AUTHOR, ARTIST, AND THEIR FEMININE SUBJECTS
Trollope and Millais succeed in their different spheres of life by
working on similar principles--The ideas which led Trollope to
write _Can You Forgive Her?_--Lady Macleod’s praises induce the
heroine to dismiss John Grey while Kate Vavasor’s devices draw her
to her cousin George--Alice’s spiritual and social surroundings
take a great part in moulding her character--Mrs. Greenow’s love
affairs relieve the shadow of the main plot--Burgo Fitzgerald tries
to recapture Lady Glencora--Mr. Palliser sacrifices his political
position to ensure her safety--He is rewarded at last--Other
novels, both social and political.
During the years in which Trollope’s industry and fame both reached
their height, J. E. Millais and Sir Henry James, afterwards Lord James
of Hereford, were among the friends of whom he saw most, and who knew
him best. About the former’s hospitalities something will be said
presently. As regards his connection with the latter, Millais in my
hearing once attributed his rare success as an illustrator of Trollope’s
novels to the writer and the artist both setting about their different
work in the same way. “As it proceeds,” he added, “each creative or
inventive stroke is inspired and stimulated or corrected as the case may
be, by mental reference to the unseen models of memory.” This was
Millais’ way of putting it. Trollope’s own words on the subject were, “A
right judgment in selection of personal traits or physical features will
ensure life likeness in representation. Horace, as Englished by
Conington, talks of ‘searching for wreaths the olive’s rifled bower.’
The art practised by Millais and myself is the effective combination of
the details, which observation has collected for us from every quarter,
and their fusion into an harmonious unity.”
Politics and sport colour and dominate a large proportion of the novels
belonging to the _Can You Forgive Her?_ period. For the personal studies
those works implied, author and artist alike found all they wanted
during their summer visits to Millais’ Highland home, or in the autumn
at the Kent or Wiltshire shooting-box of Henry James. Here they
collected representatives of the polite world in all its aspects of
pleasure or business, from the heir apparent to the latest Junior Lord
of the Admiralty and the most recent importation in the way of popular
sportsmen or reigning beauties from the other side of the Atlantic.
Later on, Trollope occasionally induced Millais to witness the hounds
throw off in those East Anglian pastures where he had placed the Roebury
Club’s headquarters, to which the author of _Can You Forgive Her?_ had
wished personally to introduce his illustrator. The similarity of
Millais’ and Trollope’s methods now considered will be best understood
from a concrete instance. Of the artist’s academy paintings in 1887, one
was reproduced as a coloured supplement to _The Illustrated Sporting and
Dramatic News_ by the name of “Portia.” Without being exactly a
portrait, the painting, like the coloured engraving after it, recalled
to every one a well-known man’s pretty daughter who had then just come
out. This young lady, indeed, had never sat to the artist; but she had
given him unconsciously the central idea for his work, into which,
during its progress, he introduced features or touches, whose suggestion
came to him from other faces.
So was it exactly with the creations of Trollope’s pen in their
companionship with those of Millais’ pencil. The literary period which,
actually opening with _Orley Farm_, produced nothing so significant of
Trollope’s advance in his craft and in his views of feminine character,
as _Can You Forgive Her?_ This was published in 1864. Much of it,
however, had been written some years previously, even so far back as
when the stories that first established him in favour with every class
were the great attraction of _The Cornhill_. We have already seen how
many manor houses and parsonages disputed with each other in the
alleged possession of the originals from whom the novelist had drawn
Lily Dale, Lucy Robarts, and their belongings. Trollope’s creative power
reached its height as he approached early middle age. His Post Office
rounds, throughout the whole country south of the Trent, had acquainted
him first-hand with every phase of womanhood, from sweet seventeen to
full-blown and flirting forty. Were some readers beginning to talk about
a satiety of bread and butter misses? _Orley Farm_ had at least reminded
such critics of its author’s capacity to be something more than the
prose laureate of virginal varieties like those to be met with in every
English village during the sixties beneath the manor or the parsonage
roof. _Can You Forgive Her?_ realised the higher expectations first
raised by _Orley Farm_ as to the literary results that might be produced
by the bolder conceptions of the sex, the broader and deeper outlook
upon the tragi-comedy of daily life that Trollope had begun to exhibit.
The Barchester series had been comedy narrative, pure and simple. The
later stories with which we are now concerned belong more or less to
melodrama. This progress of the novelist’s development possesses an
interest biographical not less than literary. Not only were Trollope’s
intellectual gifts largely inherited from his mother; to her also he was
indebted for the circumstances that supplied them with the material on
which they exercised themselves, as well as the experiences that gave
them colour and discipline. Thus Archdeacon Grantly was his maternal
grandfather, the Rev. William Milton, suave in manner, nice in person,
always doing his duty according to his lights, a former Fellow of New
College, vicar of Heckfield. As his youthful guest, the author of
_Barchester Towers_ had been introduced to clerical life on its social
side, and had observed the personal germs that afterwards grew into the
Warden, Mr. Harding, and Dean Arabin. Much also of his earliest interest
in feminine character he owed to his generally affectionate
reminiscences of his mother--her sustained courage in domestic
adversity, her cheery helpfulness to all around her, and the reserve
fund of strength and resourcefulness, which never failed her for each
fresh trial, as it came.
Trollope’s time in Ireland was the making of him, not only as a public
servant and writer, but as a social student. His boyhood in Harrow Weald
had familiarised him with the Orley Farm of his story, and with elements
of his characters in it. But, at the same time that his experiences on
the other side of the St. George’s Channel were shaping themselves in
_Castle Richmond_, they were preparing him to people with suitable
figures the pages not more of _Orley Farm_ than _Can You Forgive Her?_
Before Trollope was despatched from St. Martin’s-le-Grand on duty to
Ireland, he knew, naturally enough, very little of men, women, and
horses. In the second, at least, of those subjects, he had acquired
proficiency at the date of his final return to England. His estimate of
the sex, based on an extensive and careful generalisation, used to come
out in conversational fragments which may now be pieced together.
Thackeray and Bulwer-Lytton, here for once in agreement, and both,
perhaps unconsciously, under the Byronic influence, might have professed
a doubt whether women as a class could be considered reasonable
creatures, in the same sense as men. Trollope never went so far as this.
He did, however, admit that their ruling passion, a love of power,
habitually neutralised the tact imputed to them as an instinct, and
might obscure their intellectual perceptions, and impair their common
sense. “Hence,” he would add, “the inquisitorial officiousness which
makes my Mrs. Proudie not in the least a caricature, but, stripped of
her Episcopal surroundings, the commonplace of most English households.”
Throughout the whole period of his literary activity, Trollope was a
diligent reader of history, finding in its revelations of human
character the best supplements to his own studies from life, as well as
the most fruitful hints for the creation of the leading ladies in his
own romance. He never pursued these historical studies more diligently,
or with more definite result, than while engaged on the preparation of
_Can You Forgive Her?_ They had brought him to the conclusion that in
love affairs women are generally without discrimination. “If,” he said,
“of royal rank, they almost invariably choose their favourites ill. Thus
Elizabeth of England, Catherine II of Russia, Queen Christina of Spain,
and her daughter Isabella had the pick of great, brave, wise, and witty
men. So far from turning their opportunities to profit, they all took
dunderheads for their rulers.” How wide, therefore, the mark was that
paradoxical pundit who declared it better for a country to have a king
than a queen as its nominal head, because a king always became the
creature of women, while a queen had to put herself in the hands of men.
To make the same true, we must assume that queens always chose their
lovers well, which, being women, as a fact they seldom do.
The origin and cause of women’s troubles in nine cases out of ten are
their constitutional indisposition to compromise, whose necessity they
ought to have learnt, if not in the experience of life generally, yet
from the special example of the politicians to whom they invariably
incline. For nowadays all women are Conservatives, and Conservatism, as
we know it to-day, having political surrender for its essence, is ever a
compromise with Radicalism. In the seventeenth century they used to be
Jacobites. And that, most properly; for the special foibles of the sex
are identical with the traditional perversities of the Stuarts.
“Mankind,” said Lord Palmerston, “are, for the most part, good fellows
enough, but rather conceited.” So the Duc de Sully thought James II not
a bad sort of man, but incurably given to doing the second thing before
the first. And that is the invariable feminine tendency. We can all
sing, or say:
“It is good to be merry and wise,
It is good to be happy and true.
It is good to be off with the old love before one is on with the new.”
But when and where did one ever find the woman who willingly acted on
the precept?
This much by way of putting the reader in personal touch with
Trollope’s ideas when he set to work on _Can You Forgive Her?_ That
novel was the product of the same period as _The Small House at
Allington_; its monthly parts began while _The Cornhill_ was still
unfolding the tale of the wrongs suffered at Crosbie’s hands by one of
Trollope’s nicest and most guileless maidens. Except for the jilting
common to both, _Can You Forgive Her?_ presents a complete contrast to
_The Small House at Allington_. Among the novels belonging to the
earlier sixties, it has more of kinship to _Orley Farm_ than to any
other. Its comedy is quite as often and as suddenly changed for
melodrama, or even tragedy. Indeed, throughout these stories of the
period now under consideration, one of Trollope’s leading ideas is that
the thinnest possible partition divides human contact in the most
civilised society from primitive savagery, and that the withdrawal of
certain artificial restraints may mean a relapse into the reign of
crime.
It was of course a mere coincidence, but the interrogative title, _Can
You Forgive Her?_ reminds one that in 1859, five years earlier, there
had appeared a novel by another author also propounding a question on
its first page. This was Bulwer-Lytton’s _What Will He do with It?_ The
individuals about whom that inquiry is made equal in variety and
multitude those whom Trollope’s readers are asked whether they can
pardon. Both books, however, beyond this, resemble each other in the
adroit connection of the central plot with the several underplots and
the personal relations borne by the characters in the one to those in
the other. It is an old story told by Trollope himself long before he
put it into his autobiography how the movement of _Can You Forgive Her?_
was originally designed for stage representation and put into a play,
_The Noble Jilt_, never acted or accepted. More closely analytical of
feminine motive, conduct, and ethics than anything he had yet written,
_Can You Forgive Her?_ forms a link uniting Trollope’s purely social
stories with those which were political as well. Now, for the first
time, the shadow of the august party chief as well as social Grand
Seignior, the Duke of Omnium, throws itself over the incidents and
personages so far as these belong to politics. One of the reasons for
their unfavourable comparison with the Barchester company is that they
come after it. But of this presently. To-day _Can You Forgive Her?_
acquires a new interest from the fact of its showing its author as the
pioneer of the problem novel, the point of which generally comes to
this--how to act in the conflict between passion or self-indulgence and
the laws of good behaviour. Semiramis, an Uebermensch of the earlier
world, solved it in one way, _Libito felicito in sua legge_. A gallant
French dragoon officer, discussing the matter with a decadent, suggested
another solution. “Je trouve ça tout simple, c’était son devoir.”
Trollope’s way out of the difficulty is that, in the long run, fortune
and fate show themselves on the side of good and true hearts.
Consequently, these can afford to wait upon events. From representative
English girls of the upper class and grass-widows, to stateswomen and
potential duchesses, every one has more or less, and generally more, to
be forgiven.
The various lady schemers had, according to Trollope the fashion of the
sex, laid their plans with what they congratulated themselves must prove
an infallible ingenuity. Alas! upon all such projects rests some blight
of miscarriage. Time, place, opportunity, and character, all in turn,
have been inaccurately judged. The organising faculty and providential
power on which the leading ladies pique themselves would, but for
certain happy accidents, have resulted in misadventure or downright
disaster. Hence throughout this story, beneath a surface of feminine
scheming or social frivolity, there runs a tragic undercurrent, and the
novel, as a whole, formed a satire, in some passages of a very lurid
kind, upon the shallowness of woman’s overrated wit and the hollowness
of her worldly wisdom. The _dramatis personæ_ of both sexes are
perpetually heading for the precipice that means ruin. Will they, is the
question the reader finds himself constantly asking, by some better
influence be brought into the pathway of redemption?
The she of the opening chapter, whom you are to forgive if you can (only
one, by the way, of the many needing forgiveness), belonged to a family
some of whose various members suggest more than an accidental
resemblance to the ancestral Trollopes. So, at least, it is with Squire
Vavasor, Vavasor Hall, Westmorland. This hot-headed, ignorant, honest
old gentleman shuts himself up in his northern home because it is there
alone that parliamentary reform has had no power to alter the old
political arrangements. His younger son, John Vavasor, like Anthony
Trollope’s father, came up to London as a barrister early in life, only
to fail, or at best to make a bare livelihood. He differs, however, from
his obvious prototype, the unsuccessful agriculturist of Harrow Weald,
in finding a wife with a competence as well as rich in aristocratic
connections. The relatives of this lady, _née_ Alice Macleod, are still
debating whether they shall or shall not condone her indiscretion, when
she dies, leaving the widower with a little girl, her namesake, on whom
exclusively her fortune is settled. This daughter grows into the heroine
round whom the interest of the story centres.
John Vavasor and his daughter Alice have a comfortable house in Queen
Anne Street; though the father, living much at the old university club,
seldom dines at home, except when he entertains. Other stories produced
during the _Can You Forgive Her?_ period, and presently to be noticed,
contained much satire upon the religious school whose manifestation
Trollope disapproved, or whose sincerity he suspected. Even in _Can You
Forgive Her?_ there occur on an early page some words uncomplimentary to
evangelicalism, as well as perhaps intended to suggest that Alice
Vavasor might have less to be forgiven if she had been brought up in a
different spiritual atmosphere, for her aunt, Lady Macleod, widow of Sir
Archibald Macleod, K.C.B., suffered from two of the most serious
drawbacks to goodness that afflict a lady. A Calvinistic Sabbatarian in
religion, she was, in worldly matters a devout believer in the high rank
of her noble relatives. She could worship a youthful marquis, though he
lived a life that would disgrace a heathen among heathens. She could
condemn men and women to eternal torments for listening to profane music
in the park on Sunday. Yet, as Trollope emphasises, she was a good
woman, giving a great deal away, owing no man anything, and striving to
love her neighbours. Then she bore much pain with calm unspeaking
endurance, and lived in trust of a better world. In the case of her
so-called niece, but in reality her cousin, she had been one of the
family commission responsible for Alice’s nurture from her infancy.
Other circumstances were, or had been, equally little favourable, as
Trollope would have one understand, to the formation of Alice Vavasor’s
character. She had not long been out of the nursery before,
notwithstanding Lady Macleod’s remonstrances, she was sent to a foreign
boarding school. After that, she lived for a time with her strait-laced,
narrow-minded aunt at Cheltenham. Her years there were passed in a
chronic state of rebellion against her surroundings. When she could
stand them no longer, she arranged with her father that the two should
keep house together in London. That experiment had been going on so long
that in the opening chapter Alice has passed her twenty-fourth birthday.
Father and daughter, beneath the same roof, lived independently of each
other. Alice’s absolute control of the fortune inherited from her mother
makes her the mistress not only of the house but of herself. She does
the honours of her father’s table on the understanding that when she
sits at its head no guests connected with the peerage, on the one hand,
or the Low Church party, on the other, are to be present. Had she
further stipulated for a sprinkling of Anglican bishops and ambassadors,
she would no doubt have had her way. In a word, this young lady’s will
had never been crossed, nor had she any opportunity for consulting the
preferences of others till the particular love affair with the suitor,
pressed on her by the whole family, and indeed at the beginning favoured
by herself, John Grey. He, though her first formally betrothed, was not
her earliest declared lover; for her cousin George Vavasor had won her
temporary affections before John Grey’s turn came. From that
entanglement, however, she was supposed to have freed herself some two
years in advance of her introduction into these pages. Lady Macleod’s
praises of the Cambridgeshire squire, now her husband-elect, set the
bride that was to be on doubting whether he was suited to her. The young
lady even asked herself whether she should not make the _amende_ to
George Vavasor for his dismissal by again taking him into favour.
To that end is working George Vavasor’s sister Kate, who finds it
consistent with her sincere friendship for Alice to promote her
unscrupulous and impecunious brother’s suit with all the unconscionable
ingenuity of her sex. The latest device in that direction is a Swiss
tour. On this George is to escort the two ladies, his sister Kate and
his cousin Alice. From this event grow the chief incidents and
complications, serious, or farcical or both together. Already the young
lady, as masterful as she is capricious, has broken John Grey to harness
by ignoring his reasonable feeling that if the two ladies need a
cavalier for the conventional, perfectly safe and easy Swiss round, they
would find one more appropriate in himself than in a possible rival. The
nephew and destined heir of a wealthy Cumbrian squire, George Vavasor
has expectations, but not the command of ready money necessary for his
parliamentary ambitions and his general habits of life. Alice Vavasor’s
inherited income would supply him with the requisite funds. The varying
fortunes of the two lovers, played off by Alice against each other
through most of the chapters, are diversified by sketches of George
Vavasor’s doings in politics, or in the hunting-field. And these are
alternated with various episodes testing or illustrating the unselfish
devotion of John Grey.
While occupied with describing in his novel George Vavasor’s return to
Chelsea, Trollope himself was looking out for a parliamentary seat. How
it fared with him in that quest will presently be related with all due
and new details. Meanwhile, it may be said in passing that the comic
business between George Vavasor and the parliamentary agents, Scruby
and Grimes, is taken literally from all that Trollope went through
himself. Equally autobiographical are the Roebury Club passages, with
the entire account of George Vavasor’s hunting arrangements and runs
over the Midland and East Anglian pastures. A brewer or two, a banker, a
would-be fast attorney, a sporting literary gentleman, and a young
unmarried M.P., without any particular home of his own in the country,
formed the Roebury Club, whose headquarters were at the King’s Head or
Roebury Inn. There they had their own wine-closet, and led a jolly life.
George Vavasor himself did not regularly belong to this society; he
could not but see something of its members out of doors, while they, on
their part, criticised him after no complimentary fashion. “He’s a bad
sort of fellow,” said Grindley, “he’s so uncommonly dark. He was heir to
some small property in the north, but he lost every shilling of that
when he was in the wine trade.” “You’re wrong there,” commented Maxwell,
“he made a pot of money in it, and had he stuck to it, he would have
been a rich man.” Such is a fair specimen of Trollope’s efforts to
lighten the dark shadows cast on his pages by George Vavasor’s
forbidding personality and sinister career.
But these portions of the story are provided with a more sustained and
effectively humorous contrast in Mrs. Greenow and her courtship by the
military adventurer Captain Bellfield, and the well-to-do Norfolk
farmer, Cheesacre. The widowed and well-dowered relative of the Vavasors
shares her younger kinswoman’s contempt for the conventional advice
about being off with the old love before being on with the new. Here and
there, she suggests a family likeness to the widow Barnaby in the story
of that name, written by Trollope’s mother. That does not prevent the
husbandless lady and the two competitors for her hand being really
original creations. How the rival pursuers of the widow’s purse and
person, with laughter-moving ingenuity, try to outwit each other and to
commend each his own unselfish devotion to the lady; how she in her turn
sees through both, fools them to her heart’s content, and, womanlike,
finally takes the military scamp, is told by Trollope with a humour for
which he owed little to his mother, and in which he was excelled by none
of his contemporaries. Mrs. Greenow herself, like the others, may need
forgiveness, but will be at once unanimously pardoned for her very
innocent flirtations.
It is different with another lady, first introduced into this book, but
in later volumes destined to be among the author’s most finished
socio-political figures. Alice Vavasor is only removed at a safe
distance from the abyss into which a morbid impulse, which she herself
knew not to be love, periodically prompts her to throw herself, when she
becomes Mrs. John Grey. Alice’s cousin-lover skirts much more closely
than was ever done by Alice herself the slippery verge of the rocks
looking down upon ruin, and, though saved from actual destruction, so
far falls over as to disappear from the story.
The gradually progressive stages of Lady Glencora’s transformation from
a drawing-room doll into an ambitious and masterful stateswoman will be
traced in a subsequent chapter; without anticipating details, they may
be said to exemplify and confirm the remarks already made about
Trollope’s progress from the idyllic to the epic. Thus, during the
decade that followed _The Cornhill_ novels, Trollope showed himself
scarcely less happy and effective in his sketches of mature and prosaic
womanhood than in the innocence or sweet tormenting play[22] of the
maidens peopling the British Arcadia in which he first displayed the
powers afterwards to be exercised in the bolder and stronger flights now
mentioned.
The gallery of fashionable culprits in _Can You Forgive Her?_ contains
none in greater need of pardon than Lady Glencora, here, together with
her future husband, “Planty Pal,” first met with. Perhaps, however, the
worst sinner of all is the unscrupulous match-maker, Lady Monk, who
gives her nephew, Burgo Fitzgerald, enough ready cash for his meditated
elopement with Lady Glencora, now for some time the present “Planty
Pal’s,” and so the future Duke of Omnium’s, wife. Burgo Fitzgerald, in
his relation to Lady Glencora, forms a counterpart to George Vavasor in
his doings with Alice. In each case the pair are connected by
cousinship; while, at some former time, Burgo Fitzgerald has been Lady
Glencora’s declared and favoured lover, just as Alice Vavasor had once,
before the novel’s opening, not rejected the addresses of George. Mr.
Palliser, too, finds an exact parallel in John Grey. Both men are of
sterling worth, of unspotted honour, but neither likely to inspire a
woman with a warmer sentiment than respect or tolerance. Both these
admirable men have their most dangerous rivals in two different kinds of
scamp: Grey in the unscrupulous, and, on the whole, ill-looking George;
Palliser in the handsomest, but also the most worthless, of God’s
creatures, Burgo Fitzgerald, whose faultless face, dark hair, and blue
eyes no woman could see without being fascinated.
Again, both Alice and her noble kinswoman, Glencora, are similarly
conjured by a chorus of family dowagers to let no sentimental
infatuation betray them into the calamity of giving themselves to the
wrong man. As a fact, the by no means highly emotional, or now even
juvenile, but clear-headed and strong-willed Alice seems throughout more
likely to fall into the snare than the drawing-room butterfly, still
little more than a girl, Glencora. But the rich “daughter of a hundred
earls”[23] in the peerage of Scotland, under an external charm of face
of the apparently innocent and babyish kind known as _la beauté de
diable_, together with an apparent warm impulsiveness of temperament,
conceals a severely practical and business-like shrewdness, such as to
ensure a wisely restraining prudence from being in the end overborne by
any sudden temptation of the heart. She threw over Burgo Fitzgerald for
Plantagenet Palliser without compunction or sigh. There is no reason to
suppose her literary creator dreamed of making her do anything else than
fool the lover of her youth by not refusing point blank to leave her
husband, or even that in his heart the _soi-disant_ seducer believed he
could prevail on her to do so. One need not, therefore, feel surprised
at reading that Burgo Fitzgerald bore it like a man--never groaning
openly or quivering once at any subsequent mention of Lady Glencora’s
name. On the marriage morning he had hung about his club door in Pall
Mall, listening to the bells, occasionally saying a word or two with
admirable courage about the wedding. Then he went about again as usual,
living the old reckless life in London, in country houses, and
especially in the hunting field, where he always seems riding for
something worse than a fall. He did, as a fact, in his _maladroit_
tempting of Providence, occasionally kill a horse, much nobler and far
more deserving of life than himself.
Kate Vavasor, George Vavasor’s sister, puts forth dauntless pertinacity
and some cleverness in the attempt to oust John Grey from her cousin
Alice’s heart and replace him by her brother. Unlike, however, that
brother, she would stoop to no dishonourable devices. When George, in
desperate straits for money to cover his election expenses and other
calls, suggests requisitioning Alice, she plainly tells him it is an
ungentlemanlike way of raising the wind, with which she will have
nothing to do. Meanwhile, the strands of the central plot have been
interwoven with personages and incidents that are preparatory to the
political novels afterwards to appear, beginning with _The Prime
Minister_, 1876, and ending with _The Duke’s Children_, 1880. The
scandals that once seemed likely to grow out of Lady Monk’s ball have
been nipped in the bud or altogether averted. Immediately afterwards,
wisely considering change of scene to be best for all persons concerned,
Mr. Palliser refuses the Chancellorship of the Exchequer that he may
place his wife beyond reach of temptation by taking her abroad. The
party includes Alice as her cousin Glencora’s companion, and it does its
travels in the grand manner.
In its general results and special incidents, the journey succeeds
beyond its organiser’s fondest hopes. At Baden-Baden the good fortunes
of the tour reach their terminating point. Mr. Palliser receives from
his wife the smilingly whispered announcement that he may soon expect
the long waited, earnestly desired heir to his estates, and to the ducal
title that in the course of nature must soon be his. With such a
prospect before him he can afford to be generous. He gratifies his lady
by getting her old and worthless sweetheart, who has staked and lost his
last sovereign on the roulette board at the _Kursaal_, out of some
trouble with his hotel bill as well as in other ways standing between
him and ruin. At Baden, too, he meets John Grey, who has now developed
parliamentary ambitions, and who soon becomes intimate with Mr. and Lady
Glencora Palliser; he also finds George Vavasor’s disappearance to have
removed his last difficulty with Alice. Before the return to England had
been accomplished, Palliser, now Chancellor of the Exchequer-elect, has
settled to exchange his representation of Silverbridge for that of the
county, and to get Grey, already his warm supporter, into the vacant
seat. The son and heir fulfils the promise declared at Baden, of his
expected coming. The birth is followed by John Grey’s marriage with
Alice, by his entrance to the House of Commons, and by Mr. Palliser’s
introduction of his first budget. The parliamentary maxims with which
this story is sprinkled have from the present narrative’s point of view
a certain biographical interest, because they suggest the attention
already by Trollope to the career at St. Stephen’s, unsuccessfully
essayed by him four years after _Can You Forgive Her?_ had appeared.
Amongst the pieces of advice to aspirants at Westminster is the sound,
practical counsel not to be inaccurate, not to be long winded, and above
all not to be eloquent, since of all faults eloquence is the most
damnable.
Trollope’s original interest in _The Fortnightly Review_, about which
enough has been said in an earlier chapter, was quickened by the
opportunity thus possibly opened to him for the appearance of his own
work in its pages. His few occasional articles for it have been already
mentioned. The first novel written by him for the periodical, _The
Belton Estate_, ran its course in the Review soon after the last
instalment of _Can You Forgive Her?_ had appeared, and was followed some
time later by _The Eustace Diamonds_. Not one of his longer novels, it
recalls in its main theme the principal idea underlying the book which
has just been analysed here. In _The Belton Estate_ the heroine, Clara
Amedroz, has, like more than one of the ladies in _Can You Forgive
Her?_, two lovers, neither absolutely ineligible but greatly differing
in their value, and one of them, as in _Can You Forgive Her?_, the
lady’s cousin. The less desirable of the two comes upon the stage first,
Captain Aylmer, a member of Parliament. His suit succeeds. After the
usual Trollopian fashion the engagement is broken off; and there appears
the cousin, Will Belton, who in due course yields to Clara’s charms,
proposes, and is rejected. Then comes Aylmer’s temporary reinstatement
and at last dismissal. Cousin Will proves eventually the lucky man; and
upon him, as the heir to Clara’s father, and as Clara’s husband, the
curtain falls. The display of minute feminine analysis, such as began
with _Orley Farm_ and was continued in _Can You Forgive Her?_
characterises also _The Belton Estate_. The feminine idiosyncrasies
examined with much precision and often great skill belonged to the same
class as those of _Can You Forgive Her?_ The action, however, is much
quicker, and the swift succession of events is far less painful. The
forsaken Captain Aylmer takes to no evil courses, is never in danger of
coming to a bad end, but judiciously improves his worldly possessions by
making up to and wedding a rich baronet’s daughter, who, according to
the positive assertion of Miss Amedroz, might be pretty but for her very
decided and remarkable squint.
This was by no means the last time of Trollope’s introducing this
antenuptial situation. Something like half-a-dozen years were yet to
pass before its exhibition again in _The Golden Lion of Granpere_
(1872). This is a pretty little story of unsophisticated life in the
province of Lorraine; Marie Bromar is the pretty niece and ward of
Michel Voss, the popular, prosperous, and somewhat arbitrary proprietor
of the well-supported Grandpere hostelry known as the _Lion d’Or_. His
son George, the inheritor of his father’s masterful disposition, falls
in love with Marie, but, being driven from home by misunderstanding,
leaves the ground clear for rivals. During his absence the girl is
courted by a rich linen-buyer of a neighbouring town, whose addresses
are favoured by Marie’s guardian uncle. Everything prospers the wooing
of Adrian Urmand, the trader. The wedding eve has come: the pair are to
meet in church to-morrow. At this juncture George Voss returns. All the
confusion and doubts arising out of his long absence are cleared up.
With the light heart, that, in the case of Trollope’s young ladies, no
amatory perplexities or cares seem to depress, Marie throws over the new
love for the old, and the slight series of episodes ends in happiness,
not only for a family, but the entire neighbourhood, marred, however, by
something more than misgivings that the niece and ward of my host of the
_Lion d’Or_ may yet have to pay the penalty for having played so fast
and loose with two such blameless and desirable competitors for her
hand. The short and slight story now noticed contains not a little to
recall the third product of its author’s pen, more than twenty years
earlier, _La Vendée_ (1850). The later, like the earlier novel, exactly
catches the simple old-world spirit and atmosphere of its subject and
its scene. As a boy, by repeated if shortening sojourns abroad, Trollope
had familiarised himself with the details and personages of the daily
round in France and Germany. These experiences, instead of being dimmed
by time, remained with him fresh and vivid throughout his life. In _The
Golden Lion of Granpere_ the absolute authority of Michael Voss as the
family head, the primitive existence throughout controlled by him, the
domestic economy of the entire district, the absence of class
distinction, the universal horror at Marie’s violated troth, the appeal
to the _curé_ to remonstrate with her--all this is depicted with
pleasant art. It is perhaps rendered the more effective by its contrast
with the pictures of English fashionable society in Trollope’s other
books belonging to the same period.
Before, however, resuming the consideration of those, it would be an
inconvenient departure from the chronological arrangement followed, so
far as possible, in these pages not to complete our view of the domestic
stories, for the most part entirely English as to place and personages,
that followed the Barchester books. Of his _Cornhill_ readers, Trollope
took farewell, not as photographer of the Allington group, but in _The
Claverings_ (1867). _Can You Forgive Her?_, it has been seen, forms the
link between the novels of home life and those of politics. _The
Claverings_ connects the novels that introduced us to Barchester Palace
and close in its best-known prelate’s time with the great world outside
of peers, cabinet ministers, party leaders, society queens, and
princesses in which the Marchioness of Hartletop, _née_ Griselda
Grantly, was taking her part. The Rev. Henry Clavering of the family
which gives its name to the book held a living in Bishop Proudie’s
diocese. The grouping of events and characters not only discloses no
trace of approach to repetition, but by the freshness and vigour of its
effects shows throughout its author at his best. The plot is of the
simple straightforward kind of which Trollope made himself a master.
The temptation to indulge in the Thackerayan vein, yielded to some years
earlier, was responsible for Trollope’s poorest piece of work, _Brown,
Jones, and Robinson_, already mentioned; it was successfully withstood
in _The Claverings_, with the result that Trollope widened the circle of
his believers by a combination of _dramatis personæ_ and scenes scarcely
below the mark of Dickens. The clash of rival love-making echoes
throughout successive chapters, but with a ring altogether different
from that heard in earlier variations on the same theme. The strongest
personal force in the book is Julia Brabazon, who jilts a suitable lover
of her own age and rank to marry a rich and senile profligate. The
forsaken lover, Harry Clavering, clever, handsome, though somewhat weak,
has crowned a brilliant college course with a Fellowship. He decides on
becoming a civil engineer; and with that view enters the office of
Beilby and Burton, the latter of these two being the real head of the
firm. In that gentleman’s daughter, Florence Burton, the new pupil
finds consolation for his lost love, and even much relief, in the
society of a quiet, clean girl, the exact antithesis of the brilliant,
beautiful, and dashing Julia, now Lady Ongar. Soon after the conclusion
of an engagement between Harry and Florence, there returns to England
Lady Ongar, now a rich, still fascinating, and much-sought-after widow,
bent on atoning for her former infidelity by giving herself and her
fortune to the young man who had been her earlier conquest. About
Florence or the Burton family she knows nothing. Harry therefore soon
finds himself in the position of Ulysses when that hero had upon his
hands at the same time his own true Penelope and the bright Circe. Only
after a severe conflict of emotions does he decide on maintaining his
fidelity with Florence. That determination had been no sooner acted on
than it is splendidly rewarded; for the death at sea of his two uncles
leaves him a wealthy baronet.
In this story, as in so many others of Trollope’s, the best scenes bring
forward characters concerned only in a secondary way with the central
narrative. Madame Gordeloup, the most enjoyable and essentially
Dickensian portrait in the gallery, has made Lady Ongar’s acquaintance
during her widowhood’s earliest days; small of stature, she acts in
everything with quickness and decision, and flavours all her words with
vehemence. Her character may be read in her eyes, whose watchful
brightness makes them seem to emit sparks. At this point of the story
Harry has not come into the title. Captain Archibald Clavering, Sir Hugh
Clavering’s brother and heir presumptive, is in want of just such a wife
as Lady Ongar might make him. Widows are proverbially wooed with more
success through the good offices lent by a friend of their sex than
directly. In Madame Gordeloup, with her clear brains, tactful manner,
knowledge of her own sex generally, and of Lady Ongar in particular,
Captain Clavering sees the exact agent for furthering his matrimonial
designs. Before committing himself to Madame Gordeloup, he takes into
his confidence a seasoned and resourceful club friend, Captain Boodle.
There now follows a delightful succession of scenes between the highly
endowed little Polish lady and Clavering’s representative, the gallant
Boodle. Their only practical upshot is Archibald Clavering’s parting
with £70 to the quick-witted Madame Gordeloup. The one parallel of these
passages is that portion of _Dombey and Son_ that recalls the
intervention on Captain Cuttle’s behalf with Mrs. MacStinger, his
landlady.