reminiscent of the Barsetshire novels. Mister Fenwick is insulted by
the great landowner of the county, The Marquis of Trowbridge, and he
succeeds in repaying the Marquis with more insults. Here Trollope's
familiarity with church sensitivities brings us the Marquis's
revenge: he allows a Methodist chapel (not a regular Wesleyan
Methodist chapel, but a Primitive Methodist chapel) to be built
across the road from the vicarage, where its ugly red bricks and loud
discordant bells are a recurring nuisance to the vicar and his wife.
But then: the vicar decides to consider the chapel to be his hair
shirt, and he obtains the promise of his wife (who will never open
her front door to look at the chapel) not to mention it to him again.
The vicar considers the matter closed; but his wife's sister visits
with her husband, a distinguished barrister, who volunteers to
investigate the matter. He discovers that the land on which the
chapel is being built is glebe land! (Glebe land is that which
belongs to the vicar for his personal farming or gardening.) And here
the vicar refuses to shed his hair shirt.
His clerical mind allows him to demonstrate his virtue by tolerating
the chapel, though his poor wife may be obliged to endure the sight
and sounds of it without being allowed to complain to him. But the
perpetrator of the chapel is not to be spared, and the vicar writes a
stinging letter to the marquis, in which he explains the use of very
strong words:
He showed the letter to his wife.
"Isn't malice a very strong word?" she said.
"I hope so," answered the vicar.
The pace of the gentle life in Victorian England was surely a
leisurely one. This pace is reflected in the whole page that is given
to the thoughts of the Marquis of Trowbridge when he receives the
insulting letter from Mr. Fenwick; and his reflections are further
supplemented by the author's reminding us, if it were not already
evident, that the Marquis is an old fool:
His lordship's mind was one utterly incapable of sifting
evidence--unable even to understand evidence when it came to him.
He was not a bad man. He desired nothing that was not his own, and
remitted much that was. He feared God, honoured the Queen, and
loved his country. He was not self-indulgent. He did his duties as
he knew them. But he was an arrogant old fool, who could not keep
himself from mischief--who could only be kept from mischief by the
aid of some such master as his son.
Trollope can be more pithy, as when he describes the Marquis's
reception and reaction to the letter from the vicar: "His
intelligence worked slowly, whereas his wrath worked quickly."
The vicar subsequently feels himself cheated of his revenge after
the Marquis's son Lord St. George succeeds in "pouring oil on the
waters." But others pursue the matter for him, and in the end the
chapel is pulled down.
The vicar is actually rather well portrayed and could stand with his
clerical brethren of Barsetshire if he were given six novels in which
we could follow his career. He shows himself to be a naive clergyman
who thinks he can intervene in the problems of a pretty, banished
prostitute without incurring any risk to his reputation. He urges the
miller Jacob Brattle to accept his daughter, ignoring the father's
refusal to speak to him about Carry. He visits Carry's brother
George, urging him and his wife to take her in, facing the wife's
wrath after George advises him not to raise the issue with her. He
visits Carry's brother-in-law Mr. Jay the ironmonger with similar
lack of success. He visits Carry at the small town inn where she is
staying and pays for her lodging. Just when the reader begins to
wonder whether, in the words of the song in _The Music Man_, "Hester
will win just one more A," the vicar's wife Janet finally persuades
him to lower his profile in the matter, but he never seems to
understand the damage of gossip.
His instincts are shown to be correct in his championing of Sam
Brattle, who is accused of murder but subsequently exonerated, and
of Carry Brattle, who returns home and finally regains her father's
affection. Carry's return is after setting out on foot, exposing
herself to the elements in desperation, half expecting to die of
exposure as did Lady Dedlock in Dickens's _Bleak House_, and as
Gerald Crich would do in D. H. Lawrence's _Women in Love_. Did such
a recurrent fictional device reflect an occasional practice of the
times?
Trollope is a chatty author. Had he been as reticent as twentieth
century practitioners of minimalist fiction, we might not have
had spelled out for our curiosity a definition of a gentleman, a
recurrent source of fascination for Trollope. Miss Marrable is the
author's agent who ponders the matter, concluding that money does not
entitle a millionaire to be considered a gentleman. Attorneys don't
make the cut by virtue of their profession. A son of a gentleman,
however, could maintain his rank by earning his living as a
clergyman, a barrister, a soldier, or a sailor. Physicians were not
absolutely excluded from the ranks of the gentlemen, but a physician
could never participate in the privileges accorded to the Law
and the Church. There might be some doubt about the engineering
profession, but any man who allowed himself to touch trade or
commerce automatically excluded himself. Such men might be ever so
respectable, "but brewers, bankers and merchants were not gentlemen,
and the world, according to Miss Marrable's theory, was going astray,
because people were forgetting their landmarks."
And it goes without mentioning that for Walter Marrable, the option
of going to work to make money is never considered. His only recourse
is to return to the army.
Obvious generalizations as to class have gone out of style. But
Victorian England was a land of class and caste, as shown in this
allusion to a hired hand in the mill: "His companion in the mill did
not come near them, knowing, as the poor do know on such occasions,
there was something going on which would lead them to prefer that he
should be absent."
There's also a murder mystery. It occupies several chapters, but
at the end it is dismissed with only the limited knowledge of the
details told by Carry Brattle and her brother Sam, both witnesses at
the trial.
The story of the Mary Magdalene, though innovative, is, after all,
sentimental; the love story, perhaps considered essential to sell the
book to the public, is tedious; the murder mystery is perfunctory;
but I wouldn't miss the story of the Methodist chapel.
A TERMINAL AFFECTION
SIR HARRY HOTSPUR OF HUMBLETHWAITE
The beleaguered father of the twenty-first century might at first
look with some longing to the mores of the nineteenth century and
to _Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite_, in a time and place when
a father's word was law, and a faithful daughter would not marry
without her father's consent. It was not so simple, though, and
that's what the book is about. The plot anticipates that of Henry
James's _Washington Square_, written about ten years later about a
family in New York.
Trollope presents the story in a short novel of 172 pages, which
means there are no subplots. However, the reader is not shortchanged
by any lack of reflections by and about the characters as each turn
of the story unfolds. Whereas James regards his participants in a
rather detached fashion, as a puppet master who pulls the strings and
watches the unfortunate movements that may result, and with relative
economy of words, Trollope regards his characters with as much
affection as they deserve, spending paragraphs detailing all aspects
of the situation as they may appear to each of them all along the
way.
The daughter of a wealthy baronet falls in love with her cousin who
is a spendthrift and unworthy of her. We must follow the ground rules
of Victorian society--cousins may marry, and a father must decide
whether to approve of his daughter's intended husband and is indeed
obliged to investigate his character. In this case, we learn that
the mortal sin committed by the suitor is that he cheated at cards.
Remember T. S. Eliot's line about Macavity the Mystery Cat: "He's
outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)"
For our later generation, Trollope is a patient instructor: We are
reminded that an Englishman's home is his castle. "Nothing on earth
should induce Sir Harry to see his cousin anywhere on his own
premises."
In a society in which inheritance could be all important, the lover
of the fox hunt was beginning to suspect that the laws of inheritance
were not universally applicable: "And good blood too will have its
effect--physical for the most part--and will produce bottom, lasting
courage, that capacity of carrying on through the mud to which Sir
Harry was wont to allude; but good blood will bring no man back to
honesty."
He gives lessons in the art of negotiation: "Lady Elizabeth had
not been instructed to propose a meeting. She had been told rather
to avoid it if at all possible. But, like some other undiplomatic
ambassadors, in her desire to be civil, she ran at once to the
extremity of the permitted concession."
A serious interview ensues when George Hotspur plucks up his courage
to ask Sir Harry for Emily Hotspur's hand. Two and a half pages of
dialogue follow, during which George pleads his losing case well,
leaving Sir Harry to decide: "He sat silent for full five minutes
before he spoke again, and then he gave judgment as follows: 'You
will go away without seeing her tomorrow.'" Trollope follows the
narrative to a point further on, at which, "The process of parental
yielding had already commenced."
Ever the patient instructor, he here teaches:
On all such occasions interviews are bad. The teller of this story
ventures to take the opportunity of recommending parents in such
cases always to refuse interviews, not only between the young lady
and the lover who is to be excluded, but also between themselves
and the lover. The vacillating tone--even when the resolve to
suppress vacillation has been most determined--is perceived and
understood.
Not always a dispassionate instructor, the compassionate narrator
at one point has tender words for the doomed maiden: "Then he knelt
down and prayed . . . that he might be as a brand saved from the
burning. . . . Alas, dearest, no; not so could it be done! Not at thy
instance, though thy prayers be as pure as the songs of angels."
The story is built with several materials familiar to Trollope
readers: the faithful young woman who can never love another,
whatever becomes of the love of her life; the father concerned with
the integrity of his estate in generations to come; and the young man
who never intends to work and would readily marry for money. Whereas,
however, in other novels it all comes out all right (_Ayala's Angel_,
for instance, is a comedy from first to last in which numerous young
girls succeed in following their hearts without having to pine away)
in this story the chips fall where they may, so the ending is a bit
of a downer.
By all accounts Trollope considered himself rather a conservative
citizen. But whether consciously or not, he holds up a number of
Victorian conventions to the test of _reductio ad absurdum_ and shows
their absurdity to a later generation, whatever his contemporary
readers may have thought. No feminist, he showed the disadvantaged
state of women in novel after novel. And although Father may often
know best, his stubborn attempt to prove it might include the risk of
disastrous consequences, as shown in _Sir Harry Hotspur_.
THE HEIR AND THE BASTARD
RALPH THE HEIR
There are two Ralph Newtons in Anthony Trollope's _Ralph the Heir_.
One is nephew to the Squire of Newton Priory and is his heir. The
other is his illegitimate son. So: why should the title not be _Ralph
the Bastard_? First: this is a Victorian novel; such a title would
have been unacceptable to Victorian society. Second: even though the
squire's son shows himself to be more worthy than his cousin, the
central figure in the story really is Ralph the heir. Trollope merely
says that heroes of pure virtue and villains of unalloyed vice are
rare.
This is what it is about: There was a complicated inheritance
issue--not contested, just complicated. I had to draw a little
diagram to get it straight, and I then had to refer to it time after
time:
Ralph Newton,
the old Squire
|
+-----------+-----------+
| |
Ralph Newton Gregory Newton
The Parson The Squire
| |
+-----+-------+ |
| | |
Ralph Gregory Ralph
The Heir The Parson Not the heir
Gregory Newton the Squire, in his youth and before he became the
Squire, traveled in Europe and fathered a child (whom he named Ralph,
after his father); the mother died before their planned marriage.
Outraged at his son's indiscretion, the old Squire then entailed
the family estate to the second generation; that is, his son could
inherit the estate and use it for life, but he did not have "power of
appointment" (a phrase I learned when tracing my father's many trusts
to their intended conclusions). That is, he could not pass it on.
Unless the first born (Gregory the squire, who had fathered the
illegitimate son) should marry and have a legitimate son, the family
estate would go to the first born son of his brother Ralph Newton the
parson. (We're talking about three Ralphs and two Gregorys in three
generations here.) It so happened that Parson Ralph's first born son,
Ralph the heir, was a playboy who acquired more debts than he could
pay, and he wound up with two choices: marry for money, taking Polly
Neefit, daughter of his tailor, who had loaned money to Ralph and
would forgive his debts and give him enough money (twenty thousand
pounds) to pay his debts and more; or "go to the Jews," that is, put
up his birthright as security for a loan to pay his debts.
When Gregory the father of the illegitimate son heard of this (he
had now become squire after the death of his father), he saw an
opportunity to take the place of the Jews and basically buy the
birthright of Ralph the heir, so that he could then pass it on to his
own son, Ralph the bastard.
In considering Trollope's _John Caldigate_, I wondered at the way
in which inheritance issues could yield such complicated plots.
Obviously there were contested inheritances; today, even without
primogeniture, children of a deceased parent often have bitter
disputes over the rights to seemingly minor treasures of much greater
sentimental than monetary value--not to mention disputes over
significant property and money. But did it ever get this complicated?
Who knows?
So much for the inheritance issue. There are complicated boy-girl
issues also. Ralph the heir becomes the ward of Sir Thomas Underwood,
a distinguished but now idle barrister. Sir Thomas has two
daughters--Patience, the elder, plain and intelligent; and Clarissa,
a beauty. He also has an orphan niece, nineteen years old and "the
most lovely young woman he had ever seen," Mary Bonner. So as it
starts out: Gregory the parson, brother of Ralph the heir, is in love
with Clarissa; Clarissa is in love with Ralph the heir; Ralph the
heir kisses Clarissa and tells her he loves her, but when he realizes
he needs money he is persuaded by his tailor Mr. Neefit to propose to
his daughter Polly. When Mary arrives on the scene he vows to propose
to her; Mary keeps her own counsel, but Ralph "not the heir" falls
seriously in love with her. Patience may have had some preference of
her own but not the looks to express or pursue it.
This tangle of alliances and preferences is a bit like a murder
mystery: can the reader guess who will wind up with whom? And
in truth, the novel basically stands on its plot. Trollope is
sufficiently realistic to show that Ralph never really reforms. One
of the most interesting women is Polly Neefit, who is urged by her
father the breeches-maker to accept Ralph the heir, after Ralph is
persuaded by him to propose. She refuses him twice, first because she
doesn't think he loves her, and then, after being somewhat mollified
on that score, because he doesn't respect her father and although she
could have any one of twenty young men, she has only one father.
Her first refusal is a classic Trollopian dialogue. He swears he
can love her, but after a lengthy recitation of probabilities, she
concludes: "I ain't come to breaking my heart for you yet, Mr.
Newton."
Trollope handles the boy-girl scenes very well. But his forte is
politics. He had run for a seat in Parliament once himself, and he
had become sufficiently disillusioned to paint the political scene
in some raw ways. Here we find Sir Thomas Underwood, who has retired
from professional and public life to write the definitive biography
of Sir Francis Bacon (but never actually takes pen to paper),
deciding to try to re-enter Parliament via the rotten borough of
Percycross, on the Conservative ticket. It so happens that one of
the other contestants for one of the two Percycross seats is Ontario
Moggs, a young radical rebel who preaches the virtues of labor unions
and strikes, and who is also an ardent suitor for the hand of Polly
Neefit. We follow Ontario to the Cheshire Cheese, the public house
where he delivers impassioned orations; and we follow Sir Thomas in
his reluctant efforts to canvass the electorate. Sir Thomas and his
running mate, the incumbent Conservative candidate, win the election,
but there is a petition--a demand for a recount and an investigation
into possible improprieties in the election.
In the definitive moment of this story, Sir Thomas learns that his
reluctant expenditures for campaign costs were only the first of
the demands to be made on his purse. After apparently winning the
election, he is persuaded by Mr. Pabsby, the Wesleyan preacher,
to make a contribution for a new Wesleyan chapel. (Mr. Pabsby has
been shown to us as having a "soft, greasy voice,--a voice made of
pretence, politeness, and saliva.") But then Sir Thomas learns from
his "supporters" that the election will probably be contested, and
that he will need the loyalty of his supporters if he is to prevail.
The list of requirements--personal donations for all the schools and
all the churches, as well as fifty pounds for the old women of the
borough at Christmas--goes on and on. Poor Sir Thomas. To make a long
story short, he refuses any further favors, the petition overturns
his election, and the investigation discloses that Percycross is
such a corrupt borough that it has lost all its representation in
Parliament.
Trollope occasionally indulged in dispensing little lessons in the
facts of life. Early in the story Sir Thomas goes to Portsmouth to
meet his newly orphaned nineteen-year-old niece, whom he has never
seen. He has declared that he will serve as her guardian, and as he
waits to meet her, he is apprehensive. And now as he observes all the
men taking turns to offer her favors, he learns about "priority of
service":
There are certain favours in life which are very charming,--but
very unjust to others, and which we may perhaps lump under the
name of priority of service. Money will hardly buy it. When money
does buy it, there is no injustice. When priority of service is
had, like a coach-and-four, by the man who can afford to pay for
it, industry, which is the source of wealth, receives its fitting
reward. . . . But priority of service is perhaps more readily
accorded to feminine beauty, and especially to unprotected
feminine beauty, than to any other form of claim. Whether or no
this is ever felt as a grievance, ladies who are not beautiful may
perhaps be able to say.
Walt Disney's film makers understood this in producing _Mary
Poppins_, for whom "boxes and trunks seemed to extricate themselves."
But even today one can hardly disagree with Trollope that "priority
of service is perhaps more readily accorded to feminine beauty" than
to any other claim.
It is difficult to dislike a genial friend. And Trollope rewards his
readers with his genial approach to his fictional world. In this
story Ralph "not the heir" suffers a major reversal of fortune when
his father dies before completing the schemes that would have enabled
Ralph, the illegitimate son, to inherit the estate and his father's
additional fortune. Ralph "not the heir" had resisted ambitions to
inherit the family estate. But he had requested permission to propose
to the beautiful Mary Bonner when he anticipated some validation
of his status. And now it seemed that he would be a "nameless" man
without property or hopes of marriage to the woman he loved. At home,
his butler continues to be solicitous for his employer's feelings.
And the reader feels that the author of his distress has some
compassion for the victim. So he does. But the realistic author also
adds the butler's observation after finally leaving his young master:
"I don't suppose it do come to much mostly when folks go wrong."
But the geniality of the story is shown as the author cruises
confidently to his conclusion of the complicated affair, pulling the
strings to the satisfaction of as many as possible. Ralph the heir
finally receives a reward through the agency of Lady Eardham, mother
of three eligible and more or less young daughters. Lady Eardham
receives a letter from Polly Neefit's father telling her that Ralph
is engaged to marry his daughter Polly. Of course she knows that Mr.
Neefit is bluffing, but she shows the letter to Ralph so that he
will know she has it. She invites Ralph to call on her the following
morning, and when he does, he is toast:
Of course there was nothing done. During the whole interview
Lady Eardham continued to press Neefit's letter under her hand
upon the table, as though it was of all documents the most
precious. . . . And, though she spoke no such word, she certainly
gave Ralph to understand that by this letter he, Ralph Newton, was
in some mysterious manner so connected with the secrets, and the
interests, and the sanctity of the Eardham family, that, whether
such connection might be for weal or woe, the Newtons and the
Eardhams could never altogether free themselves from the link.
Her husband approves her work. The daughters certainly do not object.
"The girls, who knew that they had no fortunes, expected that
everything should be done for them, at least during the period of
their natural harvest." And Augusta Eardham, the first fruit of this
harvest, accepted her lot in life with equanimity. And it worked out
all right.
Bickerings there might be, but they would be bickerings without
effect; and Ralph Newton, of Newton, would probably so live
with this wife of his bosom, that they, too, might lie at last
pleasantly together in the family vault, with the record of their
homely virtues visible to the survivors of the parish on the same
tombstone.
This passage comes thirteen pages before the end of the novel. Had I
been the editor, I should have insisted that this coda be placed at
the very end.
A HARD CASE
THE GOLDEN LION OF GRANPERE
Michel Voss is a hard case. His second wife's niece, Marie, and his
son (by his first wife) George want to marry each other. Marie has
lived in the Voss household since becoming an orphan at age fifteen,
and now at age twenty she is quietly running the family inn, the Lion
d'Or at Granpere. But Michel thinks his son, about twenty-five years
of age, should prove himself in the world before marrying. "I won't
have it, George," he declares, and his word is law. And thereby hangs
the tale.
Trollope loved the hard cases. Perhaps none was harder than Louis
Trevelyan, whose terminal stubbornness was celebrated in _He Knew
He was Right_. _The Last Chronicle of Barset_ revolves around the
celebrated stubbornness of Josiah Crawley, the perpetual curate who
walked miles through the mud to face down Bishop Proudie and his wife
in a triumphant confrontation. Linda Tressel, in the novel bearing
her name, falls victim to her Aunt Charlotte, a religious zealot who
insists on a marriage that Linda refuses. Mr. Whittlestaff, in _An
Old Man's Love_, resisted giving up his young fiancée to her young
lover for long enough to make a short novel out of it. And there
are others--strong characters whose steadfastness of purpose forces
everyone else to bend or face a long struggle.