Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  Throughout the two volumes he is preoccupied with his finances, his love affairs, keeping his seat (because that is so necessary both for his love and his money), and ultimately his murder, but with the affairs of the nation he has little concern.

  It must be admitted that Phineas Finn is a hollow drum. Trollope beats upon him constantly, a fine noise is produced, but we are well aware that there is nothing inside. We have always Trollope’s account of him, never his account of himself. Even when he is gaoled, waiting his trial for murder, we do not care whether he is hanged or no, and we are sure that Trollope does not care very greatly either.

  That is not, however, to say that these two novels are failures. There are certain chapters in the middle of Phineas Redux that are Trollope at the highest power, and in no place anywhere is there dullness. There is an excellent variety of character, and outside the political gentlemen themselves (it is of no avail to search for the real figures behind Mr. Daubeny, Mr. Gresham, and the rest — as well expect barbers’ blocks to step from their pedestals and walk the Strand) everyone is alive. The finest figure in Phineas Finn is Lord Chiltern, an admirable figure of the English gentleman-savage who hunts ferociously, loves madly, fights violently, and is a good fellow at heart; in Phineas Redux, Kennedy.

  It is in these chapters in Redux that have to do with Kennedy’s growing madness (his attack on Phineas in the lodging is a grand piece of dramatic writing), Laura Kennedy’s hopeless love for Phineas, and Phineas’s quarrel with Bonteen that Trollope is at his very finest. In these chapters, as in the Stanhope chapters in Barchester Towers, in the psychology of Mr. Crawley, in the sleights-of-hand of Lizzie Eustace, in Lady Mason’s confession in Orley Farm, and the more dramatic portions of The Macdermots, Trollope is an absolute modern. No post-war psycho-analytic realist can teach him anything. He seems in these passages to know all the morbid obscurities of the human heart.

  With his analysis of Mr. Kennedy also he reveals once more his curious interest in the character of the fanatic. Kennedy is blood brother to Mr. Crawley, and even to Plantagenet Palliso — three men with a strain of brooding madness, one saved by religion, another by love of country, the third lost because he is conscious of no outside power that will rescue him from himself.

  Laura Kennedy too is an unrelenting study in the unhappy consequences of an obsessing and hopeless love. We cannot quite believe that in the first place she would ever have chosen Mr. Kennedy, but, having chosen him, the rest follows inevitably.

  There is not a great deal to be said for the murder. For one thing Trollope wilfully robs us of our major interest by revealing from the first the identity of the murderer. Our interest in Phineas might have been greater had we been allowed to wonder for two hundred pages or so whether after all he had not had the energy to hit Mr. Bonteen over the head with a life-preserver.

  But no — Lizzie Eustace, who in spite of, or perhaps because of, her bad character has at least twice the vitality of Phineas, is directly responsible. Not even this is to be laid to Phineas’s active credit.

  Finally, Lady Glencora and Planty Pall make their exits and their entrances; the old Duke of Omnium loves Marie Goesler, asks her to be his wife, and dies, leaving that honest and independent lady to the doubtful happiness of making a home for Phineas; there is some excellent hunting, some good low life and a little low journalism, a great deal of lively if rather purposeless conversation, and the doors of the House of Commons for ever swinging backwards and forwards.

  These two novels are perhaps finally justified as the creators of background for the later history of Lady Glencora and her husband. At least, when the volumes are closed and we look back, it is those two figures that we see, although in this drama their parts have been minor.

  With the first pages of The Prime Minister they take at last their rightful place.

  The reception of The Prime Minister was one of the chief disappointments of Trollope’s literary life.

  As has happened to many a novelist before him, his love for one of his characters blinded him to the book’s artistic balance. Moreover, in these later years Trollope was suffering from that inevitable public weariness that old favourites must endure when for too many years they have been producing work repetitive in theme and level in quality.

  The book encountered, in fact, unkinder reviews than any novel that he had written. This it most certainly did not deserve. It is not one of Trollope’s best, but it is very far from being one of his worst, and if looked at swiftly as a continuation in the revelation of the personalities of Lady Glencora and her husband, it is very interesting indeed.

  On this side it is interesting beyond the especial personalities of these two characters. It raises the question roused by many of the later Trollopes as to why he did not more deeply reveal to us his views of morbid irony. In certain novels like He Knew he was Right (Trollope’s Timon of Athens) he shows an extraordinary perception of the workings in the human brain of madness and jealousy, and in the analysis of his Crawleys and Kennedys his penetration is, as I have just said, of our own post-war generation; but in a book like The Prime Minister, and with two characters like Palliser and his wife under his hand, he restrains himself and dims his picture. Is this because; he is careless, or is it because he is afraid of frightening his public, or is it because he is afraid of frightening himself?

  Palliser, as revealed in The Prime Minister, is the human sensitive, naked to every wind. He is all nerves. He is exposed to every rumour, every suspicion, every chance word. He adores his wife, but has never been in any close touch with her because of his own pride and his knowledge of her earlier passion for someone else. He is noble in character as she is noble, but their nobilities are of different orders. He has the shy sense of honour of a recluse who has never been able to find touch with other men; she has a sense of honour of exactly the opposite kind; she has had so close a touch with her fellow human beings, has been in such desperate danger and has so fully realised her peril, that it is her sense of honour alone that can save her. He fears the world; she loves and embraces it. His only ambition is patriotism; her ambition is for his glory and her own pleasure. She is alive to her finger-tips, and especially in them, whereas he is alive only at his inmost heart; there he is alive indeed. He adores her, but cannot express his adoration; she has never adored him, and never will, but includes him in her love of all humanity and of life itself.

  He is so careful of expressing an untruth or an over-statement that he expresses scarcely anything at all; she bubbles over with every thought in her heart and is scarcely out of one indiscretion before she is in to another. And, it must be repeated again, they are both, in their own make and fashion, noble creatures.

  Trollope chooses a poor fable to bring out the crisis between these two. For once at least his sub-plot is connected with his main plot; it is the worthless character of Ferdinand Lopez that involves Palliser (or the Duke of Omnium as he now is) in public attacks from one old friend of Phineas, Mr. Slide, and in difficult misunderstandings with his Duchess. Would Glencora have ever had a word to say to a cad like Lopez — above all would she have invited him to stay under the Duke’s roof and encouraged him in his pseudo-politics?

  It is the character of Lopez that leads Trollope wrong here. He is, by far, too unattractive a villain. He is worse than the wretched George Vavasour of Can You Forgive Her? who was, even in his own melodramatic world, bad enough.

  Nor would Emily Wharton ever have married Lopez. She is one of Trollope’s most colourless girls, but she has breeding enough to shrink from a Lopez at sight.

  No, as a story The Prime Minister is one of the poorest perhaps in all the Trollope chronicle. The politics in it is as feeble as the old Duke of St. Bungay. That sense of doors swinging upon emptiness so constant in the Phineas books is here omnipresent. The political chapters of The Prime Minister are one vast draught, scraps of political papers blowing down empty corridors before a ghostly breeze. We must build our interest on the Duke and h
is Duchess, and even here, as I have said, we have a sense of something veiled, of some super-discretion that has kept the best things from us.

  Nevertheless Lady Glencora (as we must always think of her) is adorable. We add, as perhaps we always do to the living characters in fiction, our own consciousness of her to the things that her creator has allowed himself to tell us. She is, we cannot but feel, really an inhabitant of our own present world. Her courage, her fun, her vitality, her disregard of appearances, her warm heart, her individual morality, her lightness of touch, her passion for freedom, make her one of Meredith’s women, or, in our very own time, cousin to Mrs. Dalloway and the Mrs. Fleming of To the Lighthouse. But beyond all that she is, she shows us what, had Trollope been of our own time, she might have become.

  And so we say farewell to her — on the first page of The Duke’s Children we learn that she is dead.

  It is one of the finest tributes to the reality of Trollope’s world that the news of Glencora Palliser’s death has the force of an actual blow. Behind so many of the books her presence has been felt, laughing, mocking, deriding, one cannot but feel, the multitude of those Trollopian maidens who have found it so impossible to make up their minds about their hesitating lovers.

  She is gone. We have never known the last truth about her. What would have happened to her had life brought to her someone more worthy than Burgo, less sensitive than Palliser? Alas, she will never be Lady of the Bedchamber now! How the very echo of that sigh draws us to a close consciousness of her Victorian world, that world to which she never in truth belonged.

  She being gone, Palliser must take up his ducal burdens without her. The Duke’s Children tells us how he fared. The theme of this book is the teaching of the parents by the misdoings of the children, a theme very popular with modern novelists.

  Trollope writes, of course, around the problems of his own period, and, if we were to judge by this book alone, we should find them only snobbish. This is the weakness of this novel for us, that Trollope means his hero to be a creature of the finest spirit and noblest purpose, but drives him by instincts that may have seemed to the ‘sixties and ‘seventies worthy enough, but can for ourselves have only the colour of unimportant absurdity.

  The opening situation is one of the best that Trollope ever found — the poor Duke, bereft of his Duchess, heart-broken but resolved to do his duty both by his country and his family. That family — two sons and a daughter — reckless and selfish, having these qualities largely by his own fault because, through shyness and diffidence, he has never been able to come close to them and win their confidence. Trollope here is justified of his boast. Read these political novels in sequence and you see, clearly enough, that Palliser’s character is consistent throughout, all his later troubles the consequence of earlier obstinacies and habits.

  The first quarter of this novel is very fine. His eldest son, Silverbridge, is involved in debts and betting catastrophes (the whole of this lower world of touts and sharpers is Trollope’s own and Major Tifto is a masterly sketch); Gerald, the second son, is sent down from Oxford; Mary, the girl, is determined to make an unworthy marriage. The Duke’s efforts to bend his pride and obstinacy so that he may reach his children and understand them are admirably described. One scene there is, when the Duke goes to his son’s club, which, for tenderness and comprehension and reality, is among the very finest things in all Trollope.

  Father and son are seated there somewhat awkwardly struggling to find a common ground, when the disreputable but amiable figure of Major Tifto stumbles on them:

  Silverbridge did not wish to introduce his friend to his father. The Duke saw it all at a glance, and felt that the introduction should be made.

  “Perhaps,” said he, getting up from his chair, “this is Major Tifto.”

  “Yes — my Lord Duke. I am Major Tifto.”

  The Duke bowed graciously. “My father and I were engaged about private matters,” said Silverbridge.

  “I beg ten thousand pardons,” said the Major, “I did not intend to intrude.”

  “I think we had done,” said the Duke. “Pray sit down, Major Tifto.” The Major sat down. “Though now I bethink myself I have to beg your pardon — that I a stranger should ask you to sit down in your own club.”

  “Don’t mention it, my Lord Duke.”

  “I am so unused to clubs that I forgot where I was.”

  “Quite so, my Lord Duke. I hope you think that Silverbridge is looking well?”

  “Yes — yes. I think so.”

  Silverbridge bit his lips and turned his face away to the door.

  “We didn’t make a very good thing of our Derby nag the other day. Perhaps your Grace has heard all that.”

  “I did hear that the horse in which you are both interested had failed to win the race.”

  “Yes, he did. The Prime Minister, we call him, your Grace — out of compliment to a certain Ministry which I wish it was going on to-day instead of the seedy lot we’ve got in. I think, my Lord Duke, that anyone you may ask will tell you that I know what running is. Well; I can assure you — your Grace, that is — that since I’ve seen ‘orses I’ve never seen a ‘orse fitter than him. When he got his counter that morning it was nearly even betting. Not that I or Silverbridge were fools enough to put on anything at that rate. But I never saw a ‘orse so bad ridden. I don’t mean to say anything, my Lord Duke, against the man. But if that fellow hadn’t been squared, or else wasn’t drunk, or else wasn’t off his head, that ‘orse must have won — my Lord Duke.”

  “I do not know anything about racing, Major Tifto.”

  “I suppose not, your Grace. But as I and Silverbridge are together in this matter I thought I’d just let your Grace know that we ought to have had a very good thing. I thought that perhaps your Grace might like to know that.”

  “Tifto, you are making an ass of yourself,” said Silverbridge.

  “Making an ass of myself!” exclaimed the Major.

  “Yes — considerably.”

  “I think you are a little hard upon your friend,” said the Duke, with an attempt at a laugh. “It is not to be supposed that he should know how utterly indifferent I am to everything connected with the turf.”

  “I thought, my Lord Duke, you might care about learning how Silverbridge was going on.” This the poor little man said almost with a whine. His partner’s roughness had knocked out of him nearly all the courage which Bacchus had given him.

  “So I do; anything that interests him interests me. But perhaps of all his pursuits racing is the one to which I am least able to lend an attentive ear. That every horse has a head and that all did have tails till they were ill-used is the extent of my stable knowledge.”

  “Very good indeed, my Lord Duke, very good indeed!

  Ha, ha, ha — all horses have heads and all have tails! Heads and tails. Upon my word, that is the best thing I have heard for a long time. I will do myself the honour of wishing your Grace good-night. By bye, Silverbridge.” Then he left the room, having been made supremely happy by what he considered to have been the Duke’s joke. Nevertheless, he would remember the snubbing and would be even with Silverbridge some day. Did Lord Silverbridge think that he was going to look after his Lordship’s ‘orses, and do this always on the square, and then be snubbed for doing it!

  This is excellent comedy, and for nearly half the book Trollope keeps to a fine level; after that his two worst enemies, his procrastination and his inability to keep from the reader what is coming long, long before it comes, have him by the throat.

  Moreover, all the characters, with the exception of our old friend Marie Goesler, now of course Mrs. Finn, are unsympathetic. Even for the Duke at last we can have no sympathy. Why should not his daughter marry her nice young man, a gentleman and a good rider to hounds? Why should Silverbridge not marry a beautiful and rich and noble-hearted young American? The children too are utterly selfish, and we can only pity their prospective wives and husbands. They lose vast sums of money, and
it disturbs them not at all — Father will pay, and Trollope evidently thinks it right that he should. {TROLLOPE BOOK}

  Finally, there is no real climax to Palliser’s history. Have we watched him from those early days in Barsetshire when he flirted so foolishly with Lady Dumbello only to leave him at the last a complacent payer of bills and sentimental attendant at his children’s marriages?

  And of politics in this book there is only the I18 — ANTHONY TROLLOPE CHAP.IV faintest breeze. That make-believe is over. The House of Cards has tumbled down indeed. Nevertheless, when we look back these books have been justified by the creation of these two characters. They remain with us as only true creations can remain.

  CHAPTER V. LANDSCAPE AND FIGURES

  FOR the thorough investigator of Anthony Trollope’s art the difficult period is reached after the study of the Barsetshire and political series.

  So many novels Trollope has apparently written, so many and, most of them, so long, concerned too often with stories and backgrounds already wearisomely familiar! Out of this tangled and confused body of work, much of it forgotten, much of it out of print and unprocurable, what of value remains?

  It cannot be said that the commentators have hitherto made the way much clearer. The essayists — Leslie Stephen, Frederic Harrison, George Saintsbury, and others — have emphasised the Barsetshire novels and allowed the vast remainder to sink into shadow with such murmured words as “Unfortunately advancing years forced Trollope...” or “The novels of Trollope’s later period are scarcely worthy..

  The general impression seems still to be that, after the Barsetshire books and a few notable novels like Orley Farm and The Claverings, there is very little of merit to be discovered. Mr. Sadleir alone has drawn attention to the later books.

  Indeed, so harshly have the novels of the really last years been always treated that consideration of them here must be reserved to a separate chapter if justice is to be done.