THE FIRST TWO IRISH NOVELS
Trollope’s first novel, _The Macdermots of Ballycloran_--“The best
Irish story that has appeared for half a century”--Clever effects
of light and shade--The story’s principal characters and their
allegorical significance--Typical sketches of Irish life and
institutions--The working of the spy system in detection of
crime--Some specimens of Trollopian humour--_The Kellys and the
O’Kellys_--Trollope’s second literary venture--Links with its
predecessor--Its plot and some of the more interesting figures--The
squire, the doctor, and the parson.
Had Anthony Trollope’s first novel found many Irish readers before the
trial in the Tralee courthouse, Isaac Butt might have based upon it some
more interrogatories or sarcasms than those recorded in the last
chapter, to prejudice his audience against its author. He would have
found his material in the trial scene at Carrick towards the story’s
close. In 1844, the year of his marriage, Trollope had been moved from
his station in western Ireland to Clonmel in the south. By this time he
had not only completed the plan, but had written a volume of his
earliest novels. In his _Autobiography_, as well as in the text itself
of _The Macdermots_, the circumstances out of which his first attempt at
fiction grew have been explained by the author in words that,
transferred to Mr. Thorold’s introduction,[5] need not be repeated here.
The book itself had been begun in September 1843. Finished at Clonmel,
it was taken by its author in 1845 to England. On this occasion he
approached no publisher directly, but placed the manuscript in his
mother’s hands, to do with it what she could. Her good offices secured
its publication on the half-profit system by Newby in 1847.
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.
Trollope’s first two novels, like a few more, following after a long
interval and to be examined in their proper place, dealt exclusively
with Ireland and the Irish as he had seen both during the earlier years
of his acquaintance with the country. The waste of gifts, of energies,
and the persistent refusal profitably to employ qualities and occasions
out of which fortunes might be made, had appealed to Trollope’s sense of
pathos, directly he began to know the country. Long after their crazy
roof-trees had ceased properly to shelter them from the wind and rain,
starving families refused to exchange their homes for the large
workhouses that now studded the land. The fortunes of men and women who
ought to have been leaders of the middle class were melting to
nothingness before the fire of failures and losses that seemed as
irresistible as fate. A sort of dry-rot, as Trollope put it, moral and
intellectual not less than material, seemed preying everywhere on the
vitals of the people. And this in a land whose men lacked few endowments
which, with due discipline and direction, would have brought them
success, and whose daughters abounded in the beauty, brightness, and
grace that are heaven’s best means for making homes happy and refined.
Miss Edgeworth in _Castle Rackrent_, it has been seen, tells her story
through the medium of an old dependent of the place before its fortunes
had quite gone. In the opening pages of _The Macdermots_, Trollope
employs for the same purpose the guard of the Boyle coach. His are the
reminiscences out of which the novelist manufactures the fall from their
high estate of a family boasting the inevitable Irish kings for their
ancestors. For the rest, the sketches of place and character are from
what Trollope saw with his own eyes while going his Post Office rounds,
or from what he had picked up while staying with his friends at Coole
Park.
The head of the household, Larry Macdermot, known only by his Christian
name to his children, to his tenants, who seldom pay their rents, and to
his creditors impatiently waiting to foreclose their mortgages, is a
whining, helpless imbecile, in years little, if at all, past middle age,
but, from the combined effects of misfortune and whisky-soaking,
already in his dotage. As a younger son, Larry’s father had inherited
some six hundred acres, let in small holdings, and a house recently
constructed for him by a builder named Flannelly, who has, of course, a
mortgage upon it. This roof, now sadly out of repair, just sheltered
Larry himself, his daughter Feemy, and his son Thady, who acted as his
bailiff. The young man keeps up the pretence of transacting the business
of the property by passing a few hours every morning in a tumble-down
room which he calls his office. Thady’s parts, like many of his
qualities, are naturally good. He is neither a profligate nor a
drunkard, but the poverty, squalor, and ignorance in which he has been
brought up have starved the energies that, in happier surroundings,
might have retrieved the fortunes of a race whose degradation, never out
of his sight or mind, keeps him in a chronic condition of grievance and
discontent. By a few quiet but skilful touches in Trollope’s best
manner, signs in Thady of sensitiveness to the jeopardised Macdermot
honour gradually reveal themselves. They mark the slow dawn of a
presentiment that he is the agent chosen by fate for punishing him who
has inflicted the one foul stain yet possible on the Macdermot honour.
Ballycloran itself, with its down-at-heel occupants, typifies
allegorically, with sustained power and rugged picturesqueness, the
agricultural and pastoral Ireland which Trollope had seen and studied in
all its varieties. Less indomitably idle than his drivelling father had
always been, as well as in all respects a better man, Thady might have
been trained to a life of family and national service. His habitually
dormant powers might at any time have been roused to vigorous, fruitful
action but for the deadening and demoralising influence of his
environment. Innocent and ignorant of the sins of cities, he was
comparatively free from the commonest vices of the country. Father
Mathew’s mission had not yet inflamed the Irish peasantry with a passion
for temperance; but without any such teaching, Thady Macdermot had never
fallen a victim to strong drink. His chief enemy was his own
temperament, which, when we first meet him, it is clear may, in some
unforeseen conditions, be suddenly and dangerously kindled into
ferocious passion. Less from any words escaping him on the subject than
his habitual air of sullen and silent preoccupation do we know that he
thinks of little else than his own decadence from his forefathers. He
had always felt that his family was sinking lower and lower daily,
without finding it in him to arrest the process for the future, or move
a finger in repairing the ruin of the past. Therefore he had only become
more gloomy, more tyrannical. His one companion and his only resource is
his pipe, his one employment to fill and refill it. Into such a lot
neither pleasure nor excitement could enter, and, especially for a Celt,
Trollope would have his readers feel, that way madness lies.
Thus, through the gradual development of the plot, we know instinctively
that some Nemesis will declare itself on an existence which has lost the
force or the desire to rise out of an atmosphere whose slow poison has
stunted and deformed its growth. In its joylessness as well as in its
decline from the better fortunes of earlier days, the picture of
Ballycloran not only reflected the prevailing depression, agricultural
and industrial, of the country, but harmonised with the lamentations
from fashionable lips over the final eclipse of the gaiety of its
capital. Irish society leaders of the good old days, when the sporting
season did not keep them to their castles in Connaught or Ulster, used
on a grand scale to keep up their houses in Fitzwilliam or Merrion
Square in their native metropolis. All that had gone. Huge, overgrown,
vulgar London had snuffed out select, elegant, and refined Dublin, whose
stately quadrangles and picturesque avenues were deserted by their
proper occupants for some spick-and-span new mansions which stared one
out of countenance in Tyburnia, or some more modest tenement in a dingy
angle of Mayfair. The glories of the Viceregal Court had long since
begun to pale. The impatiently waited royal visits that it was hoped
might bring compensation were as yet repeatedly delayed. In this way the
fair city on the Liffey had been largely shorn of its attractions and
pleasures, just as the rich soil of the surrounding country was
impoverished by ignorance and neglect. Some hint of this formed the
minor key in Trollope’s powerful and pathetic dirge over the progressive
extinction of the family lamps at Ballycloran. In certain details,
therefore, as well as in general idea, the Macdermots formed the
microcosm of an entire people. Its genius, always feminised as Erin, is
appropriately personified by the daughter of the ill-starred house, on
the common ruin of whose members the curtain falls. Trollope’s Irish
experiences, as has been already said, gave him some acquaintance with
the Young Ireland movement, and its combined appeals to the patriotic
and romantic sensibilities, as well as to the cupidity, of a populace
readily lending itself to the wiles of skilled agitators.
The oratorical or literary blandishments of Smith O’Brien’s
self-summoned and mercenary camp-followers caught their victims in
snares exactly paralleled by the novels with which Feemy had debauched
her imagination and by the appeals of the lover who wrought her
overthrow. Her picture given in the first chapter of the story is a
delineation of racial features not peculiar to any one epoch of Irish
narrative. The girl’s temperament is that of her nation; her form and
figure are the perennial attributes of those belonging to her sex and
class. Here is the daughter of the Macdermots, the incarnation of her
country. At the age of twenty, when the reader first sees her, Feemy was
a tall, dark girl, with that bold, upright, well-poised figure so
peculiarly Irish. She walked as if all the blood of the old Irish
princes was in her veins. Her step, at any rate, was princely. Feemy
also had large bright-brown eyes, and long, soft, shining, dark-brown
hair, which was divided behind, fell over her shoulders, or was tied
with ribbons. She had the well-formed nose common to all of those coming
of old families; and a bright olive complexion, only the olive was a
little too brown, the skin a little too coarse. Feemy’s mouth, moreover,
was half an inch too long. But her teeth were white and good, and her
chin was well turned, with a dimple large enough for any finger Venus
might put there. In all, Feemy was a fine girl to a man not too
well-accustomed to refinement. Her hands were too large and too red, but
if Feemy had got gloves enough to go to Mass with, it was all she could
do in that way. For the rest, she was as badly shod as gloved. She
shared, therefore, with her other beautiful countrywomen an entire
absence of the neatness whose attraction, did they but understand it,
for men might have prevented their appearing so often as poor Feemy too
usually appeared.[6] In the figure thus described, there lay energies
and passions as strong as those concealed in her brother, if only any
object stimulating their fair and wholesome exercise had presented
itself.
“Men, some to business, some to pleasure take,
But ev’ry woman is at heart a rake.”
By which familiar couplet Pope of course meant nothing more than that
the essentially feminine and, it may be, entirely blameless appetite for
enjoyment, for the most part only a love of change, is no more
eradicable from the sex than love of power.
This maiden scion of a decayed stock rebelled with the whole strength of
her being, not so much against the poverty or the meanness as against
the intolerably dull sameness of life in the jerry-built tenement, now
hardly fifty years old. The mortgage on this, held by its constructor
Flannelly, places at his mercy the doomed remnants of those who had once
owned the estate. Something has been already said about the popular
Irish murmurs at the waning splendours of the Viceregal Court. The
continuance of many material abuses might have been acquiesced in almost
without complaint if Dublin Castle had become once more the living and
shining centre of a social system ablaze with hospitalities, and
communicating a sense of importance, stir, and of quickly circulating
capital, such as would have gratified even those excluded from its
entertainments. The time nominally taken by Trollope for his story is
the nineteenth century’s third decade. He himself, we have seen, did not
reach Ireland till 1841, and drew only what he actually saw. Nor, since
his arrival, had anything happened to betray him into anachronism.
In the fifties, not less than they had done in the forties, the poets,
prophets, preachers, and teachers of _The Nation_ still expatiated in
glowing terms on the good time coming when, with the aid of republican
France, Ireland should receive from the statesmen who were her sons the
glories of a new birth, and Dublin should once again be as it was when
it had its own parliament sitting in St. Stephen’s Green. Like
expectations had been encouraged in Feemy by the literature she loved.
With the help of the saints and of luck, her novelists had taught her
that a lover, brave, handsome, gallant, and sufficiently well-to-do, who
would think of nothing else but pouring silver, gold, and precious
stones into his sweetheart’s lap, would yet appear to her at some
appointed time not known. For such a prospect she had fitted herself
with some accomplishments. She could play on an old spinet which had
belonged to her mother, she had made herself a good dancer, and found
herself lifted into another sphere when, with the help of the music and
the movement, she forgot in her partner’s arms the cares, the meanness,
and the gloom of the family hearthside.
When alone, however, she still fed her fancy with the cheap,
ill-printed, trashy, and mischievous books that were to the Irish
girlhood in her day what the penny novelette and the sixpenny shocker
have, since her time, become to readers of her age, sex, and condition
on both sides of St. George’s Channel. While Feemy’s town sisters might
have been in raptures over the broadsheets wherein an earthly paradise
was promised by writers who addressed with equal skill the romantic
taste of the kitchen and the political passions of the mob, Feemy was
giving her eyes, her heart and soul to _The Mysterious Assassin_, as her
only refuge from Thady Macdermot’s everlasting talk about potatoes,
oats, pigs, and from the dread, darkening the household like a cloud,
that, impatient for principal as well as interest, Mr. Joe Flannelly of
Carrick-on-Shannon might come down upon Ballycloran, to make himself
master of the place and all within it.
Well would it have been for the Macdermots had their fair representative
sought no further distraction from her dulness than the trivial and
vulgar reading that, whatever its faults, was not calculated to do more
lasting harm to the reader than was received by town labourers and rural
peasants from the tawdry sedition mongers of Gavan Duffy’s literary
staff. Writing in the earlier forties, Trollope economised his approval
of most English measures for reforming Irish abuses. Even when not bad
in themselves, those expedients might be corrupted by the human agents
to which they were entrusted. The establishment of an Irish constabulary
force dates from Liverpool’s administration and Wellington’s
Lord-Lieutenancy in 1823. Changes in that body continued to be made till
the consolidation of the various Acts connected with the subject had for
its sequel Sir Robert Peel’s establishment in 1836 of the Irish
Constabulary. Just a generation later, at Queen Victoria’s command, this
body became known by its present name, the Royal Irish Constabulary. The
duties of this imperial force, from the first, included certain civil
services not imposed upon policemen of the United Kingdom. Such are the
yearly collection of agricultural statistics, the management of the
decennial census, the conduct by auction sales of goods taken under
distress warrants, the inspection of weights and measures, the practical
administration of the Food, Drugs, and Explosives Acts. The Irish
Constabulary, too, are charged with the prevention of smuggling and of
illicit distillation. The officers of this force are now chosen by Civil
Service examinations. Vacancies for district inspectors are filled, one
half by cadets, and one half by selected constables of exceptional
merit.
To this body in its earlier days, as reconstituted by Peel, belonged the
evil genius of Trollope’s first novel, Myles Ussher. Captain Ussher was
his local title; for the revenue police were at that time organised as a
military force. He had of course received his appointment without
submission to any educational test. The natural son of a wealthy landed
proprietor in Ulster, he owed his appointment entirely to family
influence. He could read, write, knew something of figures, and had once
learned, but had long since entirely forgotten, some Latin grammar.
There are touches in the description of this man showing that the
novelist had profited by the _Ethics_, which, to quote Trollope’s words
to the writer, “at least helped me here, though they had not done so in
the Oxford scholarship examination for which I read them.” For Ussher’s
valour was the spurious courage that comes of ignorance, and arises in
equal parts from animal spirits and from not having yet experienced the
evil effects of danger rather than from real capabilities of enduring
its consequences. In other words, we are told, never having been hit in
a duel, he would have no hesitation in fighting one; never having had a
bad fall on horseback, he was a bold rider; never having had his head
broken in a row, he would readily go into one. To pain, if it were not
absolutely disabling, he was indifferent, because, not having yet
suffered its acute form, he lacked the imagination to make him realise
the possibility of sometimes experiencing it to such a degree. This kind
of courage is shrewdly declared by Trollope to be that by far the most
generally met with, as well as fully sufficient for the life Captain
Ussher had to lead. The quality that chiefly gave Ussher some vogue with
the better classes of his district, was his unfailing self-confidence
and unconcealed belief in his ability, whether in war or love, to carry
through any purpose he had taken up. His keen, calculating Irish brain
had taught him the universal readiness to accept men at their own
valuation of themselves. Acting on that principle, he had created for
himself an impression, strong everywhere but especially among women, of
being irresistible in whatever he might take up, and of having received
from fate itself a guarantee against failure, whether in things of
business or of the heart. Add to all this that, in a country where a
little money goes a long way, Ussher contrived to be always supplied
with ready cash.
What wonder therefore if in this favourite of destiny Feemy’s
novel-nourished, romance-excited, and ill-regulated fancy saw the
realisation of her fondest visions? Of course the mounted policeman,
with the graceful seat on his horse, the uniform which became his
handsome figure so well, became to her one of the knightly figures with
whom the writers that she loved had peopled her imagination. And then
his conversation, resembling Othello’s, about “most disastrous chances,
moving accidents by flood and field, and hair-breadth escapes” in the
regions where his duty lay, “of rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose
heads touch heaven.” Feemy probably had never read Shakespeare, or she
might have learned wisdom from Desdemona. A sense of Æschylean fate, no
more to be shunned than softened, runs through this tragedy, whose
closing acts are not without the strength and pathos of Dickens in
_Oliver Twist_, and at some points touch the Shakespearean level.
Feemy’s father may not, indeed, have loved Ussher, or even “oft invited
him.” But not on that account a less frequent or warmly received guest,
he rode from his barracks, three miles distant, at Mohill, to
Ballycloran to pass almost daily a whole morning or evening. Captain
Ussher’s local unpopularity as a Protestant and a remorselessly vigilant
official was nothing to his disadvantage in Feemy’s eyes. She saw in it
only a proof of her lover’s devotion to his duty, and of his heroic
determination of not flinching from any risk of life or limb in
fulfilling the obligations he had taken upon himself.
The one member of the Ballycloran household who sees through the
policeman’s designs upon the girl is Pat Brady, Thady Macdermot’s
counsellor, rent-collector, and factotum. Even Thady, but for hampering
considerations, would not lack the spirit to repel Ussher’s advances,
and by doing so secure his sister’s safety. What, however, he mentally
asks, can he do? The exciseman, on the strength of a mere vague
suspicion, is not to be forbidden the house. That at best would only
provoke his sister’s indignant disgust. Thady therefore remains
inactive, and the only effect of the vague hints and irresponsible
suggestions received from different quarters is to intensify a silent,
sullen hatred of the man. That, henceforth, by a series of slow
degrees--the description of which is Trollope’s earliest exhibition of
high literary art--becomes his ruling passion. Not that, even yet, he
has in his heart doomed Ussher to death for his intrusions upon the
fallen family’s hospitality, and for the scandalous gossip that is
raised against Feemy. Till the final stage comes within sight, Thady’s
detestation is for the most part speechless, except when the accident of
Ussher’s voice or presence rouses the young man to a passing fit of
uncontrollable fury. About this time Ussher made a professional _coup_
which, while more than ever concentrating upon himself the ill-will of
the district at large, and in particular of Thady Macdermot, showed such
adroitness and such contempt of personal danger combined as to deepen
poor Feemy’s admiration of her hero. A wretch named Cogan, a Government
spy, disclosed all the secrets of the trade in illicit potheen: the men
who chiefly conducted it, and the places where the run spirits were to
be found. The pauper peasants had been driven to this traffic because it
offered the only chance of avoiding starvation.
Ussher’s official triumph in running the “potheen men” to earth leads
directly up to the catastrophe. It secures the policeman’s promotion,
but inflames to madness his detestation by Thady, who, little better
than a peasant himself, sympathises with the peasantry that Ussher is
hunting down. Feemy, on the other hand, idolising her lover’s
intrepidity, ignores the local misery that is wrought by his daring
devotion to duty. She thus unconsciously widens the gulf between her
brother and herself. Trollope’s Post Office discipline, hardening his
sensibilities, and constantly giving a fresh edge to his natural acumen,
fitted him successfully to investigate in all its workings the
contraband spirits trade and the spy system used for its detection. This
fact gave more than an ordinary novelist’s value to what he had to say
on the subject. Among the lower classes, two typical specimens of the
human degradation it works are seen in Joe Reynolds and Pat Brady.
Reynolds is a mere desperado, waging a truceless war with the world and
with law. Brady has never been reduced to Reynolds’ straits for money
and food; indeed the occupation alone of squeezing arrears from the
Macdermot tenantry has always placed him a little above the dread of
starvation. Will the young master of Ballycloran be induced, through
Brady as the tool of Reynolds, to join the “boys” in exacting reprisals
for the harshness meted out to them by the law?
The “boys” are bent on drawing Thady into their schemes of revenge,
likely to prove murderous, upon two of his special abominations, not
only Ussher but the builder, Flannelly’s man of business, Keegan, who
aimed at himself possessing Ballycloran. With a sigh of relief, the
reader finds Thady resist the “boys’” overtures, and, for the time,
hopes he may yet be kept from the crowning crime which destiny had
seemed to reserve for him. One of Ussher’s most recent captures goes by
the name of Tim. This, on a much earlier page, has caused an ejected
cottager to anticipate the policeman’s end with the words: “I’d sooner
be in Tim’s shoes this night than in Captain Ussher’s, fine gentleman as
he thinks hisself.” So far, however, Thady holds aloof from any projects
of retribution, likely to involve bloodshed, against the men whose names
had become bywords throughout the countryside. Nevertheless, we are
still made to feel that, superhuman agencies, in the shape of
foreordained circumstances, will draw Thady’s neck into the hangman’s
noose.
What did Trollope, after careful inquiry, find the spy system, in its
social and moral consequences, to be? At the outset he admits that paid
informers frequently bring to justice criminals who would otherwise slip
through the meshes of the legal net. On the other hand, the system
involves not only the degradation of all concerned with it, but very
often the grossest miscarriages of justice. Chief among the villainies
of Irish espionage is the premium placed upon false informations by the
prospect of blood-money. Next to that evil comes the deliberate
manufacture of offences by those who have a money interest in
fabricating baseless charges against the innocent and unwary. Trollope
does not charge the Government with encouraging these informers, or even
recognising them. All he says is that those charged with the execution
of criminal laws do frequently secure their own advancement by the most
iniquitous and demoralising methods.[7]
The resistance offered by Thady Macdermot to the schemes of ruffians who
would stick at nothing fills many powerful pages in Trollope’s first
story. The young master of Ballycloran is preoccupied with the issues of
his sister’s fate, and maddened with the insinuations to which Ussher’s
visits gave the point. Ussher himself will die a violent death, but as
regards who is to deal the avenging blow the reader is kept in the
sustained agony of a trying and artistically prolonged suspense. Some of
those seized by Ussher for systematic evasion of the Excise duties
protest their innocence while, bound together in twos and threes with
cords, they are being huddled off to prison. To one of these Ussher
exclaimed: “You mean to threaten me, you ruffian.” “I doesn’t threaten
you”, was the answer, “but there is them as does; and it will be a black
night’s work to you for what you are doing with the boys, for trying to
make out the rint with the whisky, not for themselves but for them as is
your friends.” Thus dramatically is set forth the Irish question, as it
seemed to Trollope when he first knew the country. At the same time, the
followers of his narrative, their interest in the characters now fairly
roused, experience a sense of relief at discovering that they may think
that Thady at least will be no party in doing the execrated policeman,
or anyone else, to death.
The atmosphere at this point is so heavily charged with moral issues as
to be depressing almost beyond tolerance. After the example set in such
cases by Shakespeare, and indeed in a way Shakespeare might have
approved, Trollope at once relieves the situation and at the same time,
by the force of contrast, deepens its tragedy with humorous interludes
more illustrative of Irish character than descriptions that should run
to many pages. The peasants, whose inability to pay high rent for
miserably bad land, and who, in Trollope’s words, have had recourse to
illegal means for easing them of their difficulties, may have been
driven to become “ribbon men,” but, even when separated from ruin by
less than a step, throw themselves heart and soul into the noisy
hilarities of a wake or a wedding. The description of Pat Brady’s
marriage-feast, followed by the improvised cottage ball, might be the
letterpress written up to some painting from the brush of an Irish
Morland. Even the moody young master of Ballycloran, who is among the
guests, in spite of his scowling glances and his inaudible imprecations
on the policeman, has caught the contagious gaiety of the occasion.
Ussher, also of the company, leads out Feemy as his partner. The
prevailing merriment cannot indeed dispel the haunting thought that it
may prove to be a dance of death. But the party itself ends, as it
began, in whisky and in peace. Thady indeed, having taken more whisky
than is his wont, exchanges hot words with Ussher afterwards. But the
popular voice hints only, if at all, at what is to come in Brady’s
whisper to Joe Reynolds: “It’s little Mr. Thady loves the Captain, and
it’s little he ever will.”
This small melodramatic touch is followed by pen-and-ink pictures of
society and sport, again driving the figure of a skeleton at the feast
into the distant background. Carrick is to have some races, and
afterwards a race ball. The night before, there is a dinner; one of the
chief figures at this is a gentleman jockey, Bob Gayner, whose life is
spent in riding steeplechases, and consequently in reducing his weight
to the lowest possible figure. At this particular banquet he has not
swallowed a mouthful. Our last sight of him is, when the diners
disperse, standing against the fire-place sucking a lemon, with a large
overcoat on, and a huge choker round his neck.
Quick, however, on the heels of all this festivity comes the warning
that mischief more serious than ever is in the wind. The parish priest
in _The Macdermots_, Father John, never proselytises, never intrigues,
and only exacts from his flock alms enough to keep body and soul
together. His device, however, to keep Feemy out of danger by moving her
from Ballycloran to the care of Mrs. McKeon, together with her husband
touched off in one of Trollope’s happiest character miniatures, has
failed. The lover who, on one plea after another, had evaded Feemy’s
repeated request of marriage, thinks now of nothing less than of making
her his wife, but, being content to retain her as a possession, has no
objection to punish Thady Macdermot for his unmannerly speech by
carrying off his sister. How that design fails of execution, and how
Feemy is not abducted, but Ussher, at the instant of lifting her into
the carriage, is felled to the ground a corpse by Thady’s smashing
bludgeon, forms a scene comparable, for blood-curdling force of
description, with Nancy’s murder by Bill Sykes, and did indeed win from
Charles Dickens his earliest admission that Trollope had strength as
well as glibness. The long-drawn-out strain on her whole being of the
events thus summarised has caused Feemy’s days to be numbered. She dies
suddenly while waiting to give evidence at her brother’s trial. All that
remains now is the execution of the death-sentence on Thady. The last
words that he hears before the bolt is drawn are those of Father John’s
prayer that God will receive him into His mercy.
The scenes of violence and desolation on which the curtain falls may
almost be compared for impressiveness with any picture of the collective
ruin wrought by Nemesis in Greek drama, or as the close of _Hamlet_
itself. Yet the gloom which darkens the whole narrative derives at once,
for the moment, relief from lighter interludes. Bob Gayner in _The
Macdermots_ prepares the way for Dot Blake in _The Kellys and the
O’Kellys_. One chapter also in Trollope’s first novel so overflows with
comedy passing into farce as appropriately to presage the rich and
varied humour that is on the whole the dominant note of his second
effort. Among the magistrates whom Thady Macdermot’s crime have called
in solemn conclave together, are two, Jonas Brown of Brown Hall and Mr.
Webb of Ardrum. In all respects but social or official status, these
two form a complete contrast. The ungenial and unpopular Brown, one of
Ussher’s most habitual hosts, has from the first angrily maintained the
absence of any extenuating feature in the murder committed by Thady
Macdermot. Webb, on the other hand, naturally amiable and beloved
throughout his neighbourhood, almost goes so far as to deny Thady’s
moral criminality. In the attempt to rescue something of his sister’s
honour he merely committed justifiable homicide. His remarks on Thady’s
opponents had been so severe as to be taken for personal insults by the
Brown faction. The master of Brown Hall therefore demands from Webb a
written assurance that his words were pointed at no member of the Brown
family, but receives an answer regretting that he cannot comply with
such a request. This, it must be remembered, was in the days before the
duel had become obsolete.
Brown’s two sons, Fred and George, have from the first been spoiling for
a fight. “The sod’s the only place now, father,” each exultingly
exclaims, adding: “I like him the better for not recanting.” Fred takes
a more serious view, remarks that Webb is a cursed good shot, suggests
his father should make his will before he goes out. It would also be as
well, in case of accidents, to have a doctor handy, for, as one of the
sons thoughtfully remarks: “Though so vital a part as the head be not
touched, the body is all over tender bits,” devoutly adding, in words
that really have a touch of Dogberry or Shakespearean clown about them:
“May heaven always keep lead out of my bowels; I’d sooner have it in my
brains.” The father has fidgeted a good deal between these two fires of
filial thoughtfulness and counsel, but so far has said nothing. At the
last remark, his patience deserts him, and he exclaims: “D---- your
brains! I don’t believe you’ve got any,” presently adding that the
affair is one of which he has had some experience, while as yet neither
of the young men has been out. The preliminaries of the duel may be
comedy; the combat itself rises to farce. _The Macdermots_ contains, as
will have been seen, touches of more polished humour than this, though
in most cases it is broad enough to suggest Anthony Trollope’s
inheritance of the gift from his clever mother.
Such passages as that last dwelt upon in _The Macdermots_ prepared, as
had been suggested, the way for the transition to the next novel, _The
Kellys and the O’Kellys_. That story, indeed, is not without some
incidents only less sombre than those which diffuse their colour through
the earlier book. It is characteristic of Trollope’s novels that the
underplot is often of as much importance, and the source of as sustained
an interest, as the main plot itself. In _The Kellys and the O’Kellys_,
the secondary narrative not only keeps pace with the primary, but
reflects the general character of its interest and displays a parallel
for some of its occurrences. The period, a little later than the time
chosen for _The Macdermots_, is that of O’Connell’s agitation, trial,
and unimpaired ascendency. Among those brought to Dublin by the
Liberator’s appearance before his judges are two men. One is the head of
the O’Kelly, as of the Kelly clans, now Lord Ballindine; the other is a
young man of about his own age, a widow trader’s son, Martin Kelly, whom
the nobleman contemptuously acknowledges as a sort of fifteenth cousin.
This group is completed by the evil genius of the story, Dot Blake. Both
the peer and the peasant happen just now to be united by a similarity of
object, more closely binding them for the moment than the tie of remote
kinship. Fond of the turf, with one or two horses in training for the
English “classical” races, Viscount Ballindine is bent on improving his
finances by sharing his title with an heiress, Fanny Wyndham; her
guardian, the Earl of Cashel, having other views for her, is actively
concerned to prevent communications between his ward and her lover.
Now for Martin Kelly. Simeon Lynch, the Ballindine estate manager, under
the present Viscount’s father, has feathered his nest so well as to have
amassed a fortune that has raised his children far above the social
level of their birth. His son, Barry Lynch, has even been at Eton with
young Lord Ballindine; though in Barry’s case the “learning of the
humanities have not softened manners or prevented them from being
fierce.” His daughter Anastasia, known as Anty, divides the paternal
property with her brother. She is therefore a very considerable catch.
Nevertheless the plebeian Martin Kelly, with his Irish self-confidence,
has set his heart on winning her. That project is resisted as strongly,
by Anty’s brother, as Fanny Wyndham’s guardian objects to his ward’s
union with Ballindine. Lord Cashel does what he considers his duty to
the young lady in his charge shrewdly and, so far as her lover is
concerned, harshly. Much whisky, and a money greediness that has
swallowed up other passions, have gradually degraded Barry Lynch into a
ruffianly sot, with no other thought than, by foul means if fair fail,
to become master of his sister’s share in the property their father
divided equally by will between them. The brother’s drunken ferocity
proves the death-warrant to his schemes. Driven from home by Barry’s
barbarity, Anty Lynch finds a humble refuge beneath the roof of Mrs.
Kelly, Martin Kelly’s mother. To these extremities, the relations
between Fanny Wyndham and Lord Ballindine naturally present no parallel.
Even with them, however, the course of true love runs at least as
roughly as is its proverbial wont.
The figures gathered round the leading personages in this twin drama
illustrate the closeness with which Trollope studied every phase of
Irish life. They are as racy of the soil as Charles Lever himself. Their
truth and freshness indeed so much impressed Lever that they suggested
to him the new variety of Irish character to be met with in his latest
writings. The Irish squire who lives more by his wits than his land,
Walter Blake, might indeed, had he wanted such inspiration, have
supplied the germ of Dudley Sewell in _Sir Brook Fossbrooke_, and the
other products of the post-Lorrequer period. An effeminate, slightly
made man of about thirty, good-looking, gentlemanlike, with a cold,
quiet, grey eye, and a thin lip, infallible on racing matters, riding
boldly good horses, always drinking the very best claret that Dublin
could procure, a finished gambler, who makes his six hundred a year, as
to style of life, do the work of as many thousands. Here is a
description entirely in the later Leverian style, and with the Leverian
ring in the words of the well-bred, sporting adventurer, who plays his
own game with such an entire absence of scruple, and with such polished
serenity, that his friend Frank Ballindine has to thank some of Dot
Blake’s remarks to Lord Cashel for the temporary rupture of his
engagement with Fanny Wyndham. Lever’s first profession was medicine.
How well Trollope understood its Irish representatives may be seen from
his sketch of Doctor Colligan, who, attending Anty Lynch in the illness
brought on by her brother’s brutality, resents, by knocking him down, a
hint from Barry that he would make it worth the physician’s while to
contrive the patient’s death. Of special interest, in view of what
Trollope’s next novel was to be, is the Anglican clergyman on the
Ballindine property, George Armstrong, whose life is a battle with
tradesmen and tithe-payers, but who, though on one occasion Frank
Ballindine has to supply him with a suit of clothes before despatching
him on some errand to his lady-love, can always enjoy a good dinner when
he gets one, and pilots his sorry hunter so cleverly as generally to be
in at the death when out with hounds.