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16. order of fate. After Linda Tressel has breathed her last, Frau Staubach, with
all the self-complacency in the world, relapses into a chronic state of
puritanical morosity, more dark and odious than that which had been so far
her normal condition. In this novelette there are none of the humorous
flashes constantly enlivening Rachel Ray. Its monotony of unrelieved
sadness becomes fatal. One can scarcely, therefore, be surprised that
Blackwood did not press its author for further anonymous ventures.
Before breaking the entirely new ground on which he had for some time
set his thoughts, Trollope produced at the end of the sixties a little group of
novels in his earlier and happiest vein. The first of these, Miss Mackenzie
(1865), forms something of a link between the narrative attacks on the
religionism that was his bugbear and some at least among the social novels
which followed it. In Miss Mackenzie the only clergyman drawn at full
length, Jeremiah Maguire, is one among the several candidates for the
heroine’s hand. He would have fared better in his wooing with more of the
gentleman about him and less of an unmistakable squint. His chief rivals are
Mr. Rubb, the business partner of Miss Mackenzie’s surviving brother,
socially poor Maguire’s inferior, and the lady’s cousin, a poor baronet’s son,
John Ball, whose suit eventually succeeds. At her first appearance, the lady
who thus becomes a bride is thirty years old, has an income of £800 a year,
and, by the death of her elder brother, for whom she kept house, has been
left alone in the world. The chief feature in the story is the Rev. Jeremiah
Maguire’s pertinacity in the effort to secure the sufficiently well-dowered
lady. In that endeavour he has the support of the religious set at Littlebath,
whose leaders are the Rev. and Mrs. Stumfold, and in which Miss Todd and
Miss Baker, first heard of in The Bertrams, reappear.
Much of this, at first amusing enough, is so spun out as soon to become
monotonous and gradually to lose all its point. To begin with, the satire
lacked the merit of originality, and lost all freshness long before Trollope
served up in Rachel Ray a réchauffé of the Slope passages from Barchester
Towers. Dickens, indeed, had been the first (1836) to treat the public with
its taste in the Stiggins of Pickwick, the predecessor of the Bleak House
Chadband (1853). In Dickens’ hands it was good business enough, and
served for a fresh spice to his fooling. Trollope, however, professed to
delineate, not only the superficial humours associated with the graver
subjects, but some at least among the spiritual or, at any rate, the deeper
interests of the time. He ought not, then, to have been contented with
17. reflecting the images, the ideas, and the jargon, which more than a quarter
of a century earlier (1837) his mother, in The Vicar of Wrexhill, had echoed
from the Stiggins of Pickwick, and which The Saturday Review had since
hackneyed to death before Trollope unwillingly accepted his commission
from the editor of Good Words. During the nineteenth century’s second half,
the Prongs, whom Trollope hated, had ceased to be, to any marked degree,
representative of provincial churchmanship. The commercial argument
justifies, indeed, all this loose and spiteful vituperation of his pet religious
aversions.
By 1860, however, Trollope had achieved a unique position as at once
the founder and producer of fiction as a serious profession, which, followed
a certain number of hours daily, cannot fail of yielding an annual income.
The habit of, in his own phrase, exacting from himself so many words at a
sitting could not but be unfavourable to excellence of execution, though it
interfered marvellously little, if at all, with his variety and versatility. Those
gifts, during 1867-8, he had exhibited in taking his readers from the familiar
home scenes to the less known corners of continental Europe. Here his
work, though passing muster sufficiently well with the public, did not
promise the material success which he knew he could still command in
other fields. Consequently, before venturing on the experiment to be
recorded in the next chapter, he returned to the Barchester vein with the
certainty, soon realised, of convincing publishers and public that it still
contained ore not less valuable and pleasant than he had last drawn from it a
decade ago. The extracts given at the close of the present chapter will show
that from reviewers’ and booksellers’ point of view Trollope might well
applaud himself on the reception of Rachel Ray. Nevertheless it was a
novelist’s business to create. In Rachel Ray, he soon became conscious, to
quote his own words to the present writer, of having set up certain religious
or quasi-religious images chiefly, he admitted, for the purpose of
belabouring them with verbal blows even as in The Old Curiosity Shop
Quilp vents his hatred on Christopher Nubbles in attacks on the wooden
figure to which he gives Kit’s name.
Nearly half a generation has passed since, during the eventful ramble,
already described in its proper place, round Salisbury Close, there had
occurred to him the earliest of those ecclesiastical varieties whose
portraiture amid their domestic or social surroundings soon brought him
fortune and fame. Before closing the gallery of these sketches, he would
18. draw one more clergyman of the same honest, manly English type as Mark
Robarts, and would show his readiness to recognise elevation of character
and purity of soul when, if possible, existing in an ordained minister of the
gospel of views as decidedly Low Church as the detested Mr. Prong
himself. This latter purpose was accomplished by The Last Chronicle of
Barset (1867). Nothing could be more dramatically complete than the
contrast presented to the sleek, luxurious divines, or the well-fed, well-
clothed, muscular officials of the church militant, in whom the novelist
delighted, than the austere, gaunt, ill-nourished, poverty-stricken perpetual
curate of Hogglestock in the marsh. The chronic gloom of his constitutional
melancholy is deepened and saddened by the sombre Calvinism of a creed
that admits or asks no ray of relief for the hardship of a lot still
representing, with not less of faithful cruelty than when Trollope wrote, the
hard lives of so many among the most spiritually-minded, most industrious,
and not the least well-educated of the country clergy. The Rev. Josiah
Crawley’s great qualities, his concealed accomplishments, and his shrinking
silent heroism, have won the admiration of the academic, highly-cultivated,
and well-to-do Dean Arabin, who has married Mr. Harding’s favourite,
youngest daughter Eleanor. This friendship of the prosperous Anglican
official for the half-starved incumbent gives rise to the chief and only
sensational episode of the book, at once revealing, as well as altogether
caused by, Crawley’s utter lack of all business methods, forgetfulness of
facts, and heedlessness of consequences. Nor, in these respects, is the
daughter of Crawley’s old friend, the Warden, formerly the rich widow,
Mrs. Bold, and now Mrs. Arabin, in all matters having to do with money
much better.
The crisis of the novel has been brought about in this way. Lord Lufton’s
agent has lost a cheque for £20 made payable to bearer, and afterwards
found to have been used by Crawley in settling a butcher’s bill. Asked how
he got the draft, he hesitatingly answered that no doubt it formed part of the
sum paid to him by the agent as tithes. That, it soon appeared, was
impossible, for the tithe payment some time since actually made had been,
as was always the case, in bank notes. Then, after reconsidering the matter,
Crawley revised his account; surely the cheque must have been part of a
loan made by Dean Arabin. To him, now absent from his deanery on an
Italian tour, inquiries were telegraphed, bringing the statement on the sum
having been advanced by bank notes. Crawley’s continued inability
19. satisfactorily to explain the matter now coincides with the agent’s
declaration that he must have dropped the cheque while visiting Crawley’s
house. Appearances, therefore, at every point are dead against the wretched
perpetual curate, who had naturally excited or confirmed suspicions by the
lame, and, as they have so far proved, baseless versions of the matter,
stammered out by him in his agony. Crawley is known throughout the
district for an upright, conscientious, as well as confused and muddle-
headed man. His parishioners’ conversation on the subject, and, at last, their
reluctant belief in his guilt are not only in Trollope’s best manner, dashed
with humour and knowledge of nature, but echo with Shakespearean
fidelity the words and thoughts sure to have been forthcoming in local
gossip about such an incident. Briefly they are to this effect—“Well, we
believe he’s a good man, and we think he wouldn’t have done it, but for
being so dreadful poor.”
At last comes the explanation. When, overcome with the terrors of
necessity and shame, Crawley accepted the Dean’s offer of money help,
Mrs. Arabin left the room to get the cash. While absent, without her
husband’s knowledge, she slipped into the envelope containing the notes an
additional £20 in the form of a cheque. Crawley himself showed his usual
negligence by not examining the contents of the envelope. With equally
little wisdom, Mrs. Arabin never considered how her generosity might
compromise the poor clergyman. Even these facts, however, do not fully
clear up the mystery, for how did the cheque get into Mrs. Arabin’s hands?
But that too proves to be quite a simple matter. Womanlike, as Trollope
would have said, without the slightest aptitude for such affairs, she piqued
herself on her ability to manage business concerns. She kept her own
private banking account: by way of improving its figures she dabbled now
and then in a few small speculations. In this way she had made the local inn
her own property. The landlord and landlady whom she had put in, like the
rest of their relatives, were always in difficulties. Lord Lufton’s agent, on
going his rounds, had entered the small hostelry. Here he had dropped the
cheque, which was promptly found by the innkeeper’s brother and used by
him in paying certain arrears of rent. Thus the real thieves were the licensed
victuallers, the tenants whom, without the Dean’s knowledge, Mrs. Arabin
possessed. The excellence of women within their own department, their
foredoomed and demonstrable blunders whenever they step out of it, were
ideas tragically set forth in Orley Farm, and, with the accompaniments of
20. less disaster, in Can You Forgive Her? The Last Chronicle of Barset gave
the novelist not only the chance of reverting to them in a first-rate plot, but
of doing some justice to the evangelical parson while, after an amusingly
characteristic fashion, dealing a covert stroke of feminine satire.
The second of the two stories marking, for the present, Trollope’s
farewell to the church, was The Vicar of Bullhampton. This was published
in 1870, but mostly written a good deal earlier. Some of the incidents
connected with its publication too truthfully exhibit its author’s temper in
dealing with his publishers not less significantly than the recital of Mrs.
Arabin’s blunders in disposing of the cheque which got poor Mr. Crawley
into such trouble, recalling the view of feminine limitations that he never
modified. Trollope, as usual, had been punctual to the day with the
Bullhampton manuscript, for Bradbury and Evans’ Once a Week. He had
scarcely delivered it when, to his indignant disgust, he received from the
publishers a request that his “vicar” might be held over to make way for an
English version of Victor Hugo’s L’homme qui rit. The want of patriotism
implied in the new proposal roused Trollope’s resentment, he wished it to
be understood, quite as much as did the disregard of his own convenience.
A pretentious French Radical’s “grinning man” was, in an English
magazine, to be reckoned of more account than a carefully prepared story of
national life by an English gentleman, who, however liberal and advanced
some of his views, had, in and out of print, always been the champion of
English institutions. Worse even than this, it soon turned out that Trollope’s
clergyman was not to see the light in Once a Week at all, but in another
property of the same owners, The Gentleman’s Magazine. That closed the
transaction in this quarter. The story, issued at once by Chapman and Hall,
strengthened the ties already connecting his literary progress with the
fortunes of that House.
At each successive stage of the novelist’s course, Trollope has already
been shown to have gained in breadth and depth of outlook upon life, in
power and certainty of character analysis, as well as in a dramatic
perception of the potential tragedies belonging to everyday existence. He
now habitually used the most ordinary conjunctures as agencies for
disturbing, with their grave or grim issues, the decorous surface of
conventionally monotonous and serene lives. In The Vicar of Bullhampton
all this was exemplified after a fashion scarcely less striking than in Orley
Farm or Can You Forgive Her?
21. Picture Trollope himself as having, at the age of twenty-three, found his
way into Holy Orders, instead of the General Post Office, and Frank
Fenwick, the before-mentioned clergyman, might well pass for a study of
the author. Broad-shouldered and broad-minded, the young Bullhampton
priest keeps all his powers of mind and body at the highest point of fitness.
Just, generous, upright, and kind-hearted, he is ever ready to speak his
mind, out of season perhaps as well as in it, and has all a healthy Briton’s
determination not to let a mean advantage be taken of him, especially by
those whose social ideas and antecedents differ from his own, or who
offend any of his John Bull notions about honour and manliness. He finds in
his wife a congenial, not too assertive, and sympathetic helpmate. Her great
friend Mary Lowther, the heroine of the piece, is staying with them at the
vicarage when the story opens; she has already a lover, favoured by the
hospitable Fenwicks, a neighbouring young squire, Harry Gilmore.
Here, in passing, it may be pointed out that the locality, as the names
used will suggest, has much to identify it with the midland counties and the
north of England, to both of which Trollope, as a boy, had been taken more
than once by his mother. On the other hand, both the Barchester local colour
and nomenclature are throughout conspicuous by their absence. To resume
our plot: while away from the vicarage on a visit to Miss Marrable, a
maiden aunt, Mary meets and becomes engaged to a cousin, Walter
Marrable, a wealthy baronet’s nephew, but himself without any visible
means of subsistence. In that respect he resembles the young lady he loves.
These money difficulties bring everything between the two young people to
an end. Soon after what is supposed to be their final separation, Mary hears
of her old lover’s engagement to his uncle’s ward, Edith Brownlow. In
despair herself, and overcome by the persistent importunities of her friends,
Mary Lowther accepts Harry Gilmore, only, however, to throw him over
when Marrable, unexpectedly coming into his uncle’s property, renews his
marriage proposals. Such, it will be recognised, is the regulation course run
by true love throughout the whole extent of Trollopian fiction, making, in
all that concerns affections, the last clerical story uniform with the books
that had immediately or, at some distance of time, preceded it.
Round this main episode is clustered another series of events, connecting
the vicar with his parish. These furnish some of the best scenes in the book
as well as serve to introduce the same kind of melodramatic element, first
noticeable in Dr. Thorne, afterwards receiving greater prominence in Orley
22. Farm. Thus did Trollope practically acknowledge the influence upon the
novel-reading public now firmly exercised by experts in sensational effects
like Mrs. Henry Wood, Wilkie Collins, and Miss Braddon. Among the
Bullhampton vicar’s parishioners are an unbending old miller, his daughter
Carry, who has gone wrong, and his ne’er-do-well son, Sam Brattle, now
under suspicion for a murder committed in the village. The Brattles are
therefore an undesirable family. So thinks the Marquis of Trowbridge, the
landlord of the murdered man. They happen to be tenants of Gilmore, who,
meeting one day at the vicarage Lord Trowbridge, is asked point blank to
clear his property of them. Here the vicar himself intervenes, turning on the
Marquis with sharp words for his uncharitable and inexcusable demand.
Lord Trowbridge, a pompous brainless peer, puffed up with the sense of his
extreme importance, is for the moment too much overwhelmed by the
parson’s audacity to say anything.
Presently, however, his feeling of offended dignity takes practical shape
and prepares vengeance in giving a plot of ground, exactly opposite the
parsonage gates, as the site for a Primitive Methodist Chapel, to the local
minister of that sect, one Puddleham. This territorial donation soon proves
to be not Trowbridge property at all. As a part of the glebe land it is at the
vicar’s exclusive disposal. The Marquis, therefore, now suffers the further
mortification of being compelled to make a full apology to Fenwick for the
infringement of his rights, as well as to pull down so much of the chapel as
has been already built. All of this conclusively proves, to Trollope’s naïvely
undisguised satisfaction, that Providence is on the side of the State Church.
The sooner, therefore, Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters is
literally adopted, the better for the peace, purity, and morals of the
community. The same retributive poetical justice that deals so sharply with
the Puddlehamites, with all poachers on the establishment’s preserves, and
with their patron who wears the Trowbridge title, now befriends the
Brattles. Sam turns out to be innocent; poor Carry, if she cannot regain her
innocence, displays qualities which at least secure sympathy, and is
prevented from falling over the rock of ruin to the lowest depth of
degradation. The sturdy, hot-tempered old atheist, her father does not recant
his theological heresies, but at least compares favourably with an
evangelical Nonconformist.
Q.E.D. The favourable reception in store for the book is to be explained
by other circumstances than the skill in the novelist’s technique running
23. through its successive parts and the humour generally redeeming it from
dullness. Low Churchmanship was becoming unpopular. Readers of the
mid-Victorian epoch saw telling hits and lifelike portraits in what may to-
day seem not much removed above the level of caricature. At the time,
therefore, Rachel Ray won, not only a popular, but a literary success. The
welcome given generally to it by the reviewers formed as great a
compliment as Trollope had yet received from the Press. Among the
religious papers, indeed, The Guardian and The English Churchman left
Rachel Ray and its companion stories severely alone, The Times reviewer,
however, recognised in it a new proof of Trollope’s insight into human
nature and a fresh justification of the immense favour enjoyed by him with
the most intelligent class of novel readers. “A delightful tale,”
enthusiastically exclaims this critic, placing its author with Defoe and
Richardson. “If,” it was added, “Trollope, like Defoe, has little imagination,
what he possesses is so clear that we do not feel the want of suggestion;
while his detailed knowledge of conventional custom is unsurpassed by the
author of Clarissa.”
“O happy art of fiction,” gushes this enthusiast, “which can thus adjust
the balance of fortune, raising the humble and weak to an equality in our
hearts with the proud and great!” The eulogistic note thus sounded by the
Choragus of the daily Press was at once taken up, prolonged, and swelled in
the weekly journals. To The Athenæum, Rachel Ray seemed a book sure to
do more than any critical protests to correct existing vices of public taste.
The women of the tale were admirable, being treated with skill which must
surprise even those to whom the author’s strength is most familiar. To The
Spectator, Rachel Ray demonstrated that, as a censor, Trollope had gifts far
above sarcasm, and that he had made good his place between Thackeray the
satirist and Dickens the caricaturist. The Spectator subsequently hedges by
admitting that the author of Rachel Ray leant rather in the direction of
Dickens than of Thackeray, and that his powers fitted him less for satire
than for caricature. The Saturday Review closed an outburst of panegyric
with a declaration that Trollope’s tact, discretion, and gentlemanly taste,
combined with his literary power and his faculty of devising imaginary
characters, made him eminently successful in describing the inner life of
young women.
The Saturday alone, in the Press, weekly as well as daily, noticed the
attacks on evangelicalism as follows: “Mr. Prong is not an unfair
24. representation of the lower clerical order in provincial towns; but the
accuracy of the portrait does not make it a pleasant study, the foolish
language, the pert fanaticism and the petty tricks of the worst evangelical
class are not agreeable reading. Whatever of comic there is in them is soon
exhausted unless the author glaringly exaggerates every symptom to spice
his description.” The compliments forthcoming by the famous weekly then
under Douglas Cook’s absolute editorial control, but owned by Beresford
Hope and generally reflecting its proprietor’s antipathies to all forms and
expression of faith not distinctly Anglo-Catholic, admit of another
explanation than its natural benediction on the religious portraits drawn by a
writer who was then so much in its own way of thinking as Trollope. In
1864 Anthony Trollope’s North America had received such sharp treatment
in The Saturday Review that his friends, G. H. Lewes and the famous lady
bearing his name, were concerned to find some way of counteracting what
they called the nasty notice. Eventually, some time later, Lewes himself did
justice to Trollope’s transatlantic experiences in The Fortnightly Review.
Before that he had succeeded in influencing an important section of the
political Press in Trollope’s favour. Trollope’s next experiment in fiction, as
well as certain events in his life connected with it, will form the subject of
the next chapter.
25. “A
CHAPTER XIII
PEN AND PLATFORM POLITICS
Failures of literary men in the political world at the beginning of the
nineteenth century—Trollope increases the number by going under
at Beverley—“Not in, but in at the death”—Ralph the Heir—Its
plots and politics—Trollope as editor of The St. Paul’s Magazine—
Phineas Finn—Some remarks on Trollope’s Palmerston—In the
heart of political society—The hero’s flirtations and fights in
London—His final return to the old home and friends—Phineas
Redux—Again in London—Charged with murder—Madame
Goesler’s double triumph—Some probable caricatures—Trollope
renews acquaintance with Planty Pal and his wife in The Prime
Minister—The close of the political series comes with The Duke’s
Children.
NTHONY’S ambition to become a candidate for Beverley is
inscrutable to me. Still, it is the ambition of many men, and the
honester the man who entertains it, the better for us, I suppose.” So
wrote Charles Dickens to Thomas Adolphus Trollope in the December of
1868. Exactly twenty-seven years before that date, the literary pre-eminence
of Dickens, together with his championship, with pen and on platform, of
social and administrative reform had, in 1841, brought the author of Oliver
Twist the offer of a seat for Reading. During the pre-Victorian age the future
Lord Beaconsfield’s adventures in search of a constituency had begun in
1832, some five years after the completion of Vivian Grey. Disraeli’s
contemporary in letters, and so a novelist older in point of years and fame
than Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton came before the electors of St. Ives as
the writer of Pelham, not to mention a novel and the prose or poetical
miscellanies which had preceded it. Sixteen years after Dickens declined
standing for the Berkshire capital, Thackeray (1857) unsuccessfully
contested the city of Oxford. The political tradition had therefore been
sufficiently confirmed and adorned by the leading fellow-craftsmen in his
art by 1868. This was the year in which, at the General Election, Trollope
tried his chance at Beverley. The illustrious precedents thus followed by
26. him, though numerous, were not altogether encouraging. Benjamin Disraeli
himself, in 1837, had owed his success at Maidstone not to his brilliant
romance, or even to his effective Runnymede Letters and telling pamphlets,
but to his adoption by the sitting member, Wyndham Lewis, who held the
place in his pocket.
At that date the popular tide had begun decidedly to turn against the
Whigs. Even the famous and eloquent man of letters, then worth many
votes to the Whigs on a division, T. B. Macaulay, had owed the opportunity
of his memorable displays in defence of the Grey Reform Bill to his having
been brought into the House by Lord Lansdowne for the family borough of
Calne. Macaulay’s partner in the primacy of English letters, W. M.
Thackeray, did not, in 1857, make much of a fight against Cardwell at
Oxford. Yet in that contest Thackeray had enjoyed advantages entirely
denied Trollope at Beverley. In the first place, Thackeray, as a member, of
whom naturally it was proud, had the influence of the Reform Club at his
back. Further, he had originally presented himself to the Oxford electors at
the suggestion of a universally as well as an altogether exceptionally
popular resident, Charles Neate, a Fellow of Oriel; with him Thackeray had
long lived in affectionate intimacy. Under Neate’s personal guidance, and
with him for prompter as well as introducer, the novelist canvassed the
place and spoke from the hustings. Neate too, though unseated on petition,
had carried the seat against Cardwell during the previous March. His own
reputation was therefore concerned in seeing that his recently vanquished
rival did not retrieve his discomfiture. Nevertheless, on the declaration of
the poll, July 21 (1857), the author of Vanity Fair was shown not only to
have lost the day, but to have failed in favourably impressing any large
body of the electors. “It is,” was Thackeray’s comment, “what I expected,
and I take it as the British schoolboy takes his floggings, sullenly and in
silence.” He had indeed scarcely reached his constituency before writing to
Dickens. “Not more than 4 per cent of the people here, I have found out,
have ever heard of my writings. Perhaps as many as 6 per cent know yours,
so it will be a great help to me if you will come and speak for me.”
At Beverley Trollope had no person of commanding authority to speak
for him at all; unlike Thackeray, he was not a member of the Reform. The
managers at the Liberal headquarters gave him his first introduction to the
place, where he found himself at least as well received as he could have
expected. Some ten or fifteen years later the thought and reading involved
27. in the preparation of his political stories and his Lord Palmerston (1882)
had more or less familiarised him with the temper, the issues, and the
personages of public controversy. It was without any of even that
preparation that he began to canvass the Minster town of the East Riding.
Can You Forgive Her? indeed (1864), like Rachel Ray of the same period,
had contained passages casually mentioning rather than attempting to
describe the war of parties at Westminster, or the appeals of the rival chiefs
to the country. At the General Election, therefore, that made Gladstone for
the first time Prime Minister, and brought our novelist as his supporter,
Trollope knew little more of politics than average newspaper readers and a
good deal less than the newspaper writers.
By his failure at Oxford in 1857, Thackeray, according to Trollope, was
saved from a situation in which he could not have shone. Probably the same
thing might have been said eleven years later of Trollope himself after the
Beverley misadventure of 1868. As parliamentary candidates both men,
indeed, belonged to the same description. Proud of being English gentlemen
first and popular writers afterwards, they looked, in Trollope’s own words,
upon a place at St. Stephen’s as the birthright of a well-born, well-bred, and
well-to-do Briton.[25] Like others of the social order with which they
identified themselves, their Westminster ambitions implied no more idea of
being useful than does entrance into any first-class club. The real and
serious difference between the two candidatures was this. At Oxford
Charles Neate had long been watching for a vacancy which might suit
Thackeray; the single reason that took Trollope to Beverley was its
allotment to him in return for a contribution to the Liberal election fund.
Beverley then possessed two members. The Conservative candidates were
stronger than any likely to be found on the other side. Sir Henry Edwards
had not only held the borough for the Conservatives before coming into the
baronetcy, but afterwards had contributed to its institutions of all kinds so
munificently as almost to have made its representation his own and his
friends’ appanage. He had now chosen for his colleague Captain Kennard,
who had already secured a good start of Trollope, and had spared neither
labour nor money in locally ingratiating himself. On the other hand,
Trollope soon made many friends who, in some cases, already knew his
writings and were gratified to find in their author a gentleman with every
mark of good breeding, as well as a shrewd, genial, and often delightful
companion.
28. Trollope’s comrade in the fight, then Marmaduke Maxwell of
Everingham, became subsequently Lord Herries and the Duke of Norfolk’s
father-in-law; for him Trollope had all the personal charm which he had
long found in his writings. The two representatives of Liberalism were thus
well assorted, and each in his own way did yeoman service to the other.
From his father, however, Trollope inherited an irritable intolerance of fools
and bores; he found several of both among his Beverley friends. The
business of electioneering degenerated into drudgery before it was half
done. The hunting season was in full swing; Trollope felt that he should go
out of his mind in disgust if he missed a few days off with the hounds. The
recreation was not indeed enjoyed at the cost of the seat, because the
Conservative success could never have been for a moment in doubt. It did,
however, make the novelist play a worse second to Maxwell and so leave
him even further behind the two Tory victors than might otherwise have
been the case. Though Trollope fell short of success at Beverley, the
invitation of his local friends to try again and the pressure of official
Liberalism not to withdraw his name from the candidates’ list are enough to
show that his failure had its redeeming points. His Post Office experience
and his power, improved by the practice, of getting up and expressing
himself on any subject would have helped him to make at least a
respectable figure had he ever been returned. As a speaker, he not only
exemplified his own counsel, already quoted, to those ambitious of
addressing parliament, but he delighted without exception, and on both
sides, his Beverley audiences by the sonorous delivery of virile periods,
clothing in clear and terse phrase thoughts that were the condensed essence
of practical wisdom and shrewd insight.
A few years after the election I happened to be visiting, at Brantingham
Thorp, Mr. Christopher Sykes. He had himself between 1865 and 1868
filled the seat contested by Trollope in the latter year. Beverley lay within
an easy drive. In my host’s old constituency there still flourished the local
gentlemen who had vigorously worked with head, heart, and hand for
Trollope. They included Mr. Charles Langdale, Mr. Alfred Crosskill, Mr.
Daniel Bayes, Mr. Hawkshaw, the famous civil engineer—a connection by
marriage of the great Josiah Wedgwood—Mr. Charles Elwell, and Mr. F.
Hall of The Yorkshire Post, the oldest member of that newspaper’s staff,
which indeed, before the journal actually started, he did much to get
together. Both these last-named gentlemen, still, I am happy to know, alive
29. and well, have themselves supplied me with some details and put me in the
way of getting others. These authorities have made me independent of my
own memory and even Trollope’s own reminiscences in the matter.
The county families of course threw their influence into the scale of
Trollope’s Conservative opponent. The balance of speaking talent was
undoubtedly on Trollope’s side; on the platform he derived his chief
assistance from Mr. James Stewart, of Hull, from Colonel Hodgson, a very
large employer of Beverley labour, and especially from Mr. William Carey
Upton, a Baptist minister. During the struggle, the Conservatives paid our
novelist a compliment he much appreciated by undertaking on their side to
withdraw Kennard, if their opponents would scratch Trollope. This would
have meant Sir Henry Edward’s and Mr. Marmaduke Maxwell’s
uncontested return. The official Liberals might have accepted the
suggestion, but the working men, deeply impressed by Trollope’s
unconventional treatment of familiar subjects and the sense of intellectual
power of all he said, would not for a moment hear of it, and this though
Trollope almost ostentatiously failed to do himself and his supporters
justice.
His sportsmanship formed a real point in his favour, for the Beverley
electors, like other Yorkshiremen, love a horse, and are instinctively
attracted to a bold rider to hounds. Trollope therefore did himself no harm
by letting the householders see him in his top boots and pink riding through
the streets on the way to a famous meet. His mistake was the selection for
sport of a time at which his committee were working for him night and day,
and his own presence could ill be dispensed with at public meetings or
private conclaves. Liberalism’s association with Home Rule placed
Trollope, in his later years, among the Conservatives. Had they enlisted his
distinction, ability, and energy on their side at the first dissolution after the
Derby-Disraeli Household Franchise Bill, he would undoubtedly have been
found Sir Henry Edward’s colleague on the declaration of the poll. But in
1868 the Conservative educators, by their discovery of the Conservative
working man, rode on a wave of popularity, rising in many places to
enthusiasm. As for the “another attempt” mentioned by Trollope to his
Beverley friends, that was never to be made, because, before the next
general election, Beverley had lost its independent political existence, less,
however, in consequence of its political corruption than by reason of certain
municipal irregularities. As the judges who disfranchised the place
30. themselves said, it was the “double event” which secured the political
extinction of the place. “I did not,” was Trollope’s characteristic comment
on the whole affair, “get in, yet I was in at the death; for the effort of my
defeat involved Beverley’s own parliamentary demise, under circumstances
less tantalising than those of our friend Kinglake’s parliamentary extinction;
for, unlike me, he got in only to be kicked out, while I at least had the
satisfaction of seeing those who had walked over me faring worse than
myself, inasmuch as they not only lost their seats but their money too.”[26]
Every incident, personage, or issue connected with Trollope’s
electioneering errand to Yorkshire was, after his usual fashion, turned into
“copy.” The novel thus inspired did not appear till 1871. It forms a well-
written record of its author’s personal partialities or prejudices during the
adventure already described. More than any of his books belonging to this
period, it recalls, by the loaded colour of its lampoons and the unwonted
bitterness of its satire, his mother’s way of dealing with the persons and
things she had found disagreeable. For the rest, the humorous notes,
whether in the way of local description or personal caricature, have, more
frequently than is found in any other novel, a Dickensian ring. If
occasionally laboured, as well as, for the most part, not below the average
in writing, it is as regards plot almost as complicated and confusing as those
parts of the Scriptural narrative dealing with the kings of Israel and Judah
called by the same name. Not less baffling than to the Biblical student the
rival Jehorams and Ahaziahs, are, in Ralph the Heir, the two prominent
personages named Ralph Newton. The story unfolds itself on these lines:
Old Squire Newton of Newton Priory, a rich country gentleman, has only
one child, Ralph, an illegitimate son, on whom all his love and hopes are
fixed. His estates, however, are entailed on his nephew, another Ralph
Newton, distinguished from his namesake as Ralph the Heir. This young
man, a spendthrift, equally weak and handsome, is universally admitted to
be the best fellow in the world. His only enemy is the uncle whom the law
compels to leave him the estate. His chief friend, formerly his guardian, is
Sir Thomas Underwood—a former Solicitor-General—a widower living at
Popham Villa, Fulham, with his two daughters. To this household is
presently added a niece, Mary Bonner, from abroad. Ralph the Heir, now
more than usually in debt, has his heaviest creditor in Neefit the tailor,
whose hunting breeches—his speciality—are of world-wide fame.
31. Some critics have scented in Trollope’s Neefit a likeness to the Mr. Bond
Sharp of Disraeli’s Henrietta Temple. The resemblance, however, is but
imaginary, because Mr. Bond Sharp, though professionally a maker of
clothes, is the idealised usurer of Disraeli and romance, while Neefit has
nothing to do with professional money-lending, and only supplies Ralph
with cash in the character of his future son-in-law, the husband-elect of his
daughter and heiress, Polly. Hence his indignation when Ralph backs out of
the match, although the would-be father-in-law gets his money back with
interest, for the tailor’s daughter is not the only matrimonial string to his
bow. Reflection and delay increase Ralph the Heir’s objection to entire
pecuniary dependence on the tailor’s daughter and heiress as his wife. He
has hit upon what may prove a more excellent way. True, his uncle, the
present owner and occupant of Newton Priory, is strong and well enough to
have many years of life before him. Still, some day, in the course of nature,
the place must be Ralph’s. It’s money worth could never be such an object
to him as now, when he knows not where to turn for funds. Why not,
therefore, exhaust every possible means for converting his reversionary
interest into ready cash. Rather than sell himself to father-in-law Neefit,
with Polly for his bride, why not sell outright to his uncle for a good round
sum, say £50,000, his Newton rights? Horace’s Ulysses, rent by the Circean
and Penelopeian rivalries, and Captain MacHeath, divided betwixt Polly
and Lucy, personify the failing of indecision as familiarly as Buridan’s ass
itself. Both are almost outdone by the average Trollopian youth or maiden’s
perplexity in the final selection of a lover from three or four candidates for
the place. Most pre-eminently is Ralph the Heir, Ralph the wobbler. Having
loved or talked about loving Polly Neefit, and ridden away, he goes through
the farcical process of giving what he is pleased to call his heart first to
Clarissa Underwood, next to Mary Bonner, and then to Clarissa again. At
this point, however, that young lady has something to say, with the result of
finding that not Ralph the Heir, but his younger brother, the Rev. Gregory
Newton, is the right man for her husband. At the same time Mary Bonner
similarly gives his congé to Ralph the Heir, and her hand to Ralph who is
not the Heir.
“He that will not when he may,
When he will he shall have nay.”
32. So it had befallen one of Trollope’s Three Clerks who loved the barmaid. So
it was now to befall Ralph the Heir.
At the point now reached Polly’s reappearance effects a complete change
in the situation. When he had formerly, as he thought for ever, bidden her
farewell, Polly’s affection for him by its vulgar exuberance had jarred on
the hard-up, but fastidious Heir. Now the young lady keeps him at a
distance, repulsing him with piquant prettiness, only to attract him. The old
flame of a mercenary passion is rekindled. After all there is no reason,
Ralph the Heir admits, against Polly’s becoming a gentleman’s wife. So it is
all arranged; even the happy day is provisionally mentioned. The nuptial
settlements have been drawn up, but are still unsigned when, hey presto!
fresh surprises all round, and instead of flirting, jilting, and all the rest of it,
we are in the thick of a political fight, reflecting in each detail Trollope’s
Beverley conflict. There is, however more than that. Ralph the Heir’s
namesake, Squire Newton’s illegitimate son, falls out of favour with his
father; Squire Newton himself breaks his neck out hunting. Thus by several
undeserved strokes of luck the Heir enters upon his heritage. By this time,
however, Sir Thomas Underwood has decided on re-entering public life. He
has, he hopes, found the necessary seat in the borough of Percycross, alias
that Beverley contested by Trollope himself, and now satirised in Ralph the
Heir. Underwood’s colleague in the fight is Mr. Griffenbottom; his
opponents are Westmacott in the Liberal and Ontario Moggs in the Radical
interest. The Tory triumph is followed by the unseating on petition of both
those who have won it; the disfranchisement of the borough completes the
barrenness of their victory.
Quite the best drawn figure amid the electioneering crush is the Radical
candidate. Ontario Moggs belongs to a class of idealised Industrials brought
into fashion by George Eliot, attempted also by Mrs. Lynn Linton, raised to
their highest perfection in Adam Bede, and brought down to a more familiar
level in Felix Holt. With that Radical, Ontario Moggs can at least hold his
own. He is, it is true, something of a prig, with a solemnity of manner and a
pompous pithiness of artificial phrase making him a little absurd. His real
cleverness, however, is not below his conceit; his readiness of speech,
quickness at the detection of fallacy and power of argument, justly entitle
him to his high reputation at the Cheshire Cheese and other debating Clubs.
During Trollope’s time the Labour member had still to win the vogue and
power brought in by the twentieth century. Still the Moggs of Ralph the
33. Heir forms a creditable study of those captains of Northumbrian industry,
some among whom were to win their way to the Treasury bench. By this
time Ralph the Heir’s rejected love, Miss Neefit, has shed all her vulgarity.
Realising the folly and danger of aspiring to the affection of her father’s
trying and impecunious customers, she has the good sense to invest her
fortune, hand, and heart in a life-partnership with a born gentleman, if of
inferior station, like Ontario Moggs.
Trollope’s hard common sense, detective vigilance, refusal to be
imposed upon, and absolute pitilessness for transgressors, when discharging
his Post Office duties, represented only one side of his character. From
another point of view his judgment and intellect were subordinate to his
emotions. This sentimentalism showed itself equally in his politics and in
his estimate of the personages to whom he introduced the public in his
books; with those personal creations he lived, as he often said, so intimately
as to be really hurt by his readers not taking the same interest in them as he
did himself. Hence his mortification at the indifference largely manifested
to the dramatis personæ of the political novels that followed Phineas Finn.
For those stories, now about to be considered, Trollope had prepared
himself, not only by the ordinary experiences of London life, but by those
of his Beverley campaign. He had also gone through a course of political
reading, one of whose literary results was to be his book on Palmerston.
This, though published subsequently to the political novels, had been
written before them, and may be, for other reasons, appropriately mentioned
now.
One Disraelian phrase, and one only, was sometimes quoted approvingly
by Trollope. “The free patrician life” of England produced, he always held,
the nation’s best rulers. Of that dispensation, in his patriotism, his
sympathies, at once popular and aristocratic, in home affairs, and in his
championship of oppressed nationalities abroad, Palmerston struck him as
the best type of the time. For Trollope, too, there was something of natural
congeniality in Palmerston’s schoolboy delight at those political doings
which he loved to describe as “capital strokes, and all off my own bat,” in
his brushes with the Court, and in his tit-for-tat with John Russell. When
putting his Palmerston monograph together, he received useful hints and
help from Sir Alexander Cockburn, whose friendship he owed to Sir
Richard Quain. In this way, he found himself able to appreciate the value to
Palmerston of the services rendered him by Sir Henry Bulwer during his
34. Paris residence at serious continental conjunctures. Hence, too, Trollope
could rate at its true worth Palmerston’s diplomacy, first, as shown by the
quadruple treaty of 1834, secondly, by the quadrilateral treaty of six years
later leading up to the London conference of 1840. Finally, Bulwer and
Cockburn enabled him to correct the popular impression of English
statesmanship abroad being overruled by the Queen and the Prince Consort,
and to show that, throughout the Austro-Italian questions then in progress,
the principles consistently held and carried out by our Foreign Office were
not those embodying the regard for the Austrian Empire held at the palace,
but of the zeal for Italian unity at that time animating the English people.
Some reference to current politics entered, as has been seen, into Rachel
Ray (1863). The subject was first made a prominent feature in Can You
Forgive Her? (1864). Here we are first formally introduced to more or less
public personages with whom our acquaintance is now to be improved.
Trollope had not been impelled to his Beverley candidature by any active
share in the Gladstonian enthusiasm, then beginning to show itself
throughout the country, nor can the Gladstonian lineaments be clearly
traced in any of the parliamentary portraits whose gallery opens with
Phineas Finn (1869). The sorrows, the disappointment, the labours, and the
other varieties of penance awaiting the average borough candidate, form the
autobiographical element in the novel that marked the new period in
Trollope’s life beginning with his retirement from the Post Office. After
Ralph the Heir, Phineas Finn takes the reader into the heart of the political
system, at St. Stephen’s, in Whitehall, in Pall Mall, and in the country-
houses, where leaders of parties, whether peers or commoners, Cabinet
Ministers and all their hangers on, congregate. The electioneering
reminiscences that give life and colour to Ralph the Heir make it therefore a
fit introduction to Trollope’s efforts in the new literary vein which, while a
paid servant of the State, he did not think desirable to work.
That was not the only fresh test applied by him in this, his fifty-third
year, to the loyalty of his readers. The example of famous or successful
contemporaries always excited a spirit of emulation in Trollope. Not only
had Dickens and Thackeray added to their reputation and wealth as
magazine editors, but, in the same capacity, men of whom he thought so
meanly as G. A. Sala and Edmund Yates had done well. The ex-Post Office
surveyor, therefore, resolved to spend part of his freedom from official
harness in the same rôle. The Virtues of City Road had just started a
35. monthly, The St. Paul’s Magazine. Anthony Trollope, with Mr. Edward
Dicey for his assistant, readily took the helm. He led off with an instalment
of fiction different from anything else he had yet attempted. Had this not
come after the Barchester series and therefore been judged by that earlier
standard, it might have had as many readers if not admirers as the other pen
and ink pictures of English life of which The Warden, in 1855, had been the
first. Phineas Finn, that first showed Trollope as a political novelist, after
having run through The St. Paul’s, was republished in two volumes octavo
(Virtue and Co.), 1869. It was continued five years later with Phineas
Redux. This originally appeared in The Graphic and was republished
(Chapman and Hall) in two volumes, 1874. The group of novels now
referred to contained other works, to be mentioned in their proper place,
and only ended with The Duke’s Children (1880) two years before
Trollope’s death. All these books are traversed by a slight connecting thread
of name, incident, or character. As to this, however, it will be best to let
these stories speak for themselves, beginning with the earliest of the
number, Phineas Finn.
The personage giving his name to this book is the son of an Irish doctor,
Malachi Finn, living at Killaloe, county Clare, well-known throughout the
province of Connaught, possessing no private fortune, but a good practice
and an expensive family. The household idolatry lavished upon the son is
thus commented on by the shrewd, sensible father. “So far he seems as good
as any other man’s goose, but much more evidence is wanted for
establishing his claim to any qualities of the swan.” Phineas, however, is no
sooner seen in London than he begins to be a success. Mr. Low, in whose
chambers he reads law, who on his own account entertains but checks
certain parliamentary ambitions, is a steady-going preceptor, social and
legal, of the old school, who admonishes his pupil to beware of distractions
from his professional training. Phineas, however, has already joined the
Reform Club and found many good houses open to him. Among the earliest
of his Pall Mall and Mayfair acquaintances Laurence Fitzgibbon, a happy-
go-lucky Irishman, cleverly sketched after the manner of Charles Lever, is
already in the House, and easily persuades Phineas that it is the only career
worth pursuing. An opportunity soon comes; the Loughshane constituency
wants a progressive candidate at the General Election; the Reform Club
committee promises a liberal contribution to his expenses if Phineas will
stand. Even thus Phineas’ allowance from his father must of course be
36. increased. The Killaloe doctor, talked over by the ladies of his family, will
do his very utmost to help his son in maintaining the new position. Phineas,
accordingly, is returned to Parliament, and is still in his first session when,
by sheer good luck, he gets an Under-Secretaryship. Then comes the first
check; Phineas kicks over the traces on an Irish question. Mr. Monk may at
some points vaguely reflect Gladstone. It is at least Finn’s loyalty to Monk
which involves the loss of his Ministerial office, and, with it, of his seat for
Loughshane, which, out of office, he cannot support in a style agreeable to
his enlarged views of an M.P.’s social consequence.
Nothing therefore is to be done but to resettle himself in the land of his
birth. Even after his retirement there come signs of returning luck in the
shape of a Government post worth £1000 a year. That enables him to settle
modestly in Dublin with his youthful sweetheart, Mary Flood Jones, for his
wife. The heart which he can offer this excellent lady is no longer a virgin
one, for during his London years he has had two or three serious love
affairs. One of these, in its sequel rather tragic, has been with Lady Laura
Standish, the impoverished Earl of Brentford’s daughter. That has been
really a case of love at first sight on both sides, for Lady Laura, having
given Phineas her affection at the beginning, does not conceal that he has it
to the end. She only refuses him because her father’s poverty compels her to
marry a rich plebeian, Mr. Kennedy, M.P., like Phineas himself, a political
supporter of Plantagenet Palliser, who eventually becomes the Duke of
Omnium. The handsome person and the shallow purse of the young Irish
member have also appealed warmly to Madame Max Goesler, a rich
widow; she has indeed, it having been apparently Leap Year, hinted to
Phineas at the acceptance of her hand and fortune as the best way out of his
money difficulties. This good-hearted, fascinating, and refreshingly
straightforward lady, whom he, after becoming a widower, marries, had
been suspected of angling for Planty Pal’s uncle, the reigning Duke of
Omnium. At least the duke’s infatuation for “Mrs. Max” had filled Lady
Glencora Palliser with a droll horror, lest the great man should actually
make her his wife and become the father of an heir who would disinherit
Planty Pal himself. Madame Goesler, however, has never any thought of
aiming at anyone above her own social level. The gracious but decisive
dismissal of her noble suitor converts Lady Glencora into her fast friend.
Throughout the rest of the story and indeed afterwards, among all Lady
37. Glencora’s intimates, none ranked so high in her regard and confidence as
the sensible and kindly lady who had been wise enough to refuse a duke.
Out of Phineas Finn’s attachment to Lady Laura arises an entirely fresh
entanglement of heart actually attended by results serious enough, and at
one time threatening to change the whole current of the narrative. In Lady
Laura’s drawing-room Phineas meets a beautiful heiress, Violet Effingham,
the bride-elect of Lady Laura’s brother, the red-haired, red-faced, shaggy,
and untamable Lord Chiltern, who bears something of a family likeness to
the St. Aldegonde of Disraeli’s Lothair, but who really represents Trollope’s
snapshot at the Lord Hartington of his own day, who died eighth Duke of
Devonshire. The fact of Miss Effingham being thus bespoke does not warn
off the philandering Phineas. Lady Laura has the mortification of seeing her
own devotion to him requited by his deliberate attempt to cut out Chiltern,
and so prevent the marriage that she had set her heart on for her brother.
Still, she sits by, agonised at heart, but uncomplaining. Nor does the
spectacle of Finn’s fickleness and shallowness lose him the love which, in
spite of herself, he had won.
Her brother views matters less passively. He has rather liked Phineas,
shown him much attention in London, mounted him on his most intractable
hunter, Bonebreaker, in the eastern counties, and admired the success with
which the doctor’s son from Killaloe has conquered that self-willed steed.
He is not, however, prepared to tolerate Phin’s poaching on his manor. He
will maintain the right to his sweetheart even at the price of blood.
Eventually the two agree to settle it at the pistol’s point. Blankenberg in
Belgium becomes the scene of a combat in which Phineas receives a not
very serious wrist wound. This encounter has been called an anachronism; it
disposes, the critics have said, if nothing else did, of the one merit, that of
absolute truth to life in all details, specially claimed by Trollope for the
novel. How stand the facts? Prince Albert, indeed, made duelling
unfashionable; but there were several cases of duels fought in Victoria’s
reign. Certainly, during the period of the Blankenberg encounter in Phineas
Finn, hostile meetings at Boulogne were often the talk of the town. Only a
generation and a half have passed since there still flourished at St.
Stephen’s, and occasionally dined with Mr. Gladstone, the wonderful
Ogorman Mahoon who, if report spoke truly, had once at least “killed his
man.” In 1852 a Canterbury election dispute caused a duel between George
Smythe, Coningsby’s original, and Colonel Frederick Romilly. About this
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