THE BOYHOOD OF ANTHONY TROLLOPE.
hardly know anywhere a bit of biography more puzzling than Anthony Trollope's account of himself during his boyhood, youth, and early manhood. Why was he so utterly misunderstood by everybody with whom he came in contact ? That he was so misunderstood he affirms again and again, with a persistency as remarkable Cs the absence of bitter- ness with which he describes his torments, alleging that he was. always fairly good, that he would have liked other boys had he been allowed, that he tried all he could to be an efficient public. servant. That he should have been misunderstood. by school, masters is nothing wonderful. As a rule, though schoolmasters are very proud of successful pupils, and sometimes believe.that they predicted success for them, they do not understand them very well. How should they P They see the boys for very short periods, they talk to them very little, and they inspire by their very presence a sense of constraint, which is fatal to revelations of inner character. This was especially the case in the old days, when punishment was so frequent, for the boy could seldom shake off an awe, like that of the private for the Colonel, which sometimes survived the state of pupilage, and lasted far down into middle life. Schoolmasters can judge of intellectual power, but not of character, unless it is very obvious ; andeven as regards the former, they are under an almost irresistible temptation to confuse quickness with mental force. A boy's quickness lightens the master's labour so greatly as to create an unconscious gratitude, and it is the boy who perceives, rather than the boy who thinks, who strikes the teacher • as being " full of promise." That successive masters, there- fore, should have despised Anthony Trollope does not sus. prise us. They saw before them, doubtless, a heavy las14 very badly dressed, very much shut up in himself, who did not play, and did not learn, and accepted. endless floggings with a dogged resolution to endure, but to make no change. Such a demeanour in those days was held to require flogging, and seeps& ingly they flogged—flogged excessively, flogged every day, and often more than once a day—with the usual result of making the victim more dogged than ever, as his only available defence against oppression. But why did the other boys understand nothing of the bright intelligence which had come among them P The cause was not caste feeling, for Anthony's brothers were not shunned as he was, and Anthony himself had many of the quali- ties which usually secure boy-favour. He was brave, and strong, and enduring; he neglected his lessons diligently; he was flogged often, without whining; he panted for popularity; and he thrashed an opponent so severely that he was sent home to be cured. He ought to have been a hero among his kind, and instead of that he was cut, browbeaten, and bullied, until his life was a burden to him ; and he looked back upon his school-days as the unhappiest period of his life. Why ? His own explanation is that he was impecunious, badly dressed, and neglectful of his own appearance; but boys have never cared much about those drawbacks, which, again, Trollope probably exaggerated. These could not be the reasons which provoked his own brother to thrash him every day with a thick stick, by way of discipline. Nor could they have influenced his superiors and room-mates at the Post Office so greatly that for seven mortal years he was a kind of pariah in his office ; made no friends, found no acquaintances, and was not only despised, but so disliked by his superiors that on his exportation to Ireland, Colonel Maberly, a man of unusual ability, went out of his way to give him a bad character, which might have caused his summary dismissal.
The story would be a strange one, if told of any man who subse- quently succeeded, but told of Anthony Trollope it is little less than wonderful. Of the eight or nine hundred men and boys with whom he came in intimate contact, not one liked him, not one admired him, and not one had even a glimmering perception that in the heavy lad were exceptional powers of a rare kind. His very mother—surely a keen observer, if ever one lived, and decidedly kind to him in his clerkly days—did not believe in him a bit, agreed to his going to', Ireland as the least hopeless thing he could do, and when she promised to try and sell his first novel, one of the cleverest he ever wrote, thought it best not to read it, lest she should think it so bad as to repent her of her promise. The misunderstanding was universal, yet it is to us at least almost impossible to believe that Anthony Trollope, besides being essentially upright, kindly, and affectionate, can ever have been anything but unusually able. His perception, not only of character, but of what any person would do or think in a given set of circumstances, was quite perfect, —was, as we believe, an inheritance from his mother, who painted par- ticular forms of vulgarity as they never were painted before, and must have existed in him at all times; yet no one ever detected it. He had even that rarer gift of creating character, for he described Archdeacon Grantley before he had ever seen arty one like him, but the faculty was never suspected. He must have been raconteur from his cradle, yet his mother never guessed it; and his fellow-boys, who value this accomplishment above most others, and always hold it to mark a lad with something in him, considered Trollope a dullard. He was entirely without that sort of mental stutter which so often for a time conceals ability. He thought with unusual clearness, decided with unusual rapidity, and expressed himself with a force which, in later life, drove his superiors frantic. He was, too, not only a man of genius, but a man of energy, ability, and manliness, such as are usually perceived at once. Nothing is more certain about Anthony Trollope than that he could direct, organise, make men go his way, where he had authority, and not their own, unless, indeed, it be an untiring industry, which was a nature in him, and which seemed to invest him with twice the usual length of life. Add ambition, ex- cessive physical activity, and unusual daring, and we have a man whom one would, a priori, hold to be sure of early recognition; yet his family despaired of him, his school- fellows mocked him, his room-mates in the Post Office avoided him, and he was held by his superiors to be one of the Queen's worst bargains. And finally, in a day, as it were, it all dropped off. In Ireland, from the first, his chief took to him, and gave him difficult work ; he found friends, he found a wife, and he found such popularity among women, that when he married he had to change his quarters, the exasperation of those left forlorn was so general. What was the cause of it all P Be A remembered that not only did not Trollope suddenly find himself in a higher atmosphere, but that he went to Ireland, where, if anywhere on earth, the dullard is neither popular nor believed in.
We cannot offer a complete explanation, but the story of
Anthony Trollope's life strengthens a suspicion, roused by some other biographies, that there does exist in some men a mental husk or shell out of which they grow, as they grow out of physical weakness or uncouthness. It is not that they conceal their powers, or neglect their powers; but that the powers are, for effective purposes, not there, or rather are grovin over with an impervious husk. The germ, of course, must exist, but it may for effective purposes be so crushed as to be tempc- rarily dead. Such men's minds do not simply grow, they break through also. Something has to be taken off or something im- parted before the faculties are, in the ordinary sense, faculties at all, powers which can be used at will. What it is that happens in such cases, no one can say; but that it does happen is very certain, though more frequently to women than men; and there is, as is evident from the analogy of sleep, no reason why it should not happen. Indeed, as we write, a correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette, who is evidently trying to be true, describes it as happening to himself :—" I was born north of the Tweed Death too soon appeared in my home, and I was cast out on what I found to be a cheerless and callous world. I began to question fate, and wondered why my lot should be so hard. I became fond of solitude. I did not even dream of the future. I could see nothing beyond the cruel present, with its daily, deadening drudgery. But there came a change. I was on my way one clear and sharp winter night to my lonely garret lodging, when I paused on the bridge across which I had to pass. I leaned over the parapet, and was gazing down on the black depths below, when suddenly I experienced a mental change which altered the whole current of my being. I could not account for it nor analyse it then, and cannot do so now; but there it was. A wide vista of hope and possibility was spread out before me. I seemed-in an instant to have entered on a new and nobler stage of life. I had suddenly awakened to a perception of the beautiful, although the light was yet dim." Why should not the true explanation of Anthony Trollope's boyhood be that he, the clear-sighted novelist, able man of business, and successful public servant, actually was, till he was twenty-five, for all around him, a disagreeable dullard P
Previous page
