COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE AND ITS LITERARY FRUITS
Trollope’s _Examiner_ articles--Opposing religious experiences of
boyhood and early manhood--Moulding influences of his Irish
life--The cosmopolitan in the making--Interest in France and the
French--_La Vendée_--Trollope’s relation to other English writers
on the French Revolution--The moving spirits of the Vendean
insurrection--Peasant royalist enthusiasm--Opening of the
campaign--The Chouans of fact and fiction--A republican
portrait-gallery--Barère--Santerre--Westerman--Robespierre--Eleanor
Duplay.
At the time of their first appearance the two Irish novels just
described were commercial and literary failures. They preceded, however,
even if they did not help to bring about, a turn for good in their
author’s fortunes. It was indeed only after the full establishment of
Trollope’s reputation that both _The Macdermots_ and _The Kellys and the
O’Kellys_ were shown by the reflected light of success to abound in
promise. The discovery might have been made earlier had not the books
long remained practically unknown. However, Dickens’ friend and
biographer, John Forster, then the most formidable critic and exacting
editor on the London Press, thought sufficiently well of Trollope’s work
to commission from him for _The Examiner_ certain articles about the
districts chiefly affected by the successive ravages of plague and
famine in 1847. The broken fences, the deserted farms, and the
monotonously endless stretches of misery and destitution in Trollope’s
Post Office district, including Cork, Kerry, and Clare, were soon to be
further disfigured by sights more terrible. Starvation did but prepare
the way for the most hideous forms of new and ghastly disease.
Sufferers soon found their skins tight drawn, like a drum, to the face,
and covered with small light hairs, as of those on a gooseberry. The
poor wretches thus plague-stricken, having no longer roofs to shelter
them, were huddled together in wigwams pitched under park walls, with no
other food than that which the charity of the owners of these demesnes
supplied. Conspicuous among the landlords who answered these appeals
were Lord Dunkellin and Edmund O’Flaherty of Knockbane, near Galway. Out
of all this misery, the political agitators, largely imported from the
other side of the Atlantic, had begun in 1846 to make capital. This was
their way of drawing Ireland into the subversive vortex which had
already sucked in nearly the whole European continent. The appeal of the
sedition mongers seemed to Trollope a failure, or at best but partially
and superficially successful. As to the general condition in 1848, he
told _The Examiner_ that it was not a revolutionary year, at least for
Ireland. They talked about rows. But these, he said, existed only in
newspaper columns. From Portrush to Waterford, and from Connemara to
Dublin, there would be found no trace of any widespread, popular plan
for converting peasant occupiers into sovereign proprietors. No one
realised more fully than the Connaught crofter the folly and futility of
the talk about abolishing the difference between employers and employed.
In England, wrote Trollope, there was too much intelligence to look for
any general improvement on a sudden. In Ireland there was too little
intelligence to look for any improvement at all.
The English Government, now under Sir Robert Peel, had taken the first
step towards relieving Irish distress by freeing the ports for the
admission of foreign grain in 1846. Trollope himself had seen the
universal alleviation following the arrival of Indian corn for the
starving people. Next, Lord John Russell, as Prime Minister in 1847,
instituted relief-works to help the unemployed masses. These measures
were attacked from two different quarters. Among the Irish peasantry
some complained of not being fed absolutely for nothing. The landed
classes were disposed to doubt the necessity of any State interference
at all. But in his third Irish novel, _Castle Richmond_ (1860), dealing
with the famine period, Trollope himself testified to the alacrity shown
by the territorial class in co-operating with the State. And Trollope
was likely to be an impartial judge. His personal sympathies were not
then with the Whigs. The English public man with whom he was chiefly in
communication, the philanthropic Lord Shaftesbury, having served under
Wellington and Peel, passed for a Conservative. The main points of his
_Examiner_ articles have been already given. The whole little series
formed an answer to the charges against ministers brought by their
censors, alike in Press and Parliament. The seven years he had passed on
the other side of St. George’s Channel had indeed been turned to such
good account as to make him an authority on Irish affairs in their then
most prominent aspect.
Meanwhile, by the personal intercourse of society, or by instructive and
inspiring correspondence with useful friends, Trollope had improved his
acquaintance with men, manners, and things in a way that was afterwards
to bear literary fruit. Between 1846 and 1850, his mother still lived at
Florence, and though Anthony did not actually visit Florence till 1853,
he and Mrs. Trollope, during those years, held regular and copious
communication with each other through the post. In this way many
pleasant glimpses are caught of diverse personalities famous, or at
least interesting. There is F. W. Faber, first met at Mr. Sloane’s, the
wealthy Anglo-Florentine, who gave the church of Santa Croce its new
front. To Faber, Trollope was apparently first attracted by his having
been the most brilliant Harrovian of his time. This acquaintanceship at
once deeply interested Mrs. Trollope, and was to have a lasting effect
upon her son. His first religious lessons may have been those in the
Church catechism. He had then been taken in spiritual charge by
Cunningham, the evangelical vicar of Harrow, caricatured, it was
generally believed, in Mrs. Trollope’s _Vicar of Wrexhill_. To that
divine he did his best in the way of listening as a duty, but the
copious interspersion of casual conversation by him and other Low Church
teachers with scriptural tags and devout ejaculations first made
Trollope secretly think he was talking nonsense. In this way the
youthful Anthony imbibed a sceptical disgust for the social ways and
religious tenets of all that school. Filled with these prejudices, he
came under a spiritual influence very different from any of which so far
he had any experience.
His Winchester days had closed with missing New College. A little later
he found himself hopelessly beaten for a small entrance scholarship on a
minor foundation at Cambridge. To both Universities he made several
short visits. At Oxford he heard the future Cardinal Newman preach from
the pulpit of St. Mary’s. The effect of those sermons was deepened by
many conversations with the preacher, and afterwards with the already
mentioned F. W. Faber, whose personal charm was felt as strongly by
Anthony as it had been by his mother, through whom indeed the son first
knew that accomplished divine and poet, both in his Anglican and his
Roman stage. Not indeed that Anthony Trollope was ever near to becoming
a partisan of either side. Still at the outset his sympathies were, as
afterwards, inclined towards the moderate, lettered, and generally
accomplished members of the High Church party. As a boy, while with his
parents abroad, he had seen and liked the home life of Roman Catholics.
During the interval that separated his Irish stories from his third
novel, he turned to good account the opportunities provided him by his
mother for improving his knowledge of continental institutions, secular
or religious, and the personal types they tended to produce. At each
fresh point of his literary evolution Trollope’s industry in some degree
took on the colour of the surroundings amid which it was exercised. The
earlier of his Irish books grew out of his Post Office work in the “Isle
of Saints.” Between 1848 and 1850, his cosmopolitan training had begun,
and indeed advanced some way. Some years later his _Tales of All
Countries_ was to form a memorial of his experiences as a citizen of the
world. Before these, came _La Vendée_. That novel, if written at all,
would have been written probably in a very different manner but for the
recent widening in his social, religious, and political horizons.
Trollope had been born amid the world-wide ferment of the ground swell
following the great national convulsion in France with which the
eighteenth century closed. Those commotions had seemed the more real and
recent to his childhood from the constant conversational references to
them as portending what England herself might expect. He had heard
stories of the privations and hair-breadth escapes experienced by
refugees from the reign of terror when struggling to place the Straits
of Dover between themselves and their oppressors of the first French
republic. In those parts of England from the first, at least by name
familiar to him, he had seen the country houses where the royalist
_émigrés_ had found an asylum more than once during the years between
the murder of the French king and the Vienna Congress. He had heard
English prejudice describe French loyalty to the old _régime_ as a mere
pose, and Protestant prejudice refuse to see anything that was worthy
the name of “true religion and undefiled” in the teachings of the Popish
priesthood or in the daily life of their most loyal devotees. His more
recent intercourse with men like Faber and Newman had, without leading
him to a spiritual crisis, caused him to review and recast his religious
conceptions. He had been taught as a boy to turn his back on all
pre-Reformation doctrines and rites. His own experiences had now more
than reconciled him to the working of the papal system in Ireland. On
the whole he had found the Irish Roman Catholic priests kindly and far
from bigoted men, honestly anxious to do their duty towards their flock,
as well as towards the official representatives of that Protestant
ascendency which in their heart they were bound to detest. Neither had
Trollope, always open though his keen eyes were, known many authentic
cases of priestly greed, intrigue, intolerance, or proselytism. The
conventional charges, in fact, made by evangelicals against the
hierarchy and officials of a foreign Church could from Trollope’s own
experience be disproved. The mere fact of such accusations being brought
deepened his distrust and dislike of Low Churchism and all its ways.
Possessed by such a spirit of reaction from the popular Calvinism which
his mother had lashed in _The Vicar of Wrexhill_, he sat down, after
_The Kellys and the O’Kellys_, to his third novel, _La Vendée_. By that
time half a century had passed since the issues and methods of the
French Revolutionaries, which destroyed Burke’s friendship with Fox, had
left Whiggism in a state of intestine feud. An impulse such as had urged
Coleridge and Southey into the Tory camp produced in Trollope a desire
to write a story showing the French royalists in politics at their best,
and the reasonableness of their religion as one by which to live and
die. His public school associations had been genuine Wykehamist--that is
to say, high Tory in Church and State. As a boy of fifteen he had heard
of the “three days” which, on July 27, 1830, sent the last of the
Bourbons, Charles X, from his French throne across the English Channel.
At the age of thirty-three, while, as has been seen, going his Post
Office rounds through Connaught, he had watched the progress of the
second French Revolution of the nineteenth century. He might have been
presented in his British asylum to the lately arrived “Mr. Smith,” who
was none other than the Louis Philippe formerly, with the results
already described, visited in his palace by Trollope’s mother. _Hodie
tibi, cras mihi_, while _La Vendée_ was in course of preparation for the
press, English Tories and many who were not Tories had persuaded
themselves that reform in politics, dissent in religion, and the
progressive removal of ancient landmarks in Church or State would
gradually bring this country under the same pernicious influences as
those which had unsettled and devastated the greater part of the world
beyond the Dover Straits. In _La Vendée_ Trollope successfully
fulfilled the twofold end of flattering conservative sentiment,
religious or political, and of breaking comparatively fresh soil, as
well as portraying new characters in a period that then seemed almost
modern.
Readers of Disraeli’s novels will remember the advice urged by Rigby on
Coningsby to “read Mr. Wordy’s history of the late war, in twenty
volumes, proving clearly that Providence was on the side of the Tories.”
No one knew better than Rigby’s reputed original, John Wilson Croker, or
for that matter Disraeli himself, the compendious utility of Alison’s
_History of Europe_. Elsewhere Trollope may easily have found the
historic facts on which he based his third novel. From Alison he learned
to deduce a moral in accord with the prevailing English sentiment. Like
many of his countrymen who cared nothing for party, Trollope felt
something of disgust at the Whig enthusiasm for Napoleon as the
reconstructor of the European system, notwithstanding his rise to power
by violating all those principles of civil and religious liberty which
Whigs, by their historic traditions, were bound to hold sacrosanct.
Without pretending to be a specialist in modern French history, Trollope
knew enough of the country and the people to look for the real security
of a gradual return to law and order, not in the exercise of coercive
force by any individual however great, but in the national instincts and
tendencies making for conservatism, political or religious, and, as he
thought, underrated by recent English writers on the subject. This
aspect of national character and life it became his business to bring
out in _La Vendée_. His Irish stories had already maintained and
illustrated the view that the Celt as he existed on the other side of
St. George’s Channel could be as business-like, as thrifty, as sober in
thought as the Saxon or the Lowland Scot himself. So _La Vendée_ was to
dispose of similar fallacies about the French rooted in the English
mind. Genuine religion could exist in a Roman Catholic land, as well as
genuine loyalty and uncalculating patriotism among a people
conventionally considered fickle, frivolous, and, naturally incapable of
the patient, self-repressive, and sustained effort by which Northern
nations are content slowly to await and effect the reforms that Southern
races precipitate and mar by revolutions.
Trollope occupies a middle place among the three novelists of the
Victorian age who have acknowledged the literary fascination of the
French revolutionary period in some one of its aspects, or in the events
growing out of it. Carlyle, essentially a humourist before being an
historian, first made the subject his own, and in some degree helped by
his research and method his successors in their treatment of it. Five
years after Carlyle, Bulwer-Lytton wrote _Zanoni_, the earliest English
novel descriptive of Paris during the Terror. Dickens’ _Tale of Two
Cities_ came out some time later, in 1859. Trollope’s contribution,
therefore, to the romance of the revolutionary series, chronologically
might have owed something to Alison, who alone among those of an earlier
date had touched the phases of the theme specially appealing to our
novelist. In fiction the dates just given would exempt him from any
suspicion of obligation to Bulwer or Dickens. His originality stamps
itself on the opening chapter of _La Vendée_, and is consistently
maintained throughout. Before the action of the novel begins, its
royalist heroes can no longer doubt the resolution reached by the
municipality of Paris that the king should fall. The Convention, in
fact, was already founding the republic. The actual process, indeed, had
advanced far enough to array the country gentlemen of La Vendée (1850)
and their retainers in arms against the new _régime_. The entirely fresh
descriptive feature of the opening chapters is the account of social
Paris when the Jacobins were entrapping Louis XVI.
Here Trollope drew not on Alison, but the first-hand knowledge conveyed
to him by his mother. Mrs. Trollope, in her turn, had been taken behind
the political scenes of the period by the man whom the royalists in her
son’s story agreed could alone save the throne. This was the same
General Lafayette that Trollope’s parents had visited in his French
country house and that always remained their chief friend abroad. During
the early months of 1792, most of the _haute noblesse_ had exchanged
the French capital for London or for the English country houses, many of
them, as has been already said, familiar to Trollope. They left,
however, behind them enough of wit, beauty, and fashionable brilliance
to prevent the capital from losing its character of the Western world’s
polite metropolis. The city, in a phrase of a contemporary writer, H. S.
Edwards, that took Trollope’s fancy, from having been the Lutetia of the
ancients had become the lætitia of the moderns. Intellectual interest in
the progress of the Revolution, up to the beginning of the king’s
imprisonment, had the effect of obliterating class distinctions. It
produced a certain solidarity between the professional classes which
supplied the revolutionary leaders, and the more enlightened of the
aristocracy that, long since admitting the necessity of drastic social
ameliorations, had, as Trollope summarises it, approved the early
demands of the _tiers état_, had applauded the tennis-court oath, had
entered with enthusiasm into the _fête_ of the Champ de Mars. These had
credulously persuaded themselves that sin, avarice, and selfishness were
about to be banished from the world by philosophy.
Bitter experience had already taught them their mistake. Philosophy
placed no check upon human nature’s worst passions. The high-flown
panegyrics on virtue in the abstract were practically consistent with
the letting loose of the tiger and the ape in individuals. The feast of
reason that followed the beheading of the king proved the introduction
to the long-drawn-out orgy of fiends lasting till Robespierre’s death in
1794. What refuge could there be for the now undeceived dupes of their
own fond expectations but in flight? Those who from the first had
remained courtiers or royalists, and those whom a spurious philanthropy
had caused to dally with wholesale homicide, hastened to put the English
Channel between themselves and a capital and country from which had
vanished all hope of personal safety or service to their fellow-men.
Some gallant spirits had long lingered on near the place of the king’s
confinement, refusing even now to despair of some happy chance that
might favour his escape from his enemies, and enable his friends to
conduct him permanently out of danger.
Such were the historical circumstances and actual conditions of the time
without a knowledge of which Trollope’s third novel cannot be rightly
understood. Its title came from the new republican name for the vintage
districts of Anjou and Poitou, La Vendée (_vendange_). Those of its
gentry who had rallied round the king were known in Paris as the
Poitevins. The hope of which this little group supplied the leaders was
scarcely so forlorn as it has been described since, during the seven
years period covered by Trollope’s novel, the Vendean resistance to the
Convention was carried on not only with unfailing courage but
occasionally with substantial military success. In Paris, where the
story opens, the Poitevins had attracted to their number some among the
more moderate members of the Assembly, and particularly certain of those
who had been officers of the royal bodyguard. They formed themselves
into a club whose meetings were held in the Rue Vivienne. The last of
these gatherings took place on August 12, 1792, and lasted just long
enough to acquaint all present with the final and complete defeat of the
moderates, who so far had clung to the conviction that in some
unexplained manner the monarchy would be preserved from final overthrow.
Against all gentler counsels, against, in Trollope’s words, the firmness
of Roland, the eloquence of Vergniaud, the patriotism of Guadet, the
brute force of Paris had prevailed.
Louis XVI, his worst enemies could not deny, had inherited none of his
predecessor’s vices, and had shown himself the friend of popular rights.
He had indeed actually himself convoked the Assembly that had no sooner
come together than it resolved on his destruction. The Poitevins,
however, had correctly estimated their resources in their respective
neighbourhoods. With a good heart they now welcome and prepare for open
war. When told that the sovereign’s defenders are outvoted in the
Assembly and that resistance to the people is vain, they one and all
protest against dignifying by that name the mob of blood-thirsty
ruffians who for the time have the capital at their mercy. The real
voice of the French people is for the monarch’s restoration to his
rights. Under the Vendean gentry as leaders the masses will rise like
one man against the demagogues who so foully misrepresent them. The real
enemies of France and of the king are in each case the same men. To save
the country from the usurpations of the Assembly falsely called national
is also to deliver the lawful ruler from the dungeon to which, in the
midst of this heroic oratory, comes the news of Louis having been
consigned.
That for the present the mission of the patriots in Paris cannot proceed
further is now admitted by all. Before, however, the patriots disperse,
each to his own provincial neighbourhood, we have made acquaintance with
the clearly and picturesquely characterised individuals of whom they
consist. Its most prominent member, Lescure, is a type, historically
true, of the educated and enlightened Frenchman, keenly alive to the
abuses and evils of the aristocratic system that were at the root of
popular degradation and distress. His mind had been nurtured, and his
political education derived, from studying classical republicanism, as
it existed in Athens and Rome. He was deeply read in Rousseau, Voltaire,
and in the whole literature of the encyclopædists. An amiably
philanthropic disposition had combined with tendencies of his
intellectual culture to take for his watchwords Liberty, Fraternity,
though not, it would seem, Equality. On perceiving the new movement to
mean universal surrender to an ignorant and brutal mob, he drew back, to
find himself gradually pressed into the presidency of the little
Poitevin society. This personification of high-minded and cultivated
philanthropy numbered amongst its followers the youthful heir to an
ancient and wealthy territorial marquisate, Henri de Larochejaquelin.[8]
His principles had been formed on those of his elder, Lescure, but his
temperament, eager, impetuous, delighting in the rush and whirl of
social gaiety, forms a contrast to his staid and judicious senior. In
one respect he stands out as a product of the period. The new generation
was often noticeable for the precocious manhood developed in the
hothouse atmosphere of a convulsive epoch. Since reaching his
seventeenth year, the young noble now mentioned, in consequence of his
father’s ill-health, had taken upon himself the paternal estates’
management, and his sister Agatha’s guardianship.
Adolphe Denot is another who has a place in this little company. Born to
a position of territorial ownership in Poitou, Denot represents in
Trollope’s story the superficial votaries of political change, ready to
take up with the newest mode in public affairs, without the trouble of
inquiring into its significance or worth. Without Lescure’s historical
knowledge and reflective habits, he belonged to the same section of
French society as that in which Lescure had been reared. The earliest
French protests against the tyranny of ages came from the French
nobility themselves. Never in the theatre at Versailles had louder
applause been excited than by the lines of Voltaire’s play, produced
during the interval separating the first from the last quarter of the
eighteenth century: “I am the son of Brutus, and bear graven on the
heart the love of liberty and a horror of kings.” In the cheers that
greeted these words, Trollope’s Denot might have followed the vogue by
joining. J. J. Rousseau no doubt made himself personally responsible for
the doctrine of the people’s sovereignty and its consequences. Before,
however, its proclamation by him, Voltaire’s wit had secured the notion
acceptance with rank, fashion, aristocracy, and even the Court circle.
Recently, however, the enthusiasts for freedom in the royal playhouse
had discovered everything which savoured of revolution to be
insufferably vulgar. He had therefore gone over to Larochejaquelin’s
lead, and enrolled himself under Lescure in the little Poitevin clique.
Petted and caressed, as Trollope puts it, by the best and fairest in
France, the revolution was still in its infancy when men discovered it
to be a beast of prey, big with war, anarchy, and misrule.
The royalist organisation now described having been disbanded in the
capital, the scene changes to those regions of southern France known as
La Vendée. The country gentlemen of Anjou and Poitou were generally
landlords of the smaller kind. They lived in comfort, but without any
ambition for mere splendour. No pride in the antiquity of their race
prevented their treating their tenants and household retainers less as
dependents than equals. The instances of this now given exemplify
Trollope’s favourite thesis that in a patrician dispensation
characterised by thoughtfulness on the part of its controllers for those
who live under it, there is more of the true democratic spirit than
marks the most levelling variety of popular self-rule. The gentlemen of
La Vendée have no sooner reappeared in their country homes than the
counter-revolution, without any fostering agitation on their part,
almost of its own accord sets in.
The Vendeans had heard from their rural seclusion of the king’s
imprisonment, and of the insults offered by his republican jailors to
the time-honoured ordinances of Church and State. There is no need for
Lescure, Larochejaquelin, and the others to stimulate the local
peasantry by fresh appeals against the emissaries of the detested
republic. These only show themselves for the purpose of enrolling fresh
conscripts, and forcibly apprehending a reluctant recruit. The
spontaneous popular resistance ends in a pitched battle, with victory
for the royalists. Operations are now on a larger scale. The struggle is
no longer between small local garrisons on the one hand, and hastily
levied, imperfectly disciplined royalist bodies on the other. Henceforth
two armies, each tolerably marshalled and fairly equipped, meet each
other in the field. Sieges are laid, attacks are delivered, sometimes
repelled and sometimes succumbed to; all the combatants are engaged,
towns are captured, private parks transform themselves into entrenched
camps. Durbellière particularly, the country seat of the
Larochejaquelins, becomes the theatre of a war conducted with
sanguinary resolution on both sides, and with constantly varying
fortunes. Among each host brave deeds in plenty are done. With the
royalists the most picturesque, heroic, and victorious figure is that of
Henri de Larochejaquelin, whose red sash and shoulder-band prove the
same talisman of triumph as the snow-white plume of Henry of Navarre
when he defeated the Duke of Mayenne at Ivry.
With the republicans too were to be found men equally capable or
courageous, if less personally attractive. In the French romance that
followed the Irish novels Trollope made no pretence of making his
imagination the handmaid of history. Bulwer-Lytton, in _The Last of the
Barons_, circumstantially constructed a bold and picturesque hypothesis
as a plausibly conjectural explanation of the quarrel between Edward IV
and Warwick. That was not at all in Trollope’s way. Equally little is
his inclination, after the fashion of Sir Walter Scott, to play fast and
loose with recorded facts, and to represent authenticated events in the
light, and from the point of view, which happened to suit him. For the
most part Trollope follows through every detail the accurate chronicle
of the time. In one case, however, that he may account for the
disappearance from his narrative of the character he calls Adolphe
Denot, he departs from the historic record. According to Trollope, the
Chouans, or Bretons who continued the Vendean War, followed a
mysterious, if not an actually insane leader. The alleged mystery is
mere invention. No personage of the period is more historical than Jean
Cottereau, who from the first led the Bretons, and whose signal, the cry
of the screech-owl (_chat-huant_), gave their name to the little Breton
band. Nor can it be said that the historian’s version of events is, even
for artistic purposes, improved on by the novelist’s discovery, in the
Vendean leader, of Adolphe Denot, who, in an hour of what his friends
charitably called mental aberration, had left the good cause of Church
and King, had thrown in his lot with the revolutionaries. Since then he
had remained out of sight.
At the point now under consideration, the novelist might indeed have
done better, for himself as well as for his readers, had he exercised
his fancy at least on the lines marked out by the historian. At the same
time he deserves the praise of having caught the spirit of his period,
as well as of having imbued his pages with a fair amount of genuine
local colour. One word may be said about the pen-and-ink artist’s
methods and the effect of his picture as a whole. The pervading tone,
subdued if not, as in his first story, _The Macdermots_, sombre, at
well-chosen points is relieved by the introduction of those lighter
tints that Trollope’s quick eye for the humorous never failed in the
right place to bring out. In the loyalist households, of the Vendean
squires, the servants are treated less as inferiors than equals. Seeing
in their employers their friends, and during war-time their comrades,
they vie with each other in proving their devotion to the good cause.
There thus sets in among them a generous rivalry as to who shall be
nearest their lords in the hour of peril. Such a competition provides
many happy openings for sketches of votaries of the sceptre and the
crozier outdoing each other in the still-room and the servants’ hall.
There still remain Trollope’s estimates of the republican managers who,
differing about much, agreed in calling the Vendeans mean curs, fit only
for utter extermination. Six years earlier than the writing of _La
Vendée_, Macaulay’s article on Barère had appeared in the spring number
of _The Edinburgh Review_. The estimates of that particular
revolutionary leader given by the historian and by the novelist
generally agree with each other, but in every detail show the mutual
independence of their writers. Macaulay’s account is an oratorical
indictment, delivered in a more than usually impressive manner, and
declaring that an amalgam of sensuality, poltroonery, baseness,
effrontery, mendacity, and barbarity, such as in a novel would be
condemned for caricature, was realised in Barère. Beside the essayist’s
portrait of Bertrand Barère, place that in the novel which is our
immediate concern, the one man, in a little party armed to the teeth,
without sword, constantly playing with a little double-barrelled pistol,
which he continually cocked and uncocked, and of which the fellow lay on
the table before him. A tall, well-built, handsome man about thirty
years of age, with straight black hair brushed upright from his
forehead, his countenance gave the idea of eagerness and impetuosity
rather than of cruelty or brutality. He was, however, essentially
egotistical and insincere. A republican not from conviction but from
prudential motives, he only deserted the throne when he saw that it was
tottering.
For a time Barère supported the moderate party in the republic, and
voted with the Girondists. He gradually joined the Jacobins, as he saw
they were triumphing over their rivals. He was afterwards one of those
who handed over the leaders of the Reign of Terror to the guillotine,
and assisted in denouncing Robespierre and St. Just. He was one of the
very few who managed to outlive the Revolution, and did so for nearly
half a century. Nature had not formed him to be a monster gloating in
blood. The republic had altered his disposition, and taught him, among
those with whom he associated, to delight in the work which they
required at his hands. Thus he became one of those who loudly called for
more blood, while blood on every side was running in torrents. He too it
was who demanded the murder of the queen, when Robespierre would have
saved her. Before the Revolution he had been a wealthy aristocrat; he
still wears the costume of his earlier period in the blue dress-coat,
buttoned closely, notwithstanding the heat of the weather, round his
body; the carefully tied cravat, disfigured by no wrinkle; the tightly
fitting breeches that show the well-shaped leg. As a contrast to this
sometime nobleman gibbeted by Macaulay, Trollope presents one to another
notoriety of the period, known as the “King of the Faubourgs.” This was
a large, rough, burly man, about forty years of age, of Flemish descent,
by trade a brewer, by name Santerre, without fine feelings to be
distressed at the horrid work set him to do, but filled with a coarse
ambition, which made him a ready tool for the schemers who used his
physical powers, courage, and wealth to their own ends.
The gallery given us by Trollope contains one more portrait, of fresher
interest in itself, and not less life-like in its swift, sure strokes.
Westerman in Carlyle’s description appears as an Alsatian. With Trollope
he is a pure Prussian, a mercenary soldier who, banished from his native
land, took service as a private in the army of the French republic, was
soon promoted to be an officer, and after this promotion, foreseeing the
future triumph of the extreme republicans, declared himself their
adherent, and, joining Dumourier’s army, became that general’s
aide-de-camp at the time of his attempt to sell the French legions to
their Prussian and Austrian adversaries. Then Westerman left his master,
and had since been the most prompt and ruthless military executioner of
the Convention’s sternest behests. Westerman, as drawn by Trollope, is
both soldier and politician. Two other military personages directing the
campaign against the Vendeans, Bourbotte and Chouardin, take no interest
in the affairs of State, and are merely rough, bold, brave fighters.
Conspicuous among the Vendean leaders was Cathelineau. His spirited and
fearless life’s work, crowned by a soldier’s brave death, excited the
sympathetic admiration of the republic’s two military servants. That
tribute to an enemy’s great qualities was enough to draw down upon them
the anger of their superiors, especially of Barère. It was not, however,
a time to visit such offences with a severe penalty. Both Bourbotte and
Chouardin escaped without any formal reprimand.
To the sketch of Robespierre and the analysis of his character,
Trollope, as might be expected, gives particular care. Here he
supplements rather than follows those who before him had made this
subject their own. “Seagreen incorruptible” was, says Carlyle,
physically a coward, kept from flinching or turning tail only by his
moral strength of purpose. Not so, is Trollope’s verdict. Courage indeed
went conspicuously in hand with constancy of resolution, temperance in
power, and love of country. If at the last he gave way, it was from the
inward torment caused him too late by the discovery that his whole
career had been a blunder, and that none of the objects which he had
first set before himself were fulfilled. Poor mutilated worm, exclaims
the novelist of _La Vendée_, what was there of pusillanimity in the
remorse of conscience prostrating his whole physical frame, when he
compared the aims which animated him at his beginnings with the results
he saw all about him at his close? From Carlyle, Trollope knew of
Mirabeau’s prophecy on hearing Robespierre’s maiden speech: “This man
will do somewhat; he believes every word he says.” So staunch and
sympathetic a Tory as Alison echoes as well as amplifies that view. And
with him Trollope, who like many other writers about this period had
learnt the usefulness of Alison, agrees.
To the English novelist, not less than to the English historian,
Robespierre’s career stands out not as the offspring of any individual
character, but as representing the delusions of the age. Chief among
those errors ranked a belief in the natural innocence of man. With this
fallacy had united itself another--the lawfulness of doing evil that
good might come. Once exterminate by wholesale bloodshed all who
embodied the debasing influences of a corrupt aristocracy, the masses
would rise to the full height of their native greatness. Thus a
triumphant democracy, enthroned upon mountains of patrician corpses,
would wield its beneficent sceptre over a purified and reanimated
society. Here as elsewhere agreeing with, perhaps indebted to, Alison,
Trollope also speaks of Robespierre as omnipotent in Convention and in
the Committee, but as having, too, his master, the will of the populace
of Paris. In union with and in dependence on that, he could alone act,
command, and be obeyed. Alison puts the same idea rather differently
when he says: “Equally with Napoleon during his career of foreign
conquest, Robespierre always marched with the opinions of five millions
of men.”
Apart from the failure of moral fortitude and nerve which weakened and
clouded his end, what particular feature in Robespierre’s temperament
and life gave colour to the charge of cowardice that Carlyle at least
considers so irrefutable? The answer is suggested by Trollope in what
forms the most original passage in this portion of his story. One fond
and tender dream Robespierre could never banish. Once let France, happy,
free, illustrious, and intellectual, own how much she owed to the most
disinterested patriot among her sons, Robespierre would retire to his
small paternal estate in Artois; evincing the grandeur of his soul by
the rejection of all worldly rewards, receiving nothing from his country
but adoration. While in Trollope’s pages he is represented as
preoccupied with visions like these, his garret is entered by a young
woman, decently but very plainly dressed. This was Eleanor Duplay, who,
when Robespierre allowed himself to dream of a future home, was destined
to be the wife of his bosom and the mother of his children. Eleanor
Duplay possessed no mark of superiority to others of her age (about
five-and-twenty) and station. The eldest of four sisters, she specially
helped her mother in caring for the house, of which Robespierre had
become an inmate. With no political aptitude or taste of her own, she
had caught, as she believed, political inspiration from his words,
finding in his pseudo-philosophical dogmas, at once repulsive and
ridiculous to modern ears, great truths begotten of reason and capable
of regenerating her fellow-creatures.
Eleanor Duplay has a special object in approaching Robespierre at this
moment, which brings her into the central current of the story. She had,
in fact, undertaken to plead with her father’s lodger the Vendean cause.
Both the girl herself, and the public opinion whose echoes she caught,
were shocked by the wholesale massacre of women and children now going
on in the doomed district after which Trollope called his story. What
work, she had asked herself, when rallying her courage to the task, so
fitting for the wife-elect of a ruler of the people as to implore the
stern magistrate to temper justice with mercy? Her lover’s reception of
the first hint at her prayer is not promising. The Vendeans, he says,
must be not only conquered but crushed. The religion of Christ, he goes
on, declares that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the
children to the third and fourth generation. Hence the babes must share
the fate of their parents. As for the mothers, it is, says Robespierre,
a false sentiment which teaches us to spare the iniquities of women
because of their sex. This interview leads up to one of the most
dramatic situations of the novel, and is so managed as during its
progress to bring out in effective relief the feature of Robespierre’s
character, which other expositors of it have noticed, but which none
illustrated so fully as Trollope. Eleanor Duplay’s petition had not been
completed when her lover’s suspicion--his predominating trait--expresses
itself in an outburst of dark and terrible anger. In vain she assures
him that no one has set her on to talk to him of this. In ordinary men
suspicion sometimes clouds love; in Robespierre, as he is here
described, it strangled the possibility of love at its birth.