It would be amusing to form a graph showing the curve of Trollope's literary reputation. About twenty-five years ago I wrote an article discussing him seriously as one of the most important novelists, and superior persons cried out upon me for a dealer in paradox. To-day, similar if not the same superior persons seem disposed to set this good craftsman among the great artists. Without discussing that, one may at all events be sure that no critic can rate Trollope's value too highly as a document. He gives, as no one else did, the normal England of his time. But he ranks also as a capital document for the social history of Ireland.

He was an Englishman, English as John Bull; and an Englishman's observations about Ireland must be taken with such allowance as should be made for those of a German on Poland. But there are Englishmen unsympathetic by temperament to the Irish character; and no Irishman will ever admit that Thackeray's views on the land that produced Thackeray's mother-in-law have the kind of balance that is necessary for good testimony or even for good work. On the other hand, there is a type of Englishman who takes to Ireland, like a relapsed teetotaler to alcohol. Trollope was this kind. From the first he evidently reveled in Ireland. Red tape was his detestation through life, and it is a commodity that the

1 From the Contemporary Review (London Liberal monthly), January

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Irish employ sparingly. He had been tied up with red tape for seven years in the English postal service, and the job of a surveyor's clerk in Ireland brought emancipation. From London he was launched, of all places in the world, to Banagher, in the middle of the vast central bogland.

Very few Irish people, except its own inhabitants, have ever seen Banagher. I, for instance, who have traveled a great deal in my own country, got there only once, and then, as Trollope probably did, by canal. It is on the Shannon, at a crossing-place, and most of his work tours of inspection or visits to investigate complaints took him into Connaught; but a considerable district in his charge lay eastward also, through the bogland. Anyhow, Banagher was as Irish as Irish could be. Yet it was not a wilderness. There was society. The little town was probably more important then than it is now. There is a hotel or large inn there, bearing the stamp of the coaching days, a place of some charm, with mullioned stone windows, rare in Ireland; and I am very sure that Trollope had many a chop and many a glass of punch there.

But the essential thing was that Trollope found himself clerk to a surveyor who kept a pack of hounds; and he instantly conformed to the custom of the country and bought a horse and hunted. About one in ten of the Englishmen that take root in Ireland is chiefly concerned with shooting or fishing; the other nine become part of Ireland's freemasonry of horseflesh. Trol

lope loved a horse and a hunt and a race well enough to have a passport to the friendliness of a people who, as a rule, ask no better than to be friendly with a stranger if he does not want to do them good. Hunting men and hunting women are comparatively free from the English propensity to philanthropic demonstrations. A man so English as Trollope would have been insufferable in Ireland but for the happy chance that brought him into association with the Irish in a field where Irishmen admittedly had considerable competence. There, associating with them through a common enjoyment on terms of equal comradeship, he learned to judge them frankly; and he had the happy instinct to make his work grow into and out of his play. Wherever he went, he went on horseback; and he soon convinced himself that inspection was much more satisfactorily conducted if the inspector dropped out of the clouds, in hunting-kit, on his way to a meet or back from a run. I have seen a good deal of Irish official business done, and well done, in the same sort of way, which had great merits among a shy and suspicious people who did not and could not regard the Government machinery as part of their own being, and who, if time were given them to prepare it, always got up a story.

In short, Trollope had the first requisite for understanding Ireland: he liked the Irish people, and was more aware of their resemblance to what he approved in human beings than of their difference from that standard. So he judged them without exaggeration, and found them, as he wrote in 1876:

"That there is a strong feeling against things Irish it is impossible to deny. Irish servants need not apply; Irish acquaintances are treated with limited confidence; Irish cousins are regarded as being decidedly dangerous; and Irish stories are not popular with the booksellers. For myself I may say, that if I ought to know anything about any place, I ought to know something about Ireland; and I do strongly protest against the injustice of the above conclusions. Irish cousins I have none. Irish acquaintances I have by dozens; and Irish friends, also, by twos and threes, whom I can love and cherish almost as well, perhaps, as though they had been born in Middlesex. Irish servants I have had in my house for years, and never had one that was faithless, dishonest, or intemperate. I have traveled all over Ireland closely as few other men can have done, and have never had my portmanteau robbed or my pocket picked. At hotels I have seldom locked up my belongings, and my carelessness has never been punished. I doubt whether as much can be said for English inns.'

He was certainly entitled to claim the right to speak with knowledge. For eighteen years his home and his work had been in Ireland. He had married in Ireland, but not an Irishwoman; and the fact, he says, was somewhat re

sented in Banagher, so that he was glad when a transfer took him to Clonmel. Later he lived in Mallow; later still, for eighteen months, in Belfast, and then his headquarters were in Dublin. He had traveled every corner of the country, had hunted with perhaps a score of packs. He had made good his official position, so that he was detailed from Ireland for other duties, in Egypt, in the West Indies, and in England. Also he had done some of his very best work in Ireland: The Warden, Barchester Towers, and Doctor Thorne were all published before he left that country. But he began on what lay nearest to his observation: his first two novels dealt with life in Connaught. Three years after they appeared, a scheme for extending postal services in country parts caused this rapid surveyor, who had finished his Irish task, to be detailed to England; and so he came to Salisbury and the germ of The Warden was conceived.

There is no question at all that Trollope writing of England is incomparably superior to Trollope writing of Ireland. The two first novels, whose scene is laid west of the Shannon, suffer from the clumsiness of a beginner; but Castle Richmond was written after Doctor Thorne and Barchester Towers, and actually at the same time as Framley Parsonage. I cannot better express the difference than by saying that when Trollope wrote of England he knew what to take for granted; when Ireland was his subject, he was always laboring to be understood, and to understand. English life comes to him easily, carelessly, and spontaneously; he creates it instinctively. Of Irish scenes he is only the well-informed, attentive, fair, but detached observer.

The novels that I purpose to examine have no permanent value as works of art. But they do tell us, with certain well-defined limitations, what Ireland

was like at a period of its history of which little is known. They are not to be called photographic, for they are the record of a temperament. They tell us what a very honest and able stranger saw in a country that grew in a sense intimately familiar to him, yet in a truer sense was only superficially apprehended. He depicted what he saw, at times with great power; he told us very plainly what he thought about what he saw; and both his pictures and his judgments have a real interest and importance.

This interest and importance are immensely enhanced by the fact that Trollope was present at the great and tragic change that altered Ireland out of knowledge. He knew the country before the famine; he knew it ten years later when the population was reduced by nearly two millions in eight. The first two of his novels were written before the potato crop failed; in the third, scenes of great hunger make a background against which the main characters pass. That is not all. His last novel, like his first, had an Irish scene: The Land Leaguers is unfinished, yet quite enough of it remains to illustrate the first phase of the long-drawn-out revolution that ended only the other day. Of the revolution itself there is not the least comprehension; but he gives us an admirable picture of the society that the revolution broke up.

Forty years, roughly speaking, lay between the writing of the first of these books and the last, and we have Trollope's observation given before the famine, after the famine, again in 1876 when the country was at its quietest, and lastly in the fierce beginnings of the land war.

The first of the four novels, despite its 'prentice handling, is in some respects the least unsatisfactory, just because it is least hampered by that dualism in Irish life that perhaps ex

plains why Irish literature has produced so few good novels. All the personages in The Macdermots of Ballycloran are in natural relation to each other because they all belong to the same Ireland. Ussher, indeed, in a sense the villain of the piece, is a Protestant, but he is a policeman - the true connecting link between the two Irelands of last century. All the rest are Catholics; and Trollope, because he was an Englishman, had less of the prepossession against Catholics than was common among Protestants of his class at that time in Ireland. He notes in his autobiography that shortly after he came to Banagher he dined with a Roman Catholic, and was told shortly after by another acquaintance that he must 'choose his party'; he 'could not sit at both Protestant and Catholic tables.' 'Such a caution,' he adds 'would now (in 1876) be impossible in any part of Ireland.' It is very evident that even in 1843 Trollope disregarded it; and though he had no sympathy whatever with the Catholic outlook on life, he saw Catholic Ireland with the eyes of a fair and friendly Englishman.

Ballycloran House is a sort of counterpart to Castle Rackrent. Miss Edgeworth pictures the gradual decline of one of the improvident AngloIrish gentry, heirs of the great confiscations. Macdermot of Ballycloran was something much rarer than Sir Condy Rackrent-being, as Trollope puts it, 'a true Milesian, pious Catholic, and descendant of King Somebody, who had managed through all the troubles of his poor country to keep a comfortable little portion of his ancestral royalties.' That is Trollope's way of describing what he had undoubtedly met, - for his invention is everywhere based on observation, one of the old princely families that had retained some landed property, by the conniv

ance of Protestant friends, and was now

in the landlord class - yet not quite of it; for, as he says in The Land Leaguers, by the judgment of the old-fashioned gentry, 'it was the business of a Protestant to take rent, and the business of a Catholic to pay rent.'

Larry Macdermot was really of the spurious class 'to be found in shoals through the country speaking of their properties and boasting of their places, but who owned no properties, and had no places, when the matter came to be sifted.' He and his his decent son with no education, set to screw rents out of starving tenants instead of working with his own head or hands, and his good-looking daughter whom a convent school had taught to play the piano and read novels were all on their way to disappear, or sink into the peasant class. Thady, the son, is shown as having the makings of a good peasant farmer, or a stout soldier, but tragedy comes across his life he kills the man who had misled his sister, and hangs for it. Incidentally he is drawn into a Ribbon Society, and Trollope's picture of this peasant conspiracy is well constructed and in accordance with the facts of Irish life.

Many of the facts were unpleasing to this denizened alien, who did not take everything for granted. Trollope did not approve of the type of police force, nor of its methods especially disliking its use of informers. On all such matters he never hesitates to interrupt his story and give his plain opinion, which has interest but not necessarily authority. Authority, however, does attach to the descriptions set down by such an observer, and many of them are like nightmares. The Ireland with eight and a quarter million people, a good quarter of them paupers, was a ghastly country. This Englishman, whose Irish friends were chiefly of the landlord class, was shocked to find honorable men taking rent from such

people and from such habitations as he pictured in this first book-written two years before the famine. Yet even then hunger was the main fact of Irish life. When Thady is out 'on his keeping' food is brought to him- bacon and some potatoes.

Thady ate a portion of what was given him, and as he did so he saw the old man's greedy eyes glare on him, as he still sat in his accustomed seat; it was quite horrible to see how greedy and ravenous he appeared. Thady, however, left far more than he consumed, and the girl, carefully putting the bit of bread away for his breakfast in the morning, divided the remnant of the bacon with her father. Then the man's apathy and tranquillity vanished, and the voracity with which he devoured the unaccustomed dainty showed that though he might have no demon thoughts to rack his brain, the vulture in his stomach tortured him as violently.

That has on it the stamp, not of invention, but of dreadful reminiscence. Trollope had evidently seen that ravenous glare somewhere in his comings and goings. Such people in the ordinary course of their lives had nothing to eat but 'lumpers' - that is, the poorest that is, the poorest and most watery kind of potato. Potatoes always ran short in summer, between the two crops. But in 1846 and after Trollope saw a time when lumpers and every kind of potato failed altogether. Castle Richmond is the locus classicus in literature for description of the Irish famine; for it renders, not only the facts of destitution, but the state of mind among those who were not destitute, reproduced with a simplicity that makes one rub one's eyes. Surely the Manchester school begot the strangest of all philosophies that allied itself amazingly with a smug religion. Here is a leading passage describing April 1847:

It was a busy month in Ireland. It may probably be said that so large a sum of VOL. 388-NO. 4861

money had never been circulated in the country in any one month since money had been known there; and yet it may also be said that so frightful a mortality had never occurred there from the want of what money brings. It was well understood by all men now that the customary food of the country had disappeared. There was no longer any difference of opinion between rich and poor, between Protestant and Roman Catholic; as to that, no man dared now to say that the poor, if left to themselves, could feed themselves, or to allege that the sufferings of the country arose from the machinations of money-making speculators. The famine was an established fact, and all men knew that it was God's doings- all men knew this, though few could recognize as yet with how much mercy God's hand was stretched out over the country.

Trollope never departed from the opinion that he expressed publicly at the time, that the English Government had taken the wisest measures to cope with the situation. He did not blame the Irish; he took it all as part of 'God's mercy.' And he was convinced that Ireland was morally and materially the better for this visitation. The peasant had survived and was better off, but 'it is with thorough rejoicing, almost with triumph, that I declare that the idle genteel class has been driven forth out of its holding into the wide world and punished with the penalty of extermination.' These are hard words. But he was all for the prosperous, respectable, steady-going landlord, and he thought that agents did their work 'as a rule, honestly.' It never entered his mind that the peasant class should oust the landlords from their position of authority. In The Kellys and the O'Kellys he draws a picture of well-to-do Irish Catholic folk, and the widow Kelly, with her shop and her daughters, and her son, Martin, with his big farm, are decent Irish people, seen with a friendly eye, but seen across a barrier. Trollope approves