Frances Milton, so well known in English literature under her married name of Trollope, was born at Heathfield Parsonage in Hampshire, in 1787. She received, under her father's supervision, a very careful education, and developed her proclivities for literary composition at an early age. She was but eighteen when she accepted the hand of Mr. Thomas A. Trollope, a barrister, and the cares and duties of married life for some years diverted her energies into a different channel. The true bent of her talents—a sharp, bold, and somewhat coarse satire—she did not discover until after her visit to the United States (1829-1831). There she conceived an antipathy to American manners and customs, which seems to have awakened her powers of sarcasm, and resulted in her first publication,
"Domestic Life of the Americans." The peculiarities she had found so obnoxious she sketched with a strong, rough hand; and the truth of her drawing was proved by the wrathful feelings which it provoked in the breasts of its victims.
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Reading it now, we are naturally inclined to think it a caricature and an exaggeration; but it is only fair to remember that, since its appearance half a century ago, a great change has come over the temper of American society. The great fault of Mrs. Trollope is, that she is always a critic and never a judge. She looks at everything through the magnifying lens of a microscope. And, again, it must be admitted that she is often vulgar; whatever the want of refinement in American society, it is almost paralleled by the want of refinement in her lively, but coarsely-coloured pages. For the rest, she is a shrewd observer; has a considerable insight into human nature, especially on its "seamy side"; and if a hard hitter, generally keeps her good temper, and does not resent a fair stroke from an antagonist. As a humorist she takes high rank: there are scenes in her novels, as well as in her records of travel, which are marked by a real and vigorous, if somewhat masculine, fun. Perhaps some of her defects are due to the influences among which she lived—that ultra Toryism of the Castlereagh school which resented each movement of reform, each impulse of progress, as a direct revolutionary conspiracy against everything approved and established by "the wisdom of our ancestors"—that narrowness of thought and shallowness of feeling which resisted all change, even when its necessity was most apparent.
That Mrs. Trollope's prejudices sometimes prevail over her sense of justice is apparent in the ridicule she lavishes upon the rigid observance of the Sabbath by
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the American people. She forgot that they inherited it from the English Puritans. If her evidence may be accepted, it amounted in her day to a bigotry as implacable as that of the straitest sect of the Scotch Presbyterians a generation ago. She tells an anecdote to the following effect:—A New York tailor sold, on a Sunday, some clothes to a sailor whose ship was on the point of sailing. The Guild of Tailors immediately made their erring brother the object of the most determined persecution, and succeeded in ruining him. A lawyer who had undertaken his defence lost all his clients. The nephew of this lawyer sought admission to the bar. His certificates were perfectly regular; but on his presenting himself he was rejected, with the curt explanation that no man bearing the name of F
—— (his uncle's name) would be admitted. We need hardly add that such fanaticism as this would not be possible now in the United States.
Mrs. Trollope's animadversions are obsolete on many other subjects. Much of her indignation was necessarily, and very justly bestowed on the then flourishing institution of domestic slavery; but that foul blot on her scutcheon America wiped out in blood, the blood of thousands of her bravest children. Her criticism upon manners and social customs has also, to a great extent, lost its power of application. Of its liveliness and pungency we may give, however, a specimen; her description of the day's avocations of a Philadelphian lady of the first class:—
"This lady," she says, "shall be the wife of a senator
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and a lawyer in the highest repute and practice. She has a very handsome house, with white marble steps and door-posts, and a delicate silver knocker and door-handle; she has very handsome drawing-rooms, very handsomely furnished (there is a side-board in one of them, but it is very handsome, and has very handsome decanters and cut-glass water jugs upon it); she has a very handsome carriage and a very handsome free black coachman; she is always very handsomely dressed; and, moreover, she is very handsome herself.
"She rises, and her first hour is spent in the scrupulously nice arrangement of her dress; she descends to her parlour neat, stiff, and silent; her breakfast is brought in by her free black footman; she eats her fried bean and her salt fish, and drinks her coffee in silence, while her husband reads one newspaper, and puts another under his elbow; and then, perhaps, she washes the cups and saucers. Her carriage is ordered at eleven; till that hour she is employed in the pastry-room, her snow-white apron protecting her mouse-coloured silk. Twenty minutes before her carriage should appear she retires to her chamber, as she calls it, shakes, and folds up her still snow-white apron, smooths her rich dress, and with nice care sets on her elegant bonnet, and all the handsome et cætera; then walks downstairs, just at the moment that her free black coachman announces to her free black footman that the carriage waits. She steps into it, and gives the word, "Drive to the Dorcas Society." Her footman stays at home to clean the knives, but her
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coachman can trust his horses while he opens the carriage door, and his lady not being accustomed to a hand or an arm, gets out very safely without, though one of her own is occupied by a work basket, and the other by a large roll of all those indescribable matters which ladies take as offerings to Dorcas societies. She enters the parlour appropriated for the meeting, and finds seven other ladies, very like herself, and takes her place among them; she presents her contribution, which is accepted with a gentle circular smile, and her parings of broad-cloth, her ends of ribbon, her gilt paper, and her minikin pins, are added to the parings of broad-cloth, the ends of ribbon, the gilt paper, and the minikin pins with which the table is already covered; she also produces from her basket three ready-made pin-cushions, four ink-wipers, seven paper matches, and a paste-board watch-case; these are welcomed with acclamations, and the youngest lady present deposits them carefully on shelves, amid a prodigious quantity of similar articles. She then produces her thimble, and asks for work; it is presented to her, and the eight ladies all stitch together for some hours. Their talk is of priests and of missions; of the profits of their last sale, of their hopes from the next; of the doubt whether young Mr. This or young Mr. That should receive the fruits of it to fit him out for Siberia; of the very ugly bonnet seen at church on Sabbath morning; of the very handsome preacher who performed on Sabbath afternoon; and of the very large collection made on Sabbath evening. This lasts till
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three, when the carriage again appears, and the lady and her basket return home; she mounts to her chamber, carefully sets aside her bonnet and its appurtenances, puts on her scalloped black silk apron, walks into the kitchen to see that all is right, then into the parlour, where, having cast a careful glance over the table prepared for dinner, she sits down, work in hand, to await her spouse. He comes, shakes hands with her, spits, and dines. The conversation is not much, and ten minutes suffices for the dinner: fruit and toddy, the newspaper, and the work-bag succeed. In the evening the gentleman, being a savant, goes to the Wister Society, and afterwards plays a snug rubber at a neighbour's. The lady receives at ten a young missionary and three members of the Dorcas Society.
And so ends her day."
A harmless day, after all! No doubt such days were spent by Philadelphian ladies exactly as Mrs. Trollope describes them; no doubt such days are possible in American society now, and, for that matter, in English society also. But it is not less certain that then and now many women in Philadelphia spent and spend their time with a wiser activity, and more to the advantage of themselves and their fellow creatures. The fault of the satirist is, that he reasons from particulars to generals, whereas the sagacious observer will reason from generals to particulars.
The manners and customs, the idiosyncrasies of a class will probably be the manners and customs and idiosyncrasies of most of its members; but it by no means follows that from two or three individuals
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we can safely predict the general characteristics of the class to which they belong. In a regiment famous for its bravery we may unquestionably conclude that the majority of the rank and file will be brave men; but a few may be composed of less heroic stuff. Would it be just to take these as the types of the regiment?
After an unsuccessful attempt to make a home in America, Mrs. Trollope returned to England, with the world to begin again, a husband incapacitated for work by ill-health, and children who needed aid, and were too young to give any. In such circumstances many would have appealed to the sympathy of the public, but Mrs. Trollope was a courageous woman, and preferred to rely upon her own resources. She followed her first book, the success of which was immediate and very great, by a novel entitled "The Refugee in America," in which the plot is ill-constructed, and the characters are crudely drawn, but the writer's caustic humour lends animation to the page.
"The Abbess," a novel, was her third effort; and then, in the following year, came another record of travel,
"Belgium and Western Germany in 1833." Her Conservative instincts found less to offend them in Continental than in American society, and her sketches, therefore, while not less vivid, are much better humoured than in her American book. Some offences against the "minor morals" incur her condemnation; but the evil which most provokes her is the incessant tobacco smoking of the Germans, against
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which she protests as vehemently as did James I. in his celebrated "Counterblast."
Three years later she produced her "Paris and the Parisians," of which M. Cortambret speaks as "crowning her reputation," and as receiving almost as warm a welcome in France as in England. The character, customs, and literature of the French furnish the theme of a series of letters, in which the clever and vivacious writer never fails to charm even those whom she does not convince. It is curious to read this book, published in 1836, and to compare the state of society in those days with that which now exists. What changes, in half a century, have been wrought in the national character! There seems in the present a certain dulness, greyness, and indifference,—or is it rather an acquired reticence and self-control?—which contrast very strikingly with the feverish, agitated, tumultuous past, so partial to fantastic crotchets, but so sympathetic also with great doctrines and generous ideas.
Mrs. Trollope records as an historical and noteworthy phrase, much in vogue in 1835, "Young France," and describes it as one of those cabalistic formulæ which assume to give expression to a grand, terrible, sublime, and volcanic idea. What shall we say now-a-days of these two brief monosyllabic words, in which the strong generation of the Revolution and the First Empire reposed so haughty a confidence? What shall we say of them to a disillusionized youth, who no longer believe in anything, and know neither faith nor culture, except in
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one thing, money—for whom Sport and the Bourse have replaced the literature which strengthened and developed the faculties, and the politics which made men citizens?
Mrs. Trollope preserves two other words, which first rose into popularity in 1835—the words rococo and décousu. All things which bore the stamp of the principles and sentiments of former generations were branded as rococo. Whatever partook of the extravagance of the Romantic school was termed décousu. Eventually this latter word was abandoned as wanting in vigour, and at first that of débraillé was substituted; afterwards that of Bohemian, which, despite the injurious insinuation it conveyed, has been accepted and adopted by a considerable school. Mrs. Trollope avers that, when she visited France, it was impossible for two persons to carry on a conversation for a quarter of an hour without introducing the words rococo and décousu a score of times. They turned up as frequently as "the head of Charles I." in Mr. Dick's discourse. And, she adds, with her usual causticity, that if one were to classify the population into two great divisions, it would be impossible to define them more expressively than by these two words.
That Mrs. Trollope had no sympathy with the Romantic school will not excite surprise. Lamennais and Victor Hugo she stigmatizes as décousus of the worst kind, and places them in the same rank as Robespierre. The genius of Victor Hugo, so vast, so elevated, and so profound, she could not understand; she could see
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only its irregularities, like a certain "æsthete" who, when contemplating the water-floods of Niagara, directed his attention to a supposed defect in their curve! Her methodical, matter-of-fact mind was wholly unable to measure the proportions of the gigantic genius of the author of "Nôtre Dame," and hence she discharges at him a volley of denunciatory epithets, borrowed always from the severest classic style—"the champion of vice," "the chronicler of sin," "the historian of shame and misery." She could not believe that in all his writings it was possible to discover a single honourable, innocent, and wholesome thought. Sin was the Muse which he invoked; horror attended his footsteps; thousands of monsters served as his escort, and furnished him with the originals of the "disgusting"
portraits which he passed his life in painting. This was plain speaking; but Mrs. Trollope attacking Victor Hugo is one of those rebellions on the part of the infinitely little against the infinitely great which move the laughter of gods and men.
In truth, she is seldom happy in her literary criticisms. She speaks of Béranger as "a meteor," yet of no French poet has the renown more steadily increased. She is constrained to admit that the great people's poet, whose fame will endure when that of most of his contemporaries has passed into dull oblivion, is a man of a fine genius, but she will not yield to him that foremost place which posterity, nevertheless, has adjudged to belong to him. Of Thiers and Mignet she admits the merits
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as historians, but characterizes their philosophy as narrow and shabby.
But from literature let us turn to society, in which she is easier to please. Whether it belongs to the character of the people, or whether it is but a transitory feature in the physiognomy of the age, she declares herself unable to determine; but nothing strikes her so forcibly as the air of gaiety and indifference with which the French discuss those great subjects that involve the world's destinies. We are inclined to think, however, that of late years a more serious spirit has prevailed. On the other hand, we cannot recognize as in existence now that exquisite courtesy of the French husband towards his wife which moved Mrs. Trollope's admiration. Unless recent observers err greatly, and unless the stage has ceased to reflect the tone and manners of society, a great change for the worst has taken place in this respect, due, perhaps, to the combined influence of speculation on the Bourse, smoking, and the coarser code of morals introduced from the North. That elaborate and delicate gallantry was a kind of blague for the whole nation; it made every Frenchman a knight of chivalry. No doubt it served as a cloak for many vices, but we have the vices still, without the cloak! "I should be surprised," says Mrs. Trollope, "if I heard it said that a Frenchman of good education had ever spoken rudely to his wife!"
To one of the worst enemies of the old-fashioned courtesy she makes a passing allusion, while hoping
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cordially that the ladies will easily conquer it—we mean Positivism. If the women of France, she says, remain true to their vocation, they will eventually combat with success the ever-increasing partiality of their compatriots for the positive, and will prevent each salon from becoming, like the boulevard of the Café Tortoni, a petite Bourse.
Under the second Empire, however, women were scarcely less guilty than the men, and the mania of speculation raged in almost every boudoir. It is too early to decide dogmatically whether in this all-important branch of morals the Republic has effected an improvement; but assuredly the improvement, if it has begun, has not extended very far or very deep.
In 1835 the Parisians sometimes fell to blows in support of a philosophical principle, and would incur almost any hazard to hear a favourite orator or to "assist" at the representation of a drama by one of their own pet authors.
Half a century later and they hurry to horse races, and fight one another for a caprice. In 1835 they committed suicide through love or sentiment; now they blow out their brains when their speculations have suddenly collapsed, some bubble burst.
Of the numerous suicides which half a century ago were recorded in the newspapers, Mrs. Trollope furnishes an example. Two young people, scarcely out of their childhood, went into a restaurant and ordered a dinner of extraordinary delicacy and not less extraordinary cost, returning at the appointed time to partake of it. They
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finished it with a good appetite, and with the enjoyment natural to their age. They called for champagne, and emptied the bottle, holding each other's hand. Not the slightest shadow of sadness obscured their gaiety, which was prolonged, almost noisy, and apparently genuine. After dinner came coffee, a mouthful of brandy, and the bill. One of them with his finger pointed out the total to the other, and both at the same time broke out into a fit of laughter. After they had drank the coffee they told the waiter that they wished to speak to the proprietor, who came immediately, supposing that they wished to complain of some article as overcharged.
But instead, the elder of the two began by declaring that the dinner was excellent, and went on to say that this was the more fortunate because it would assuredly be the last they should eat in this world; that as for the bill, he must be good enough to excuse payment, inasmuch as neither of them possessed a farthing. He explained that they would never have played him so sorry a joke had it not been that, finding themselves overwhelmed by the troubles and anxieties of the world, they had resolved to enjoy a good meal once more, and then to take leave of existence.
The first portion of their project they had satisfactorily carried out, thanks to the excellence of Monsieur's cuisine and cellar, and the second would not be long delayed, since the coffee and the brandy had been mixed with a drug which would help them to pay all their debts.
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The landlord was furious. He did not believe a word of the young man's oration, and declared he would hand them over to the commissary of police. Eventually he allowed them to leave on their furnishing him with their address.
The following day, impelled half by a wish to get his money, and half by a fear that they might have spoken in earnest, he repaired to the address they had given him, and learned that the two unfortunate young men had been found that morning lying on a bed which one of them had hired some weeks before. They were dead, and their bodies already cold.
On a small table in the room lay several papers covered with writing; all of them breathed the desire to attain renown without difficulty and without work, and expressed the utmost contempt for those who consented to gain their livelihood by the sweat of their brow. There were several quotations from Victor Hugo, and a request that their names and the manner of their death might be published in the newspapers.
It is a pity that their yearning for posthumous notoriety was gratified, inasmuch as the sentimental articles written to order by dexterous pens, and the verses composed in honour of the two lunatics by Béranger, in which a romantic halo is thrown over their audacious crime,
"Et vers le ciel se frayant un chemin,
Ils sont partis en se donnant la main"...
encouraged, it is to be feared, a suicidal mania.
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We have hinted that Mrs. Trollope's strength lay in her faculty of observation, and her strong, pungent humour.
Occasionally, however, she ventures on a vein of reflection, and not without success. For instance, her observations upon the elevation of Louis Philippe to the French throne are marked by a clear, cool judgment.
When she diverts her thoughts, she says, from the dethroned and banished king to him whom she saw before her, walking without guards and with an assured step, she could not but recall the vicissitudes he had experienced, and the conclusion forced itself upon her that this earth and all its inhabitants were but the toys of children, which change their name and destination according to the moment's whim. It seemed to her that all men must be classed in the order which it was good for them to hold; and that everything would be thrown into the greatest confusion if they were cast down in order to be raised up again, and thus they were perpetually hurled from side to side; with all this, so powerless in themselves, and so completely governed by chance! She felt humbled by the sight of human weakness, and turned her eyes from the monarch to meditate on the insignificance of men.
How vain are all the efforts which man is able to make to direct the course of his own existence! There is nothing, in truth, but confidence in an exalted Wisdom and an immovable Power which can enable us, from the greatest to the smallest, to traverse with courage and tranquillity a world subject to such terrible convulsions.
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In the opinion of one French critic, the book upon "Paris and the Parisians" is one of the most interesting works which has dealt with the subject of French society. It reflects with wonderful accuracy the physiognomy of the reign of Louis Philippe; those outbreaks which so frequently troubled the city; those political discussions which every evening transformed the salons into so many clubs; the romantic aspirations of Young France; the turbulence of the people, and the general want of respect for the monarchy.
Everywhere, moreover, as one of her translators has said, this literary Amazon marches, armed with a bold and vivid criticism, which gathered around her eager readers and bitter foes. Do not expect that she will relate to you (as Lady Morgan does) the tittle-tattle of the boudoirs of the countries she visits or in which she resides; for from the particularity and range of her observations it is clear that she made no flying visit, that her masculine mind penetrated below the surface. When she arrived in a new land she planted there her flag, and with pen upraised set forth to attack or energetically praise, according to her sympathies or her hatreds, the social and political manners exposed to her searching gaze.
France was not the only field of study which she found in Europe. In 1838 she published her "Vienna and the Austrians," in which her old antipathies and causticities reappeared; and in 1843, a "Visit to Italy," which
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was far from being a success. The classic air of Italy was not favourable to the development of her peculiar powers, and among the antiquities of Rome the humour which sketched so forcibly the broad features of American society was necessarily out of place.
Our business in these pages is with Mrs. Trollope the traveller, but of the industry of Mrs. Trollope the novelist we may reasonably give the reader an idea. In 1836 she published "The Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw," in which she renewed her attacks on American society, and drew a forcible sketch of the condition of the coloured population of the Southern States. Some of the scenes may fairly be credited with having suggested to Dickens the tone and sentiment of his American pictures in "Martin Chuzzlewit." Her best novel, "The Vicar of Wrexhill"—a highly-coloured portrait of an Anglican Tartuffe, bitter in its prejudices, but full of talent—appeared in 1837; the "Romance of Vienna," an attack on caste distinctions, in 1838. To the same year belongs her "Michael Armstrong," in which her Ishmael hand fell heavily on the narrow-mindedness of the manufacturing class—
anticipating, in some degree, Dickens's "Hard Times." "One Fault," a satire upon romantic exaggeration; and the coarse, but clever "Widow Barnaby," a racy history of the troubles of a vulgar-genteel bourgeoise in search of a second husband, were published in 1839; and in the following year appeared its sequel, "The Widow Married,"
which is quite as coarse as its predecessor, but not
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so amusing. With indefatigable pen she produced, in 1843, three three-volume novels, "Hargreave," "Jessie Phillips," and "The Laurringtons"—the first a not very successful sketch of a man of fashion; the second, an unfair and exaggerated delineation of the action of the new Poor Law; and the third, a forcible and lively satire upon "superior people," in which some of the passages are in her best style.
In 1844 the industrious satirist, who would have been more generally successful had she selected the objects of her attacks with greater discretion, withdrew to Florence, from the host of enemies her "free hitting" had provoked, burying herself in an almost absolute seclusion. But her active mind could not long enjoy repose, and in 1851 she resumed her pen, selecting the Roman Catholic Church for her target in "Father Eustace." This was followed in 1852 by "Uncle Walter." It is unnecessary, however, to enumerate the titles of her later works, as they
lacked most of the qualities which secured the popularity of her earlier, and have already passed into oblivion. It is doubtful, indeed, whether even her better work is much known to the reading public of the present day.[38]
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This clever and industrious woman died at Florence on the 6th of October, 1863, in the eighty-fifth year of her age. Her name has been highly honoured in her two surviving sons, Anthony and Thomas Adolphus Trollope, both of whom have attained to a place of distinction in English literature.
FOOTNOTES:
[38]
We have omitted from our list "The Blue Belles of England" (1841); "Tremordyn Cliff" (1838); "Charles Chesterfield" (1841); "The Ward of Thorpe-Combe" (1842); "Young Love" (1844); "Petticoat Government" (1852); and "The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman" (1853). Between the last-named and "The Vicar of Wrexhill" the gulf is very wide. One cannot help admiring, however, the indefatigable perseverance and the astonishing fertility of this accomplished novelist.
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