For Anthony Trollope’s Birthday

A photograph of him around age 40, completely unglamorized; it’s not often reprinted

Friend and readers,

Anthony Trollope was born April 24, 1815.

Two tributes also not often reprinted, and a brief comment by Proust which sums up what Margaret Oliphant implied in her (also not sufficiently consulted, but too long to quote here) 4+ page review of Trollope’s An Autobiography (reprinted in Trollope: Interviews & Recollections, ed. R.C. Terry, from which the two passages below also come):

What did he look like:

His outward appearance symbolises, or rather pictures, his inner. When you look at his face, you exclaim, with Addison’s Cato, ‘Plato, thou reasonest well.’ For, as that great one said, the soul chooses a fit house wherein to dwell, you must own that the soul of Trollope has fitted itself with a proper and suggestive tabernacle. His portrait is gaunt, grim, partly grey and looks taller than he is; his eyes are noticeable, dark and brilliant; two strong lines down each side of his mouth, lost in a tufted American-like beard, give him a look of greater ill-nature than he possesses. He is unquestionably a gentleman, but of the middle-class look, by no means of haut école. He gives one an idea — that is, if one knows life and town pretty well — that he has seen hard service in the drudgery of some government office; he has cut-and-dried official look, and seems capable of scolding and otherwise irritating his juniors. He looks his age – about fifty-five – and is a man one would hardly choose to confide in …
     — Douglas Jerrold, The Housekeeper, on whom see Spartacus Educational, and wikipedia, his son Blanchard Jerrold’s great picture book is London: A Pilgrimage, illustrated by Gustave Doré

How did his inward personality strike people in his presence:

Nobody could see anything of him without feeling that he was in the presence of an exceptionally high-minded as well as an exceptionally gifted man, a man of strong feelings as of strong sense, but a man who well knew how to keep his feelings in check, and a man whose practice as well as his theory was Christian. He told me once a story — and the story was pathetic enough as he told it with all its details — of a certain work of his having been claimed by someone else, and of the inevitable exposure which followed the claim; and his own feeling was of pity for the claimant. This, told without the impression which his own manner of telling it conveyed, seems a trifling thing by which to illustrate the noble qualities of a man who was great in more than one sense; but the absolute simplicity of it, the complete incapacity to imagine that anyone telling such a story could tell it with any other feeling, made an enduring impression on me; and it seemed to me strange to reflect that had he for purposes of fiction had to describe a man with a particle of meanness in him, telling such a story, he would have brought out the meanness in the most easy and most lifelike way. What he would have seized on with quick instinct as a novelist was out of his ken as a man.
      Something has been said as to the wide grasp of Mr Trollope’s powers and intellect, and this applied to what his mind took in as well as to what it gave out. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a well-read man, and he used always to read for a given time in the early morning, before sitting down to his task of composition …
      — Walter Herries Pollock, From “Anthony Trollope,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 66 (May 1883) — Trollope’s neighbor in Montagu Square

Proust (Contre Saint-Beuve)

qu’un livre est le produit d’un autre moi que celui que nous manifestons dans nos habitudes, dans la societe, dans nos vices . . . [The man who appears in conversation and drawing-room essays is … not] le moi qui a attendu pendant qu’ on etait avec les autres, qu’ on sent bien le seul reel, et pour lequel seuls les artistes finis sent par vivre’. [A book is the product of another self than the one we show in our habits, in society, in our vices …. the self who waits while one is with others, whom one feels is the sole real I, for whom in the end artists live, my translation]

John Everett Millais, “Judge Staveley and His Daughter, for Orley Farm

Trollope said he loved Millais as a man, he certainly loved many of Millais’s illustrations to his novels, he had the whole set for Orley Farm which, it’s said, he looked at many times. This one, my favorite of the series, is a typical one of depiction of imminent loss retrieved.

About another (of Lady Mason, the heroine) he said as narrator of Orley Farm (that is, inside the novel):

In an early part of this story I have endeavoured to describe how this woman sat alone, with deep sorrow in her heart and deep thought on her mind, when she first learned what what terrible things were coming on her. The idea, however, which the reader will have conceived of her as she sat there will have come to him from the skill of the artist, and not from the words of the writer. If that drawing is now near him, let him go back to it. Lady Mason was again sitting in the same room — that pleasant room, looking out through the verandah on to the sloping lawn, and in the same chair; one hand again rested open on the arm of the chair, while the other supported her face as she leaned upon her elbow; and the sorrow was still in her heart and the deep thought in her mind. But the lines of her face were altered, and the spirit expressed by it was changed. There was less of beauty, less of charm, less of softness; but in spite of all that she had gone through there was more of strength, — more of the power to resist all that this world could do to her.

Ellen just now rereading The American Senator

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