RELIGIOUS ORTHODOXY AND OPINIONS
Anglican orthodoxy and evangelical antipathies imbibed by Trollope
in childhood--His personal objections to the Low Church Party for
theological as well as social reasons--His characteristic revenge
on Norman Macleod for extorting from him a _Good Words_
novel--_Rachel Ray_ a case of “vous l’avez voulu, George
Dandin”--And instead of a story for evangelical readers a spun-out
satire on evangelicalism--Its plot, characters, and
incidents--_Nina Balatka_ regarded as a problem Jew story--_Linda
Tressel_ to Bavarian Puritanism much as _Rachel Ray_ to
English--_Miss Mackenzie_ another hit at the Low Church--Its
characters and plot--_The Last Chronicle of Barset_ and _The Vicar
of Bullhampton_--Their serious elements, as well as social
photographs and occasional touches of satire against women, ever
doing second thing before first and then doing the first
wrong--Both novels illustrate Trollope’s views of the tragic
volcano ever ready to break out from under the social crust.
The beginnings of Anthony Trollope’s religious sympathies came from his
own home. The social and moral influences that he, as a boy,
unconsciously imbibed here were altogether anti-evangelical. John Wesley
died in 1791, leaving behind him the contemptuously called “Methodies.”
Charles Simeon, whose Cambridge disciples were scornfully known as
“Sims,” lived till 1836. Between those two dates, practically indeed up
to 1850, weekday religion was only in vogue among distinctively
evangelical surroundings, though in 1850 Charlotte Yonge’s writings
began to exercise a sort of spiritual missionary force in High Anglican
households. Into a Low Church environment Anthony Trollope had not been
born. His grandfathers on both sides, clergymen of the orthodox, highly
respectable, and not unamiable kind, were disposed, by ancestral or
aristocratic tradition, towards sacramental Anglicanism. Like the rest
of Trollope’s clerical relatives, they boasted their doctrinal descent
from the High Church divines of the Stuart period, and would have
disapproved as much as was done by the lady who wrote _The Heir of
Redclyffe_ any violation of an habitual reserve on all religious
subjects except upon devotional occasions.
With all the children of Thomas Anthony and Frances Trollope the Church
catechism, with the epistles and gospels of the season, was included in
the home lessons. Anything more than that would have been called
evangelical or Low Church. As in other upper middle-class households of
the time, so beneath the Trollope roof it became the rising generation’s
fixed idea that Low-churchism must be a mark of vulgarity, a sort of
spiritually parasitic growth, flourishing, alas, among the small
tradesmen, whose sons were educated at some private venture schools, but
happily unknown in the superior educational or social soil, which grew
something better than English grammar and arithmetic. From the nursery,
these notions had been confirmed in Anthony Trollope, not only by the
pervading sentiments or table-talk of his elders, but by the official
authority of his mother’s old friend and frequent visitor, Dr. Nott, one
among the Winchester canons, whose spare figure, pale, delicate
features, black gaiters reaching to the knee, spotlessly white neckcloth
of many folds, and elegant Italian scholarship, suggested not a few
touches for cultured and cosmopolitan Dr. Stanhope in the Barchester
group. Dr. Nott, an exemplary priest of his period, had been one of the
Princess Charlotte’s tutors, and had initiated the structural repairs
that prevented Winchester Cathedral from falling into ruin. His
periodical calls upon Mrs. Trollope became the occasion for an examining
review of the children--were they good, obedient, truthful, and
industrious? When answering, one day, these questions, Anthony and his
elder brother Tom volunteered the statement that, if they were not quite
everything which could be wished, it was because of their nurse Farmer
being an Anabaptist. Such heterodoxy, Dr. Nott admitted, might be
deplorable, but did not, he added, absolve the children from the duty of
subordination. This was resented by the two brothers as a snub, and
intensified their disgust with schismatics, including Low Church of
every degree.
In 1837 Mrs. Trollope’s bitter attack upon evangelicalism in _The Vicar
of Wrexhill_ deepened still further her children’s loathing of
“Methodies” and all whose religious faith did not conform to a
gentlemanlike Anglicanism. How these preferences and prejudices coloured
_Barchester Towers_ and the novels that followed, it has been already
pointed out. Not that Trollope grew up into an irreligious or other than
God-fearing man. It was indeed to some extent the intellectual man’s
contempt for the crass, ignorant infidelity of the time that, as years
went on, deepened his respect for genuine piety in all its
manifestations, and made his strictures upon certain of its unseasonable
and mischievous phases so different as to tone and spirit from the
satire of Dickens upon the same phenomena. His turn of mind was not
fervently devotional, but for spiritual as well as social reasons he
disliked Churchmen of Mr. Slope’s variety. His great ground of quarrel
with evangelicalism was its tendency to divorce conduct from religion.
The Mosaic law and ritual were confessedly so exacting as to be suited
only for the earliest stage of the Divine revelation. They were
superseded entirely by Christianity, independent, in its pure and early
form, of all externals, but progressively overloaded with superstitious
ceremonies and doctrines, some of which the Protestant Reformation was
said to have abrogated. Evangelicalism, however, with its ruthless
insistence on a series of psychological experiences and of emotional
developments, as the indispensable tests of genuine conversion and
effectual deliverance from the wrath to come, instituted a kind of
subjective ordeal, in comparison of which the yoke of Hebrew formalism
was easy and the burden of Popish ritual light.
A man could know for certain whether he had or had not performed the
religious acts enjoined on him by his spiritual superiors; but could
not, in the nature of things, be equally sure of having realised all the
ghostly sensations, and of having exactly attained to that frame of mind
necessary, as he was told, for salvation. The first stage in the process
prescribed for all penitents by the evangelical doctors, the being
brought under conviction of sin, might seem simple; but how long was
that phase of agony to last, or, if the painful experience were not
followed by a consciousness of peace and pardon, did it mean that the
Divine wrath was not to be appeased? About this the evangelical teachers
shrank from committing themselves, with the result, as it seemed to
Trollope, that the newly wakened soul must be left indefinitely to
torment itself with doubts whether its failure to pass, in the orthodox
order, from distress and disturbance to peace and joy, might not imply
guilt beyond all hope of pardon. At the best these disabling agitations
could not fail, while inflicting torment on those who suffered them, to
disqualify human beings for the performance of their daily duties to
each other, as well as to make religion itself, not an invigorating
inspiration, but a paralysing terror.
In a word, evangelicalism, as conceived of by Trollope, puzzled,
perplexed, and irritated him. Of the evangelical teachers, with the
shibboleths they parade as well as the stultifying inconsistencies these
imply, he would say, “Your profession does not make you a Christian. For
that, you must act like one. Yet,” he added, “we are told good works,
though the test of religion, are also a snare, and certainly make for
perdition if performed by those not in a state of grace or merely as
moral duties.” “You tell me,” I once heard Trollope say to an
evangelical monitor perhaps almost old enough to have sat under Grimshaw
or Romaine, “that, in effect, virtue becomes vice if its practical
pursuit be not sanctified by a mystical motive not within the
understanding of all. Such a theory, I retort, can in its working have
only one of two results--the immorality of antinomianism, or a
condition of perplexity and confusion which must drive men from religion
in disgust and despair.”
_Barchester Towers_ contained Trollope’s earliest embodiment of
Low-churchmanship in Mr. Slope, with his baneful influence on Mrs.
Proudie. Primarily the Barchester bishopess personified the tendency of
her sex to mistake worry for work and fuss for energy. In simple truth,
the Established Church was to Trollope, from his pervadingly official
point of view, a branch of the Civil Service, which could not properly
be carried on if irregular influences and emotions or imperfectly
qualified persons were allowed to have a voice in it. Hence the famous
caricature of the she ecclesiastic in 1857.
In the year now reached by this narrative, 1863, Trollope renewed his
attack upon the religionists he detested, after a fashion and under
circumstances that give to the book _Rachel Ray_ a genuine biographical
significance. The genesis of _Rachel Ray_ is indeed throughout a
revelation of its author’s idiosyncrasies, shown perhaps even more in
the facts connected with its publication than in the unrelieved
bitterness of its sectarian strictures. Trollope, at the time of its
publication being arranged for, was in the full tide of his success and
fame. He could make his own terms with editors or publishers. _Good
Words_, when--from 1862 to 1872--conducted by a Presbyterian minister,
Norman Macleod, though in no sense a denominational organ, could not
afford to fly in the face of evangelical prejudices. Naturally Trollope
understood this so well that when applied to by its editor for a story,
he deprecated the offer on the ground of his not being a “goody-goody”
writer, as well as of his inability or indisposition to suit his
sentiments or his language to Macleod’s public. In reply to those
objections, the novelist received from the editor the promise of a free
hand and the assurance that no attempt to gag him should be made.
Trollope therefore reluctantly accepted the engagement, and proceeded to
fulfil it in a temper deeply resenting the pressure that had been placed
upon him. “Vous l’avez voulu, George Dandin;”[24] _caveat emptor_: on
such principles Trollope made the bargain and set to work. For, if _Good
Words_ would not have the novel, a forfeit could be squeezed out and
another publisher found. This is what actually happened. The author’s
misgivings were fulfilled to the letter. The magazine manager sent back
to the author the manuscript, accompanied by the fine, and the book
found its publishers in Chapman and Hall.
How, after all these years, will the novel strike the reader to-day?
Trollope affected to see the specific reasons of the rejection by
Macleod in its praise of dancing as a healthy and innocent recreation.
Nothing of the sort. Nor, it is certain, would any controversial
passages, however little in harmony with Presbyterian ideas, have made
Macleod pronounce it impossible. As it was, the story served Trollope as
the vehicle, less of his own notions about spiritual truth and falsehood
than of his inveterate and violent antipathies to certain manifestations
of the religious spirit in individuals and in daily conduct. For the
first time since the Slope episodes in _Barchester Towers_, he saw and
used his opportunity for letting the evangelicals have it. All that they
did or thought, and the most typical members of their class, were
depicted with not less personal bitterness against their religious faith
than was displayed, in his _History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_, by the historian Gibbon towards the primitive Christians as the
great disturbing and anti-social force of the second and third
centuries. Wherever evangelicals are found or whithersoever these
pietists go, they bring with them discomfort, suspicion, and ill-will.
They may not be chargeable with those sins of the passions that are the
infirmities of manlier natures. They therefore hold themselves entitled
to unlimited indulgence in scandal-mongering, backbiting, and other
social devices for gratifying their sense of power, by making all those
about them uncomfortable.
In the course of his sojourns at or near Bath, Cheltenham, and other
West of England resorts, Trollope had personally experienced and
resented the widespread ascendency, social and political, of the Low
Church Party. For that reason the scene of _Rachel Ray_ is laid in that
South Devon district which, within Trollope’s recollection, had been
torn by ecclesiastical feuds arising from differences about the costume
proper to be worn during the conduct of divine service. This suggested
to Thomas Hood his clever lines, less well-known now perhaps than they
deserve to be:
“I see there is a pretty stir, about things down at Exeter;
Whether a clergyman should wear a black dress or a white dress.
For me I neither know nor care whether a clergyman should wear
a black dress or a white dress.
I have a grievance of my own, a wife that preaches in her gown,
And lectures in her night dress.”
The local quarrels thus satirised by the humorist, much and widely
talked about at the time, long left the clerical atmosphere of the
neighbourhood in a highly electrical state. While local animosities were
at their height, Trollope had been on Post Office duty in the south-west
of England. In the Baslehurst of the story, and in other Exeter suburbs,
he describes the points at which, for the moment, evangelicalism had
triumphed. Here, during the fifties, he had his veritable originals: the
severe, imperious Puritan, Mrs. Prime, and the younger sister Rachel
whom she bullies, living with their mother Mrs. Ray, a sweet-tempered,
gentle, loving woman, endowed with a still attractive person, having
much in common with her second born, Rachel, and, like her, somewhat
tyrannised over by the elder of her two daughters. The husband survived
by Mrs. Ray is a good specimen of Trollope’s terse character-sketching.
He managed the property of dean and chapter, knew the rights and wrongs
of prebendaries, minor canons, vicars choral, and even choristers. He
had, however, passed away long before the story opens, and is only
mentioned to point the contrast of the widow’s earlier orthodox
clerical surroundings with the irregular spiritual influences that now
agitate her home.
When we make this lady’s acquaintance, there is in progress, beneath her
roof, a pitiless attempt on the part of the elder sister, Dorothea, by
rigorous evangelical discipline, to crush worldliness out of the
younger, her mother’s favourite, who gives the title to the novel. A
long course of Calvinistic bullying has almost broken Mrs. Ray’s spirit.
To that tyranny of soul Miss Ray has never quite surrendered herself.
Its shadows fall, however, heavily enough over her young life; the iron
of its terrors and threats had begun to penetrate her inmost being, when
Luke Rowan’s appearance flashes a ray of hope upon her overcast life.
The new-comer to Baslehurst is the partner in the brewery, hitherto
entirely in the hands of Mr. Tappitt. The Tappitts, at whose house Miss
Ray first meets Rowan, fervently admire the Low Church clergyman Mr.
Prong. This pastor resembles the Barchester Mr. Slope, not only in being
generally objectionable, but in the same mercenary attachment whether to
Mrs. Ray herself or to her widowed daughter, Mrs. Prime, as Slope
conceived to Mrs. Bold.
The incidents of the story naturally grow out of Rachel Ray’s courtship
by the latest addition to the brewery staff, less welcomed by the
Tappitt circle than tolerated as a worldly intruder whose salvation is
rather a matter of prayer than of belief. Doleful indeed are the
prognostications of the results likely to follow their acquaintance
called forth by Rowan’s earliest _tête-à-tête_ with Miss Ray. This,
really the opening scene in the action of the story, gives Trollope
scope for the humour that alone redeems from failure a story as painful
as _The Kellys and the O’Kellys_, without the pathetic power and witty
relief that have made his second novel worthier of republication than
_Rachel Ray_.
Before passing to another book with which _Rachel Ray_ tempts
comparison, something must be said about the new experiment of which
_Linda Tressel_ formed the second product. Change of scene, of
characters, and of interest, as well as anonymity of authorship, in the
year of his departure from the Post Office, 1867, marked Trollope’s dual
venture. Each owed something to the stimulating and instructive society
in which Trollope found himself as the guest of the famous editor and
publisher to whom he had been introduced years earlier by John Forster,
but whom he scarcely knew well till the Scotch tours that Post Office
duties or holiday recreation called him to make during the nineteenth
century’s second half. In the case of both stories, also, the skill with
which the local colour was laid on struck all critics, not less than the
truth to life with which the essentially German characters, with their
social and moral backgrounds, were depicted.
_Nina Balatka_ came first of the two in 1867. Its scene is laid in
Prague, the old Bohemian capital. Here there exists a large Jewish
colony. Among its members, the distinction between Hebrew and Gentile is
marked with such depth and bitterness that an intermarriage between the
two races is considered degrading to each. The girl who gives her name
to the story, a broken-down tradesman’s daughter, and the niece of a
rich merchant Zamenoy, has given her heart to an Israelite engaged in
commerce, Anton Trendellsohn. This suitor, in his many dealings with old
Balatka, Nina’s father, has shown himself a considerate creditor. The
roof beneath which Nina lives is legally due to him for her father’s
debts. Trendellsohn, however, has not even pressed for the title deeds.
These would establish his right to the property, but are now in other
Jewish hands, those of Zamenoy. The lover’s generosity and
self-sacrificing devotion to Nina are accompanied by all the suspicion
of his race and by a characteristic resentment of the overreaching
practised, as he considers, on him. The Zamenoys, representing the evil
genius of the story, are only bent on breaking off the engagement of the
two lovers. As the first step to that end they contrive to secrete the
title deeds, now wanted by Trendellsohn, in his sweetheart’s desk. Next
they tell Trendellsohn that the girl he loves has appropriated them. A
search is made, the documents are found in the place described by the
Zamenoys, and Trendellsohn believes that he has been fooled. The lovers
part. About the same time old Balatka dies. Deserted alike by the man to
whom she has given her heart and by her rich relations, who have gone
over to the Zamenoys, Nina resolves on suicide. With Trendellsohn at
length, love proves a stronger motive than greed. A messenger from him
arrives bidding Nina return to her place in his heart. Thus, happily, in
marriage, ends the story, really remarkable for clever analysis of
motive in the conflict with the essentially Hebraic Trendellsohn between
the passion for a woman and for real estate.
The situation had the undoubted merit of originality as well as of being
artistically presented in a singularly suitable environment immemorially
associated with congenial traditions. The story’s success in magazine
shape was afterwards heightened by its anonymity, and by the extent to
which the studied air of secrecy enveloping the composition and all to
do with it piqued curiosity. In London, at any rate, the first to solve
the mystery was R. H. Hutton of _The Spectator_, not only the subtlest
literary critic of his time, but an omnivorous reader of novels, with an
instinct for discovering in their most commonplace occurrences and least
likely characters a new revelation of their author’s personality and
mental habit. He had already watched and commented on Trollope’s
evolution from the domestic to the cosmopolitan stage. He knew
Trollope’s turns of expression and leading ideas about the human combat
of interest with feeling from his social conversation as well as his
books. Dining at a table near Laurence Oliphant’s at the Athenæum, with
no other companion than the last chapter of _Nina Balatka_, he received
and soon afterwards uttered, the inspiration: “The ‘great unknown’ of
the _Blackwood_ story is Anthony Trollope.” Intimate with the Blackwoods
though he was, Oliphant was not fully assured of the facts; “I believe,”
he said oracularly, “they are satisfied with its reception.” Such proved
to be the case. Although, as John Blackwood put it, not selling, it was
telling. Blackwood’s London manager, one of Trollope’s Garrick
intimates, received orders from Edinburgh to encourage Trollope, with
“the author of _Nina Balatka_” for his pen name, to let the Magazine
have another novel from his pen.
This second book, by the title of _Linda Tressel_, began its course some
five years after the publication of _Rachel Ray_, and introduced its
readers to an interest, personal or spiritual, of much the same sort.
The locality had changed from Exeter to Nuremberg. Here, at The Red
House, lived the eponymous heroine in charge of her aunt. This relative,
Frau Staubach, however well-meaning or conscientious, lacked the
gentleness, the grace, and the feminine charm generally, of her English
prototype, the mother with whom Rachel Ray passed her time. Yet, though
in a less degree than the Devonshire widow, who sat under Mr. Prong, the
petticoated pietist of Nuremberg is a kindly woman at heart. Only the
iron creed, which makes her whole being so grievous a burden to herself
and to those about her, constrains her to see wickedness in joy; in
every form of pleasure a species of profligacy; in all love for children
a pernicious indulgence endangering their eternal welfare; and, in every
woman, Satan’s easy prey, until guarded by a middle-aged, respectable,
unlovable and austere husband. Such a one she has found for her niece in
her lodger, Peter Steinmarc. He has the recommendation of being
small-minded, selfish, ugly, and so just the man destined to make
unhappy for life a bright, handsome, high-spirited girl, such as her own
young ward. In the English story, the destined victim, after a
comparatively short captivity, escapes her doom, though not before her
whole nature has suffered from the ordeal. The spirit of Rachel Ray’s
Bavarian sister of misfortune is not easily worn out; but, eventually,
her spirit is broken, and she is proclaimed the bride-elect of the
odious consort selected by her aunt. At the psychological moment,
however, Death, the deliverer, steps in; poor Linda dies before being
called to put on her wedding dress. Her remorseless aunt watches her
slow departure from life without pity or tears, but in a spirit of
half-vindictive satisfaction with the order of fate. After Linda Tressel
has breathed her last, Frau Staubach, with all the self-complacency in
the world, relapses into a chronic state of puritanical morosity, more
dark and odious than that which had been so far her normal condition. In
this novelette there are none of the humorous flashes constantly
enlivening _Rachel Ray_. Its monotony of unrelieved sadness becomes
fatal. One can scarcely, therefore, be surprised that Blackwood did not
press its author for further anonymous ventures.
Before breaking the entirely new ground on which he had for some time
set his thoughts, Trollope produced at the end of the sixties a little
group of novels in his earlier and happiest vein. The first of these,
_Miss Mackenzie_ (1865), forms something of a link between the narrative
attacks on the religionism that was his bugbear and some at least among
the social novels which followed it. In _Miss Mackenzie_ the only
clergyman drawn at full length, Jeremiah Maguire, is one among the
several candidates for the heroine’s hand. He would have fared better in
his wooing with more of the gentleman about him and less of an
unmistakable squint. His chief rivals are Mr. Rubb, the business partner
of Miss Mackenzie’s surviving brother, socially poor Maguire’s inferior,
and the lady’s cousin, a poor baronet’s son, John Ball, whose suit
eventually succeeds. At her first appearance, the lady who thus becomes
a bride is thirty years old, has an income of £800 a year, and, by the
death of her elder brother, for whom she kept house, has been left alone
in the world. The chief feature in the story is the Rev. Jeremiah
Maguire’s pertinacity in the effort to secure the sufficiently
well-dowered lady. In that endeavour he has the support of the religious
set at Littlebath, whose leaders are the Rev. and Mrs. Stumfold, and in
which Miss Todd and Miss Baker, first heard of in _The Bertrams_,
reappear.
Much of this, at first amusing enough, is so spun out as soon to become
monotonous and gradually to lose all its point. To begin with, the
satire lacked the merit of originality, and lost all freshness long
before Trollope served up in _Rachel Ray_ a _réchauffé_ of the Slope
passages from _Barchester Towers_. Dickens, indeed, had been the first
(1836) to treat the public with its taste in the Stiggins of _Pickwick_,
the predecessor of the _Bleak House_ Chadband (1853). In Dickens’ hands
it was good business enough, and served for a fresh spice to his
fooling. Trollope, however, professed to delineate, not only the
superficial humours associated with the graver subjects, but some at
least among the spiritual or, at any rate, the deeper interests of the
time. He ought not, then, to have been contented with reflecting the
images, the ideas, and the jargon, which more than a quarter of a
century earlier (1837) his mother, in _The Vicar of Wrexhill_, had
echoed from the Stiggins of _Pickwick_, and which _The Saturday Review_
had since hackneyed to death before Trollope unwillingly accepted his
commission from the editor of _Good Words_. During the nineteenth
century’s second half, the Prongs, whom Trollope hated, had ceased to
be, to any marked degree, representative of provincial churchmanship.
The commercial argument justifies, indeed, all this loose and spiteful
vituperation of his pet religious aversions.
By 1860, however, Trollope had achieved a unique position as at once the
founder and producer of fiction as a serious profession, which, followed
a certain number of hours daily, cannot fail of yielding an annual
income. The habit of, in his own phrase, exacting from himself so many
words at a sitting could not but be unfavourable to excellence of
execution, though it interfered marvellously little, if at all, with his
variety and versatility. Those gifts, during 1867-8, he had exhibited in
taking his readers from the familiar home scenes to the less known
corners of continental Europe. Here his work, though passing muster
sufficiently well with the public, did not promise the material success
which he knew he could still command in other fields. Consequently,
before venturing on the experiment to be recorded in the next chapter,
he returned to the Barchester vein with the certainty, soon realised, of
convincing publishers and public that it still contained ore not less
valuable and pleasant than he had last drawn from it a decade ago. The
extracts given at the close of the present chapter will show that from
reviewers’ and booksellers’ point of view Trollope might well applaud
himself on the reception of _Rachel Ray_. Nevertheless it was a
novelist’s business to create. In _Rachel Ray_, he soon became
conscious, to quote his own words to the present writer, of having set
up certain religious or quasi-religious images chiefly, he admitted, for
the purpose of belabouring them with verbal blows even as in _The Old
Curiosity Shop_ Quilp vents his hatred on Christopher Nubbles in attacks
on the wooden figure to which he gives Kit’s name.
Nearly half a generation has passed since, during the eventful ramble,
already described in its proper place, round Salisbury Close, there had
occurred to him the earliest of those ecclesiastical varieties whose
portraiture amid their domestic or social surroundings soon brought him
fortune and fame. Before closing the gallery of these sketches, he would
draw one more clergyman of the same honest, manly English type as Mark
Robarts, and would show his readiness to recognise elevation of
character and purity of soul when, if possible, existing in an ordained
minister of the gospel of views as decidedly Low Church as the detested
Mr. Prong himself. This latter purpose was accomplished by _The Last
Chronicle of Barset_ (1867). Nothing could be more dramatically complete
than the contrast presented to the sleek, luxurious divines, or the
well-fed, well-clothed, muscular officials of the church militant, in
whom the novelist delighted, than the austere, gaunt, ill-nourished,
poverty-stricken perpetual curate of Hogglestock in the marsh. The
chronic gloom of his constitutional melancholy is deepened and saddened
by the sombre Calvinism of a creed that admits or asks no ray of relief
for the hardship of a lot still representing, with not less of faithful
cruelty than when Trollope wrote, the hard lives of so many among the
most spiritually-minded, most industrious, and not the least
well-educated of the country clergy. The Rev. Josiah Crawley’s great
qualities, his concealed accomplishments, and his shrinking silent
heroism, have won the admiration of the academic, highly-cultivated,
and well-to-do Dean Arabin, who has married Mr. Harding’s favourite,
youngest daughter Eleanor. This friendship of the prosperous Anglican
official for the half-starved incumbent gives rise to the chief and only
sensational episode of the book, at once revealing, as well as
altogether caused by, Crawley’s utter lack of all business methods,
forgetfulness of facts, and heedlessness of consequences. Nor, in these
respects, is the daughter of Crawley’s old friend, the Warden, formerly
the rich widow, Mrs. Bold, and now Mrs. Arabin, in all matters having to
do with money much better.
The crisis of the novel has been brought about in this way. Lord
Lufton’s agent has lost a cheque for £20 made payable to bearer, and
afterwards found to have been used by Crawley in settling a butcher’s
bill. Asked how he got the draft, he hesitatingly answered that no doubt
it formed part of the sum paid to him by the agent as tithes. That, it
soon appeared, was impossible, for the tithe payment some time since
actually made had been, as was always the case, in bank notes. Then,
after reconsidering the matter, Crawley revised his account; surely the
cheque must have been part of a loan made by Dean Arabin. To him, now
absent from his deanery on an Italian tour, inquiries were telegraphed,
bringing the statement on the sum having been advanced by bank notes.
Crawley’s continued inability satisfactorily to explain the matter now
coincides with the agent’s declaration that he must have dropped the
cheque while visiting Crawley’s house. Appearances, therefore, at every
point are dead against the wretched perpetual curate, who had naturally
excited or confirmed suspicions by the lame, and, as they have so far
proved, baseless versions of the matter, stammered out by him in his
agony. Crawley is known throughout the district for an upright,
conscientious, as well as confused and muddle-headed man. His
parishioners’ conversation on the subject, and, at last, their reluctant
belief in his guilt are not only in Trollope’s best manner, dashed with
humour and knowledge of nature, but echo with Shakespearean fidelity the
words and thoughts sure to have been forthcoming in local gossip about
such an incident. Briefly they are to this effect--“Well, we believe
he’s a good man, and we think he wouldn’t have done it, but for being so
dreadful poor.”
At last comes the explanation. When, overcome with the terrors of
necessity and shame, Crawley accepted the Dean’s offer of money help,
Mrs. Arabin left the room to get the cash. While absent, without her
husband’s knowledge, she slipped into the envelope containing the notes
an additional £20 in the form of a cheque. Crawley himself showed his
usual negligence by not examining the contents of the envelope. With
equally little wisdom, Mrs. Arabin never considered how her generosity
might compromise the poor clergyman. Even these facts, however, do not
fully clear up the mystery, for how did the cheque get into Mrs.
Arabin’s hands? But that too proves to be quite a simple matter.
Womanlike, as Trollope would have said, without the slightest aptitude
for such affairs, she piqued herself on her ability to manage business
concerns. She kept her own private banking account: by way of improving
its figures she dabbled now and then in a few small speculations. In
this way she had made the local inn her own property. The landlord and
landlady whom she had put in, like the rest of their relatives, were
always in difficulties. Lord Lufton’s agent, on going his rounds, had
entered the small hostelry. Here he had dropped the cheque, which was
promptly found by the innkeeper’s brother and used by him in paying
certain arrears of rent. Thus the real thieves were the licensed
victuallers, the tenants whom, without the Dean’s knowledge, Mrs. Arabin
possessed. The excellence of women within their own department, their
foredoomed and demonstrable blunders whenever they step out of it, were
ideas tragically set forth in _Orley Farm_, and, with the accompaniments
of less disaster, in _Can You Forgive Her?_ _The Last Chronicle of
Barset_ gave the novelist not only the chance of reverting to them in a
first-rate plot, but of doing some justice to the evangelical parson
while, after an amusingly characteristic fashion, dealing a covert
stroke of feminine satire.
The second of the two stories marking, for the present, Trollope’s
farewell to the church, was _The Vicar of Bullhampton_. This was
published in 1870, but mostly written a good deal earlier. Some of the
incidents connected with its publication too truthfully exhibit its
author’s temper in dealing with his publishers not less significantly
than the recital of Mrs. Arabin’s blunders in disposing of the cheque
which got poor Mr. Crawley into such trouble, recalling the view of
feminine limitations that he never modified. Trollope, as usual, had
been punctual to the day with the _Bullhampton_ manuscript, for Bradbury
and Evans’ _Once a Week_. He had scarcely delivered it when, to his
indignant disgust, he received from the publishers a request that his
“vicar” might be held over to make way for an English version of Victor
Hugo’s _L’homme qui rit_. The want of patriotism implied in the new
proposal roused Trollope’s resentment, he wished it to be understood,
quite as much as did the disregard of his own convenience. A pretentious
French Radical’s “grinning man” was, in an English magazine, to be
reckoned of more account than a carefully prepared story of national
life by an English gentleman, who, however liberal and advanced some of
his views, had, in and out of print, always been the champion of English
institutions. Worse even than this, it soon turned out that Trollope’s
clergyman was not to see the light in _Once a Week_ at all, but in
another property of the same owners, _The Gentleman’s Magazine_. That
closed the transaction in this quarter. The story, issued at once by
Chapman and Hall, strengthened the ties already connecting his literary
progress with the fortunes of that House.
At each successive stage of the novelist’s course, Trollope has already
been shown to have gained in breadth and depth of outlook upon life, in
power and certainty of character analysis, as well as in a dramatic
perception of the potential tragedies belonging to everyday existence.
He now habitually used the most ordinary conjunctures as agencies for
disturbing, with their grave or grim issues, the decorous surface of
conventionally monotonous and serene lives. In _The Vicar of
Bullhampton_ all this was exemplified after a fashion scarcely less
striking than in _Orley Farm_ or _Can You Forgive Her?_
Picture Trollope himself as having, at the age of twenty-three, found
his way into Holy Orders, instead of the General Post Office, and Frank
Fenwick, the before-mentioned clergyman, might well pass for a study of
the author. Broad-shouldered and broad-minded, the young Bullhampton
priest keeps all his powers of mind and body at the highest point of
fitness. Just, generous, upright, and kind-hearted, he is ever ready to
speak his mind, out of season perhaps as well as in it, and has all a
healthy Briton’s determination not to let a mean advantage be taken of
him, especially by those whose social ideas and antecedents differ from
his own, or who offend any of his John Bull notions about honour and
manliness. He finds in his wife a congenial, not too assertive, and
sympathetic helpmate. Her great friend Mary Lowther, the heroine of the
piece, is staying with them at the vicarage when the story opens; she
has already a lover, favoured by the hospitable Fenwicks, a neighbouring
young squire, Harry Gilmore.
Here, in passing, it may be pointed out that the locality, as the names
used will suggest, has much to identify it with the midland counties and
the north of England, to both of which Trollope, as a boy, had been
taken more than once by his mother. On the other hand, both the
Barchester local colour and nomenclature are throughout conspicuous by
their absence. To resume our plot: while away from the vicarage on a
visit to Miss Marrable, a maiden aunt, Mary meets and becomes engaged to
a cousin, Walter Marrable, a wealthy baronet’s nephew, but himself
without any visible means of subsistence. In that respect he resembles
the young lady he loves. These money difficulties bring everything
between the two young people to an end. Soon after what is supposed to
be their final separation, Mary hears of her old lover’s engagement to
his uncle’s ward, Edith Brownlow. In despair herself, and overcome by
the persistent importunities of her friends, Mary Lowther accepts Harry
Gilmore, only, however, to throw him over when Marrable, unexpectedly
coming into his uncle’s property, renews his marriage proposals. Such,
it will be recognised, is the regulation course run by true love
throughout the whole extent of Trollopian fiction, making, in all that
concerns affections, the last clerical story uniform with the books that
had immediately or, at some distance of time, preceded it.
Round this main episode is clustered another series of events,
connecting the vicar with his parish. These furnish some of the best
scenes in the book as well as serve to introduce the same kind of
melodramatic element, first noticeable in _Dr. Thorne_, afterwards
receiving greater prominence in _Orley Farm_. Thus did Trollope
practically acknowledge the influence upon the novel-reading public now
firmly exercised by experts in sensational effects like Mrs. Henry Wood,
Wilkie Collins, and Miss Braddon. Among the Bullhampton vicar’s
parishioners are an unbending old miller, his daughter Carry, who has
gone wrong, and his ne’er-do-well son, Sam Brattle, now under suspicion
for a murder committed in the village. The Brattles are therefore an
undesirable family. So thinks the Marquis of Trowbridge, the landlord of
the murdered man. They happen to be tenants of Gilmore, who, meeting one
day at the vicarage Lord Trowbridge, is asked point blank to clear his
property of them. Here the vicar himself intervenes, turning on the
Marquis with sharp words for his uncharitable and inexcusable demand.
Lord Trowbridge, a pompous brainless peer, puffed up with the sense of
his extreme importance, is for the moment too much overwhelmed by the
parson’s audacity to say anything.
Presently, however, his feeling of offended dignity takes practical
shape and prepares vengeance in giving a plot of ground, exactly
opposite the parsonage gates, as the site for a Primitive Methodist
Chapel, to the local minister of that sect, one Puddleham. This
territorial donation soon proves to be not Trowbridge property at all.
As a part of the glebe land it is at the vicar’s exclusive disposal. The
Marquis, therefore, now suffers the further mortification of being
compelled to make a full apology to Fenwick for the infringement of his
rights, as well as to pull down so much of the chapel as has been
already built. All of this conclusively proves, to Trollope’s naïvely
undisguised satisfaction, that Providence is on the side of the State
Church. The sooner, therefore, Defoe’s _The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters_ is literally adopted, the better for the peace, purity, and
morals of the community. The same retributive poetical justice that
deals so sharply with the Puddlehamites, with all poachers on the
establishment’s preserves, and with their patron who wears the
Trowbridge title, now befriends the Brattles. Sam turns out to be
innocent; poor Carry, if she cannot regain her innocence, displays
qualities which at least secure sympathy, and is prevented from falling
over the rock of ruin to the lowest depth of degradation. The sturdy,
hot-tempered old atheist, her father does not recant his theological
heresies, but at least compares favourably with an evangelical
Nonconformist.
Q.E.D. The favourable reception in store for the book is to be explained
by other circumstances than the skill in the novelist’s technique
running through its successive parts and the humour generally redeeming
it from dullness. Low Churchmanship was becoming unpopular. Readers of
the mid-Victorian epoch saw telling hits and lifelike portraits in what
may to-day seem not much removed above the level of caricature. At the
time, therefore, _Rachel Ray_ won, not only a popular, but a literary
success. The welcome given generally to it by the reviewers formed as
great a compliment as Trollope had yet received from the Press. Among
the religious papers, indeed, _The Guardian_ and _The English Churchman_
left _Rachel Ray_ and its companion stories severely alone, _The Times_
reviewer, however, recognised in it a new proof of Trollope’s insight
into human nature and a fresh justification of the immense favour
enjoyed by him with the most intelligent class of novel readers. “A
delightful tale,” enthusiastically exclaims this critic, placing its
author with Defoe and Richardson. “If,” it was added, “Trollope, like
Defoe, has little imagination, what he possesses is so clear that we do
not feel the want of suggestion; while his detailed knowledge of
conventional custom is unsurpassed by the author of _Clarissa_.”
“O happy art of fiction,” gushes this enthusiast, “which can thus adjust
the balance of fortune, raising the humble and weak to an equality in
our hearts with the proud and great!” The eulogistic note thus sounded
by the Choragus of the daily Press was at once taken up, prolonged, and
swelled in the weekly journals. To _The Athenæum_, _Rachel Ray_ seemed a
book sure to do more than any critical protests to correct existing
vices of public taste. The women of the tale were admirable, being
treated with skill which must surprise even those to whom the author’s
strength is most familiar. To _The Spectator_, _Rachel Ray_ demonstrated
that, as a censor, Trollope had gifts far above sarcasm, and that he had
made good his place between Thackeray the satirist and Dickens the
caricaturist. _The Spectator_ subsequently hedges by admitting that the
author of _Rachel Ray_ leant rather in the direction of Dickens than of
Thackeray, and that his powers fitted him less for satire than for
caricature. _The Saturday Review_ closed an outburst of panegyric with a
declaration that Trollope’s tact, discretion, and gentlemanly taste,
combined with his literary power and his faculty of devising imaginary
characters, made him eminently successful in describing the inner life
of young women.
_The Saturday_ alone, in the Press, weekly as well as daily, noticed the
attacks on evangelicalism as follows: “Mr. Prong is not an unfair
representation of the lower clerical order in provincial towns; but the
accuracy of the portrait does not make it a pleasant study, the foolish
language, the pert fanaticism and the petty tricks of the worst
evangelical class are not agreeable reading. Whatever of comic there is
in them is soon exhausted unless the author glaringly exaggerates every
symptom to spice his description.” The compliments forthcoming by the
famous weekly then under Douglas Cook’s absolute editorial control, but
owned by Beresford Hope and generally reflecting its proprietor’s
antipathies to all forms and expression of faith not distinctly
Anglo-Catholic, admit of another explanation than its natural
benediction on the religious portraits drawn by a writer who was then so
much in its own way of thinking as Trollope. In 1864 Anthony Trollope’s
_North America_ had received such sharp treatment in _The Saturday
Review_ that his friends, G. H. Lewes and the famous lady bearing his
name, were concerned to find some way of counteracting what they called
the nasty notice. Eventually, some time later, Lewes himself did justice
to Trollope’s transatlantic experiences in _The Fortnightly Review_.
Before that he had succeeded in influencing an important section of the
political Press in Trollope’s favour. Trollope’s next experiment in
fiction, as well as certain events in his life connected with it, will
form the subject of the next chapter.