The critics were very generally against this initial venture, which, for all practical purposes, fell indeed still-born from the Press. Naturally the author considered it a failure. Here, however, he was less than just to himself; for, if it had gone very wide of immediate success, it belonged to that class of miscarriages which nevertheless to the judicious seem as full of promise as Benjamin Disraeli’s maiden speech. The collective wisdom of the Commons would have none of that; but individual members, who were also seasoned and trustworthy judges, predicted great things for the parliamentary _débutant_ on the strength of those rhetorical extravagances which had been laughed down. So with _The Macdermots of Ballycloran_. The professional reviewers had little but what was contemptuous to say about it. There were others--reviewers in their time--whose knowledge of literature generally and of Ireland in particular made their opinion worth having. These soon recognised in the book a true picture of the country, a correct insight into its people, real felicity as well as power in seizing the genius of the place and time, and bodying it forth in words. Such were William Gregory himself, whose house had really been the cradle of the story, and his friend, possessed of a literary taste not less sound than his own, Sir Patrick O’Brien, M.P. for King’s County during most of the Victorian age. These, and others equally competent to form an opinion in such a matter, did not hesitate to call Anthony Trollope’s earliest work the best Irish story that had appeared for something like half a century.
Maria Edgeworth’s _Castle Rackrent_ (1800) had introduced readers to the first unconventional Irishman they had seen for generations. This was Thady Quirk, who, unlike his predecessors in fiction, contrived to express himself without a stage brogue, and supplied entertainment as well as, when necessary, information, though not decorating every other sentence with a bull. As a fact, Trollope probably borrowed nothing from Miss Edgeworth. The only resemblance between _Castle Rackrent_ and _The Macdermots_ is to be found in the truth to nature, the freshness, the simplicity, and the strength common to each. Had he, however, incurred such an obligation, he would but have followed the example of Sir Walter Scott, who, it will be remembered, attributed his own _Waverley_ to the inspiration of the Irish authoress. About the same time that Anthony Trollope was busy on his first novel, Emily Brontë had been achieving immortality with her single romance. _Wuthering Heights_ and _The Macdermots of Ballycloran_ resemble each other in that they are moving and powerful rather than pleasant reading. Both writers were possessed, in a degree equally deep and overpowering, by their different subjects. Gloom pervades the atmosphere of each. But whereas the sombreness of _Wuthering Heights_ lacks relief throughout from any gleam of humour or even light, the tragic effects of _The Macdermots_ are heightened by the social incidents and conversational by-play that form the staple of successive pages or even chapters, amid the squalor, the misery, the sin, and the horrors following each other thick and fast as the story approaches its blood-stained climax. Reading Shakespeare with her sons, Frances Trollope had pointed out the art with which the coarse dialogue of the watchmen in _Macbeth_, the grave-digger’s mirthful memories of Yorick in _Hamlet_, and the nurse’s frivolities in _Romeo and Juliet_ are the skilfully planned preludes that, through force of contrast, intensify the terror and melancholy of the appalling sequel. There is something not unworthy to be called Shakespearean in the transitions that mark Trollope’s first novel. The peasant marriage-junketings, the race dinner with the ball to follow, contrast with and heighten those later acts of the drama where the curtain rises on the battered and bleeding body of the villain of the piece, while his avenging murderer stands, a doomed man, at the gallows’ foot, and his victim succumbs to the long drawn-out agonies of the ordeal which had deprived her of fair fame, of home, of brother, as well as the, through all, blindly loved author of her guilt.