PEN AND PLATFORM POLITICS
Failures of literary men in the political world at the beginning of
the nineteenth century--Trollope increases the number by going
under at Beverley--“Not in, but in at the death”--_Ralph the
Heir_--Its plots and politics--Trollope as editor of _The St.
Paul’s Magazine_--_Phineas Finn_--Some remarks on Trollope’s
_Palmerston_--In the heart of political society--The hero’s
flirtations and fights in London--His final return to the old home
and friends--_Phineas Redux_--Again in London--Charged with
murder--Madame Goesler’s double triumph--Some probable
caricatures--Trollope renews acquaintance with Planty Pal and his
wife in _The Prime Minister_--The close of the political series
comes with _The Duke’s Children_.
“Anthony’s ambition to become a candidate for Beverley is inscrutable to
me. Still, it is the ambition of many men, and the honester the man who
entertains it, the better for us, I suppose.” So wrote Charles Dickens
to Thomas Adolphus Trollope in the December of 1868. Exactly
twenty-seven years before that date, the literary pre-eminence of
Dickens, together with his championship, with pen and on platform, of
social and administrative reform had, in 1841, brought the author of
_Oliver Twist_ the offer of a seat for Reading. During the pre-Victorian
age the future Lord Beaconsfield’s adventures in search of a
constituency had begun in 1832, some five years after the completion of
_Vivian Grey_. Disraeli’s contemporary in letters, and so a novelist
older in point of years and fame than Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton came
before the electors of St. Ives as the writer of _Pelham_, not to
mention a novel and the prose or poetical miscellanies which had
preceded it. Sixteen years after Dickens declined standing for the
Berkshire capital, Thackeray (1857) unsuccessfully contested the city of
Oxford. The political tradition had therefore been sufficiently
confirmed and adorned by the leading fellow-craftsmen in his art by
1868. This was the year in which, at the General Election, Trollope
tried his chance at Beverley. The illustrious precedents thus followed
by him, though numerous, were not altogether encouraging. Benjamin
Disraeli himself, in 1837, had owed his success at Maidstone not to his
brilliant romance, or even to his effective _Runnymede Letters_ and
telling pamphlets, but to his adoption by the sitting member, Wyndham
Lewis, who held the place in his pocket.
At that date the popular tide had begun decidedly to turn against the
Whigs. Even the famous and eloquent man of letters, then worth many
votes to the Whigs on a division, T. B. Macaulay, had owed the
opportunity of his memorable displays in defence of the Grey Reform Bill
to his having been brought into the House by Lord Lansdowne for the
family borough of Calne. Macaulay’s partner in the primacy of English
letters, W. M. Thackeray, did not, in 1857, make much of a fight against
Cardwell at Oxford. Yet in that contest Thackeray had enjoyed advantages
entirely denied Trollope at Beverley. In the first place, Thackeray, as
a member, of whom naturally it was proud, had the influence of the
Reform Club at his back. Further, he had originally presented himself to
the Oxford electors at the suggestion of a universally as well as an
altogether exceptionally popular resident, Charles Neate, a Fellow of
Oriel; with him Thackeray had long lived in affectionate intimacy. Under
Neate’s personal guidance, and with him for prompter as well as
introducer, the novelist canvassed the place and spoke from the
hustings. Neate too, though unseated on petition, had carried the seat
against Cardwell during the previous March. His own reputation was
therefore concerned in seeing that his recently vanquished rival did not
retrieve his discomfiture. Nevertheless, on the declaration of the poll,
July 21 (1857), the author of _Vanity Fair_ was shown not only to have
lost the day, but to have failed in favourably impressing any large body
of the electors. “It is,” was Thackeray’s comment, “what I expected,
and I take it as the British schoolboy takes his floggings, sullenly and
in silence.” He had indeed scarcely reached his constituency before
writing to Dickens. “Not more than 4 per cent of the people here, I have
found out, have ever heard of my writings. Perhaps as many as 6 per cent
know yours, so it will be a great help to me if you will come and speak
for me.”
At Beverley Trollope had no person of commanding authority to speak for
him at all; unlike Thackeray, he was not a member of the Reform. The
managers at the Liberal headquarters gave him his first introduction to
the place, where he found himself at least as well received as he could
have expected. Some ten or fifteen years later the thought and reading
involved in the preparation of his political stories and his _Lord
Palmerston_ (1882) had more or less familiarised him with the temper,
the issues, and the personages of public controversy. It was without any
of even that preparation that he began to canvass the Minster town of
the East Riding. _Can You Forgive Her?_ indeed (1864), like _Rachel Ray_
of the same period, had contained passages casually mentioning rather
than attempting to describe the war of parties at Westminster, or the
appeals of the rival chiefs to the country. At the General Election,
therefore, that made Gladstone for the first time Prime Minister, and
brought our novelist as his supporter, Trollope knew little more of
politics than average newspaper readers and a good deal less than the
newspaper writers.
By his failure at Oxford in 1857, Thackeray, according to Trollope, was
saved from a situation in which he could not have shone. Probably the
same thing might have been said eleven years later of Trollope himself
after the Beverley misadventure of 1868. As parliamentary candidates
both men, indeed, belonged to the same description. Proud of being
English gentlemen first and popular writers afterwards, they looked, in
Trollope’s own words, upon a place at St. Stephen’s as the birthright of
a well-born, well-bred, and well-to-do Briton.[25] Like others of the
social order with which they identified themselves, their Westminster
ambitions implied no more idea of being useful than does entrance into
any first-class club. The real and serious difference between the two
candidatures was this. At Oxford Charles Neate had long been watching
for a vacancy which might suit Thackeray; the single reason that took
Trollope to Beverley was its allotment to him in return for a
contribution to the Liberal election fund. Beverley then possessed two
members. The Conservative candidates were stronger than any likely to be
found on the other side. Sir Henry Edwards had not only held the borough
for the Conservatives before coming into the baronetcy, but afterwards
had contributed to its institutions of all kinds so munificently as
almost to have made its representation his own and his friends’
appanage. He had now chosen for his colleague Captain Kennard, who had
already secured a good start of Trollope, and had spared neither labour
nor money in locally ingratiating himself. On the other hand, Trollope
soon made many friends who, in some cases, already knew his writings and
were gratified to find in their author a gentleman with every mark of
good breeding, as well as a shrewd, genial, and often delightful
companion.
Trollope’s comrade in the fight, then Marmaduke Maxwell of Everingham,
became subsequently Lord Herries and the Duke of Norfolk’s
father-in-law; for him Trollope had all the personal charm which he had
long found in his writings. The two representatives of Liberalism were
thus well assorted, and each in his own way did yeoman service to the
other. From his father, however, Trollope inherited an irritable
intolerance of fools and bores; he found several of both among his
Beverley friends. The business of electioneering degenerated into
drudgery before it was half done. The hunting season was in full swing;
Trollope felt that he should go out of his mind in disgust if he missed
a few days off with the hounds. The recreation was not indeed enjoyed at
the cost of the seat, because the Conservative success could never have
been for a moment in doubt. It did, however, make the novelist play a
worse second to Maxwell and so leave him even further behind the two
Tory victors than might otherwise have been the case. Though Trollope
fell short of success at Beverley, the invitation of his local friends
to try again and the pressure of official Liberalism not to withdraw his
name from the candidates’ list are enough to show that his failure had
its redeeming points. His Post Office experience and his power, improved
by the practice, of getting up and expressing himself on any subject
would have helped him to make at least a respectable figure had he ever
been returned. As a speaker, he not only exemplified his own counsel,
already quoted, to those ambitious of addressing parliament, but he
delighted without exception, and on both sides, his Beverley audiences
by the sonorous delivery of virile periods, clothing in clear and terse
phrase thoughts that were the condensed essence of practical wisdom and
shrewd insight.
A few years after the election I happened to be visiting, at Brantingham
Thorp, Mr. Christopher Sykes. He had himself between 1865 and 1868
filled the seat contested by Trollope in the latter year. Beverley lay
within an easy drive. In my host’s old constituency there still
flourished the local gentlemen who had vigorously worked with head,
heart, and hand for Trollope. They included Mr. Charles Langdale, Mr.
Alfred Crosskill, Mr. Daniel Bayes, Mr. Hawkshaw, the famous civil
engineer--a connection by marriage of the great Josiah Wedgwood--Mr.
Charles Elwell, and Mr. F. Hall of _The Yorkshire Post_, the oldest
member of that newspaper’s staff, which indeed, before the journal
actually started, he did much to get together. Both these last-named
gentlemen, still, I am happy to know, alive and well, have themselves
supplied me with some details and put me in the way of getting others.
These authorities have made me independent of my own memory and even
Trollope’s own reminiscences in the matter.
The county families of course threw their influence into the scale of
Trollope’s Conservative opponent. The balance of speaking talent was
undoubtedly on Trollope’s side; on the platform he derived his chief
assistance from Mr. James Stewart, of Hull, from Colonel Hodgson, a
very large employer of Beverley labour, and especially from Mr. William
Carey Upton, a Baptist minister. During the struggle, the Conservatives
paid our novelist a compliment he much appreciated by undertaking on
their side to withdraw Kennard, if their opponents would scratch
Trollope. This would have meant Sir Henry Edward’s and Mr. Marmaduke
Maxwell’s uncontested return. The official Liberals might have accepted
the suggestion, but the working men, deeply impressed by Trollope’s
unconventional treatment of familiar subjects and the sense of
intellectual power of all he said, would not for a moment hear of it,
and this though Trollope almost ostentatiously failed to do himself and
his supporters justice.
His sportsmanship formed a real point in his favour, for the Beverley
electors, like other Yorkshiremen, love a horse, and are instinctively
attracted to a bold rider to hounds. Trollope therefore did himself no
harm by letting the householders see him in his top boots and pink
riding through the streets on the way to a famous meet. His mistake was
the selection for sport of a time at which his committee were working
for him night and day, and his own presence could ill be dispensed with
at public meetings or private conclaves. Liberalism’s association with
Home Rule placed Trollope, in his later years, among the Conservatives.
Had they enlisted his distinction, ability, and energy on their side at
the first dissolution after the Derby-Disraeli Household Franchise Bill,
he would undoubtedly have been found Sir Henry Edward’s colleague on the
declaration of the poll. But in 1868 the Conservative educators, by
their discovery of the Conservative working man, rode on a wave of
popularity, rising in many places to enthusiasm. As for the “another
attempt” mentioned by Trollope to his Beverley friends, that was never
to be made, because, before the next general election, Beverley had lost
its independent political existence, less, however, in consequence of
its political corruption than by reason of certain municipal
irregularities. As the judges who disfranchised the place themselves
said, it was the “double event” which secured the political extinction
of the place. “I did not,” was Trollope’s characteristic comment on the
whole affair, “get in, yet I was in at the death; for the effort of my
defeat involved Beverley’s own parliamentary demise, under circumstances
less tantalising than those of our friend Kinglake’s parliamentary
extinction; for, unlike me, he got in only to be kicked out, while I at
least had the satisfaction of seeing those who had walked over me faring
worse than myself, inasmuch as they not only lost their seats but their
money too.”[26]
Every incident, personage, or issue connected with Trollope’s
electioneering errand to Yorkshire was, after his usual fashion, turned
into “copy.” The novel thus inspired did not appear till 1871. It forms
a well-written record of its author’s personal partialities or
prejudices during the adventure already described. More than any of his
books belonging to this period, it recalls, by the loaded colour of its
lampoons and the unwonted bitterness of its satire, his mother’s way of
dealing with the persons and things she had found disagreeable. For the
rest, the humorous notes, whether in the way of local description or
personal caricature, have, more frequently than is found in any other
novel, a Dickensian ring. If occasionally laboured, as well as, for the
most part, not below the average in writing, it is as regards plot
almost as complicated and confusing as those parts of the Scriptural
narrative dealing with the kings of Israel and Judah called by the same
name. Not less baffling than to the Biblical student the rival Jehorams
and Ahaziahs, are, in _Ralph the Heir_, the two prominent personages
named Ralph Newton. The story unfolds itself on these lines: Old Squire
Newton of Newton Priory, a rich country gentleman, has only one child,
Ralph, an illegitimate son, on whom all his love and hopes are fixed.
His estates, however, are entailed on his nephew, another Ralph Newton,
distinguished from his namesake as Ralph the Heir. This young man, a
spendthrift, equally weak and handsome, is universally admitted to be
the best fellow in the world. His only enemy is the uncle whom the law
compels to leave him the estate. His chief friend, formerly his
guardian, is Sir Thomas Underwood--a former Solicitor-General--a widower
living at Popham Villa, Fulham, with his two daughters. To this
household is presently added a niece, Mary Bonner, from abroad. Ralph
the Heir, now more than usually in debt, has his heaviest creditor in
Neefit the tailor, whose hunting breeches--his speciality--are of
world-wide fame.
Some critics have scented in Trollope’s Neefit a likeness to the Mr.
Bond Sharp of Disraeli’s _Henrietta Temple_. The resemblance, however,
is but imaginary, because Mr. Bond Sharp, though professionally a maker
of clothes, is the idealised usurer of Disraeli and romance, while
Neefit has nothing to do with professional money-lending, and only
supplies Ralph with cash in the character of his future son-in-law, the
husband-elect of his daughter and heiress, Polly. Hence his indignation
when Ralph backs out of the match, although the would-be father-in-law
gets his money back with interest, for the tailor’s daughter is not the
only matrimonial string to his bow. Reflection and delay increase Ralph
the Heir’s objection to entire pecuniary dependence on the tailor’s
daughter and heiress as his wife. He has hit upon what may prove a more
excellent way. True, his uncle, the present owner and occupant of Newton
Priory, is strong and well enough to have many years of life before him.
Still, some day, in the course of nature, the place must be Ralph’s.
It’s money worth could never be such an object to him as now, when he
knows not where to turn for funds. Why not, therefore, exhaust every
possible means for converting his reversionary interest into ready cash.
Rather than sell himself to father-in-law Neefit, with Polly for his
bride, why not sell outright to his uncle for a good round sum, say
£50,000, his Newton rights? Horace’s Ulysses, rent by the Circean and
Penelopeian rivalries, and Captain MacHeath, divided betwixt Polly and
Lucy, personify the failing of indecision as familiarly as Buridan’s
ass itself. Both are almost outdone by the average Trollopian youth or
maiden’s perplexity in the final selection of a lover from three or four
candidates for the place. Most pre-eminently is Ralph the Heir, Ralph
the wobbler. Having loved or talked about loving Polly Neefit, and
ridden away, he goes through the farcical process of giving what he is
pleased to call his heart first to Clarissa Underwood, next to Mary
Bonner, and then to Clarissa again. At this point, however, that young
lady has something to say, with the result of finding that not Ralph the
Heir, but his younger brother, the Rev. Gregory Newton, is the right man
for her husband. At the same time Mary Bonner similarly gives his
_congé_ to Ralph the Heir, and her hand to Ralph who is not the Heir.
“He that will not when he may,
When he will he shall have nay.”
So it had befallen one of Trollope’s Three Clerks who loved the barmaid.
So it was now to befall Ralph the Heir.
At the point now reached Polly’s reappearance effects a complete change
in the situation. When he had formerly, as he thought for ever, bidden
her farewell, Polly’s affection for him by its vulgar exuberance had
jarred on the hard-up, but fastidious Heir. Now the young lady keeps him
at a distance, repulsing him with piquant prettiness, only to attract
him. The old flame of a mercenary passion is rekindled. After all there
is no reason, Ralph the Heir admits, against Polly’s becoming a
gentleman’s wife. So it is all arranged; even the happy day is
provisionally mentioned. The nuptial settlements have been drawn up, but
are still unsigned when, hey presto! fresh surprises all round, and
instead of flirting, jilting, and all the rest of it, we are in the
thick of a political fight, reflecting in each detail Trollope’s
Beverley conflict. There is, however more than that. Ralph the Heir’s
namesake, Squire Newton’s illegitimate son, falls out of favour with his
father; Squire Newton himself breaks his neck out hunting. Thus by
several undeserved strokes of luck the Heir enters upon his heritage.
By this time, however, Sir Thomas Underwood has decided on re-entering
public life. He has, he hopes, found the necessary seat in the borough
of Percycross, _alias_ that Beverley contested by Trollope himself, and
now satirised in _Ralph the Heir_. Underwood’s colleague in the fight is
Mr. Griffenbottom; his opponents are Westmacott in the Liberal and
Ontario Moggs in the Radical interest. The Tory triumph is followed by
the unseating on petition of both those who have won it; the
disfranchisement of the borough completes the barrenness of their
victory.
Quite the best drawn figure amid the electioneering crush is the Radical
candidate. Ontario Moggs belongs to a class of idealised Industrials
brought into fashion by George Eliot, attempted also by Mrs. Lynn
Linton, raised to their highest perfection in _Adam Bede_, and brought
down to a more familiar level in _Felix Holt_. With that Radical,
Ontario Moggs can at least hold his own. He is, it is true, something of
a prig, with a solemnity of manner and a pompous pithiness of artificial
phrase making him a little absurd. His real cleverness, however, is not
below his conceit; his readiness of speech, quickness at the detection
of fallacy and power of argument, justly entitle him to his high
reputation at the Cheshire Cheese and other debating Clubs. During
Trollope’s time the Labour member had still to win the vogue and power
brought in by the twentieth century. Still the Moggs of _Ralph the Heir_
forms a creditable study of those captains of Northumbrian industry,
some among whom were to win their way to the Treasury bench. By this
time Ralph the Heir’s rejected love, Miss Neefit, has shed all her
vulgarity. Realising the folly and danger of aspiring to the affection
of her father’s trying and impecunious customers, she has the good sense
to invest her fortune, hand, and heart in a life-partnership with a born
gentleman, if of inferior station, like Ontario Moggs.
Trollope’s hard common sense, detective vigilance, refusal to be imposed
upon, and absolute pitilessness for transgressors, when discharging his
Post Office duties, represented only one side of his character. From
another point of view his judgment and intellect were subordinate to his
emotions. This sentimentalism showed itself equally in his politics and
in his estimate of the personages to whom he introduced the public in
his books; with those personal creations he lived, as he often said, so
intimately as to be really hurt by his readers not taking the same
interest in them as he did himself. Hence his mortification at the
indifference largely manifested to the _dramatis personæ_ of the
political novels that followed _Phineas Finn_. For those stories, now
about to be considered, Trollope had prepared himself, not only by the
ordinary experiences of London life, but by those of his Beverley
campaign. He had also gone through a course of political reading, one of
whose literary results was to be his book on Palmerston. This, though
published subsequently to the political novels, had been written before
them, and may be, for other reasons, appropriately mentioned now.
One Disraelian phrase, and one only, was sometimes quoted approvingly by
Trollope. “The free patrician life” of England produced, he always held,
the nation’s best rulers. Of that dispensation, in his patriotism, his
sympathies, at once popular and aristocratic, in home affairs, and in
his championship of oppressed nationalities abroad, Palmerston struck
him as the best type of the time. For Trollope, too, there was something
of natural congeniality in Palmerston’s schoolboy delight at those
political doings which he loved to describe as “capital strokes, and all
off my own bat,” in his brushes with the Court, and in his tit-for-tat
with John Russell. When putting his Palmerston monograph together, he
received useful hints and help from Sir Alexander Cockburn, whose
friendship he owed to Sir Richard Quain. In this way, he found himself
able to appreciate the value to Palmerston of the services rendered him
by Sir Henry Bulwer during his Paris residence at serious continental
conjunctures. Hence, too, Trollope could rate at its true worth
Palmerston’s diplomacy, first, as shown by the quadruple treaty of 1834,
secondly, by the quadrilateral treaty of six years later leading up to
the London conference of 1840. Finally, Bulwer and Cockburn enabled him
to correct the popular impression of English statesmanship abroad being
overruled by the Queen and the Prince Consort, and to show that,
throughout the Austro-Italian questions then in progress, the principles
consistently held and carried out by our Foreign Office were not those
embodying the regard for the Austrian Empire held at the palace, but of
the zeal for Italian unity at that time animating the English people.
Some reference to current politics entered, as has been seen, into
_Rachel Ray_ (1863). The subject was first made a prominent feature in
_Can You Forgive Her?_ (1864). Here we are first formally introduced to
more or less public personages with whom our acquaintance is now to be
improved. Trollope had not been impelled to his Beverley candidature by
any active share in the Gladstonian enthusiasm, then beginning to show
itself throughout the country, nor can the Gladstonian lineaments be
clearly traced in any of the parliamentary portraits whose gallery opens
with _Phineas Finn_ (1869). The sorrows, the disappointment, the
labours, and the other varieties of penance awaiting the average borough
candidate, form the autobiographical element in the novel that marked
the new period in Trollope’s life beginning with his retirement from the
Post Office. After _Ralph the Heir_, _Phineas Finn_ takes the reader
into the heart of the political system, at St. Stephen’s, in Whitehall,
in Pall Mall, and in the country-houses, where leaders of parties,
whether peers or commoners, Cabinet Ministers and all their hangers on,
congregate. The electioneering reminiscences that give life and colour
to _Ralph the Heir_ make it therefore a fit introduction to Trollope’s
efforts in the new literary vein which, while a paid servant of the
State, he did not think desirable to work.
That was not the only fresh test applied by him in this, his fifty-third
year, to the loyalty of his readers. The example of famous or successful
contemporaries always excited a spirit of emulation in Trollope. Not
only had Dickens and Thackeray added to their reputation and wealth as
magazine editors, but, in the same capacity, men of whom he thought so
meanly as G. A. Sala and Edmund Yates had done well. The ex-Post Office
surveyor, therefore, resolved to spend part of his freedom from official
harness in the same _rôle_. The Virtues of City Road had just started a
monthly, _The St. Paul’s Magazine_. Anthony Trollope, with Mr. Edward
Dicey for his assistant, readily took the helm. He led off with an
instalment of fiction different from anything else he had yet attempted.
Had this not come after the Barchester series and therefore been judged
by that earlier standard, it might have had as many readers if not
admirers as the other pen and ink pictures of English life of which _The
Warden_, in 1855, had been the first. _Phineas Finn_, that first showed
Trollope as a political novelist, after having run through _The St.
Paul’s_, was republished in two volumes octavo (Virtue and Co.), 1869.
It was continued five years later with _Phineas Redux_. This originally
appeared in _The Graphic_ and was republished (Chapman and Hall) in two
volumes, 1874. The group of novels now referred to contained other
works, to be mentioned in their proper place, and only ended with _The
Duke’s Children_ (1880) two years before Trollope’s death. All these
books are traversed by a slight connecting thread of name, incident, or
character. As to this, however, it will be best to let these stories
speak for themselves, beginning with the earliest of the number,
_Phineas Finn_.
The personage giving his name to this book is the son of an Irish
doctor, Malachi Finn, living at Killaloe, county Clare, well-known
throughout the province of Connaught, possessing no private fortune, but
a good practice and an expensive family. The household idolatry lavished
upon the son is thus commented on by the shrewd, sensible father. “So
far he seems as good as any other man’s goose, but much more evidence is
wanted for establishing his claim to any qualities of the swan.”
Phineas, however, is no sooner seen in London than he begins to be a
success. Mr. Low, in whose chambers he reads law, who on his own
account entertains but checks certain parliamentary ambitions, is a
steady-going preceptor, social and legal, of the old school, who
admonishes his pupil to beware of distractions from his professional
training. Phineas, however, has already joined the Reform Club and found
many good houses open to him. Among the earliest of his Pall Mall and
Mayfair acquaintances Laurence Fitzgibbon, a happy-go-lucky Irishman,
cleverly sketched after the manner of Charles Lever, is already in the
House, and easily persuades Phineas that it is the only career worth
pursuing. An opportunity soon comes; the Loughshane constituency wants a
progressive candidate at the General Election; the Reform Club committee
promises a liberal contribution to his expenses if Phineas will stand.
Even thus Phineas’ allowance from his father must of course be
increased. The Killaloe doctor, talked over by the ladies of his family,
will do his very utmost to help his son in maintaining the new position.
Phineas, accordingly, is returned to Parliament, and is still in his
first session when, by sheer good luck, he gets an Under-Secretaryship.
Then comes the first check; Phineas kicks over the traces on an Irish
question. Mr. Monk may at some points vaguely reflect Gladstone. It is
at least Finn’s loyalty to Monk which involves the loss of his
Ministerial office, and, with it, of his seat for Loughshane, which, out
of office, he cannot support in a style agreeable to his enlarged views
of an M.P.’s social consequence.
Nothing therefore is to be done but to resettle himself in the land of
his birth. Even after his retirement there come signs of returning luck
in the shape of a Government post worth £1000 a year. That enables him
to settle modestly in Dublin with his youthful sweetheart, Mary Flood
Jones, for his wife. The heart which he can offer this excellent lady is
no longer a virgin one, for during his London years he has had two or
three serious love affairs. One of these, in its sequel rather tragic,
has been with Lady Laura Standish, the impoverished Earl of Brentford’s
daughter. That has been really a case of love at first sight on both
sides, for Lady Laura, having given Phineas her affection at the
beginning, does not conceal that he has it to the end. She only refuses
him because her father’s poverty compels her to marry a rich plebeian,
Mr. Kennedy, M.P., like Phineas himself, a political supporter of
Plantagenet Palliser, who eventually becomes the Duke of Omnium. The
handsome person and the shallow purse of the young Irish member have
also appealed warmly to Madame Max Goesler, a rich widow; she has
indeed, it having been apparently Leap Year, hinted to Phineas at the
acceptance of her hand and fortune as the best way out of his money
difficulties. This good-hearted, fascinating, and refreshingly
straightforward lady, whom he, after becoming a widower, marries, had
been suspected of angling for Planty Pal’s uncle, the reigning Duke of
Omnium. At least the duke’s infatuation for “Mrs. Max” had filled Lady
Glencora Palliser with a droll horror, lest the great man should
actually make her his wife and become the father of an heir who would
disinherit Planty Pal himself. Madame Goesler, however, has never any
thought of aiming at anyone above her own social level. The gracious but
decisive dismissal of her noble suitor converts Lady Glencora into her
fast friend. Throughout the rest of the story and indeed afterwards,
among all Lady Glencora’s intimates, none ranked so high in her regard
and confidence as the sensible and kindly lady who had been wise enough
to refuse a duke.
Out of Phineas Finn’s attachment to Lady Laura arises an entirely fresh
entanglement of heart actually attended by results serious enough, and
at one time threatening to change the whole current of the narrative. In
Lady Laura’s drawing-room Phineas meets a beautiful heiress, Violet
Effingham, the bride-elect of Lady Laura’s brother, the red-haired,
red-faced, shaggy, and untamable Lord Chiltern, who bears something of a
family likeness to the St. Aldegonde of Disraeli’s _Lothair_, but who
really represents Trollope’s snapshot at the Lord Hartington of his own
day, who died eighth Duke of Devonshire. The fact of Miss Effingham
being thus bespoke does not warn off the philandering Phineas. Lady
Laura has the mortification of seeing her own devotion to him requited
by his deliberate attempt to cut out Chiltern, and so prevent the
marriage that she had set her heart on for her brother. Still, she sits
by, agonised at heart, but uncomplaining. Nor does the spectacle of
Finn’s fickleness and shallowness lose him the love which, in spite of
herself, he had won.
Her brother views matters less passively. He has rather liked Phineas,
shown him much attention in London, mounted him on his most intractable
hunter, Bonebreaker, in the eastern counties, and admired the success
with which the doctor’s son from Killaloe has conquered that self-willed
steed. He is not, however, prepared to tolerate Phin’s poaching on his
manor. He will maintain the right to his sweetheart even at the price of
blood. Eventually the two agree to settle it at the pistol’s point.
Blankenberg in Belgium becomes the scene of a combat in which Phineas
receives a not very serious wrist wound. This encounter has been called
an anachronism; it disposes, the critics have said, if nothing else did,
of the one merit, that of absolute truth to life in all details,
specially claimed by Trollope for the novel. How stand the facts? Prince
Albert, indeed, made duelling unfashionable; but there were several
cases of duels fought in Victoria’s reign. Certainly, during the period
of the Blankenberg encounter in _Phineas Finn_, hostile meetings at
Boulogne were often the talk of the town. Only a generation and a half
have passed since there still flourished at St. Stephen’s, and
occasionally dined with Mr. Gladstone, the wonderful Ogorman Mahoon who,
if report spoke truly, had once at least “killed his man.” In 1852 a
Canterbury election dispute caused a duel between George Smythe,
Coningsby’s original, and Colonel Frederick Romilly. About this time,
too, is nearly the date at which an ordeal of the same kind was gone
through by Reginald Russell in Paris.
Phineas Finn’s Irish exile was short. He had recently lost his wife in
Dublin, when a letter from his old friend, Lady Laura Standish’s
cousin, Barrington Erle, told him of just the thing to suit him in the
shape of a parliamentary investment for a little legacy into which he
had come. This was the vacant seat in Lord Brentford’s borough of
Tankerville. To London therefore he hurries. In the solitude of his
Jermyn Street Hotel he is surprised and gladdened by a letter from the
former Violet Effingham, now Lady Chiltern, conveying a particularly
cordial invitation to their country house, Harrington Hall. So he feels
himself really on the way back to the old life formerly so much enjoyed
and, as it seemed, but a few months since withdrawn from him for ever.
But his welcome is not absolutely unanimous. Among those who, as a
personal offence to themselves, resent his reappearance after having
made up their minds that he was finally out of their way, Finn’s most
malevolent ill-wisher is Mr. Bonteen. Phineas has just got back to St.
Stephen’s as member for Tankerville; shortly afterwards goes into the
Reform Club; here, stung by Bonteen’s remarks, he almost comes to blows
with Bonteen; a little later he is seen walking home Mr. Bonteen’s way.
The next morning Bonteen is found dead in a Mayfair alley with his skull
broken, manifestly by such a pocket bludgeon as Finn is known to be in
the habit of carrying for protection against garrotters. The Irish
member’s arrest follows; it might have gone hard with him in court but
for Madame Goesler’s resourcefulness, devotion, and ready wit. The tide
of circumstantial evidence, so far flowing strongly against Phineas, now
turns, and, thanks entirely to Madame Goesler’s vigilance and skill,
gives Trollope the chance of a hit at his old enemies, the evangelicals,
by setting in conclusively against a dissenting minister who now
replaces Phineas in the dock, but just contrives to cheat the gallows.
Phineas, of course, finds a rising statesman’s ideal wife in Madame
Goesler, and is henceforth known as the prosperous middle-aged M.P.
Here, it will be seen, is the same blending as in _Orley Farm_ and _Can
You Forgive Her?_ of tears with laughter, of the terrible with the
ludicrous, and of more than melodrama with downright farce. The darker
background to the social or political scenes is supplied chiefly by the
relations between Mr. Kennedy and his wife, to whom might be added
Phineas Finn himself. To begin with, Lady Laura Standish probably would
never have become Lady Laura Kennedy if the handsome young Irishman who
won her heart directly she saw him had pressed his suit with the
audacity she perhaps looked for against that of the priggish and insipid
Kennedy. As it is, loving him from the first, she nurses a steadily
deepening passion for him till her widowhood, where Trollope with
artistic delicacy leaves her, feeling no doubt that all the proprieties
of fiction would be violated if married happiness were awarded to the
two parties in a flirtation that, innocent throughout in itself, had
been associated with such domestic discomfort and havoc. Take her for
what the novelist meant her to be, Lady Laura, well thought out, firmly,
not less than, at each point, consistently drawn, is a good specimen of
the mid-nineteenth century society woman of the better sort. She had,
indeed, her exact parallel in at least one commanding ornament of
Mayfair drawing-rooms concerning whom Lord Beaconsfield said, “She needs
only a husband of the right sort to be a statesman’s helpmate.” On both
sides the Laura and Phineas friendship is pure throughout; it is only
not absolutely without reproach because the lady refuses to give it up
after her husband’s disapproval and jealousy have been plainly and, for
success, too peremptorily signified. Kennedy commits that and other
mistakes because he does not quite come up to the idea of Trollope’s
perfect gentleman and man of the world. To begin with he is a devout
Presbyterian; this defect alone was almost as fatal in Trollope’s eyes
as it would have been with Charles II himself. When they are staying at
Loughlinter Lady Laura complains of her headache and begs to be excused
kirk. Kennedy delivers a little discourse on the malady of headache
generally and his wife’s headache in particular. The ailment, he lays
down, proceeds from either the stomach or nerves. In the former case the
walk to church should prove beneficial; in the latter, the malady, he
plainly intimates, comes from Phineas Finn. This insinuation acts as a
last straw. Lady Laura Kennedy leaves her husband’s house and settles
with her father abroad at Dresden. There Phineas is about to visit her
when, before starting, he adds insult to injury by asking Kennedy
whether he can take any message to his wife. This naturally leads to an
angry scene between the two men shortly afterwards, with fresh violence
on both sides.
Trollope loved newspaper writers even a little less than he did
evangelicals; in _The Warden_ he had dealt some rather clumsy thrusts at
them. In his later novels, including that now considered, he personifies
them in the vulgar, unscrupulous Quintus Slide of _The People’s Banner_.
This ruffian of the Press embitters and complicates the Finn-Kennedy
embroglio for personal spite against Phineas and for the enlivenment of
his own columns with some spicy personalities obtained from the now
half-maddened Kennedy himself. Infuriated with jealousy because, not
unnaturally, incredulous of the really Platonic conditions of his wife’s
friendship with Phineas, Kennedy has one more personal passage with the
Irish Member, noticeable only because it contains a repetition of the
attempt at murder with a pistol that had already, when the quarrel lay
between John Grey and George Vavasor, done duty in _Can You Forgive
Her?_ As for Lady Laura, she lives out a faded life in attendance on her
father, Lord Brentford, and only reappears in England to hear from her
old lover of his intention to secure himself against pecuniary troubles
in the future by persuading Madame Goesler to become Mrs. Finn. This is
the second announcement of the same kind which poor Lady Laura has had
to face; for some years earlier it was to her also he confided his
intention of trying his chance with Violet Effingham. This is a little
too much even for so fond and blind an admirer of Phineas as the widowed
Lady Laura Kennedy. “Why,” she exclaims, “to me of all persons in the
world do you come with the story of your intentions? I could bear it
when you came to me about Violet, because I loved her even though she
robbed me, but how am I to bear it now in the case of a woman I loathe?”
The curtain falls upon poor Lady Laura, sobbing her heart out upon the
false one’s breast in Saulsby Park with self-reproaches for having
worshipped him instead of her God; upon Phineas flourishing as Madame
Goesler’s husband, a prosperous middle-aged M.P., refusing the offer of
a place in Mr. Gresham’s Government because, as the newly made Mrs.
Phineas Finn puts it, a rich wife’s husband can afford to prefer freedom
to responsibility. The only figures of the Phineas group prominently
reappearing in the subsequent political stories are Planty Pal
transformed into the Duke of Omnium and his Duchess, formerly Lady
Glencora. The new duke presides over no Cabinet, but takes a paternal
interest in public affairs generally, and is specially delighted at the
improved prospects of his old fiscal fad, decimal coinage. The duchess,
having sown all her wild oats, settles down into a great political lady
of the most aspiring and imperious kind. Her mistakes in that part
illustrate Trollope’s favourite moral that the feminine ambition “which
o’erleaps itself” spoils instead of adorns whatever it may touch.
There is little, as has been already said, in Trollope’s first two
political novels to fix the parliamentary period to which they belong.
As regards good looks, Phineas may have had something in common with
Colonel King-Harman, whom the novelist occasionally met at the Arts
Club, but at all other points Trollope’s Irish Member, by his fine
presence, winning manners, and his return to St. Stephen’s after an
interval of absence, suggests Sir John Pope Hennessy rather than any
other representative of the Emerald Isle during the pre-Household
Suffrage portion of the Victorian age. For the rest, Prime Minister
Gladstone and Prime Minister Gresham only resemble each other in the
first letter of their names. The future Lord Beaconsfield, however, is
clearly meant by Daubeny. Disraeli is the subject of a verbal photograph
as the brilliant and unscrupulous charlatan who dishes the Whigs, not
over parliamentary reform but over Church Disestablishment. But the
politician pitted against Daubeny bears scarcely a remote resemblance to
Disraeli’s arch antagonist. Among those who resist Daubeny’s designs,
the foremost, the already-mentioned Gresham, universally respected,
admired, is too reserved and self-contained for popularity. He therefore
recalls Sir Robert Peel rather than the most famous of Peel’s disciples
or successors. Trollope’s Turnbull as the angular, inflexibly upright,
middle-class M.P. shows no trace of the Cobden, John Bright, or any of
that school reflected in the Job Thornberry of Disraeli’s _Endymion_.
The fact of the publication of _Endymion_ being later, by some ten
years, than that of _Phineas Finn_ does away with the suggestion that
Trollope’s Turnbull was modelled from Disraeli’s Thornberry. In like
manner Monk, Trollope’s ideal parliament man, is evolved entirely from
his creator’s inner consciousness. So too Plantagenet Palliser had no
original among the well-born, scientific financiers of the House of
Commons in Trollope’s time, but merely personifies his creator’s notion
of the pattern gentleman, the soul of honour and of chivalrous
consideration in his treatment equally of Lady Glencora’s flirtations
when his bride-elect and of her ill-devised socio-political strategies
after she has become Duchess of Omnium. At each stage of his development
from the Planty Pal of _Can You Forgive Her?_ to the inheritance of the
ducal title in _Phineas Redux_, these aspects of his character are
consistently, logically, as well as at every point effectively,
sustained. When, in _Phineas Finn_, his uncle’s death sends him to the
Upper House, to be known henceforth as the duke, while not holding
office he becomes the oracle, the good genius and presiding potentate of
his party.
_The Prime Minister_ (1876) shows him as the First Lord of the Treasury,
always gracious, calm, and strong, though often harassed by his wife’s
intermeddling in public affairs, and, as in the case of Ferdinand Lopez,
by her patronage of discreditable supporters. For, if the duke be the
ornament of his order and his vocation, Lady Glencora, since becoming
Her Grace, has transformed herself into a satire upon feminine
aspiration when untempered by true womanly feeling and good sense. The
Duchess of Omnium was, I fancy, felt by Trollope himself to be, as he
put it to me, _une grande dame manquée_. Trollope’s lifelong Harrow
contemporary and loyal friend, Sir William Gregory, so often mentioned
in these pages, called his Irish member a libel upon the Irish
gentleman. The relations in which Phineas Finn stood to his own sex were
those of Trollope’s duchess to the genuine great lady of existing
political drawing-rooms. Of moral fibre, harder and coarser than when
first introduced as the girlish but even then sufficiently shrewd Lady
Glencora, she provokes, when seen in _The Prime Minister_,
disadvantageous comparison with another politician’s wife, her equal in
fortune, whom she once called an adventuress, but has since promoted to
the first place in her friendship. Mrs. Max Goesler, now Mrs. Phineas
Finn, who herself might have been a duchess had she liked, is a rising
statesman’s model wife, knowing exactly when to help her husband by
appearing in the foreground, and how to advance his interests by
unadvertised activity behind the scenes. But then Mrs. Max was a real
figure in the society of Trollope’s day, and the Duchess of Omnium was
an abstraction.
The characters, however, in _The Prime Minister_, on which Trollope
relied to popularise the book, by relieving the strain of the demand
that the purely political portions made on the reader’s attention are
those of Emily Wharton, whose life is marred by her marriage with the
aspiring incarnation of city scampdom, Lopez, and of Arthur Fletcher,
Emily’s blameless lover, who eventually becomes her husband. Trollope
himself was never seen to greater advantage than in the best
professional society. Especially did he shine when talking with doctors
like his particular friend, Sir Richard Quain, or with lawyers of the
old school such as he had first known from his father. Nothing,
therefore, in _The Prime Minister_ is better than Emily’s father, the
shrewd old-world barrister, reminiscent of the bygone legal celebrities,
Jockey Bell, the first conveyancer of his time, or Leech, Master of the
Rolls.[27] The snobbish and pretentious knave, Lopez, has entrapped into
partnership in his commercial infamies a city drudge as low as
personally he is harmless, named Parker. Not unworthy of Dickens, is the
praise deserved by the simple and graphic drollery of Trollope’s
description of Sexty Parker amid the mean surroundings of his suburban
home, with his poor wife’s affrighted protests at the dangerous degree
to which he is being made the tool of Lopez, or Parker’s picture on his
seaside holiday, smoking his pipe and drinking his gin and water in the
shabby villa’s porch, while his ill-clad and ill-nourished children make
mischief of every kind in the stony and almost flowerless garden. An
effective contrast to these scenes of squalid domesticity is forthcoming
in the varied company at Gatherum Castle, now inhabited by Planty Pal as
Duke of Omnium, and despotically managed by Lady Glencora as duchess,
who, by way of forming a party of her own, has invited some rather shady
guests. Among these is Lopez; how the duke sees through him, soon
showing him the door, and how His Grace, beset by an uncongenial
house-party, platonically consoles himself with Lady Rosina De Courcy as
well as follows her advice to take care of his health by wearing cork
soles, is told in Trollope’s best manner.
With this social by-play are mingled the Silverbridge parliamentary
contests; here Beverley is drawn upon once more, and the election
agents, Sprugeon and Sprout, are pen and ink photographs of Trollope’s
Yorkshire friends. _The Prime Minister_ ends with the hideous suicide of
the villain of the piece, Ferdinand Lopez. All the incidents leading up
to that catastrophe make very unpleasant reading indeed.
Infinitely superior to _The Prime Minister_ is _The Duke’s Children_.
Here our author regains his old and happier cunning in the portrait of
Isabel Boncassen. This American beauty combines high intellectual power
with absolute perfection of face and figure. Still more arresting is her
English counterpart, Lady Mabel Grex. That heroine, an impoverished and
profligate nobleman’s daughter, had passed scathless through the trying
ordeal of her earlier days. Neither the keenness of her insight nor the
strength of her will is impaired; her capacity of entire devotion where
her heart is really touched has not suffered from any hardening
experiences of life’s seamy side. Yet some time has to pass before she
can do justice to these great qualities, though from the first she makes
herself felt as the good genius of the story. Meanwhile, the widowed
Duke of Omnium has had trouble both with his sons and daughter. These
vexations to some degree involve Lady Mabel Grex. His eldest son, Lord
Silverbridge, a good deal both of the scapegrace and the spendthrift,
has managed to drop £70,000 on a single race. The duke’s only daughter,
Lady Mary Palliser, is scarcely less unsatisfactory. With the pick of
the peerage as well as the plutocracy to choose from, she perversely
refuses to marry anyone but Frank Tregear, a Cornish squire’s penniless
younger son. Frank, however, and Lady Mabel Grex are already the
subjects of a reciprocal passion. This attachment is doomed for money
reasons never to end in marriage. Even after she has convinced herself
that this love is hopeless, Mabel Grex only becomes resigned to the
inevitable after a long and agonised struggle with herself. It ends,
however, in her accepting an offer from the duke’s heir, Silverbridge.
At the same time Frank Tregear breaks off with Mabel and transfers his
affections to the Duke of Omnium’s daughter, the already mentioned Lady
Mary. Defeated at every point, as well as crushed under the burden of a
hopeless love, Mabel Grex passively accepts the doom of aimless poverty
and absolute desolation for the rest of her days.