Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  In this extension of territory lies, in fact, one of the chief importances of The Small House, because it is in these pages that we are introduced for the first time to Mr. Palliser, son of the Duke of Omnium and heroin-chief of all the later political series of novels. Trollope says himself that he did not, on this first introduction of him, realise how important a person he was to become. He plays, indeed, a sorry part in The Small House, occupying himself in an almost wordless flirtation with Griselda Grantley, now Lady Dumbello, and one of the best things in the book is her little interview with her lord concerning him. At present Palliser is only a “thin-minded, plodding, respectable man”. His glories are to come. It is in The Small House, too, that we have the first mention of one of Trollope’s dearest and best-beloved women, Lady Glencora. It is with these two figures that the Barsetshire novels and the political series are joined.

  Finally, in 1867, comes The Last Chronicle of Barset.

  Because the shilling magazines had interfered greatly with the success of novels published in numbers without additional letterpress, The Last Chronicle was brought out in monthly parts at sixpence each. We may see how far Trollope has travelled by now from the humble days of The Warden when we realise that he received £3000 for this novel.

  The Last Chronicle is to the Barsetshire series what the Götterdämmerung is to Wagner’s “Ring”; it gathers up all the motifs — the Proudie motif, the Harding motif, the Grantley motif (mingled now with the Dumbello motif), the Crawley motif, the Ailington motif, the De Courcy and the De Guest motifs, the Thorne and Dunstable motif.

  Trollope’s spirit is too unmorbid, cheerful, and humorous for any general twilight atmosphere, and yet, in the deaths of Mr. Harding and Mrs. Proudie, is there not some melancholy a little foreign to his customary mood?

  True artist that he is, he ends as he began. The Barsetshire novels have for their opening theme one of the simplest and seemingly most unimportant of arguments — shall an old man remain warden of a little insignificant institution for a dozen destitute paupers or no? — and — after giving us every aspect of human life and affairs, leading us into every grade of society, making us companions of the De Courcys and De Guests, Dumbellos and Pallisers, taking us into the councils of the political and religious great — leads us back again into another question as quiet and gentle as the first — did an obscure out-at-elbows parson of an obscure out-at-elbows village steal twenty pounds or no?

  The question of Mr. Crawley’s theft has become one of the important ones in English fiction, like the question of Emma Woodhouse’s manners, the existence of Mrs. Harris, why Esmond married his spiritual mother, whether Diana really sold the political secret, whether in sober truth it was God or Mr. Hardy who punished Jude and Sue so severely. It has been already claimed for Mr. Crawley that he is, with Mrs. Proudie and Mr. Harding, one of the three great pillars of the Barsetshire fabric, with Archdeacon Grantley, Miss Dunstable, and the Robarts family as lesser supporting pillars.

  But with Mr. Crawley, as with Mrs. Proudie and Mr. Harding, Trollope can do no wrong. In Framley Parsonage he is shown to us only as the fanatic and rebellious Job. He is exasperating, as he is meant to be. We are intended there to feel for Mrs. Crawley and admire Lucy Robarts, and we are given just as much of Mr. Crawley as will assist us to these states of mind. But in The Last Chronicle Mr. Crawley is the hero, and not only is he the hero of this particular book, but he becomes the hero of the whole series. It is essential that he should be so, for, if he fails to be dominating and memorable in this book, the whole series, on its spiritual side, falls down.

  But dominating and memorable he is. For the first hundred pages, until the Bishop “sends his angel”, we have the Mr. Crawley of the earlier book, fanatical, rebellious, selfish in his concentration on his wrongs, preventing, nay, forbidding, our sympathy. Then in the glorious interview with Mr. Thumble and the equally glorious letter to the Bishop (the variety, life, and vigour of the letters in Trollope!) he steps out as a new completed man. He has, beyond his fanaticism, a courage that is human and a humour that is as genuine as it is grim. From this moment Trollope is never at fault. Mr. Crawley’s walk into Barchester, his interview with Mrs. Proudie and her Bishop (“Madam,” said Mr. Crawley, “you should not interfere in these matters. You simply debase your husband’s high office. The distaff were more fitting for you. My lord, good morning”), his last appearance in his pulpit, his talk to his wife when he confesses to his madness, his dignity when he knows that he is cleared, his final acceptance of St. Ewolds — never for an instant does Trollope waver. How difficult this delicate adjustment between the man’s fanaticism and his true spirituality, his love for his wife and his family and his harshness to them, between his stupid pride and his manly dignity, between his religion and his conceit, his poverty and his independence!

  One’s only criticism of the Crawley affair is that, as was now becoming customary, its author is too dilatory. Where would The Last Chronicle be had Mrs. Arabin not been travelling in Italy? (How characteristic, by the way, it is that it should be this idiot of a woman, our old tear-pelting Eleanor Harding, who should be responsible for the whole trouble!) But novelists must be permitted their arbitrary coincidences, or where indeed would most of the world’s best novels be?

  For the rest, Mr. Crawley is The Last Chronicle, and The Last Chronicle is Mr. Crawley. Of Johnny Eames in London, Miss Madalina Demolino, Miss Van Siever and the pictures of Mr. Conway Dalrymple I will say nothing. They are among the poorest things in all Trollope. Mr. Toogood is admirable, and Sir Raffle Buffle is amusing, although he is more patient with Eames (who grows gradually too big for his boots) than Eames deserves.

  There is, for one reader at least, too much of Lily Dale and too much altogether of London. There are three superb letters, one written by Dr. Proudie to Mr. Crawley, one written by Mr. Crawley to Dr. Proudie, and one written by Lady Julia De Guest to Johnny Eames.

  Dr. Proudie’s shame touches us, but seems perhaps a little melodramatically excessive.

  In the death of Mrs. Proudie I do not believe at all. It may be that I have heard too often the story of the Bishops in the Athenaeum, who, overheard wishing Mrs. Proudie dead, caused Trollope to kill her. Certainly she dies with a lightning unexpectedness and in a strange manner. Of a weak heart? When did Mrs. Proudie have a weak heart, and if she had, is a quarrel with the Bishop going to affect it?

  No, she is still haunting the cloisters of Barchester, scolding Mrs. Quiverful for the new addition to her family; confronting Mrs. Grantley in her own house with an implication as to Lady Dumbello’s virtue; rejoicing in her London reception at which there will be only lemonade and biscuits; accusing Mrs. Thorne of presumptuous impertinence for giving a reception at all; flushing at the murmured reminder (Mrs. Grantley or Lady Lufton is the reminder) of her old arch-enemy Mr. Slope; instituting Sabbath schools here, there, and everywhere; marrying her daughters as best she may; keeping her Bishop, by means of short commons and the inevitable bed-chamber hour, in his true place, loving him nevertheless in her own queer, dry, savage fashion.

  No, Mrs. Proudie will never die!

  With the final pages of The Lust Chronicle Trollope ended his Barsetshire records. In some of the other novels, and especially in The Claverings, there is mention of Barchester and its county, but Barchester was never to be a main background for any of his men and women again.

  With these six books he has definitely secured his kingdom. However enthusiastically one admirer or another may push forward the claims of this novel or that, the Barchester sequence remains, and always will remain, as his principal achievement.

  Why is this? As individual works their supremacy can be plausibly challenged. Orley Farm, The Claverings, Phineas Finn and its sequel, each can be claimed, with some reason behind the claim, to be Trollope’s finest novel, and I have heard often enough some favourite pressed forward as worth “all the Barchester books put together”. The Eustace Diamonds, Can You Forgive Her? The Belton
Estate, Ayala’s Angel, The Duke’s Children — there has never been an English novelist who produced so many novels on an equally fine level as did Trollope.

  But the result is always the same. Without the Barsetshire series the high claims made now for Trollope could not possibly for a moment be sustained. For he has achieved in this series, and in this series only, an especial success allowed to very few novelists in any country at any time — he has created a world.

  In our time Thomas Hardy alone has done this, and if we think of all the novelists in history, how many others are there? Balzac supremely, and after him Zola in France, Thackeray and Jane Austen among our greater novelists, Henry Kingsley, Francis Marion Crawford among our smaller.

  This particular achievement is something that has to do with geography and furniture as well as with the souls and bodies of men. It has to do with walled gardens and country lanes, with desolate spaces and the warm lighted streets of country towns, with roadmaps and rivers, bays and islands, and then, within these, with all the paraphernalia of daily life, with tables and chairs, pictures on the walls, broad stone staircases and little crooked ones, meals and nurseries, baths and horses, the country postman and the bells of the country church.

  No detail is too small and every detail is related. A world must be created in which we, the spectators, move as freely and as idly, according to our will, as the actors themselves.

  Who that has read Trollope has not made his own map of Barsetshire and walked therein with critical eye, accusing the creator himself of this oversight and that inaccuracy?

  Mr. Michael Sadleir has discovered Trollope’s own map and it is in his book for anyone to see. But it is a little dim and distant, and I recommend one made by an ardent Barsetshire man, Father Ronald Knox, who, puzzled by many of Trollope’s little inaccuracies, has nevertheless fashioned things closely enough for most of us. There are assuredly certain questions that we should like to have answered. As, for instance, some explanation of the extraordinary route taken by Mark Robarts’s letter to his wife, or again the exact distance of Courcy from Barchester, or — most fascinating of all — why was Caleb Oriel compelled to sleep at Framley when he was only eight miles from home? and is it Plumstead or Plumpstead, Grantly or Grantley, Fillgrave or Filgrave?

  No matter. These are not the important things. Every chronicler has erred at one time or another in order to give his commentators something to do.

  It is this small square of territory that Trollope has given to us. With what sort of human histories and adventures has he filled it? On what principal theme does the whole creation turn?

  The answer is clear enough. The Barsetshire epic is a clerical epic, although many other worlds are included in the general pattern. If the clergy in these books fail as true pictures of real life, then the books themselves fail. How, after these years, do these clerical figures stand? Do they still honestly exist for us, and can we, after reading these books, declare that, beyond question, we have here been given the clerical world of Mid-Victorian England in its full circumference, nothing extenuated, nothing omitted?

  First, there is Trollope’s own answer to these questions.

  On the last page of The Last Chronicle he makes his defence.

  Before I take my leave of the diocese of Barsetshire for ever, which I propose to do in the succeeding paragraph, I desire to be allowed to say one word of apology for myself, in answer to those who have accused me — always without bitterness and generally with tenderness — of having forgotten, in writing of clergymen, the first and foremost characteristic of the ordinary English clergyman’s life. I have described many clergymen, they say, but have spoken of them all as though their professional duties, their high calling, their daily workings for the good of those around them, were matters of no moment either to me or, in my opinion, to themselves. I would plead, in answer to this that my object has been to paint the social and not the professional lives of clergymen; and that I have been led to do so, firstly, by a feeling that no men affect more strongly, by their own character, the society of those around than do country clergymen, so, therefore, their social habits have been worth the labour necessary for painting them; and secondly, by a feeling that though I, as a novelist, may feel myself entitled to write of clergymen out of their pulpits, as I may also write of lawyers and doctors, I have no such liberty to write of them in their pulpits. When I have done so, if I have done so, I have so far transgressed. There are those who have told me that I have made all my clergymen bad, and none good. I must venture to hint to such judges that they have taught their eyes to love a colouring higher than nature justifies.... Had I written an epic about clergymen, I would have taken St. Paul for my model; but describing, as I have endeavoured to do, such clergymen as I see around me, I could not venture to be transcendental. For myself I can only say that I shall always be happy to sit, when allowed to do so, at the table of Archdeacon Grantly, to walk through the High Street of Barchester arm in arm with Mr. Robarts of Framley and to stand alone and shed a tear beneath the modest black stone in the north transept of the cathedral on which is inscribed the name of Septimus Harding.

  In these days of impersonal fiction, when the author is allowed as much conscious active presence as a pallid Freudian complex, such a confession on the part of a novelist must be considered very shocking, and for a novelist to shed a tear beside the tomb of one of his own characters is to disgrace all the literary axioms of modern artistic theory. But there is, nevertheless, in this confession something very illuminating.

  Is there not in that phrase of his “a colouring higher than nature justifies” the final statement of everything that Trollope was trying for, and can we not now understand why Hawthorne’s famous phrase concerning the novels— “solid, substantial, written in the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of” — should have pleased this marvellously modest author as did none other?

  During his lifetime he was applauded again and again for the astonishing fidelity of his clerical pictures, and it gave him a kind of schoolboy pleasure to protest that he had never lived in a Cathedral Close nor been intimate with Archdeacons. To this Leslie Stephen has remarked that there was nothing very odd about it, and that he supposes that Archdeacon Grantley was, behind his gaiters, even as other men of other professions.

  Here, in fact, we have the begging of the whole question. After we have listened to Trollope’s own defence, do we feel that criticism has been silenced and that he has given us his world in full and with nothing (save the franker realisms which his period and his own training forbade him) omitted?

  The answer, I think, must be that criticism has not been entirely silenced. Wonderful true pictures of a section of human life though they are, the Barsetshire novels are not universal as Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Le Rouge et le Noir, Illusions Perdues, The Return of the Native are universal. They are not universal because, in the first place, they do not deal in universal ideas, and, in the second place, because they convey no sense of the poetical mysticism that lies at the heart of all human life.

  This question of universal ideas can be very hotly argued. What ideas, you may say, are more universal than those of birth and death, of self-sacrifice, loyalty, and fidelity, and do not the Barsetshire novels deal with these when they describe, to take one or two instances out of many, the struggle in Mr. Harding’s soul about his duty, Mark Robarts’s treachery to his divine office, Crawley’s submission to legal authority, Crosbie’s betrayal of his plighted word? Yes, but universal ideas must go behind these universal instances. There must be a challenge to the whole general material and spiritual world in the conduct of the single character. When the Master of Ravenswood rides his horse across the quaking sands all the horizon is darkened; when Anna throws herself beneath the
wheels of the train all morality is challenged; all nature is attentive when the Reddleman plays his dice by the light of the fireflies; the escape of the lover in the Chartreuse de Parme is the escape of all the lovers in the world.

  More than that. In the great novels of the world old rooted ideas take new growth. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov’s murder of the old woman tears up the old idea of social obligation from its bed and plants it in fresh soil where it will push forward with fresh life. The tragedies of King Lear or Père Goriot create anew all the old problem of family love; when the young Karamazov is searched by the police our hearts bleed for all oppressed and lonely humanity.

  We are not asking here that Trollope should supply us with new arguments in dogmatic theology. There are few examples of fiction more tiresome than the novel of dogmatic religion, as Yeast and Daniel Deronda and Robert Elsmere have sufficiently proved to us. Trollope has in fact in nothing shown us more his ever-abiding good sense than in his avoidance of clerical dogma; Mrs. Proudie’s Low Church missionising is as close to that as he will take us.

  But he is tied both by the limitations of his talent and the limitations of his period to a simple and almost childish treatment of ideas. It is not true that he has not given us true portraits of good and spiritual clergymen — as he himself says, the figures of Septimus Harding, of Mark Robarts, of Mr. Oriel, of Mr. Crawley are answer sufficient to that charge — but these men are moved by emotions that are, in themselves, static. When we are sorry for Mr. Harding’s banishment from Hiram’s we are sorry for Mr. Harding, we do not sympathise, as we do when we follow Père Goriot’s history, with some grief and loneliness that is universal. We are excited as to whether or no Mr. Crawley has stolen the cheque, but his fate is not a general fate as is the death of Ivan Ivanovitch, or the shabby ruin of Emma Bovary, or the sad loneliness of Tess.