Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  For the others what must be read?

  Trollope published in all, including volumes of short stories, fifty-one works of fiction. The classification made by Mr. Spencer Nichols and Mr. Michael Sadleir seems on the whole a fair one, although the distinction between novels of manners, social satires, and psychological analyses is often very slender.

  I. The Chronicles of Barsetshire.

  The Warden (1855).

  Barchester Towers (1857).

  Doctor Thorne (1858).

  Framley Parsonage (1861).

  The Small House at Allington (1864).

  The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867).

  II. The Political Novels.

  Can You Forgive Her? (1864).

  Phineas Finn: The Irish Member (1869).

  The Eustace Diamonds (1873).

  Phineas Redux (1876).

  The Prime Minister (1876).

  The Duke’s Children (1880).

  III. Novels of Manners and Social Dilemma.

  The Three Clerks (1858).

  Orley Farm (1862).

  The Belton Estate (1866).

  The Claverings (1867).

  The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870).

  Ralph the Heir (1871).

  Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite (1871).

  Lady Anna (1874).

  The American Senator (1877).

  Is He Popenjoy? (1878).

  Ayala’s Angel (1881).

  Marion Fay (1882).

  IV. Social Satires.

  The Bertrams (1859).

  Rachel Ray (1863).

  Miss Mackenzie (1865). —

  The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson (1870).

  The Way We Live Now (1875).

  Mr. Scarborough’s Family (1883).

  V. Irish Novels.

  The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847).

  The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848).

  Castle Richmond (1860).

  The Land Leaguers (1883).

  VI. Australian Novels.

  Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874).

  John Caldigate (1879).

  VII. Historical and Romantic Novels.

  La Vendée (1850).

  Nina Balatka (1867).

  Linda Tressel (1868).

  The Golden Lion of Granpère (1872).

  VIII. Psychological Analyses and Stories of Single Incident.

  He Knew He was Right (1869).

  An Eye for an Eye (1879).

  Cousin Henry (1879).

  Dr. Wortle’s School (1881).

  Kept in the Dark (1882).

  An Old Man’s Love (1884).

  IX. Fantasia.

  The Fixed Period (1882).

  X. Short Stories.

  Tales of all Countries, 1st and 2nd series (1861)

  Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories (1867).

  Why Frau Frohmann raised her Prices, and Other Stories (1882).

  I cannot feel that this is an ideal system of classification, but in what decisive fashion can you draw any line between the subject and the spirit of a novel like Miss Mackenzie and a novel like The Vicar of Bullhampton? Is there any true and essential division in method or in fable between Rachel Ray and Cousin Henry? Nevertheless, the general classification here in front of us we can move towards a further clearing of the ground.

  Which of these novels need no one alive in the world to-day trouble to investigate? Are there any novels of Trollope’s that may be eternally and remorselessly forgotten as though they had never been born? There are. Marion Fay and The Adventures of Brown, Jones, and Robinson will be abandoned, I am sure, by the most eager lover of Trollope. Marion Fay, indeed, is the exact negation of every virtue Trollope possessed. To these I would myself add: The Bertrams, Castle Richmond, Lady Anna, and An Old Man’s Love.

  Here personal feeling must of course count. There may be somewhere, hidden in dark fastnesses, certain defenders of The Bertrams and Castle Richmond. The first has a sort of bitterness on the tongue which is agreeable, the second some mildly pleasant Irish backgrounds, better done elsewhere. For Lady Anna there is surely nothing to be said. Much of it was written during a storm at sea, and it needs every excuse that can be offered for it; An Old Man’s Love is a feeble little story that justifies the ironical scorner of the work of his last days; there are others, of that same period, worthy of his strongest, most vigorous middle years.

  Of these six novels it may be said that they add nothing to Trollope’s lustre, that there is nothing in them that has not been better done by him elsewhere, that if they are never seen again by mortal eye there is no one who will be the worse for not reading them.

  For the further clearing of the ground there are one or two that one would venture to add to this little list of complete failures were it not that Trollope’s extraordinary level of accomplishment is for ever securing for him, even in the most unlikely places, some fine observation, some honest piece of analysis, some fragment of humorous dialogue that one does not wish to lose.

  So for the things in them rather than for what they are, Miss Mackenzie, Is He Popenjoy? and The American Senator must be retained.

  Miss Mackenzie was the novel that he wrote to prove that a novel need not have a love-story, and for that reason (because a Trollope novel without a love-story is like Dickens without his poetic prose or Thackeray without his morality) the book should have been interesting. But it is not. Miss Mackenzie is an old bore, and so is her story.

  Is He Popenjoy? has in the Dean a jolly cleric, but very little else, and The American Senator contains some admirable descriptions of English fields and the hunting that passes over them, but the Senator himself is a failure.

  And now, when the early novels, the Barsetshire novels, the political novels, and the later novels are all neatly pigeon-holed in appropriate drawers, no need for any sort of classification remains concerning the rest of them. One plays, if one likes, with phrases like “social satires” and “psychological analyses”, but Trollope would, I am sure, if he were aware, sweep them at once aside with one wave of his broad hand.

  He wrote novels as a man, not in his own opinion very clever, hampered by no fads or witcheries or modern fashions, an excellent observer of what is right under his nose, a man of heart and sentiment but no nonsense, a man who is discovering things partly because he is curious but chiefly because he has an unresting affection for his fellow human beings, as a man of honest and quiet but persistent habit who is taking constant journeys in a country that he knows and loves but can never either know or love sufficiently.

  Just as he travelled about for the Post Office seeing that everyone got his or her letters properly, so he writes his novels seeing that everyone gets his or her deserts.

  The supreme pleasure that comes to the pursuer of Trollope — the faithful pursuer who is not merely content with a Barchester novel or two — is this sense that comes to him in a while that he too is poking his nose in and out, here and there, through the Trollope country, that he has not any longer to bother his head about the lie of the land or complain because this or that elaborate piece of architecture or some superb Persian garden or Chinese Pagoda or Russian country mansion or American sky-scraper is not to be found there — he has learnt by this time that there is nothing here but what is thoroughly English and even at that very little whose address is not in the Post Office Directory.

  But, as his gentle nag goes padding about the country lanes and treading the cobbles of the country towns, the traveller slowly realises that the interest here is endless. It is in no way dictated to him what he shall choose. The friend who has introduced him to the country lays down no laws, does not even, as so many do, insist on his own preferences. Granted that you do not complain of the actual colour, shape, features of the country, you may be quite your own master.

  This, then, must be a chapter of personal preferences; I would mention in it only certain places and persons that have become especially intimate to me through the sequence of my little journeys — and
Barchester and Politics and Ireland are, for the moment, excluded; they belong to a more settled plan and, possibly, to a more critical mood.

  And if this is to be a chapter of personal preferences, I cannot do better than recall the door through which I first passed into this Trollope country.

  The atmosphere around me was just what it ought to be — an old red-bricked Canon’s house in the precincts of a Cathedral town, a snowy landscape beyond the windows, a leaping fire, half sleepiness, half dream, the walls lined with books to the ceiling, and on the table at my hand two long purple-covered volumes. Idly my hand felt for one of them, opened it and turned the page. But not many pages, for there, as frontispiece, was one of the most enchanting pictures, one of the most English pictures, seen by me then or ever — and at the bottom of the page were printed the two words “Orley Farm I shall never be able to tell now whether Millais’s illustrations to Orley Farm are entirely better than any other illustrations to any other novel whatever. I feel that they must be, but the romantic accumulations of thirty years have deepened their shadows and heightened the delicacy of their draughtsmanship. But looking at them again to-day, of this I can be certain, that no novelist, in England at least, has ever, in spirit and mind and talent, been more perfectly and faithfully recorded by any artist than Trollope in this book by Millais.

  That first picture of Orley Farm, the birds in lazy flight over the tufted trees, the old house with its odd corners and bow windows and rounded balcony, its little tower with the clock, its sloping lawn and gnarled trunks, deep shade and lighted grass, its cow and milkmaid and weeded pond — all rural England is here, it is the perfect and final symbol of everything that Trollope tried to secure in his art.

  After that first thrilling discovery how eagerly I searched the two volumes for more, and even at this distance of time these pictures stare out at me as clearly as though they were standing, framed, here on my table.

  “There was snow in her heart” — Lady Mason sitting thinking on her crime, the room with the crinkled chair in the window, the dark worked firescreen, the heavy carpet and wall-paper all sharing in her sorrow — or the morning of the meet at Monkton Grange with the lovely old house in the background, Madeline Stavely so exquisite in her riding habit, the hunters, the hounds, the air of autumn quiet, or, most dramatic of them all, the scene of the famous confession, Lady Mason at Sir Peregrine’s feet, a figure, as it seems to me still, of exquisite grace and pathos, or, most beautiful of them all, “Farewell!” the final parting of Mr. Orme and Lady Mason.

  It is hard to say now whether Orley Farm is as a novel good or bad — it is too closely bound to me by every sort of romantic feeling. Any novel read and appreciated in early youth carries with it ever afterwards a kind of eternal conviction of its veracity.

  There have been severe critic s of the famous trial — it seems that it will not hold legal water for a single moment. Those were comparatively early days for Trollope, and afterwards he was to prove in The Eustace Diamonds and John Caldigate that legal intricacies had no danger for him; but it is not the accuracy of Orley Farm that matters, it is a kind of passion of suffering and distress that lies at the heart of it, a deep consciousness of almost hopeless tragedy that appears in the other novels only rarely, in Laura Kennedy’s despair, in the tragic fidelity of the little heroine of Sir Harry Hotspur, and in the two early Irish books.

  For many travellers in Trollope’s country it must appear scarcely a novel at all. It merges, like Barchester Towers and The Belton Estate, into the hedges and roads of the English countryside.

  Can, for instance, The Cleeve, Sir Peregrine’s home, be only a house of fairy-tale? A turn to the left, past the cross-roads, through the village and up the hill, and must it not lie there in all its beauty before you?

  There was, however, no place within the county which was so beautifully situated as The Cleeve, or which had about it so many of the attractions of age. The house itself had been built at two periods — a new set of rooms having been added to the remains of the old Elizabethan structure in the time of Charles II. It had not about it anything that was peculiarly grand or imposing, nor were the rooms large or even commodious; but everything was old, venerable, and picturesque. Both the dining-room and the library were panelled with black wainscotting; and though the drawing-rooms were papered, the tall elaborately worked wooden chimney-pieces still stood in them, and a wooden band or belt round the rooms showed that the panels were still there although hidden by the modern paper.

  But it was for the beauty and wildness of its grounds that The Cleeve was remarkable. The land fell here and there into narrow, wide ravines and woody crevices.... There ran a river through the park — the river Cleeve from which the place and parish are said to have taken their names; — a river or rather a stream, very small and inconsiderable as to its volume of water, but which passed for some two miles through so narrow a passage as to give to it the appearance of a cleft or fissure in the rocks. The water tumbled over stones through this entire course, making it seem to be fordable almost everywhere without danger of wet feet; but in truth there was hardly a spot at which it could be crossed without a wild leap from rock to rock.

  Narrow as was the aperture through which the water had cut its way, nevertheless a path had been contrived, now on one side of the stream and now on the other, crossing it here and there by slight hanging wooden bridges. The air here was always damp with spray, and the rocks on both sides were covered with long mosses, as were also the overhanging boughs of the old trees. This place was the glory of The Cleeve, and as far as picturesque beauty goes it was very glorious. There was a spot in the river from whence a steep path led down from the park to the water, and at this spot the deer would come to drink. I know nothing more beautiful than this sight, when three or four of them could be so seen from one of the wooden bridges towards the hour of sunset in the autumn.

  This is one of the few occasions when Trollope allows himself romance, and over the whole of Lady Mason’s story hang the trees and waters of The Cleeve, dark and shining against the pastoral background of Orley Farm. For it is in those dark rooms and within the sound of those waters that she makes her confession and faces her punishment.

  The relations of Sir Peregrine and herself are worked with a fine courtesy and gentleness, but the strength of the book does not lie in its figures.

  The characters, Lady Mason and her odious son; Sir Peregrine and his heir (one of the nicest of Trollope’s young men); the villain of the piece, Dockwrath, and his satellites; the customary maiden invaded by lovers; the low humours of rustic courting — all these are a little dim beside Millais’s brilliant portrayal of them and the reality of the atmosphere that surrounds them.

  It is a story of atmosphere, and when the story moves to London, genuine though the unhappy Furnivals, the bullying Chaffenbrass, and the amiable Mr. Gray are, it is the musty, stuffy passages and rooms of the London law-courts that stay with the reader after the book is closed.

  Dickens was not Trollope’s superior in his pictures of London side streets, lodging-houses, eating-houses, dingy courts and stairs, save in the one great quality of intensity. Here, as must later be emphasised, Trollope always spreads his atmosphere too thin, missing, or perhaps not caring to secure that sudden leaping of a scene or a character into a fiery emphasis that can never afterwards be forgotten.

  Even in the climax of the great trial he is almost casual:

  But it was not fated that Lady Mason should be sent away from the court in doubt. At eight o’clock Mr. Aram came to them, not with haste, and told them that the jury had sent for the judge. The judge had gone home to his dinner, but would return to court at once when he heard that the jury had agreed.

  “And must we go into court again,” said Mrs. Orme.

  “Lady Mason must do so.”

  “Then of course I shall go with her. Are you ready now, dear?”

  Lady Mason was unable to speak, but she signified that she was ready and they w
ent into court. The jury were already in the box, and as the two ladies took their seats, the judge entered. But few of the gas lights were lit, so that they in the court could hardly see each other, and the remaining ceremony did not take five minutes.

  “Not guilty, my lord,” said the foreman. Then the verdict was recorded, and the judge went back to his dinner. Joseph Mason and Dockwrath were present and heard the verdict. I will leave the reader to imagine with what an appetite they returned to their chamber.

  One is not asking for melodrama, but recall the close of the Waterloo chapter in Vanity Fair, Beatrix coming down the stairs to meet Esmond, Emma Bovary at the play, Lucy Snow’s vision of Rachel, Marty South mourning for Winterbourne, the duel in the snow in Ballantrae, and we must feel that Trollope here has missed his opportunity.

  The word “intensity” (and possibly the word “melodrama”) leads one away from the lawns and shrubberies of Orley Farm and The Cleeve to a darker air and more sinister surroundings. Why if one thinks of Orley Farm does one instantly recollect The Claverings?

  At first sight no two works could claim a more slender kinship. There are, it is true, sinners in both; there is a sad and repentant lady in both, and they are alike, too, in that their atmosphere is more important than their story. But the one is implicit Trollope — it could have been written by no one else in the world — while the other, The Claverings, is Trollope’s most serious attempt to escape from his own personality.

  Or is it not — and this is one of the principal interests of The Claverings — that here he is giving us a hint of the things he might have done had his morality permitted him? What Trollope knew but wasn’t allowed to tell! Had he been born a Frenchman would there have been any limit to the revelations in character that Crosbie and Dockwrath and George Vavasour and Burgo Fitzgerald and Sophie Furnival and the Signora Neroni would have shown us! Trollope not an Englishman — there is a subject for an interesting study in the modern cynical manner — and in The Claverings he is nearer the adoption of another nationality than in any other of his novels.