. They no longer wear wigs or ride in State coaches. They may be seen in third-cla.s.s railway carriages, or sitting on the tops of omnibuses. But they have gained by having countless opportunities opened up to them for exerting influence in philanthropic as well as in religious movements; and the more zealous among them turn these opportunities to excellent account.

Whatever is true of an ordinary bishop is true _a fortiori_ of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He is still a great personage, but he is great in a new way, with less of wealth and power but larger opportunities of influence. He is also a kind of Pope in a new way, because he is the central figure of the Anglican communion over the whole world, with no legal jurisdiction outside England (except in India), but far over-topping all the prelates of that communion in the United States or the British Colonies. Less deference is paid to the office, considered simply as an office, than it received in the Middle Ages, because society and thought have been tinged by the spirit of democratic equality, and people realise that offices are only artificial creations, whose occupants are human beings like themselves. But if he is himself a man of ability and force, he may make his headship of an ancient and venerated church a vantage-ground whence to address the nation as well as the members of his own communion. He is sure of being listened to, which is of itself no small matter in a country where many voices are striving to make themselves heard at the same time. The world takes his words into consideration; the newspapers repeat them. His position gives him easy access to the ministers of the Crown, and implies a confidential intercourse with the Crown itself. He is, or can be, "in touch" with all the political figures who can in any way influence the march of events, and is able to enforce his views upon them. All his conduct is watched by the nation; so that if it is discreet, provident, animated by high and consistent principle, he gets full credit for whatever he does well, and acquires that influence to which ma.s.ses of men are eager to bow whenever they can persuade themselves that it is deserved. During the first half of the nineteenth century the English people was becoming more interested in ecclesiastical and in theological matters than it had been during the century preceding. It grew by slow degrees more inclined to observe ecclesiastical persons, to read and think about theological subjects, to reflect upon the relations which the Church ought to bear to civil life and moral progress. Thus a leader of the Church of England became relatively a more important factor than he had been a century ago, and an archbishop, strong by his character, rect.i.tude, and powers of utterance, rose to occupy a more influential, if not more conspicuous, position than his predecessors in the days of the Georges had done.

These changes naturally made the selection of an archbishop a more delicate and troublesome business than it was in those good old days.

n.o.body then blamed a Prime Minister for preferring an aspirant who had the support of powerful political connections. Blameless in life he must be: even the eighteenth century demanded that from candidates for English, if not, according to Dean Swift, for Irish sees. If he was also a man of courtly grace and dignity, and a finished scholar, so much the better. If he was a man of piety, that also was well. By the time of Queen Victoria the possession of piety and of gifts of speech had become more important qualifications, but the main thing was tactful moderation. Even in apostolic days it was required that a bishop should rule his own house well, and the Popes esteemed most saintly have not always been the best, as the famous case of Celestine the Fifth attests. An archbishop must first and foremost be a discreet and guarded man, expressing few opinions, and those not extreme ones.

His chief virtue came to be, if not the purely negative one of offending no section by expressing the distinctive views of any other, yet that of swerving so little from the _via media_ between Rome and Geneva that neither the Tractarian party, who began to be feared after 1837, nor the p.r.o.nounced Low Churchmen could claim the Primate as disposed to favour their opinions. In the case of ordinary bishops the plan could be adopted, and has since the days of Lord Palmerston been mostly followed, of giving every party its turn, while choosing from every party men of the safer sort. This method, however, was less applicable to the See of Canterbury, for a man on whose action much might turn could not well be taken from any particular section. The acts and words of a Primate, who is expected to "give a line" to the clergy generally and to speak on behalf of the bench of bishops as a whole, are so closely scrutinised that he must be prudent and wary, yet not so wary as to seem timid. He ought to be both firm and suave, conciliatory and decided. That he may do justice to all sections of the Church of England, he ought not to be an avowed partisan of any.

Yet he must be able and eminent, and of course able and eminent men are apt to throw themselves into some one line of action or set of views, and so come to be considered partisans. The position which the Archbishop of Canterbury holds as the representative in Parliament of the whole Established Church, makes statesmanship the most important of all qualifications. Learning, energy, eloquence, piety would none of them, nor all of them together, make up for the want of calmness and wisdom. Yet all those qualities are obviously desirable, because they strengthen as well as adorn the primate's position.

Archibald Campbell Tait (born in Scotland in 1811, died 1882) was educated at Glasgow University and at Balliol College, Oxford; worked at his college for some years as a tutor, succeeded Dr. Arnold as headmaster of Rugby School in 1843, became Dean of Carlisle and then Bishop of London, and was translated to Canterbury in 1868. It has been generally understood that Mr. Disraeli, then Prime Minister, suggested another prelate for the post, but the Queen, who did not share her minister's estimate of that prelate, expressed a preference for Tait. Her choice was amply justified, for Tait united, and indeed possessed in a high degree, the qualifications which have just been enumerated. He was, if it be not a paradox to say so, more remarkable as an archbishop than as a man. He had no original power as a thinker.

He was not a striking preacher, and the more pains he took with his sermons the less interesting did they become. He was so far from being learned that you could say no more of him than that he was a sound scholar and a well-informed man. He was deeply and earnestly pious, but in a quiet, almost dry way, which lacked what is called unction, though it impressed those who were in close contact with him. He showed slight interest either in the historical or in the speculative side of theology. Though a good headmaster, he was not a stimulating teacher. Had he remained all his life in a subordinate position, as a college tutor at Oxford, or as canon of some cathedral, he would have discharged the duties of the position in a thoroughly satisfactory way, and would have acquired influence among his colleagues, but no one would have felt that Fate had dealt unfairly with him in depriving him of some larger career and loftier post. No one, indeed, who knew him when he was a college tutor seems to have predicted the dignities he was destined to attain, although he had shown in the theological strife that then raged at Oxford the courage and independence of his character.

In what, then, did the secret of his success lie--the secret, that is, of his acquitting himself so excellently in those dignities as to have become almost a model to his own and the next generation of what an Archbishop of Canterbury ought to be? In the statesmanlike quality of his mind. He had not merely moderation, but what, though often confounded with moderation, is something rarer and better, a steady balance of mind. He was carried about by no winds of doctrine. He seldom yielded to impulses, and was never so seduced by any one theory as to lose sight of other views and conditions which had to be regarded. He was, I think, the first man of Scottish birth who ever rose to be Primate of England, and he had the cautious self-restraint which is deemed characteristic of his nation. He knew how to be dignified without a.s.sumption, firm without vehemence, prudent without timidity, judicious without coldness. He was, above all things, a singularly just man, who recognised every one's rights, and did not seek to overbear them by an exercise of authority. He was as ready to listen to his opponents as to his friends. Indeed, he so held himself as to appear to have no opponents, but to be rather a judge before whom different advocates were stating their respective cases, than a leader seeking to make his own views or his own party prevail. Genial he could hardly be called, for there was little warmth, little display of emotion, in his manner; and the clergy noted, at least in his earlier episcopal days, a touch of the headmaster in his way of receiving them. But he was simple and kindly, capable of seeing the humorous side of things, desiring to believe the good rather than the evil, and to lead people instead of driving them. With all his caution he was direct and straightforward, saying no more than was necessary, but saying nothing he had occasion to be ashamed of. He sometimes made mistakes, but they were not mistakes of the heart, and, being free from vanity or self-conceit, he was willing in his quiet way to admit them and to alter his course accordingly. So his character by degrees gained upon the nation, and so even ecclesiastical partisanship, proverbially more bitter than political, because it springs from deeper wells of feeling, grew to respect and spare him. The influence he obtained went far to strengthen the position of the Established Church, and to keep its several parties from breaking out into more open hostility with one another. He himself inclined to what might be called a moderate Broad Church att.i.tude, leaning more to Evangelical than to Tractarian or Romanising views in matters of doctrine. At one time the extreme High Churchmen regarded him as an enemy. But this unfriendliness had almost died away when the death of his wife and his only son (a young man of singularly winning character), followed by his own long illness, stilled the voices of criticism.

He exerted great influence in the House of Lords by his tact, by his firmness of character, and by the consistency of his public course, as well as by powers of speech, which, matured by long practice, had risen to a high level. Without eloquence, without either imagination or pa.s.sion, which are the chief elements in eloquence, he had a grave, weighty, thoughtful style which impressed that fastidious audience.

His voice was strong and sonorous, his diction plain yet pure and dignified, his matter well considered. His thought moved on a high plane; he spoke as one who fully believed every word he said. The late Bishop of Winchester, the famous Dr. Samuel Wilberforce, was incomparably his superior not only as a talker but as an orator, but no less inferior in his power over the House of Lords, for so little does rhetorical brilliance count in a critical and practical a.s.sembly.

Next to courage, the quality which gains trust and regard in a deliberative body is that which is familiarly described when it is said of a man, "You always know where to find him." Tait belonged to no party. But his principles, though not rigid, were fixed and settled; his words and votes were the expression of his principles.

The presence of bishops in the House of Lords is disapproved by some sections of English opinion, and there are those among the temporal peers who, quite apart from any political feeling, are said to regard them with little favour. But every one must admit that they have raised and adorned the debates in that chamber. Besides Tait and Wilberforce, two other prelates of the same generation stood in the front rank of speakers, Dr. Magee, whose wit and fire would have found a more fitting theatre in the House of Commons, and Dr. Thirlwall, a scholar and historian whose ma.s.sive intellect and stately diction were too rarely used to raise great political issues above the dust-storms of party controversy.

Perhaps no Archbishop since the Revolution of 1688 has exercised so much influence as Dr. Tait, and certainly none within living memory is so well ent.i.tled to be credited with a definite ecclesiastical policy.

His aim was to widen the bounds of the Church of England, so far as the law could, without evasion, be stretched for that purpose. He bore a leading part in obtaining an Act of Parliament which introduced a new and less strict form of clerical subscription. He realised that the Church of England can maintain her position as a State Church only by adapting herself to the movements of opinion, and accordingly he voted for the Divorce Bill of 1859, and for the Burials Bill, which relieved Dissenters from a grievance that exposed the Established Church to odium. The Irish Church Disestablishment Bill of 1869 threw upon him, at the critical moment when it went from the House of Commons, where it had pa.s.sed by a large majority, to the House of Lords, where a still larger majority was hostile, a duty delicate in itself, and such as seldom falls to the lot of a prelate. The Queen wrote to him suggesting that he should endeavour to effect a compromise between Mr. Gladstone, then head of the Liberal Ministry, and the leading Tory peers who were opposing the Bill. He conducted the negotiation with tact and judgment, and succeeded in securing good pecuniary terms for the Protestant Episcopal Establishment. Though he had joined in the Letter of the Bishops which conveyed their strong disapproval of the book called _Essays and Reviews_ (whose supposed heretical tendencies roused such a storm in 1861), and had thereby displeased his friends, Temple (afterwards archbishop), Jowett, and Stanley,[20] he joined in the judgment of the Privy Council which in 1863 dismissed the charges against the impugned Essayists. Despite his advocacy of the Bill which in 1874 provided a new procedure to be used against clergymen transgressing the ritual prescribed by law, he discouraged prosecutions, and did his utmost to keep Ritualists as well as moderate Rationalists within the pale of the Church of England. He did not succeed--no one could have succeeded, even though he had spoken with the tongues of men and of angels--in stilling ecclesiastical strife. The controversies of his days still rage, though in a slightly different form. But in refusing to yield to the pressure of any section, in regarding the opinion of the laity rather than that of the clergy, in keeping close to the law yet giving it the widest possible interpretation, he laid down the lines on which the Anglican Established Church can best be defended and upheld. That she will last, as an Establishment, for any very long time, will hardly be expected by those who mark the direction in which thought tends to move all over the civilised world. But Tait's policy and personality have counted for something in prolonging the time-honoured connection of the Anglican Church with the English State.

Perhaps a doubtful service either to the Church or to the State. Yet even those who regret the connection, and who, surveying the long course of Christian history from the days of the Emperor Constantine down to our own, believe that the Christian Church would have been spiritually purer and morally more effective had she never become either the mistress or the servant or the ally of the State, but relied on her divine commission only, may wish that, when the day arrives for the ancient bond to be unloosed, it should be unloosed not through an embittered political struggle, but because the general sentiment of the nation, and primarily of religious men throughout the nation, has come to approve the change.

[19] An admirable life of Archbishop Tait by his son-in-law, Dr. R. T.

Davidson (now Archbishop of Canterbury), and Canon Benham appeared in 1891.

[20] They thought his public action scarcely consistent with the language he had used to Temple in private.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE[21]

When Mr. Anthony Trollope died (December 11, 1882) at the age of sixty-seven, he was the best known of our English writers of fiction, and stood foremost among them if the double test of real merit and wide popularity be applied. Some writers, such as Wilkie Collins, may have commanded a larger sale. One writer at least, Mr. George Meredith, had produced work of far deeper insight and higher imaginative power. But the gifts of Mr. Meredith had then scarcely begun to win recognition, and not one reader knew his name for five who knew Trollope's. So Mr. Thomas Hardy had published what many continue to think his two best stories, but they had not yet caught the eye of the general public. Mrs. Oliphant, high as was the general level of her work, and inexhaustible as her fertility appeared, had not cut her name so deep upon the time as Trollope did. Everything she did was good, nothing superlatively good. No one placed Trollope in the first rank of creative novelists beside d.i.c.kens or Thackeray, or beside George Eliot, who had died two years before. But in the second rank he stood high; and though other novelists may have had as many readers as he, none was in so many ways representative of the general character and spirit of English fiction. He had established his reputation nearly thirty years before, when Thackeray and d.i.c.kens were still in the fulness of their fame; and had maintained it during the zenith of George Eliot's. For more than a generation his readers had come from the best-educated cla.s.ses as well as from those who lack patience or taste for anything heavier than a story of adventure. In this respect he stood above Miss Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, Ouida, and other heroines of the circulating libraries, and also above such more artistic or less sensational writers as William Black, Walter Besant, James Payn, and Whyte Melville. (The school of so-called realistic fiction had scarcely begun to appear.) None of these had, like Trollope, succeeded in making their creations a part of the common thought of cultivated Englishmen; none had, like him, given us characters which we treat as typical men and women, and discuss at a dinner-table as though they were real people. Mrs. Proudie, for instance, the Bishop of Barchester's wife, to take the most obvious instance (though not that most favourable to Trollope, for he produced better portraits than hers), or Archdeacon Grantly, was when Trollope died as familiar a name to English men and women between sixty and thirty years of age as Wilkins Micawber, or Blanche Amory, or Rosamond Lydgate. There was no other living novelist of whose personages the same could be said, and perhaps none since has attained this particular kind of success.

Personally, Anthony Trollope was a bluff, genial, hearty, vigorous man, typically English in his face, his talk, his ideas, his tastes.

His large eyes, which looked larger behind his large spectacles, were full of good-humoured life and force; and though he was neither witty nor brilliant in conversation, he was what is called very good company, having travelled widely, known all sorts of people, and formed views, usually positive views, on all the subjects of the day, views which he was prompt to declare and maintain. There was not much novelty in them--you were disappointed not to find so clever a writer more original--but they were worth listening to for their solid common-sense, tending rather to commonplace sense, and you enjoyed the ardour with which he threw himself into a discussion. Though boisterous and insistent in his talk, he was free from a.s.sumption or conceit, and gave the impression of liking the world he lived in, and being satisfied with his own place in it. Neither did one observe in him that erratic turn which is commonly attributed to literary men. He was a steady and regular worker, who rose every morning between five and six to turn out a certain quant.i.ty of copy for the printer before breakfast, enjoying his work, and fond of his own characters--indeed he declared that he filled his mind with them and saw them moving before him--yet composing a novel just as other people might compose tables of statistics. These methodical habits were to some extent due to his training as a clerk in the Post Office, where he spent the earlier half of his working life, having retired in 1864. He did not neglect his duties there, even when occupied in writing, and claimed to have been the inventor of the pillar letter-box. It was probably in his tours as an inspector of postal deliveries that he obtained that knowledge of rural life which gives reality to his pictures of country society. He turned his Civil Service experiences to account in some of his stories, giving faithful and characteristic sketches, in _The Three Clerks_ and _The Small House at Allington_, of different types of Government officials, a cla.s.s which is much more of a cla.s.s in England than it is in America, though less of a cla.s.s than it is in Germany or France. His favourite amus.e.m.e.nt was hunting, as readers of his novels know, and until his latest years he might have been seen, though a heavy weight, following the hounds in Ess.e.x once or twice a week.

When E. A. Freeman wrote a magazine article denouncing the cruelty of field sports, Trollope replied, defending the amus.e.m.e.nt he loved. Some one said it was a collision of two rough diamonds. But the end was that Freeman invited Trollope to come and stay with him at Wells, and they became great friends.

Like most of his literary contemporaries, he was a politician, and indeed a pretty keen one. He once contested in the Liberal interest--in those days literary men were mostly Liberals--the borough of Beverley in Yorkshire, a corrupt little place, where bribery proved too strong for him. It was thereafter disfranchised as a punishment for its misdeeds; and his costly experiences doubtless suggested the clever electioneering sketches in the story of _Ralph the Heir_. Thackeray also was once a Liberal candidate. He stood for the city of Oxford, and the story was current there for years afterwards how the freemen of the borough (not an exemplary cla.s.s of voters) rose to an unwonted height of virtue by declaring that though they did not understand his speeches or know who he was, they would vote for him, expecting nothing, because he was a friend of Mr. Neate's. Trollope showed his continued interest in public affairs by appearing on the platform at the great meeting in St. James's Hall in December 1876, which was the beginning of a vehement party struggle over the Eastern Question that only ended at the general election of 1880. He was a direct and forcible speaker, who would have made his way had he entered Parliament. But as he had no practical experience of politics either in the House of Commons or as a working member of a party organisation in a city where contests are keen, the pictures of political life which are so frequent in his later tales have not much flavour of reality. They are sketches obviously taken from the outside. Very rarely do even the best writers of fiction succeed in reproducing any special and peculiar kind of life and atmosphere. Of the various stories that purport to describe what goes on in the English Parliament, none gives to those who know the social conditions and habits of the place an impression of truth to nature, and the same has often been remarked with regard to tales of English University life. Trollope, however, with his quick eye for the superficial aspects of any society, might have described the House of Commons admirably had he sat in it himself. He was fond of travel, and between 1862 and 1880 visited the United States, the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa, about all of which he wrote books which, if hardly of permanent value, were fresh, vigorous, and eminently readable, conveying a definite and generally correct impression of the more obvious social and economic phenomena he found then existing.

His account of the United States, for instance, is excellent, and did something to make the Americans forgive the asperity with which his mother had described her experiences there many years before.

Trollope's travel sketches are as much superior in truthfulness to Froude's descriptions of the same regions as they are inferior in the allurements of style.

The old cla.s.sification of novels, based on the two most necessary elements of a drama, divided them into novels of plot and novels of character. To these we have of late years added novels of incident or adventure, novels of conversation, novels of manners, not to speak of "novels with a purpose," which are sermons or pamphlets in disguise. No one doubted to which of these categories Trollope's work should be referred. There was in his stories as little plot as a story can well have. The conversations never beamed with humour like that of Scott, nor glittered with aphorisms like those of George Meredith. The incidents carried the reader pleasantly along, but seldom surprised him by any ingenuity of contrivance. Character there was, and, indeed, great fertility in the creation of character, for there is hardly one of the tales in which three or four at least of the personages do not stand out as people whom you would know again if you met them years after. But the conspicuous merit of Trollope's novels, in the eyes of his own countrymen, is their value as pictures of contemporary manners. Here he may claim to have been surpa.s.sed by no writer of his own generation. d.i.c.kens, with all his great and splendid gifts, did not describe the society he lived in. His personages were too unusual and peculiar to speak and act and think like the ordinary men and women of the nineteenth century; nor would a foreigner, however much he might enjoy the exuberant humour and dramatic power with which they are presented, learn from them much about the ways and habits of the average Englishman. The everyday life to which the stories are most true is the life of the lower middle cla.s.s in London; and some one has observed that although this cla.s.s changes less quickly than the cla.s.ses above it, it is already unlike that which d.i.c.kens saw when in the 'thirties he was a police-court reporter. Critics have, indeed, said that d.i.c.kens was too great a painter to be a good photographer, but the two arts are not incompatible, as appears from the skill with which Walter Scott, for instance, portrayed the peasantry of his own country in _The Antiquary_. Thackeray, again, though he has described certain sections of the upper or upper middle cla.s.s with far more power and delicacy than Trollope ever reached, does not go beyond those sections, and has little to tell us about the middle cla.s.s generally, still less about the cla.s.ses beneath them. Trollope was thoroughly at home in the English middle cla.s.s and also (though less perfectly) in the upper cla.s.s; and his pictures are all the more true to life because there is not that vein of stern or cynical reflection which runs through Thackeray, and makes us think less of the story than of the moral. Trollope usually has a moral, but it is so obvious, so plainly and quietly put, that it does not distract attention from the minor incidents and little touches of every day which render the sketches lifelike. If even his best-drawn characters are not far removed from the commonplace this helps to make them fairly represent the current habits and notions of their time. They are the same people we meet in the street or at a dinner-party; and they are mostly seen under no more exciting conditions than those of a hunting meet, or a lawn-tennis match, or an afternoon tea. They are flirting or talking for effect, or scheming for some petty temporary end; they are not under the influence of strong pa.s.sions, or forced into striking situations, like the leading characters in Charlotte Bronte's or George Eliot's novels; and for this reason again they represent faithfully the ordinary surface of English upper and upper middle cla.s.s society: its prejudices, its little pharisaisms and hypocrisies, its sn.o.bbishness, its worship of conventionalities, its aloofness from or condescension to those whom it deems below its own level; and therewith also its public spirit, its self-helpfulness, its neighbourliness, its respect for honesty and straightforwardness, its easy friendliness of manner towards all who stand within the sacred pale of social recognition. Nor, again, has any one more skilfully noted and set down those transient tastes and fashions which are, so to speak, the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of the dress, and which, transient though they are, and quickly forgotten by contemporaries, will have an interest for one who, a century or two hence, feels the same curiosity about our manners as we feel about those of the subjects of King George the Third. That Trollope will be read at all fifty years after his death one may hesitate to predict, considering how comparatively few in the present generation read Richardson, or Fielding, or Miss Edgeworth, or Charlotte Bronte, and how much reduced is the number of those who read even Walter Scott and Thackeray. But whoever does read Trollope in 1930 will gather from his pages better than from any others an impression of what everyday life was like in England in the "middle Victorian" period.

The aspects of that life were already, when his latest books were written, beginning to change, and the features he drew are fast receding into history. Even the clergy of 1852-1862 are no longer, except in quiet country districts, the same as the clergy we now see.

People have often compared the personal impressions which eminent writers make on those who talk to them with the impressions previously derived from their works. Thomas Carlyle and Robert Browning used to be taken as two instances representing opposite extremes. Carlyle always talked in character: had there been phonographs in his days, the phonographed "record" might have been printed as part of one of his books. Browning, on the other hand, seemed unlike what his poems had made a reader expect: it was only after a long _tete-a-tete_ with him that the poet whose mind had been learned through his works stood revealed. Trollope at first caused a similar though less marked surprise. This bluff burly man did not seem the kind of person who would trace with a delicate touch the sunlight sparkling on, or a gust of temper ruffling, the surface of a youthful soul in love. Upon further knowledge one perceived that the features of Trollope's talent, facile invention, quick observation, and a strong common-sense view of things, with little originality or intensity, were really the dominant features of his character as expressed in talk. Still, though the man was more of a piece with his books than he had seemed, one could never quite recognise in him the delineator of Lily Dale.

As a painter of manners he recalls two of his predecessors--one greater, one less great than himself. In his limitations and in his fidelity to the aspects of daily life as he saw them, he resembles Miss Austen. He is inferior to her in delicacy of portraiture, in finish, in atmosphere. No two of his books can be placed on a level with _Emma_ and _Persuasion_. On the other hand, while he has done for the years 1850-1870 what Miss Burney did for 1770-1790, most critics will place him above her both in fertility and in naturalness. Her characters are apt either to want colour, like the heroines of _Evelina_ and _Cecilia_, or to be so exaggerated, like Mr. Briggs and Miss Larolles, as to approach the grotesque. Trollope is a realist in the sense of being, in all but a few of his books, on the lines of normal humanity, though he is seldom strong enough to succeed, when he pierces down to the bed-rock of human nature, in rendering the primal pa.s.sions either solemn or terrible. Like Miss Austen, he attains actuality by observation rather than by imagination, hardly ever entering the sphere of poetry.

His range was not wide, for he could not present either grand characters or tragical situations, any more than he could break out into the splendid humour of d.i.c.kens. His wings never raised him far above the level floor of earth. But within that limited range he had surprising fertility. His clerical portrait-gallery is the most complete that any English novelist has given us. No two faces are exactly alike, and yet all are such people as one might see any day in the pulpit. So, again, there is scarcely one of his stories in which a young lady is not engaged, formally or practically, to two men at the same time, or one man more or less committed to two women; yet no story repeats exactly the situation, or raises the problem of honour and duty in quite the same form as it appears in the stories that went before. Few people who have written so much have so little appeared to be exhausting their invention.

It must, however, be admitted that Trollope's fame might have stood higher if he had written less. The public which had been delighted with his earlier groups of novels, and especially with that group in which _The Warden_ comes first and _Barchester Towers_ second, began latterly to tire of what they had come to deem the mannerisms of their favourite, and felt that they now knew the compa.s.s of his gifts.

Partly, perhaps, because he feared to be always too like himself, he once or twice attempted to represent more improbable situations and exceptional personages. But the attempt was not successful. He lost his touch of ordinary life without getting into any higher region of poetical truth; and in his latest stories he had begun to return to his earlier and better manner.

New tendencies, moreover, embodying themselves in new schools, were already beginning to appear. R. L. Stevenson as leader of the school of adventure, Mr. Henry James as the apostle of the school of psychological a.n.a.lysis, soon to be followed by Mr. Kipling with a type of imaginative directness distinctively his own, were beginning to lead minds and tastes into other directions. The influence of France was more felt than it had been when Trollope began to write. And what a contrast between Trollope's manner and that of his chief French contemporaries, such as Octave Feuillet or Alphonse Daudet or Guy de Maupa.s.sant! The French novelists, be their faculty of invention greater or less, at any rate studied their characters with more care than English writers had usually shown. The characters were fewer, almost as few as in a cla.s.sical drama; and the whole action of the story is carefully subordinated to the development of these characters, and the placing of them in a critical position which sets their strength and weakness in the fullest light. There was more of a judicious adaptation of the parts to the whole in French fiction than in ours, and therefore more unity of impression was attained.

Trollope, no doubt, set a bad example in this respect. He crowded his canvas with figures; he pursued the fortunes of three or four sets of people at the same time, caring little how the fate of the one set affected that of the others; he made his novel a sort of chronicle which you might open anywhere and close anywhere, instead of a drama animated by one idea and converging towards one centre. He neglected the art which uses incidents small in themselves to lead up to the _denoument_ and make it more striking. He took little pains with his diction, seeming not to care how he said what he had to say. These defects strike those who turn over his pages to-day. But to those who read him in the 'fifties or 'sixties, the carelessness was redeemed by, or forgotten in, the vivacity with which the story moved, the freshness and faithfulness of its pictures of character and manners.

[21] Trollope's autobiography, published in 1883, is a good specimen of self-portraiture, candid, straightforward, and healthy, and leaves an agreeable impression of the writer. Dr. Richard Garnett has written well of him in the _Dictionary of National Biography_.

JOHN RICHARD GREEN[22]

John Richard Green was born in Oxford on 12th December 1837, and educated first at Magdalen College School, and afterwards, for a short time, at a private tutor's. He was a singularly quick and bright boy, and at sixteen obtained by compet.i.tion a scholarship at Jesus College, Oxford, where he began to reside in 1856. The members of that college were in those days almost entirely Welshmen, and thereby somewhat cut off from the rest of the University. They saw little of men in other colleges, so that a man might have a reputation for ability in his own society without gaining any in the larger world of Oxford. It so happened with Green. Though his few intimate friends perceived his powers, they had so little intercourse with the rest of the University, either by way of breakfasts and wine-parties, or at the University debating society, or in athletic sports, that he remained unknown even to those among his contemporaries who were interested in the same things, and would have most enjoyed his acquaintance. The only eminent person who seems to have appreciated and influenced him was Dean Stanley, then Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Canon of Christ Church. Green had attended Stanley's lectures, and Stanley, whose kindly interest in young men never failed, was struck by him, and had some share in turning his studies towards history. He graduated in 1860, having refused to compete for honours, because he had not received from those who were then tutors of the college the recognition to which he was ent.i.tled.

In 1860 he was ordained, and became curate in London at St. Barnabas, King's Square, whence, after two years' experience, and one or two temporary engagements, including the sole charge of a parish in Hoxton, he was appointed in 1865 to the inc.u.mbency of St. Philip's, Stepney, a district church in one of the poorest parts of London, where the vicar's income was ill-proportioned to the claims which needy parishioners made upon him. Here he worked with zeal and a.s.siduity for about three years, gaining an insight into the condition and needs of the poor which scholars and historians seldom obtain. He learnt, in fact, to know men, and the real forces that sway them; and he used to say in later life that he was conscious how much this had helped him in historical writing. Gibbon, as every one knows, makes a similar remark about his experience as a captain in the Hampshire militia.

Green threw the whole force of his nature into the parish schools, spending some part of every day in them; he visited incessantly, and took an active part in the movement for regulating and controlling private charity which led to the formation of the Charity Organisation Society. An outbreak of cholera and period of distress among the poor which occurred during his inc.u.mbency drew warm-hearted men from other parts of London to give their help to the clergy of the East End.

Edward Denison, who was long affectionately remembered by many who knew him in Oxford and London, chose Green's parish to work in, and the two friends confirmed one another in their crusade against indiscriminate and demoralising charity. It was at this time that Green, who spent upon the parish nearly all that he received as vicar, found himself obliged to earn some money by other means, and began to write for the _Sat.u.r.day Review_. The addition of this labour to the daily fatigues of his parish duties told on his health, which had always been delicate, and made him willingly accept from Archbishop Tait, who had early marked and learned to value his abilities, the post of librarian at Lambeth. He quitted Stepney, and never took any other clerical work.

Although physical weakness was one of the causes which compelled this step, there was also another. He had been brought up in Tractarian views, and is said to have been at one time on the point of entering the Church of Rome. This tendency pa.s.sed off, and before he went to St. Philip's he had become a Broad Churchman, and was much influenced by the writings of Mr. F. D. Maurice, whom he knew and used frequently to meet, and whose pure and n.o.ble character, even more perhaps than his preaching, had profoundly impressed him. However, his restless mind did not stop long at that point. The same tendency which had carried him away from Tractarianism made him feel less and less at home in the ministry of the Church of England, and would doubtless have led him, even had his health been stronger, to withdraw from clerical duties. After a few years his friends ceased to address letters to him under the usual clerical epithet; but he continued to interest himself in ecclesiastical affairs, and always retained a marked dislike to Nonconformity. Aversions sometimes outlive attachments.

On leaving Stepney he went to live in lodgings in Beaumont Street, Marylebone, and divided his time between Lambeth and literary work.

He now during several years wrote a good deal for the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, and his articles were among the best which then appeared in that organ. The most valuable of them were reviews of historical books, and descriptions from the historical point of view of cities or other remarkable places, especially English and French towns. Some of these are masterpieces. Other articles were on social, or what may be called occasional, topics, and attracted much notice at the time from their gaiety and lightness of touch, which sometimes seemed to pa.s.s into flippancy. He never wrote upon politics, nor was he in the ordinary sense of the word a journalist, for with the exception of these social articles, his work was all done in his own historical field, and done with as much care and pains as others would bestow on the composition of a book. Upon this subject I may quote the words of one of his oldest and most intimate friends (Mr. Stopford Brooke), who knew all he did in those days.

The real history of this writing for the _Sat.u.r.day Review_ has much personal, pathetic, and literary interest.

It was when he was vicar of St. Philip's, Stepney, that he wrote the most. The income of the place was, I think, 300 a year, and the poverty of the parish was very great. Mr. Green spent every penny of this income on the parish. And he wrote--in order to live, and often when he was wearied out with the work of the day and late into the night--two, and often three, articles a week for the _Sat.u.r.day Review_. It was less of a strain to him than it would have been to many others, because he wrote with such speed, and because his capacity for rapidly throwing his subject into form and his memory were so remarkable. But it was a severe strain, nevertheless, for one who, at the time, had in him the beginnings of the disease of which he died.

I was staying with him once for two days, and the first night he said to me, "I have three articles to write for the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, and they must all be done in thirty-six hours." "What are they?" I said; "and how have you found time to think of them?"

"Well," he answered, "one is on a volume of Freeman's _Norman Conquest_, another is a 'light middle,' and the last on the history of a small town in England; and I have worked them all into form as I was walking to-day about the parish and in London."

One of these studies was finished before two o'clock in the morning, and while I talked to him; the other two were done the next day. It is not uncommon to reach such speed, but it is very uncommon to combine this speed with literary excellence of composition, and with permanent and careful knowledge. The historical reviews were of use to, and gratefully acknowledged by, his brother historians, and frequently extended, in two or three numbers of the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, to the length of an article in a magazine. I used to think them masterpieces of reviewing, and their one fault was the fault which was then frequent in that _Review_--over-vehemence in slaughtering its foes. Such reviewing cannot be fairly described as journalism. It was an historical scholar speaking to scholars.

Another cla.s.s of articles written by Mr. Green were articles on towns in England, France, or Italy. I do not know whether it was he or Mr. Freeman who introduced this custom of bringing into a short s.p.a.ce the historical aspect of a single town or of a famous building, and showing how the town or the building recorded its own history, and how it was linked to general history, but Mr.

Green, at least, began it very early in his articles on Oxford. At any rate, it was his habit, at this time, whenever he travelled in England, France, or Italy, to make a study of any town he visited.

Articles of this kind--and he had them by fifties in his head--formed the second line of what has been called his journalism. I should prefer to call them contributions to history.

They are totally different in quality from ordinary journalism.

They are short historical essays.