by Hugh Walpole
On to this deserted scene creep certain figures, and the chief of them are the three Macdermots — Old Larry, his son Thady, aged twenty-four, and his daughter Euphemia or Feemy, twenty, “a tall, dark girl, with that bold, upright, well-poised figure which is so peculiarly Irish. She walked as if all the blood of the old Irish Princes was in her veins.”
This Feemy is one of the finest of all Trollope’s heroines and is true sister to Lily Dale, Clara Amedroz of The Belton Estate, Lucy Robarts, Ayala of Ayala’s Angel, and, most human of them all, Trollope’s own beloved Lady Glencora.
Feemy Macdermot, moreover, had something that none of the later heroines possess, a certain poetry and tragic inevitability that the popular novelist of after years would have found perhaps too darkly coloured for his serial purposes.
Feemy’s tragedy is that she loves a certain coarse- minded adventurer, Captain Ussher, trusts that he will marry her, and at last, because she loves him so dearly, consents that he shall abduct her and carry her off to Dublin. Thady, her brother, intercepts the abduction and murders Ussher, is tried for his life and hung; Feemy, ruined by her lover and loving dearly her brother, dies.
It will be seen that there is no relenting anywhere in this tragedy. The young author, caring not whether he had any readers or no, is obsessed by the conviction of his story and does not look beyond it. It is the only novel of Trollope’s in which the public is not for an instant considered; afterwards, as the Autobiography only too frequently reveals, he had his public constantly before him, and only refused to compromise in its favour when his art was too strong for him, as, thank God, on several notable occasions it was.
Even here there is one compromise: the whole chapter of the comic duel, inserted perhaps because the author felt that his gloom was gathering too heavily about him, should be omitted by any reader who cares for the self-respect of his author, as, indeed, every reader ought to care.
With this single exception the story moves forward relentlessly and without prolixity. The characters are all revealed by natural and lively dialogue, and every character has his work to do in the development of the central theme. Trollope revealed in this first book at once two of the gifts that were to do him splendid service throughout his life — his genius for natural easy dialogue and his ability for bringing off his great scenes.
He shows also a Balzacian talent for detail of business and finance. It is want of money, of course, that is ruining the Macdermots, and in the very first spoken words of the novel we have that money need pushed before us.
“Thady,” said old Macdermot, as he sat eating stir-about and thick milk, over a great turf fire, one morning about the beginning of October, “Thady, will you be getting the money out of them born devils this time, and they owing it, some two, some three years this November, bad cess to them for tenants?”
Is not this direct authentic speech, and should not this first page of dialogue alone have convinced a novel-devouring world that a new and remarkable talent had come among them?
But it is Feemy’s love, very simple, direct, and honest, for the different human beings that are in her life that gives human basis to the whole novel. This love is never directly analysed by Trollope; it is expressed in the acts and words of the girl herself. She exists independently of her author, but technique must be at the basis of this self-revelation, and one can only wonder that so young an author, in this his first book, could move so surely. The two deep devotions of her life are for her brother Thady and for the scoundrel Ussher. Her love for her brother is something born out of the very trees and timber of her Irish home and of her Macdermot blood. She cannot but love him whatever he may do, however weak or wicked he may be, but poor Thady is never wicked, only a little weak, always crushed by the inevitable progress of harsh events.
Feemy’s hesitation between her growing passion for Ussher and her unfaltering devotion to her brother is wonderfully conveyed. Trollope draws no fancy picture of her, as, too frequently, the novelists of the period were tempted to do. Here she is in the Macdermot home:
Ussher would not come till evening, and her hair was therefore in papers — and the very papers themselves looked soiled and often used. Her black hair had been hastily fastened up with a bit of old black ribbon and a comb boasting only two teeth, and the short hairs round the bottom of her well-turned head were jagged and uneven, as though bristling with anger at the want of that attention which they required. She had no collar on, but a tippet of different material and colour from her frock was thrown over her shoulders. Her dress itself was the very picture of untidiness; it looked as though it had never seen a mangle; the sleeves drooped down, hanging despondently below her elbows; and the tuck of her frock was all ripped and torn.... There she sat, with her feet on the fender, her face on her hands and her elbows on her knees, with her thumb-worn novel lying in her lap between them.
The moment arrives when her friend is to be married, and poor Feemy makes the most of herself for the wedding and the dance that is to follow. The description of this wedding is one of the very best things in the whole of Trollope; he shows here the abundancy of vital creation that belongs only to the consecrated novelists. The other Irish figures, the two priests, Father John and Father Cullen, Pat Brady, Mr. Keegan, Denis McGovery, and the others are authentic and true. Moreover, Trollope seems to have learnt at the very beginning of the practice of his art how to permit his plot to develop without allowing the reader to suspect that life is being twisted for his dramatic benefit, one of the hardest of all a novelist’s hard lessons.
After the wedding it is Thady Macdermot who steps to the centre of the stage. There is in him a deep-seated longing to do right, but he is taunted by the agent Keegan, pursued by the wild ruffians of the hills who are always at his elbow inciting him to murder, and, above all, driven by the longing to preserve the Macdermot honour. These are now revealed as the underlying motives of the book — Thady, ruined, desperate, deserted as he is, his passion for his family honour always persisting, and Feemy, driven by her love, her two different loves for her brother and her lover.
Father John is the good genius of the affair, and in him also Trollope has created an unforgettable figure with his kindliness, his carelessness, his untidiness, his selflessness. He, seeing well the danger that lies in front of the brother and sister, tries to save Feemy by sending her to a place where she will be protected and cared for, but events march too inevitably for him. Feemy cannot abandon the only romance of her life, Thady cannot abandon his longing for revenge, Ussher cannot abandon his lust — the final catastrophe arises from the human weaknesses of these three.
After the murder the story shows certain evidences of Trollope’s immaturity. There are fine scenes when Thady is hiding in the hills — the incident between himself and the greedy old man in the cabin is one of the best things in the book — but after Thady’s surrender to justice the story becomes, for the first time, prolix. The preparations for the Assizes, the long details of Thady’s trial, the questions arising around Feemy’s evidence, these are external things and tell us nothing more about Feemy and Thady themselves. The trial itself fails to be dramatic and vivid in the way in which the earlier wedding and race-course scenes were dramatic. Feemy’s disgrace and death are too appropriate to be inevitable, and we can see the young author sighing, with satisfaction, as he lays down his pen, at the ruin and destruction that he has caused.
Nevertheless there is something in this book unique among Trollope’s writing. He was never to be quite so starkly realistic again, never again so immediately and impressively to invite comparison with the great tragedies of English fiction — Wuthering Heights, Adam Bede7 The Return of the Native; it does not seem to the reader when he closes this book that The Macdermots looks foolish in such company. The Kellys and the O’Kellys is, however, more authentic Trollope.
Trollope’s mother, who published one hundred and fourteen volumes during her lifetime, must have had a very accurate knowledge of public taste in
fiction, and we cannot doubt but that, after reading The Macdermots, she advised her son “not to be so gloomy next time”.
So we can perceive in this second book two very different impulses pulling at the author’s imagination. He will not abandon too readily that field of tragedy that seems, by right perhaps of his early unhappy life, to belong to him, but he is aware too that “there are other things in life”, that he has a vein of comedy that is very pleasant to discover, and that the one mood makes a very happy contrast with the other.
Indeed, as I have already said, there is foreshadowed in The Kellys every side of the art that Trollope was soon fully to develop, and this gives the book a quite unique interest.
Trollope was never at any period after The Macdermots a very happy contriver of plot, and here we discover for the first time one of his besetting sins, the plan of running two or even three stories side by side with the very slenderest connecting links. It seems that he began The Kellys without any very clear idea as to how it would end, determining that he would have some fun in it and some real Irish life and an attractive beautiful heroine. But the shades of poor Feemy still hung over him; her world yet pressed in upon him; and so he had two heroines, one Anty Lynch who might well have been Feemy Macdermot’s sister, and the other the lovely aristocratic Fanny Wyndham, forerunner in her grace, beauty, simplicity, and stupidity of many a Trollope heroine. Having two heroines he must have two heroes, and so at the close of Chapter II. we have this clear statement of the purpose of the book:
Both Martin and Lord Ballindine (and they were related in some distant degree, at least so always said the Kellys, and I never knew that the O’Kellys denied it) — both the young men were, at the time, anxious to get married, and both with the same somewhat mercenary views; and I have fatigued the reader with the long history of past affairs in order to imbue him, if possible, with some interest in the ways and means which they both adopted to accomplish their objects.
Trollope intended, possibly, that the link between the Kellys and the O’Kellys should be very much stronger than it turned out to be. Only once does Ballindine borrow some money from Martin, once they attend together at the same Hunt, and on one or two occasions Ballindine takes a languid interest in the villain of the piece, the desperate brother of Martin’s young lady.
But if it is true that the stories scarcely touch, it is also true that the contrast of the two worlds, the High Life and the Low Life, is admirable, and this alone should have won for the novel a host of friends, because all those who found the story of Anty’s persecution “too low for words” might revel in the delightful society of a real Earl and his attendant ladies, and those who found the society at the Castle insipid could feed their superior minds upon the grim horrors of Barry Lynch and his surroundings.
The two stories move, as did the plot of The Macdermots, upon the need of money. The Earl of Cashel needs money desperately both for himself and his son, the young ne’er-do-well Kilcullen, and the Earl’s ward, Fanny Wyndham, is immensely rich. What more natural than that Kilcullen should marry the ward? But she loves young Ballindine, who is more stupid in his wooing of her than is credible. In the Lower Life, Barry and Anty Lynch are brother and sister, and the Lynch property, to Barry’s great indignation, has been divided between them. Barry, who is a sort of cross between Quilp and Barnes Newcome and has also some horrors all his own, does everything to his sister short of murdering her (and he attempts to bribe her doctor even to that), but she clings, with a splendid dumb persistency, to her bit of property, and marries at the last her faithful, if rather commonplace, Martin.
It is not perhaps in the character of the different actors that this book excels, but rather in the admirable variety and vitality of the scenes.
All the events at Grey Abbey are delightful and foreshadow Barchester, and the Duke of Omnium, and Phineas Finn, and all the later ease and humour of Trollope’s social scenes. The Earl is something of a caricature perhaps, although, seventy years ago, Earls were allowed more dignity with less explanation than they are to-day. The Countess is an admirable sketch of a kind of a “White Queen” of a muddle-head, and all the young ladies are drawn to the Trollope pattern as though he had been doing nothing else for fifty years at least. The house party gathered together for the purpose of beguiling Kilcullen into a proposal to the heiress is capital fun, and it must have been exciting for the young author to discover how well and how easily he could do such things. The other good scene on this side of the book is the first of Trollope’s many hunting parties, when Barry Lynch kills one of Ballindine’s favourite hounds, and is expelled for doing so. How, one is compelled to ask once again, was it possible for the readers of’48 to pass this scene with indifference? Perhaps they never discovered it. And yet someone must have read the book, and that someone... No, it remains an insoluble mystery.
On the Low Life side Barry Lynch slinks forward as the greatest devil in the whole gallery of Trollope’s fiction. He was not often given to devils, and almost always when he was so given his kind heart relented before the last. But there is no relenting to Barry. One cannot but wish that he had in later years allowed himself more portraits of this kind. All the right psychology is here, but as it were subvasively, and Barry grows from his own natural wickedness rather than from Trollope’s determination to make him wicked. How good and how unlike the later Trollopian tranquillity is the scene in which Barry tries to persuade the doctor to murder his sister; and even better than this Barry’s interview with that same poor sister when he thinks that she is dying. Although there is no analysis of the modern sort, Barry is a convincing villain, because his wickedness is based on very evident weaknesses — his greed for gold, his love of drink, his mean jealousies, his muddled and bewildered brain. He creeps through the book like the slug that he is, but he is a human slug from first to last.
Neither Anty Lynch nor Martin are as successfully created as the Feemy and Thady of the earlier book. The chief merit in Anty is that she clings on to her bit of property in spite of her love for her detestable brother. This should have been agreeable to the novel reader of’48, who must have wearied heartily of the self-surrendering Mid-Victorian heroine. Anty surrenders nothing, but she sticks to her point through a sort of dumb indifference rather than any active or passionate feeling. She is afraid of her brother, and loves him too, but all quite placidly. Young Martin, who is one of the most colourless of all Trollope’s heroes, gets exactly the bride that he deserved. No, of the two heroines Fanny Wyndham is the more attractive and alive. She finds herself in the position that was to become almost a mania with the later heroines of Trollope — how to make the right choice between two gentlemen, one loved but inconvenient, the other not loved but most persistently at hand.
She behaves with much less indecision than do most of her fair sisters. She never wavers, although for an instant the reader has a horrible fear that Kilcullen is proving too clever for her. In these modern days, of course, any lady with one hundred thousand pounds all of her very own would do exactly what she pleased, and would not hesitate about doing it, but the modern reader of Trollope has again and again to check his impatience at the slow tortoise-like movements of the heroes and heroines of these books. Such minute points of honour hold lovers apart for several volumes, and one sometimes longs for a fire or an earthquake to hasten matters. But here, because there was not as yet the serial necessity, the waiting is not so very lengthy and is filled in with most admirable social comedy.
As I have said, the strength of The Kellys does not lie so much in any exceptional creation of character but rather in the “God’s Plenty” of the whole. It is delightful to see the true spirit of creative zest working with such freedom and richness.
All the minor characters are admirable — Mrs. Kelly and her daughters, Griffith the housekeeper at the Castle (a sort of minor Mrs. Slip-Slop), Mr. Armstrong the hunting parson, Colligan the doctor, and many another.
And the Hunt! Is anybody better than Trollope at
this?
And now the men settled themselves to the work, and began to strain for the pride of place, at least the younger portion of them; for in every field there are two classes of men. Those who go out to get the greatest possible amount of riding, and those whose object is to get the least. Those who go to work their nags and those who go to spare them! The former think that the excellence of the hunt depends on the horses, the latter, on the dogs. The former go to act, and the latter to see. And it is very generally the case that the least active part of the community know the most about the sport.
They, the least active above alluded to, know every high road; they consult the wind, and calculate that the fox won’t run with his nose against it; they remember this stream and this bog and avoid them; they are often at the top of eminences, and only descend when they see which way the dogs are going; they take short cuts, and lay themselves out for narrow lanes; they dislike galloping and eschew leaping; and yet, when a hard-riding man is bringing up his two hundred guinea hunter a minute or two late for the finish, covered with foam, trembling with his exertion, not a breath left in him — he’ll probably find one of these steady fellows there before him, mounted on a broken-down screw, but as cool and as fresh as when he was brought out of the stables; and what is perhaps still more amazing at the end of the day, when the hunt is canvassed after dinner, our dashing friend, who is in great doubt whether his thoroughbred steeple-chaser will ever recover his day’s work, and who has been personally administering warm mashes and bandages before he would venture to take his own boots off, finds he does not know half so much about the hunt or can tell half as correctly where the game went as our quiet-going friend, whose hack will probably be out on the following morning under the car, with the mistress and children! Such a one was Parson Armstrong; and when Lord Ballindine and most of the others went away after the hounds he coolly turned round in a different direction, crept through a broken wall into a peasant’s garden, and over a dunghill, by the cabin door into a road, and then trotted along as demurely and leisurely as though he were going to bury an old woman in the next parish.