by Hugh Walpole
“I sent for you, Lord George, because I did not like the idea of parting with you for ever without one word of adieu.”
“You are going to tear yourself away — are you?”
“I am going to Portray on Monday.”
“And never coming back any more? You’ll be up here before the season is over with fifty more wonderful schemes in your little head. So Lord Fawn is done with, is he?”
“I have told Lord Fawn that nothing shall induce me ever to see him again.”
“And Cousin Frank?’
“My cousin attends me down to Scotland.”
“Oh — h. That makes it altogether another thing. He attends you down to Scotland, does he? Does Mr. Emilius go too?”
“I believe you are trying to insult me, sir.”
“You can’t expect but what a man should be a little jealous, when he has been so completely cut out himself.
There was a time, you know, when even Cousin Frank wasn’t a better fellow than myself.”
“Much you thought about it, Lord George.”
“Well — I did. I thought about it a good deal, my lady. And I liked the idea of it very much.” Lizzie pricked up her ears. In spite of all his harshness, could it be that he should be the Corsair still? “I am a rambling, uneasy, ill-to-do sort of man; but still I thought about it. You are pretty, you know — uncommonly pretty.” —
“Don’t, Lord George.”
“And I’ll acknowledge that the income goes for much. I suppose that’s real at any rate?”
“Well, I hope so. Of course it s real. And so is the prettiness, Lord George — if there is any.”
I never doubted that, Lady Eustace. But when it came to my thinking that you had stolen the diamonds, and you thinking that I had stolen the box — ! I’m not a man to stand on trifles but, by George, it wouldn’t do then.”
“Who wanted it to do?” said Lizzie. “Go away. You are very unkind to me. I hope I may never see you again. I believe that you care more for that odious vulgar woman downstairs than you do for anybody else in the world.”
“Ah dear! I have known her for many years, Lizzie, and that both covers and discovers many faults. One learns to know how bad one’s old friends are, but then one forgives them, because they are old friends.”
“You can’t forgive me because I’m bad, and only a new friend.”
“Yes, I will. I forgive you all, and hope you may do well yet. If I give you one bit of advice at parting it is to caution you against being clever when there is nothing to get by it.”
“I ain’t clever at all,” said Lizzie, beginning to whimper.
“Good-bye, my dear.”
“Good-bye,” said Lizzie. He took her hand in one of his; patted her on the head with the other, as though she had been a child, and then left her.
The Corsair was a blackguard, he would cheat you as soon as look at you, but there were just one or two things that “wouldn’t do.”
But for Lizzie there was nothing that “wouldn’t do” and even at that, worst fault of all in the Corsair’s eyes, “she wasn’t clever.”
Lizzie Eustace, indeed, has no redeeming point anywhere — she is stupid, vain, selfish, greedy, sensual, false, common, cowardly; and then — although he can give us no point to admire, not even the back-to-the-wall courage of a Becky Sharp or the pitiful longing for romance of an Emma Bovary — so complete is the comic spirit with which he regards her that he can lead us with him to a sort of kindly indulgence. Perhaps no other British novelist, save possibly Fielding, could have achieved this humorous compassion. Richardson would have moralised, Jane Austen condemned, Dickens and Thackeray shown indignation, George Eliot philosophised, Meredith romanticised, Hardy have blamed the Deity, and the novelist of our own day have seen a thousand Freudian complexes.
But Trollope smiles and, like his Corsair, pats her on the head “as though she had been a child”, and thus leaves her.
There are many other excellent things in The Eustace Diamonds. Lord Fawn is an admirable nincompoop, and all the Fawn family are pleasantly alive. The good heroine, Lucy Morris, is by no means so irritating as good heroines usually are, and bears her misfortunes, showered on her by her faithless (and I fear worthless) lover, with proper spirit and courage. Her scene with Lord Fawn when he has insulted her lover is finely done, and proves her first cousin to Lucy Robarts.
Then the underworld of thieves, policemen, defaulting serving maids is excellent, as always with Trollope. Major Mackintosh deserves a special word of praise. Good for him that he has his wife and seven children waiting for him at home! One can feel him trembling at the touch of Lizzie’s hand, and one is not surprised that at the end of the interview, he should have “escaped rather quickly from the room”.
The smart world too, that plays chorus to the adventures of the diamond, is excellently sketched. Lady Glencora is here only in the background, but she is alive with every word that she speaks. The reader who knows what is to come must shudder as he sees poor Mr. Bonteen so casually unaware of the catastrophe that, hand in hand with Lizzie Eustace, is already approaching him. Well for him had he never known of her existence!
An excellent book, one of the first comedies in the ranks of the English novel, and it is a strange emphasis on some of the unaccountable omissions in modern publishing that this novel should have been now for many years out of print and unobtainable.
Less excellent from every point of view is Can You Forgive Her?
This is the novel formed on the comedy The Noble Jilt written by Trollope in 1850. The only record of its performance occurs in The Eustace Diamonds when Mrs. Carbuncle goes to see it and discusses its probabilities. The story appeared in twenty shilling numbers from August 1863, and the first volume had illustrations by “Phiz”.
Here is an obvious case of a sub-plot swallowing the principal story. The answer of any reader who has finished the book as to whether he forgives Alice Vavasour or no must be that she is neither interesting enough nor alive enough for forgiveness or nonforgiveness to matter in the slightest. She is one of the stickiest and most stupid in all the ranks of Trollope’s heroines, and her lovers are as sticky as she.
The Trollope reader may force himself to submit to this constant recurrence of the favourite theme, the lover hesitating between two suitors; but when, as on this occasion, the lady in question is completely unattractive and has no reasons of any interest for refusing in alternate chapters the stupidly persistent gentlemen, he may be forgiven his exasperation. The honest John Grey (why is John so fatal a name for a hero?) is revolting in his dull integrity, and George Vavasour, the villain with the horrible scar, is revolting in his stupidity, and Alice Vavasour is revolting in her snobbery, selfish indecisions, and complete lack of charm.
There is, moreover, a sub-sub-plot which is one of the poorest ever fashioned by its author. Trollope himself didn’t think so:
The humorous characters [he considers] which are also taken from the play — a buxom widow who with her eyes open chooses the most scampish of two selfish suitors because he is the better looking — are well done. Mrs. Greenow between Captain Bellfield and Mr. Cheesacre is very good — as far as the fun of novels is.
I’m afraid that “Mrs. Greenow between Captain Bellfield and Mr. Cheesacre” isn’t fun at all, even “as far as the fun of novels is”. All the Greenow chapters belong to the Theodore Hook, Lover, and Lever world, a world that is as unreal in its Harlequinade spirits to our modern sense as the traditional habits of the Druids. Nothing is odder in the novels of Trollope than the cheek-by-jowl intimacy of that old dead horse-play world and the modern vision and sense of character. There is something of this in the juxtaposition of the later development of Mr. Slope which is distinctly Leverish, and the astonishing modernity of the Stanhope family who belong absolutely to the sarcastic touch of Miss Rose Macaulay or Mr. Aldous Huxley.
So here Mrs. Greenow and her lovers are incredible beside the delicacy of Lady Glencora and Mr. Palliser. Trol
lope was right, I think, when he boasted that these two characters showed the finest consistent development of any of his human figures. Mrs. Proudie, Mr. Crawley, Mr. Chaffenbrass, and others strike our memory with more conscious force, but they are static in their creation.
Trollope, speaking of his two favourites in the Autobiography, sounds almost the note of a satisfied deity, so proud is he of his handiwork here, and yet, as always, there is modesty within his pleasure:
By no amount of description or asseveration could I succeed in making any reader understand how much these characters with their belongings have been to me in my later life.... Plantagenet Palliser I think to be a very noble gentleman — such a one as justifies to the nation the seeming anomaly of an hereditary peerage and of primogeniture. His wife is in all respects very inferior to him; but she too has, or has been intended to have, beneath the thin stratum of her follies, a basis of good principle....
I fancy that the modern reader will not agree that Lady Glencora is “in all respects very inferior to her husband”. Palliser is, in this novel at least, a good deal of a stick, although in one delightful interview with his wife, when he has every reason for maddened jealousy, he behaves with excellent wise dignity.
Lady Glencora is the essence of all that Trollope found adorable in woman. She is small of stature (the tall women of his novels are either good-natured males like Miss Dunstable or stupid beauties like Griselda Grantley), she is beautiful, she is gay, a lively “rattle” but no fool, a lady with plenty of dignity when she wishes, much spirit and fire and fun, a heart, and not too heavily weighted down with principles. In one reader’s opinion at least he succeeded in creating in Lady Glencora what he failed to create in Lily Dale.
In Can You Forgive Her? she nearly elopes with Burgo Fitzgerald, but is saved by Victorian principles and the birth of a child. Burgo is of the Steerforth type; he has bright blue eyes, a perfect figure, a personality of such charm that as he passes barmen drop their beer and stare, and he gives half-crowns to “unfortunates”. For the rest he is worthless and lazy.
It is a tribute to Trollope’s wisdom that while the Glencora of Can You Forgive Her? might very easily be tempted by the charms of Burgo Fitzgerald, the Glencora (now Duchess of Omnium) of The Prime Minister would see his beauty but be in no danger from it.
Very touching and simply defined is the sense of loneliness and isolation that at this stage of their married life both Glencora and Palliser feel. There is a nobility in Trollope’s silences, felt through the inconsequent chatter of so many of his pages, that is exceedingly impressive. No man knew better than he what the fear of loneliness could be, and there are few of his more serious characters who do not know it too.
For the rest, the only other thing to notice about Can You Forgive Her? is that it contains some charming and, for Trollope, unusually poetical descriptions of scenery, the Westmorland country above Haweswater being the background for much of the Vavasour history. —
With Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux (although one novel was published five years before the other they form together one continuous narrative) we enter into the proper world of politics.
Why is it that the political novel is so difficult to write? The world of journalism is, in its daily sensations, as ephemeral as the world of politics, but no political novel has yet been written that approaches the convincing power and truth of Pendennis. The world of trade does not seem at first view an attractive subject for the novelist, but no political novel rivals for drama and interest The Old Wives’ Tale. The world of bookmakers and racing stables is not apparently alluring — where is the political novel of the high order of Esther Waters? No political novel written by Trollope or anyone else is so excellent as Barchester Towers — but are the clergy clearly better subjects for fiction than politicians?
The answer to all these questions may lie in the word Disraeli, but I do not think that it does. What is Disraeli’s best political novel? Coningsby perhaps, and a very brilliant and amusing novel it is. The politics in it are lively and, allowing for the Disraeli mirage, convincing, but is it not because Disraeli happened to be interested in politics that we are interested, not at all because there is anything interesting in the politics themselves?
The Disraeli novels give us the shudder of electric light upon plush, but so bright is the flare, so iridescent the plush, that our attention is held. We are aware, too, that behind these works is the personality of a very great man, a personality that, as the years pass, does not diminish in power and in glory. But, for the fictional politics that he gives us, who can care save in so far as they are symbols of the realities with which in his own life he was concerned?
Moreover, there is something in the political life that irritates us all by some inherent falseness. We are interested in contemporary politics because our personal fates depend upon their issue, but past politics, because we have so thankfully escaped from them, are derisively dead for most of us. If the issues with which politics are concerned are truly great ones, then they are, nine times out of ten, too great for the actors concerned in them. Contemporary politicians usually seem to us too small for their job, but when a really great politician emerges we either (if we are of the opposite party) detest him or (if we are on his side) complain that he does not pay sufficient regard to us.
In any case, representation of past politics seems an empty beating in the air because all the old issues have changed into present problems. Disraeli’s novels have the life of Disraeli’s odd greatness, not the life of politics.
Later, more contemporary efforts at the political novel have been forced to succumb to a kind of Surrey-side melodrama in which votes are symbols of financial ruin and horrible marital infidelities, or they tumble into a welter of gorgeousness, crowns of tinsel, rows of gilt chairs in tapestried drawing-rooms, the tea-cups of Duchesses, and the rough-edged cuffs of truculent Labour Members.
Trollope was, we must suppose, well aware of the difficulties of his subject. Speaking of this group of novels he says:
I have used them for the expression of my political or social conventions. They have been as real to me as Free Trade was to Mr. Cobden or the dominion of a party to Mr. Disraeli, and as I have not been able to speak from the benches of the House of Commons, or to thunder from platforms, or to be efficacious as a lecturer, they have served me as safety-valves by which to deliver my soul.
In the General Election of 1868 Trollope stood for Beverley and was rejected. In Ralph the Heir all the incidents of that election will be found, as closely autobiographical as incidents in a novel can be. It says much for Trollope’s fairness and independence of mind that the loveliest and truest character in this novel is Ontario Moggs, the Radical candidate; but for the rest, the human beings in this novel are not very interesting; through its pages, however, one can feel the author’s deep and sincere interest in politics, and his eagerness to give life and power to that interest.
The four following political novels then sprang from a true and vital impulse, and it is not Trollope’s fault that their final interest is human rather than political. Nevertheless the House of Commons is not omitted from the body of these books as the cathedral is omitted from the Barsetshire novels. In all its external paraphernalia it is admirably there.
It is also for us the more vivid and actual because Trollope’s own personality does not in any way obscure it; it is too quiet in tone to blind our gaze. When we look at Disraeli’s House of Commons it is only the fantastic dazzling figure of Disraeli that we see; we must raise our hands to shade our eyes from the glitter of the gas.
But in watching Trollope’s House of Commons we do behold the actual benches, hear the feet hurrying down the passages, the calling voices, the swinging to and fro of doors. We see, too, the various figures — Mr. Daubeny, Mr. Monk, Mr. Gresham, Mr. Turnbull, Mr. Bonteen, Barrington Erie, Mr. Palliser, and the others. We see them busied with the affairs of State, lounging back in their seats, their hats pulled over their eyes, rising
to speak, yielding to all the Parliamentary moods of indignation, slumber, eloquence, irony. We see their moving forms, we hear their voices raised, but — it is all concerning nothing at all.
We see the benches filled with figures, the gallery crowded with spectators, the hats and the papers and the trousers and the cuffs, but in spite of all this moving life, nothing occurs. It is like the last pages of Alice in Wonderland when Alice, raising her hands, cries: “Why, they are only a pack of cards after all!” It is like one of those dreams where numbers of ghostly figures move eagerly in a ghostly bustle, but no sound is heard and no purpose is achieved.
Trollope’s House of Commons is extraordinarily real so long as one can persuade oneself that it is the true game of politics to be exceedingly busy about exactly nothing. That may, indeed, be the actual truth. It is difficult for one who is no politician to have any useful opinion.
It is, of course, true that Trollope’s politicians are constantly busy and occupied, but they are occupied always over the business of coming in and going out. It is as though they were for ever practising a rehearsal for a ceremony that never in the end takes place.
I fancy that when he comes to Phineas Redux he is aware that in Phineas Finn the politics have been exceedingly slim, because in this second Phineas he does stir up the dust over some question of Church Reform; but so hazy is the question, and so uncertain are we, his readers, as to the issue that it really involves, that soon he is himself bored with the question and falls back on a somewhat unconvincing murder in order that the narrative interest may be sustained.
So nebulous, in fact, are the politics that we are never sure as to the exact political opinions of our hero Phineas. He is a fine handsome gentleman with whom all the ladies are in love (why is it, by the way, that the illustrations picture him as untidy, shabby, and poorly built?); he slips into politics with an amazing ease, advances with incredible rapidity, and slips out again with quite casual nonchalance, but his political creed seems to amount only to this, that he will always stick honestly to his opinion and declare it whatever his leaders may wish him to do. All very fine, but what if he has no very definite opinions to stick to?