THE BROADENING OF THE LITERARY AND GEOGRAPHICAL HORIZON
Trollope as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. G. H. Lewes among the lions
of literature and science at The Priory, Regent’s Park--Charles
Dickens present in the spirit, not in the flesh, thinks Adam Bede
is by Bradbury or Evans, and doesn’t fancy it is Bradbury--Was
there any exchange of literary influence between George Eliot and
Trollope?--Trollope’s new departure illustrates the progress from
the idyllic to the epic--_Orley Farm_--Its plot--Trollope’s first
visit to the United States, in 1860.
Thackeray’s death in 1863 had left Trollope without any special intimate
among his fellow-craftsmen. Several years later, indeed, his success as
a novelist brought him, after the manner to be duly mentioned in its
proper place, into business relations with Dickens, his mother’s rather
than his own old friend. John Forster, it has been seen, may be said
first to have brought him out in print. With that ex-editor of _The
Examiner_, Trollope always maintained some social intimacy, visiting him
first in the Lincoln’s Inn Chambers, where he so long lived, and
afterwards more frequently at his house in Queen’s Gate. Here the chief
new literary acquaintance formed by Trollope was with the second Lord
Lytton, who snatched from his diplomatic employments abroad enough time
for constant reappearance in literary circles at home. Between 1865 and
1875, however, the most interesting and eventful visits paid by Trollope
to any host among contemporary writers were those to Mr. and Mrs. G. H.
Lewes at The Priory, North Bank, Regent’s Park. At these well-known
Sunday afternoon receptions, Trollope first found himself at the social
heart of the highest nineteenth century culture. G. H. Lewes, George
Eliot, and Anthony Trollope were all nearly of an age. How far Lewes and
his scientific tastes affected George Eliot’s literary style may be an
open question. There is no doubt that George Eliot in her turn
influenced Trollope’s views of life and character. In Trollope’s time,
the regular Sunday _habitués_ of the double drawing-room at The Priory,
for the most part men, seldom failed to number among them Frederick
Leighton, whose drawings for _Romola_ decorated the walls; E. S. Beesly,
History Professor at London University College; Robert Browning always;
sometimes, on his rare visits to London, Alfred Tennyson; the
philosophers Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, E. F. S. Pigott invariably;
occasionally Owen Jones, to whose decorative art The Priory owed
scarcely less than the Crystal Palace itself; some men of note from the
Universities; and generally one or two foreigners of distinction in
letters, science, or art.
Of all this company, none more frequently than Trollope obtained a seat
near Mrs. Lewes’ armchair on the left of the fire-place. The two
novelists never talked publicly about themselves, but among the guests
there were some who noticed a kind of parallel in George Eliot’s and
Anthony Trollope’s literary courses. The earliest successes of both with
the general public won the favour also of their most famous
fellow-authors. Thackeray pleasantly complained if, after the day’s work
was done, he could not at once refresh himself with _The Three Clerks_.
George Eliot’s _Scenes of Clerical Life_ had no sooner appeared in
_Blackwood’s_ than Dickens conjured all those about him to read them,
saying, “They are the best things I have seen since I began my course.”
A little later, Miss Marian Evans, to recall for a moment the name which
never, by the by, appeared on the title-page of any of her books, set
the literary world speculating about the identity veiled by the George
Eliot pseudonym. Dickens alone penetrated the mystery, after reading the
description of Hetty Sorrel doing her back hair. Only a woman, and one
of first-rate genius, could have written that, he said. Hence his
oracular reply, through his daughter, to a letter asking his opinion on
the subject: “Papa wishes me to say he feels sure _Adam Bede_ is either
by Bradbury or Evans, and he doesn’t think it’s Bradbury.”[21]
George Eliot, like many other great writers, avoided, so far as
possible, reading the periodical reviews of her books. Love of
approbation was with her a phrenological organ strongly developed; as
all writers cannot but do, she found sweetness in the appreciation of
her work by other labourers in the same literary field as her own.
During the later fifties she made more than one visit to Florence and
its neighbourhood in quest of materials and local colour for _Romola_,
published in 1863. On those occasions she saw much of Anthony Trollope’s
elder brother, Thomas Adolphus, who had made the Tuscan capital his
home, and who never left it save on a short and rare visit to England.
Anthony Trollope’s familiarity with the place dated, as has been seen,
from the visit paid by him to his mother during her residence there.
Those early reminiscences naturally increased Anthony Trollope’s
interest in _Romola_. “A delightful generous letter from Mr. Anthony
Trollope about _Romola_” brightened and encouraged the authoress in one
of those moods of passing depression that sometimes beset the most
intellectual toilers. “The heartiest, most genuine, moral and generous
of men.” Such, at an earlier state of their acquaintance, had been the
impression given by the author of _The Small House at Allington_ to the
hostess of The Priory at those Sunday afternoon receptions. In common
with his fellow-guests Trollope felt to the full the austere charm of
George Eliot’s grave urbanity, and of her conversation--brightened
indeed by no flashes of humour, but occasionally seasoned with
utterances of penetrating sagacity condensed into epigram. With this
woman of genius Trollope became a personal favourite. More than that,
the two novelists appreciably, to some extent, influenced each other.
“I am not at all sure,” George Eliot told Mrs. Lynn Linton, “that, but
for Anthony Trollope, I should ever have planned my studies on so
extensive a scale for _Middlemarch_, or that I should, through all its
episodes, have persevered with it to the close.”
Trollope’s progress as a novelist owed something to his acquaintance
with the two chief literary women of his age. Mention has already been
made of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s preference over all his earlier
stories for _The Three Clerks_. Nothing else of his, she said, had thus
far combined so happily pure romance with realistic incident. This
praise, he told the present writer, had the effect of doubling his care
with the labour of plot-weaving in connection with character-drawing.
This was in 1858. In 1862 _Orley Farm_ produced nearly the same
compliment to him from the author of _Adam Bede_. Ten years after Mrs.
Browning’s hints came the inspiring and instructive intercourse with
George Eliot. Fresh from that association Trollope began to deal less
superficially than his earlier stories had required with feminine
problems. Into his comedy narrative of manners were now introduced
questions of social casuistry, involving moral issues of a graver kind
than those which so far had charged his atmosphere. Among the most
marked of Trollope’s mental features was his receptivity. This had been
already shown by the literary account to which he successively turned
his Post Office experiences at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, in Ireland, and
again after that in England, provincial as well as metropolitan. His
admiration of George Eliot’s art generally, particularly of those
qualities in her work that secured her the compliment of comparison with
Shakespeare, did without affecting his literary style and method to some
degree influence, as he himself felt, his views of character and life.
_Can You Forgive Her?_ (1864), as will presently be shown, marked a
fresh stage in the novelist’s evolution. In the manifestation of poetic
gifts the natural order of advance has always been from the idyllic to
the epic. Whether with the founder of pastoral poetry this may have been
the case we do not know, since from Theocritus there have come down to
us from him no strains more militant than those in which he celebrated
the rivalries, the loves, the alternate fears and hopes, not of a purely
ideal Arcadia, but as those sentiments existed in everyday life among
the Syracusan swains and shepherds whom in real life he knew. The
Virgilian Bucolics were in wide circulation before, at the wish of
Augustus, the Æneid was begun. So with English poets. Milton’s shorter
and gentler compositions preceded _Paradise Lost_ by the best part of a
generation. Alexander Pope’s Pastorals soothed pleasantly the popular
ear while their author still meditated in his Twickenham grotto the
English presentation of the Greek and Latin heroic masterpieces. So too
with Trollope. The broader canvas, the greater variety of personages,
and the swifter sequence of stirring incident exemplified a progress
corresponding with that just explained.
Something of the same sort had already happened, or was about to take
place with a literary ornament of the Victorian age, of an order more
illustrious than Anthony Trollope. The greatest, probably, of modern
English poets who have ever filled the office of laureate made his first
successful appeal to the public with compositions that were in metre
much what Trollope’s _Cornhill_ stories were in prose. Six years older
than Anthony Trollope, Alfred Tennyson had first caught the English ear
with his rural lays and lyrics of English home life. The taste thus
gratified, as well as to some extent created, demanded prose fiction
possessing domestic interest of the same kind. The public had delighted
in _The Miller’s Daughter_, _The Sisters_, _The Gardener’s Daughter_,
_Dora_, _Audley Court_, and _Edwin Morris_ from the poet. It, therefore,
found what exactly suited its mood in _Framley Parsonage_, and _The
Small House at Allington_ from the novelist. The way for Trollope’s
popularity had also been prepared, not only by writers of his own
period, but by the gradual evolution of the English novels at the hand
of its earlier masters. His stories of everyday life began to appear
while Jane Austen’s novels were still in the highest favour and Maria
Edgeworth’s still retained much of their original vogue. Charlotte
Yonge had first extended her fame from the High Church circles to the
general public a little later, and retained her position well into the
nineteenth century’s second half. But the well-to-do and more or less
cultivated English households that read and discussed _The Heir of
Redclyffe_ had by no means ceased to care for the analysis of feminine
character as illustrated by English fiction’s earliest master of that
art, Samuel Richardson. There were, too, Richardson’s less famous or now
almost forgotten successors; these numbered not only Thomas Holcroft,
but Robert Page, whose _Hermsprang_ contains studies of girlhood and
womanhood as effective, and, in their day as much admired, as any of the
portraits in “those large, still books,” to apply to them Tennyson’s
description. The welcome given to those heroines on their first
appearance before the public presaged in its warmth and universality the
reception awaiting the latter-day descendants of the men, the matrons,
and widows whom Richardson’s example had encouraged Trollope to think no
labour of observation or of pen too great, if, as he had seen them, he
could in his stories, to the life, reproduce, not only them, but their
social atmosphere and surroundings. This Trollope did, and an older
generation, which knew Richardson first-hand, encouraged its juniors to
see in Lily Dale and Lucy Robarts most of what an earlier age had found
in Clarissa Harlowe and Pamela.
Such were the earlier among the literary labourers in something like his
own path of industry who undoubtedly, as no one saw more clearly than he
did himself, acted as the pioneers of Trollope’s particular industry. In
what relation did he stand to his own contemporaries? More than any
other of these George Eliot disciplined and developed personages in
themselves often commonplace, by means of abnormal experiences and
exceptionally dramatic situations. Trollope, on the other hand, before
the season of his personal intercourse with George Eliot during the
early sixties and thereafter, found the familiar conjunctures of
everyday life abundantly rich in all the opportunities he needed for
the evolution of those characters--daughters, mothers, and
sweethearts--to whom his readers had no sooner been introduced than they
began to share Trollope’s own love for these, the novelist’s own
creations. It was during 1862, the year of his first visit to America,
that Trollope first acquainted his readers with feminine types whose
display and development required another set of surroundings as well as
incidents somewhat outside the common routine. The earliest of the fresh
ventures belongs to 1862. The monthly parts in which _Orley Farm_ then
appeared, as several of Dickens’ and Thackeray’s novels had already been
issued, were not the only detail wherein Trollope conformed to the great
examples of his time. During the early sixties the popularity of the
sensational novel, introduced by Mrs. Henry Wood, was confirmed by
Wilkie Collins and was still further increased and extended by Miss
Braddon. No one, as will be more fully seen on a later page, mirrored
more promptly and faithfully than Trollope the literary tendencies of
this time. Always quick to take a hint, Trollope therefore introduced
the sensational element into the novel _Orley Farm_, and, by its
successful appeal to interests, which it had not yet fallen within his
scope to touch, completely justified the new experiment.
The seeds of the plot for the story now to be considered had been long
sown in Anthony Trollope’s mind. He himself partly attributed their
promise of fruitfulness to conversations on the subject with his brother
Thomas Adolphus. When their father removed his household gods from
Bloomsbury to Harrow Weald he became, it may be remembered, successively
the occupant of two houses. The first, a convenient and even handsome
building, had been raised by himself under the name of Julians. The
second roof that sheltered him and his family was a farmhouse he had
found standing on the ground he rented. This formed the original of the
structure in which Trollope laid the scene of a novel that had engaged
him earlier than his _Cornhill_ stories. Some of the most stirring
incidents in _Orley Farm_ grow out of events which took place several
years before the opening of the narrative.
The Johnsons were a family that had done well in the hardware business.
They had, indeed, almost attained the dignity of county standing.
Suddenly they fell upon evil times. As a result, Mr. Johnson’s name
appeared in _The Gazette_. He had, however, one valuable asset in the
person of his handsome daughter Mary. This young lady’s calm and
dignified beauty eventually attracted, among her father’s north-country
acquaintances, old Sir Joseph Mason, a desolate widower of Groby Park,
Yorkshire, whose ambition it had always been to become the founder of a
territorial line. His three daughters had all married well; each of
them, together with their husbands, shared their father’s social
aspirations. Such were some of the ready-made relatives by whom Mary
Johnson, on giving her hand in marriage to Sir Joseph Mason, was to find
herself surrounded. Though Sir Joseph Mason’s chief estate and principal
country house lay to the north of the Trent, his favourite residence had
long been the modest building in one of the home counties known as Orley
Farm situated between twenty and thirty miles from London. At the time
of his settlement at Orley Farm, Sir Joseph Mason’s son and heir by his
first marriage, Joseph Mason junior, had almost reached the age of
forty, when, to his chagrin and his nearest kith and kin’s disgust, his
father’s second marriage bore fruit in the birth of a brother, Lucius
Mason. The undoubted inheritor of the chief Mason property, Groby Park,
Joseph Mason had always counted on possessing, on his father’s death,
Orley Farm as well. When, however, old Sir Joseph’s will came to be
read, it disclosed a codicil bequeathing Orley Farm to his infant son,
Lucius. Another testamentary disposition equally unexpected was that of
£2000 to Miriam Usbech, the daughter of that attorney, Jonathan Usbech,
employed by Sir Joseph Mason to draft the Will with the codicil, round
which the interest of the story centres. The provisions of that
document, contested by the eldest son, had formed the subject of an
action which he brought against Lady Mason before the novel begins.
That had been decided in Lady Mason’s favour. The curtain thus rises on
the late Sir Joseph’s eldest son, baffled by his step-mother in the
effort legally to assert his ownership of the entire Mason property,
and, by this failure, more keenly even than his sisters embittered
against her. His half-brother, Lucius, now between twenty and
twenty-five, having finished his education in a German university, has
brought home with him scientific ideas of farming, and of land
improvement generally, which are greatly to increase the value of the
Orley Farm, whose master, on attaining his majority, he became.
Meanwhile his half-brother, settled at the Yorkshire headquarters of the
family, Groby, has held no intercourse with him. Sir Joseph Mason’s two
sons have indeed always been strangers to each other.
By this time also, Miriam Usbech, a beneficiary, as has been already
mentioned, under Sir Joseph’s Will to the extent of £2000, has become
the wife of a local solicitor, Dockwrath, whose practice lies near Orley
Farm. This man had received from Lady Mason, during the minority of her
son Lucius, a grant of land on the understanding that it should remain
in his hands until it might be wanted by her son, as possessor of the
farm. Lucius has no sooner arrived at his majority than the contingency
thus forecast is realised. The ground in question has become, he finds,
essential for the improvement he is bent on introducing into the estate.
Dockwrath, therefore, has, in the earlier chapters of the book,
conceived a grudge against Lucius Mason, as well as a strong suspicion
of his mother. A search among the papers of his father-in-law, Jonathan
Usbech, discloses the fact that the alleged witnesses to old Sir Joseph
Mason’s signature of a codicil devising Orley Farm to Lucius must, on
the same day, have witnessed also the execution of another legal
instrument. That strikes Dockwrath as, to say the least of it, odd; he
therefore hunts up these witnesses and puts to them the question: Did
they, on the date of certifying Sir Joseph Mason’s signature of the
codicil, certify also in a like capacity his signature of the other
paper? So far from thinking she did anything of the sort, the
interrogated witness felt quite certain that she had only seen Sir
Joseph writing his name once.
The results of this inquiry are communicated by Dockwrath to the master
of Groby Park, who forthwith commences a second suit against his
step-mother on the charge of perjury committed at the first trial. At
this point begins the real action of the novel under conditions so
sombre, and in an atmosphere loaded so depressingly with a sense of
coming evil, that considerations of art and nature imperatively demand
some relief. This lighter element is supplied by expedients resembling
those which, for a similar purpose, were adopted so skilfully in
Trollope’s first book, _The Macdermots_. The humorous passages, now
following in brisk and varied succession, without actually advancing the
movement of the story are no mere excrescences upon it. They give life
and reality to the figures in the central episode, and in their place
are perfectly natural as being Dockwrath’s experiences on his momentous
journey to Groby Park. Their drollery relaxes the nerve tension at a
painful point, but deepens, by the force of contrast, the dark
presentiment of the tragic catastrophe to which the freakish fun of the
commercial-room visited by Dockwrath forms a comic prelude. Humorous
criticism or witty dialogue, seasoned with incisive repartee, was not
Trollope’s strongest point. He is, however, seen at his best in these
laughter-moving descriptions of bagmen’s buffoonery or in the sketches
of platitude-mongering vulgarity, which his fresh and vigorous seizure
of slight personal distinctions redeems from commonplace.
Samuel Dockwrath was a little man with sandy hair, a pale face, and
stone-blue eyes. Those who knew Anthony Trollope in the flesh saw in him
one who, at his prime, had stood some six feet in his socks, with the
other parts of his person on a corresponding scale. It was not, however,
his goodly proportions of body that so much impressed the judicious
observer as the penetrating fire of the quick blue eyes. This was
intensified rather than concealed by the large, heavy spectacles which
so entirely remedied any natural infirmity of vision that, after he had
taken to wearing them, his eyes never missed a single characteristic
feature of his fellow-creatures, or failed accurately and at once to
stamp the impression they received on the retentive brain. Those were
the eyes that had themselves seen on his Post Office doors--for the most
part those in England--each one of Dockwrath’s companions in the
commercial-room of the Bull Inn at Leeds. Dickens himself, unsurpassed
in sketching the humours of the road as well as the outer and inner life
of its travellers’ houses of call, paid Trollope a special compliment on
the rapid successions of life-like touches with which he draws a
contrast between the arrival at an inn of regular _habitués_ and
strangers--the former loud, jocular, assured, or, in case of deficient
accommodation, loud, angry, and full of threats; the strangers shy,
diffident, doubtful, anxious to propitiate the chambermaid by great
courtesy. To the latter belonged Dockwrath. To the former belonged
another arrival by the same train, called Moulder, whose salutation to
the girl at the bar, “Well, Mary, my dear, what’s the time of day with
you?” is met with the reply, “Time to look alive and keep moving.” This
has been introduced by a living picture of Dockwrath’s effort to make
himself as much at home as the freest and easiest frequenters of the
place by calling for a pair of public slippers, while solacing himself
with a glass of mahogany-coloured brandy and water and a cigar. Here end
the comic preliminaries.
The tragic realities that have brought Dockwrath from London to
Yorkshire are opened by the solicitor’s call on Joseph Mason at Groby
Park. The £2000, it must be remembered, which old Sir Joseph had left to
Dockwrath’s wife were devised to her in the codicil that it is the real
object of Dockwrath’s interview with Lady Mason’s stepson to upset.
Ostensibly, therefore, as Dockwrath reminds the squire of Groby, the
solicitor’s own interest lies in maintaining, not invalidating the
supplementary bequests. Duty, however, has first claim upon the man of
law, who begins his conversation by hinting that Joseph Mason’s
representatives, Round and Crook, have been slack in guarding their
clients’ interest. Will not Mr. Dockwrath, Mr. Mason suggests, see Round
and Crook themselves, and so save time and trouble by imparting to them
his tale of misgivings and suspicions? No, Dockwrath will do nothing of
the sort. His message is for Joseph Mason alone. Then comes the decisive
conversation in which Dockwrath’s shrewdness tells him that his cue is
only to begin with piquing Mason’s curiosity and emphasising by a
significant reserve the imputations against his stepmother. At last, he
sees reason to fear he may be irritating and offending rather than
interesting the squire of Groby by his prolix exordium. He therefore
concentrates all his damning suggestions into the one word, forgery.
Even this only elicits from Joseph Mason the remark: “I always felt sure
my father never intended to sign such a codicil as that.” The question
about the line of action to be now taken is the more difficult because
the children of Sir Joseph Mason’s first marriage have already disputed
the will with the result that a Court of Justice has given its award in
Lady Mason’s favour. Before deciding on further litigation, Joseph Mason
must consult his men of business in London. Meanwhile, what is likely to
be said by the undoubted witnesses to the will and the alleged witnesses
to the codicil--did they or did they not upon the same day attest the
signatures to separate documents?
When the conference arranged between Mason and Dockwrath takes place,
Bridget Bolster, who is known to have been a witness to the Will, and
alleged to have witnessed also a codicil, in an interview with Messrs.
Round and Crook has most positively declared her certainty that she
never attested more than one document on the same day. Still, Messrs.
Round and Crook are against prosecuting Lady Mason. Joseph Mason’s
emphatic rejoinder, “I will never drop the prosecution,” encourages for
a moment Dockwrath’s hope of getting the business. On that point Mason
is as obstinate as on the other. The case, therefore, goes forward under
the London attorney’s management. Trollope justly prided himself on the
accuracy with which, thanks to the experts he consulted, are presented
the legal details in the trial and in all the business connected with
it. The entire episode is, like the characters that figure in it, a
piece of skilfully contrived realism. The Old Bailey barrister,
Chaffanbrass, who rises to his work so meekly, smiling gently while he
fidgets about with his papers as though he were not at first quite
master of the situation; Sir Richard Leatherham, the Solicitor-General
and the leading counsel for the prosecution, are none of them
full-length sketches from life. Each is a composite of many originals.
Nor is there a single member of the group who does not recall, by some
trick of manner, of voice, or by some other distinctive peculiarity, the
qualities of advocates well known in the era during which Cairns,
Coleridge, and Ballantine were in the full flush of their forensic fame.
Dickens, in _A Tale of Two Cities_, notoriously found his model for
Darnay’s counsel, Stryver, in Edwin James. Of James I can recall
Trollope’s remark: “I had scarcely ever seen him, out of court or in it,
but I have been told he had Chaffanbrass’s habit of constantly arranging
and re-arranging his wig, and of sometimes, for effect, dropping his
voice so low that it could scarcely be heard.” The other court scenes
form a little series of artistically disposed photographs. More skilful
even than these clever descriptions is the manner in which a few simple
and well-chosen words, remarkable for their power, less of expression
than suggestion, bring Lady Mason’s anguish and agony home to the reader
as vividly as could be done by any minute and harrowing details of her
countenance and carriage. Even so, the suspense caused by these Acts in
the drama called for mitigation by Trollope’s favourite device of
entertaining interlude. The by-play of the under-plot now introduced
shows throughout the true mastery of his art here reached by Trollope.
Lady Mason’s good looks, noble bearing, and painful position, have
deeply interested her leading counsel, Furnival, her acquaintance in
society long before he became her advocate in Court. Hence, the one
deviation from exact verisimilitude in this part of the book. The
commencement of the proceedings finds Lady Mason without a solicitor of
her own, and anxious above all things to dispense with one. After the
service of the writ upon her, she consults her admiring neighbour, the
chivalrous Sir Peregrine Orme, who naturally pronounces the solicitor a
necessary evil. To that, her objection still remains. Assured that she
has a warm friend in Furnival, a barrister of high repute, she visits
him at his chambers, Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn. On his advice she places
her affairs in the hands of a solicitor he recommends, Solomon Aram, as
the cleverest criminal solicitor known to Furnival. Meanwhile, the
presence at her husband’s business rooms of so attractive a client
excites Mrs. Furnival’s suspicions in such a degree that a series of
domestic scenes is only closed by the lady leaving the family roof in
Harley Street. The immediate sequel is given with Trollope’s happiest
humour. The housekeeper predicts misery for the barrister if his wife
remains inexorable, but is at once told by the butler that their master
would live twice as jolly without her, and that it would only be “the
first rumpus of the thing.” Is it not, reflectively asks the novelist,
the fear of the “first rumpus” which keeps together many a couple. Even
the special and manifest pains taken with them do not, as Trollope
himself felt, entirely redeem the trial chapter from the charge of
anti-climax.
The already-mentioned Sir Peregrine Orme belongs to the class of county
_preux chevaliers_, of which one situation in a later novel--_Phineas
Finn_--displays for a moment the Duke of Omnium as another specimen.
The trial had been fixed, but not begun, when Lady Mason finds herself
at the house of the baronet whom she had first known years ago as a
county neighbour, and one of her husband’s colleagues at the Quarter
Sessions. More recently, the widow of _Orley Farm_ and the
daughter-in-law of the baronet who resides at The Cleeve have become
close friends. Still fair, tall, graceful, and comely, Lady Mason
retains enough of her original beauty to have won this fine old
gentleman’s heart. To his daughter-in-law he confides his intention of
offering the widow his hand. For that purpose the call at The Cleeve has
been arranged. To stand by her throughout the approaching ordeal, to
defend her against the tongues of wicked men and against her own
weakness, is the duty that the widow’s mature and knightly lover would
now perform. All this is said while he gently strokes the silken hair of
the lady who, having sunk to the ground, is kneeling at his feet. The
agonised recipient of the old man’s chivalrous proposal mingles, with
her murmured reply, some words deprecating the shame and trouble she
might bring upon him and his. The offer, however, is not rejected, and
the conversation ends by Lady Mason becoming Sir Peregrine Orme’s
bride-elect. The next meeting between the pair is of a very different
kind. Not that even this opens with any approach to self-incrimination
on the lady’s part. Greetings, however, had been scarcely exchanged when
she shows her desire to break off the engagement. “If,” pleads Sir
Peregrine, “we were to be separated now, the world would say I had
thought you guilty of this crime.” After this, no more of the sweet
smiles, which have been so much admired, play over Lady Mason’s face.
“Sir Peregrine,” she says, “I am guilty, guilty of all this with which
they charge me.” That admission seals, of course, Lady Mason’s social
fate, and withdraws her from any active part in the rest of the
narrative. What remains, however, is saved from the reproach of mere
supplementary padding by the really surprising skill and resourcefulness
in which the rest of the story abounds. All that concerns Lady Mason
herself has been, and remains to the end, of a uniformly depressing hue.
But among the junior counsel for the defence is a young barrister, Felix
Graham, enamoured of a judge’s daughter, Madeline Staveley. This young
lady is much after the pattern of Trollope’s earlier heroines; while her
lover prefigures a youthful variety of the sort to be met with in one,
at least, of his later stories, but with more originality of character
and view than had so far been shown by most of his young men. The
clearness and freshness of Felix Graham’s portrait stand out the more
boldly by reason of the complete contrast to him forthcoming in Madeline
Staveley’s other lover, old Sir Peregrine Orme’s grandson. In all moral
and social qualities, he worthily reproduces the old baronet’s
character, but reflects too truly the conventional young country squire
to present the union between intellectual gifts and high principles
forthcoming in his rival, the young barrister.
This is only one among several passages that by expedience, which might
be described as Trollope’s speciality, sustain the novel’s interest to
the end. “None but himself can be his parallel.” And really the
dexterity with which Trollope winds up the characters and incidents of
_Can You Forgive Her?_ suggests a comparison with his equestrian
perseverance in the hunting field. That quality records itself in
Phineas Finn’s management of Lord Chiltern’s Bonebreaker. For a minute
or two the horse has got manifestly out of control; the spectators think
it is infallibly heading and leading its rider to irrecoverable grief,
when the Irish Nimrod suddenly, not less than surely, recovering
himself, regains authority over the beast, and sends him and his rider
straight as a die over the brook with those impracticable sides. When
riding among the first flight, side by side with Sir Evelyn Wood or Mr.
E. N. Buxton, after the Essex, or with Mr. H. Petre’s staghounds,
Trollope, we have seen, like others, sometimes found himself at the
bottom of a Roothing ditch, only in a twinkling to pull himself
together, reappear in the open, regain his saddle, and finish in the
field that saw the end of the chase. The adroitness of the horseman,
Phineas Finn, displayed by the novelist of _Orley Farm_, prevented what
in less skilful hands would have been the evaporation of the story’s
interest after the tragic _dénoûment_ of Peregrine Orme’s courtship.
But, by this time, the bluff, artless sportsman, which was all that many
of his country neighbours and some of his London acquaintances saw in
Trollope, had mastered every portion of the novelist’s technique as
thoroughly as he had long since done all departments of Post Office
business. To the spectators, Trollope’s Irish Nimrod on Lord Chiltern’s
Bonebreaker may have seemed doomed to mishap, but without, thanks to his
skill and coolness, having been in actual peril. So with Trollope in
_Orley Farm_. The apparently inevitable dullness of reaction from
painfully exciting incidents threatened, as many a reader thought, to
spoil a first-rate novel’s close. These had not estimated at its true
value the author’s rare resourcefulness in his art.
Other fortunes than those of Madeline Staveley and her two lovers have
to be advanced a stage. The finishing touches have not, so far, been
given to Lady Mason’s loyal friend of her own sex, Sir Peregrine’s
daughter-in-law. In person, if not altogether in experience, Mrs. Orme
presents a picturesque contrast to her unhappy friend. Lady Mason, tall
and stately, makes the journey every day to the Court in one of The
Cleeve carriages. Seated by her side is Mrs. Orme, small in size,
delicate in limb, with soft, blue wondering eyes and a dimpled cheek.
Apart from the present calamity, a past sorrow has forged a sympathetic
link between the two. The châtelaine of The Cleeve has suffered a blow
only less terrible than that which has crushed her companion. After a
year of happy wedlock, her husband, Sir Peregrine’s only child, the
pride of all who knew him, the hope of his political party in the
county, had fallen one day from his horse, and was brought home to The
Cleeve a corpse. The delicacy and strength of genuine pathos make
themselves felt throughout every page describing the intercourse between
these two ladies, after Mrs. Orme knows her friend’s guilt, before or
during the trial itself. Nor, even here, is it all untempered
melancholy. The character sketches thrown off in a few sentences people
the scene with figures all entertainingly appropriate to the judicial
drama like that now begun. The witness, Bridget Bolster, we see
preparing for action, with the perfect understanding of her claim to be
well fed when brought out for work in her country’s service, to have
everything she wanted to eat and drink at places of public
entertainment, and then to have the bills paid behind her back.
“Something to your tea” is the promise she has received from Dockwrath,
interpreted by Moulder as a steak, by Dockwrath himself as ham and eggs,
and by Bridget, as an amendment, as kidneys. Close upon the bold
witness, Bridget, comes the timid witness, Kenneby, whose utmost hope
and prayer are that he may leave the box without swearing to a lie, who
replies to Dockwrath’s suggestion of refreshment: “It is nothing to me;
I have no appetite; I think I’ll take a little brandy and water.” By way
of moral sustenance to the nervous Kenneby, Moulder relates a legal
reminiscence of his youth: It was at Nottingham; there had been some
sugars delivered, and the rats had got at it. “I’m blessed if they
didn’t ask me backwards and forwards so often that I forgot whether they
was seconds or thirds, though I had sold the goods myself. And then the
lawyer said he’d have me prosecuted for perjury.” Mr. Moulder himself
fancies something hot, toasted and buttered, to his tea, openly
asserting, while refreshing himself, that Lady Mason has no better
chance of escape than--“than that bit of muffin has,” with which words
the savoury morsel in question disappeared from the fingers of the
commercial traveller into his throat.
To turn from the doings of Trollope’s _personæ_ to those of Trollope,
himself. Before finishing _Orley Farm_ he had arranged a trip across the
Atlantic, which, as usual, was to combine industry with amusement. The
first thing, therefore, had been to obtain a commission from his
publishers, Chapman and Hall, for a book about his journey and
experiences. The settlement of that business, on his own terms, was
effected without a hitch. The other preliminary, involving a reference
to his Post Office superiors, threatened recrudescence of the immemorial
and inveterate feud with Rowland Hill, now the Post Office Secretary.
Nine months leave of absence formed the application made by the surveyor
of the eastern counties to the Postmaster-General, then Lord Stanley of
Alderley, direct instead of through the active head of the department,
his enemy Hill. “Is it,” rejoined the Minister, with a look of bland
cynicism as he eyed Trollope’s particularly vigorous form and country
squire’s face, “on the plea of ill-health?” “No,” came the answer, “I
want a holiday, and to write a book about it, and I think, my lord, my
many years labour in the public service have earned it for me.” The
forms on which the leave was granted were, at Hill’s instance, that it
should be considered a full equivalent for any special services rendered
by the surveyor to the department. To that condition, suggested, as he
knew it had been, by the Post Office Secretary, Trollope demurred. It
was therefore withdrawn at the Postmaster-General’s order.
Anthony Trollope’s first sojourn on the other side of the Atlantic began
in the August of 1861, and lasted to the May of the following year. The
occurrences between these dates included the earlier battles of the
American Civil War, and to some extent decided his route. Travelling for
recreation and rest as well as profit, he purposely avoided the dangers
and discomforts of the seceding states, but, even thus, frequently found
himself in the direct line of fire. For the time he allowed himself, he
went too far and too fast. An atmosphere loaded with the din and smoke
of conflicting armies did not promote the calm and close study of the
nation’s social or political life and institutions. These, however, were
surprisingly little interrupted by the conflict. The comparative
regularity with which the routine of peace in the forum, in the Law
Courts, in the State Assemblage, and beneath the private roof, preserved
their continuity practically undisturbed by the shocks and convulsions
of war, may have struck other English travellers at the time. By
Trollope they were brought to bear with a force and freshness that
imparted special interest and value to the book on North America, begun
by him after his accustomed fashion, in the midst of his transatlantic
travels, and carried some way towards completion before he had returned
to England.
The work suffers from its author’s laborious attempts to impress the
reader with a sense of its variety and fullness. It is neither a record
of travel nor history; Trollope, had he taken more time about it, would
have seen the mistake of trying to make it both. His impressions of the
country are wanting less in animation and accuracy than in literary
methods and logical arrangement of ideas. Before landing from his
outward voyage he had persuaded himself that the final victory would
rest with the North. This belief had not been shaken by the news of the
Confederate success at Bull Run (July 21, 1861); which had created among
all sections of English society, and elicited from the English Press,
much of the exultant enthusiasm for the Secessionists, of whom Gladstone
himself said that Jefferson Davis had called into existence a new
nation. “Nothing,” were Trollope’s words to the present writer,
“impressed me more during this troublous time than the immensity of the
strength in reserve at the Union’s command. Moreover,” he added, “I was
kept well abreast with the latest political news from Europe.” The
Southerners’ only chance, as none knew better than themselves, or
rather, than their leading spirits, had always been European
intervention on their behalf. Napoleon III might have moved in that
direction, had Palmerston given the signal, but no one really doubted
either that France had resolved to follow the English lead or that
England, whatever her irresponsible personal sympathies here and there,
would take no real part in the quarrel. One international incident
belonging to the struggle first became known to Trollope when dining at
the White House, November 1861. The Federal seizure of the Southern
agents, Mason and Slidell, on board the British West Indian mail
steamer, had caused the diplomatic crisis that made their Washington
post first acquaint Trollope and his other guests with the possible
necessity of all English subjects at short notice leaving the States.
Exactly a generation before her third son’s visit to the New World,
Trollope’s mother was thought, by her son, to have wounded the national
susceptibilities in her _Domestic Manners of the Americans_. As a fact,
except in Ohio, that book did not attract as much attention, even at
the time of its publication (1832), as Anthony Trollope himself
believed. It had been quite forgotten by, or rather had never been known
to the generation that had welcomed her son as its guest. Indeed, by
1861-2 Dickens had long since received plenary forgiveness for offences
in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ and the _American Notes_ much more serious than
those of Mrs. Trollope. Nor did Anthony Trollope’s on the whole
complimentary estimate of his American hosts, in his own forthcoming
book, however pleasantly received at the moment, live much longer in the
popular remembrance than his mother’s rather thin satire. Already the
novels which had won him popularity in England were favourites in the
United States. Then, as to-day, what the American public valued from him
was the qualities which had endeared to the whole of the Anglo-Saxon
race his Barchester books.
Trollope’s subsequent visits to the States may have left some mark on
his writings, and have given him an occasional suggestion for stories
like _The American Senator_, but had no influence upon the place filled
by him in the New World as in the Old. On both sides of the Atlantic,
the amiable motive of his _North America_ was recognised, but its
warmest welcome was not found in the land that it described. A
subsequent chapter will contain specific facts and figures enabling the
reader to form an accurate idea of Trollope’s progress to popularity
with the United States Republic. Meanwhile we return to the novelist’s
new departure in fiction, opened to some extent in _Orley Farm_, but
beginning more decidedly with _Can You Forgive Her?_