by Hugh Walpole
No, the whole of Trollope is in this book, by no means matured nor capable, as yet, of its fullest flights; but I think it may truly be said that if a reader try The Kellys and find it tiresome, then Trollope is not for him.
La Vendée, Trollope’s solitary historical novel, is a queer affair. In the Autobiography there are these words of criticism:
The story is certainly inferior to those which had gone before; — chiefly because I knew accurately the life of the people in Ireland, and knew, in truth, nothing of life in the La Vendée country, and also because the facts of the present time came more within the limits of my powers of story-telling than those of past years. But I read the book the other day, and am not ashamed of it. The conception as to the feeling of the people is, I think, true; the characters are distinct; and the tale is not dull. As far as I can remember, this morsel of criticism is the only one that was ever written on the book.
Nor do I think that there has been a word of criticism of it from that day to this. There are some references to it in Mr. Escott’s Life, but they are scarcely critical; all the prominent Trollope authorities pass it over completely: Sir Leslie Stephen, Mr. Saintsbury, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. Charles Whibley — not one of them, with the exception of Mr. Sadleir, has a word for or against it. Nor has it, it appears, been reprinted since the “Ward Lock” edition of the ‘sixties.
It was published in 1850 when the historical novel in England was dominated by Harrison Ainsworth and Bulwer Lytton.
There have been since Scott very few fine historical novels in English — Henry Esmond, The Cloister and the Hearth, The Scarlet Letter, John Inglesant, Kidnapped and Catriona, The Arrow of Gold, and for their unflagging narrative power some of the stories of Mr. Stanley Weyman. It seems that the historical novel, to justify its struggling hybrid form, must do one of three things: revive, as does Esmond, the manners and customs of its period not only accurately but beautifully; or state, as does John Inglesant, a spiritual problem which is eternal and belongs to every age; or have a narrative zest so authoritative that it carries the reader over the difficulties of the genre without his realising them. Sometimes, as in Redgauntlet and The Cloister and the Hearth, all these aims are achieved. Trollope, in his solitary historical novel, is very humble. He has no thought but to give a clear and accurate account of the Royalist movement in La Vendée, but because he is a true novelist and is interested in character creation before everything else, he cannot help but blow breath into at least some of his people, and because he has also a real narrative gift his story becomes at times most genuinely exciting.
There is indeed in one character, the coward Adolphe Denot, a very remarkable figure, one of the most memorable in Trollope’s long gallery, and he is the more memorable because of all the human beings alive on this earth a coward must have been the most contemptible and the least readily understood by a man of Trollope’s temperament. Throughout the book he treats Denot with wonderful kindliness and charity.
Had Denot been the work of a modern novelist he would have been compelled to yield to a very drastic course of psycho-analysis. There is no psychoanalysis in Trollope’s methods; he reveals Denot entirely by his own words and actions, never himself commenting on them.
Whereas a good deal of the book is pedestrian and more sentimental than is wise, there is one scene that is quite terrific. Denot, mad at his rejection by Agatha Larochejaquelin, the most beautiful of all the Royalist t women, goes over to the Republicans and leads a band of soldiers under Santerre, the Republican leader, to the Château where Agatha is living. The inhabitants of the Château, the old marquis, Agatha, the young heir, the servants of the Château, are all captured and are instantly to be shot. The servants, screaming and shrieking, are put up in a row against the garden wall and Santerre leans out of the window to give the order to fire; some strain of pity holds him back and the sentence is, for the night at least, repealed. They are all boxed, in together there: the ancient marquis and the boy, typically proud and defiant; Agatha at the mercy of Denot, now crazy with lust, desire for revenge and self-shame; and the rough and brutal Santerre, puzzled dimly by his recent soft-heartedness but holding with a kind of dumb superstition to his given word.
This is the fine scene of the book, fine not so much for its dramatic power as because its interest arises out of its psychology. Denot, Santerre, and Agatha are in this one scene children of all time, belonging to no especial country or period, and Trollope understands and sympathises with them all.
It is the true strain of human sympathy running through the book that makes it memorable. Trollope is Royalist, stoutly, in his feeling, but he is able to paint a picture of Robespierre that is not violently one-sided, and he is never dogmatic in his judgements.
Above all, at a time when Bulwer and Ainsworth were turning the historical novel into a thing of tinsel and coloured paper, it was remarkable that a young unknown novelist should be able to produce anything as sturdily honest and undecorated as this. There is too much sentimentality of course, especially when one of the heroes carries one of the heroines (there are a rather confusing number of both) in her nightdress out of a burning house, but there is no nonsense about it anywhere; the reader on closing the book is conscious of three things: that he knows very much more, in all probability, about the movement in La Vendée than he did before, that one character and one scene are added unforgettably to his experience, and that his respect for Trollope as a kindly, tolerant observer of human nature is most happily confirmed.
The young novelist, then, with these three books is launched. Not a ripple of interest has been stirred by their publication on the literary waters, but for himself in the writing of them he has learnt a number of things, and this — most surely, of all — that he is, by the grace of God, a born and intended novelist.
CHAPTER III. BARSETSHIRE
IN the course of my Post Office job I visited Salisbury, and while wandering there one midsummer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral I conceived the story of The Warden — from whence came that series of novels of which Barchester, with its bishops, deans, and archdeacons, was the central site.... On the 29th of July 1853 — having been then two years without having made any literary effort — I began The Warden at Tenbury in Worcestershire. It was then more than ten months since I had stood for an hour on the little bridge in Salisbury, and had made out to my own satisfaction the spot on which Hiram’s Hospital should stand. Certainly no work that I ever did took up so much of my thoughts. On this occasion I did no more than write the first chapter, even if so much.... It was not till the end of 1852 that I recommenced it, and it was in the autumn of 1853 that I finished the work. It was only one small volume, and in later days would have been completed in six weeks, or in two months at the longest if other work had pressed. On looking at the title-page, I find that it was not published till 1855.
In these words the Autobiography records the event that was to mark the turning-point of Anthony Trollope’s life.
In considering the Barsetshire novels as a whole — the purpose of this chapter — the first remark to make is that it was not as a whole that they were considered by their author.
They grew out of this first small incident of the government of Hiram’s Hospital for several reasons, the first that the public liked them, the second that the critics liked them, the third and overwhelmingly important one that Trollope himself liked them — nay, not merely liked them but revelled in them with all the tumultuous joy and exuberance of a creator who has at last, after several uncertain ventures, found his own absolute kingdom.
The Warden, however, enjoyed its original success with its own immediate generation for all the reasons that seem to our own period damaging and tiresome.
A review, quoted with obvious pride by the publishers at the beginning of the first edition of Barchester Towers, proves that very conclusively.
In the story of The Warden [says the Literary Gazette] a slightly disguised fiction presents many facts t
hat have recently been made public regarding the alienation of old ecclesiastical endowments, and the turning of the funds of almshouses and hospitals to other uses than the maintenance of the poor. Under the fictitious name of Barchester Hospital, many of the evils that have been brought to light of Rochester and Dulwich and St. Cross and elsewhere are exposed. The book will be useful for strengthening that public feeling which is necessary for successful attempts to remove long-established abuses.
In those days, as in these, reviewers had their careless moments, but one would have supposed that Hiram’s Hospital stands out with sufficient prominence in The Warden for its name to be remembered correctly. And no word of Archdeacon Grantley, Mr. Harding, the old Bishop! There was apparently no consciousness as yet that a new and astonishing creator of human beings had arrived. It was as propaganda that The Warden won its audience, and it was because of these social abuses, it is now amusing to realise, that the whole country of Barsetshire with its cathedral city, its villages, its country houses, its lanes and fields, entered into an immortal existence.
Trollope in fact shows himself in this book as a very uncertain artist. He is still hesitating in the shadows of that dangerous ground beloved of the Victorian minor novelist, the country of caricature, the country of the Lovers and the Levers, the Theodore Hooks, and on occasion of greater men.
The thunderings of the “Jupiter”, the rather schoolboy imitations of Carlyle, the excited personal asides of the author, shock the reader into constant suspicions of the fable and the reality of the actors.
On the other hand, The Warden is essential to every lover of Trollope because it is in these pages that he meets for the first time two of the great figures in English fiction, Mr. Harding and Archdeacon Grantley. Mr. Harding holds the Barchester novels together as does none other of the Trollope characters. He is the only figure who appears in actual person in every one of the six chronicles. When the final page of the Last Chronicle is turned and the reader looks back over that marvellous expanse of country, it is the gentle ‘celloplaying, courageous, slightly ironical, tender creation of Mr. Harding that hovers, as a kind of symbol of that manifested world, over the scene. With every aspect of the Barchester life he has been brought into contact, from the rough bullying worldliness of his son-in-law, the dominating autocracy of his bishop’s wife, the bigoted aristocracy of De Courcy Castle to the child companionship of his granddaughter Posy and the haughty tinsel splendour of Adolphus Crosbie.
We may say, indeed, that his rejection first of Hiram’s and then of the glories of the Deanery states the theme for the whole of the Barsetshire symphony. By this list every character in the six books is finally judged. He is Trollope’s grandest gentleman.
It may be suggested also that it is in The Warden that Archdeacon Grantley is to be found in his purest essence. His personality is expanded and developed in the later books, but never again is he so completely revealed as in his truculent commanding but in some fashion generous dealings with his son-in-law, and when, at last, he clones his study door and draws his Rabelais from its secret hiding-place we grant him the satisfied sigh of completed revelation. We shall never, in after event, know him better than now.
For the rest The Warden suffers from Trollope’s most tiresome heroine, and that is saying much. Eleanor Harding, afterwards Bold, afterwards Arabin (and that she receives at last a perfect stick of a husband is only her fitting reward), cries and sobs her way through The Warden until we wonder that she is not, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, almost drowned in her own tears. She is to weep plentifully again in Barchester Towers, but there, praise be, she has to yield her pride of place to sterner women, the Signora Neroni and Mrs. Proudie.
The old men of Hiram’s are admirable, and reveal the extraordinary overflowing talent of the major Victorian novelists for minor characters.
Finally, there was enough strength and power in this book to show Trollope that he could now gallantly go forward — and go forward gallantly he does! He goes forward to what is beyond question his most famous work.
Barchester Towers was published in May 1857, and at once, by the curious intuition that tells a novelist that he has “arrived”, he knew that he would in the future be “read”. He had no intention as yet of abandoning his regular Post Office work, but novel writing would now be to him a serious and important element in his livelihood.
He had to encounter some difficulties with Longman’s, his publishers, which are evidence of the Victorian mind. The reader of the manuscript offered one or two surprising judgements!
Viewed as a whole the work is inferior to The Warden.
.. Plot there is none.... The grand defect of the work, I think, as a work of art is the low-mindedness and vulgarity of the chief actors. There is hardly a “lady” or “gentleman” among them. Such a bishop and his wife as Dr and Mrs. Proudie have certainly not appeared in our time, and prebendary doctor Stanhope’s lovely daughter, who is separated from her husband — an Italian brute who has crippled her for life — is a most repulsive, exaggerated, and unnatural character.... It would be quite possible to compress the three volumes into one without much detriment to the whole.
And to understand the full extent to which Victorian prudery could run, observe Trollope writing to his publishers two months before the book’s publication:
At page 93 by all means put out “foul breathing”, and page 97 alter “fat stomach” to “deep chest” if the printing will now allow it.
Nor did the book at once find favour. In August 1857 Trollope is writing to his publishers:
While you were from town I got a letter from your firm not saying much about the sale of Barchester Towers, while the letter just received, though it gives no bad news, gives none that are good. From this I may imagine that you do not consider the sale satisfactory.
Nevertheless it was with Barchester Towers that he turned his difficult corner, and for the next ten years he was to ride forward accompanied with every kind of triumph.
What is it that gives Barchester Towers its unique place amongst Trollope’s novels? It is not, it may be argued, his greatest. The Last Chronicle, Framley Parsonage, Orley Farm, have all their champions. It has in it no episode as tragically moving as Mr. Crawley’s visit to Barchester in The Last Chronicle, nothing as dramatic as the trial in Orley Farm, as subtly true as Lady Glencora’s relations with her husband in Can You Forgive Her?, as naturally engaging as the situation of the sisters in Ayala’s Angel.
Its scheme is of the slenderest, Mr. Slope, masterly though he is, not far removed from caricature, and certain of the scenes, like the tilting at the quintain in the Ullathorne sports, not far removed from Lever’s tomboy antics, nevertheless it remains as perhaps the type novel of all the Trollope family. It is the one book of them all that you would give to someone who said to you: “Now what is Trollope really like? What is the point about Trollope?”
It has, in the first place, no longueurs. Its author is not yet writing for serial publication, has not yet acquired that fatal facility of easy, natural, but purposeless dialogue. If the Longman reader considered that Barchester Towers could be compressed into one volume, what would he have had to say in after years to He Knew he was Right and Is he Popenjoy? and The American Senator?
Secondly, this book introduces and exults over one of the greatest figures in the Barsetshire Chronicles — Mrs. Proudie.
Thirdly, the theme, slender though it is, is one eternally attractive — the theme of the biter bit, the bully bullied, the war between tyrants. Every reader in the world has been in turn both Dr. Proudie and Mrs. Proudie, and Mr. Slope is the Aunt Sally of every private backyard.
But principally Barchester Towers is Trollope’s most popular book because in it he is, from the first page to the last, in glorious high spirits. It would be untrue to say that there is no kindness nor gentleness in the book; that would be as much as to imply that Mr. Harding were not present in it — but Trollope’s good spirits are constant here as they are i
n no other work of his, constant but controlled, bending to the demands of creation, felt rather than heard. There is nothing that the reader likes better than to realise the author rejoicing in his strength, conscious of his great powers, having them at his hand, judging their proper use, revelling in his awareness.
This is the first time that Trollope has all his forces completely in control — the first, and we are inclined to say the last. He was afterwards to do greater things, but nothing again so perfectly rounded.
But of course Mrs. Proudie is sufficient of herself to ensure a comparative immortality for any novel.
Is it fanciful to see her in the first place as a Sir Rowland Hill (afterwards Sir Raffle Buffle) in petticoats? She is one of the three great pillars of the Barset history, Mr. Harding and Mr. Crawley being the other two. She is not, as her creator is careful to emphasise, a bad woman. She can be touched by the prayers of Mrs. Quiverful, and she loves even while she bullies her lord but not her master. She is immortal because she is real both as type and as individual. She always rings true. Trollope has not to ask, as he too often does about other of his creations — now is that what they would be doing? would they be saying this or that? She is greater than he knows.
She is great also because she expresses triumphantly Trollope’s deep loathing of tyranny, oppression, unfair dealing, and it is a wonderful witness to his powers that, hating as he does everything for which she stands, he never caricatures her personality, laughs with her as well as at her, and feels tenderly for her at the last. In this at least he is greater than his contemporaries Thackeray and Dickens, His wise, balanced estimate of her allows us our own freedom of judgement. We do not hate her, because her creator does not, and so we realise her as we can never realise anyone hated by us.