by Hugh Walpole
It is a novel of atmosphere, and the atmosphere is of that sort very dangerous for the English novelist, the atmosphere captured so supremely well by Thackeray; the green-lighted, close-scented gambling rooms, the shabby adventures of half-deserted Spas, the shelving beaches of foreign watering-places, concealed accents, stolen passports, impoverished counts and impertinent ladies’ maids.
Not that in The Claverings the atmosphere is so sharply altered — we are still in England, there is with us yet the Vicarage lawn and tea-table — the hesitating maiden (in this instance she is faithful, poor Florence Burton, to one of the feeblest, most vacillating, and least interesting of all the Trollope heroes). We are not carried from England to Them — no, They cross the Channel and remain with us. They are in the first instance the English variety of unhappy immoralists, Hugh Clavering and his pretty brother Archie and his little hanger-on, Captain Boodle of Warwickshire, and the Foreign variety, Count Pateroff and his sister Sophie Gardeloup.
No reader of The Claverings pays any attention to the insipid love affairs of the miserable Harry Clavering and his Florence, or his sister Fanny and her ridiculous Mr. Gaul. Readers may have done so once — they certainly do so no longer. Nor are the unpleasant Hugh and brother Archie anything but conventional villains, something in the Dickens manner — indeed Hugh Clavering’s resemblance to Sir Mulberry Hawk is quite remarkable, considering Trollope’s dislike of Dickens’s over-emphasis. But Sophie Gardeloup — there is a woman! and behind her Pateroff and Julia Brabazon, afterwards Lady Ongar.
Sophie Gardeloup is The Claverings and The Claverings is Sophie Gardeloup. She is one of Trollope’s three best wicked women, the other two being, of course, Signora Neroni and Lizzie Eustace. How splendid are these three figures, with what humour are they treated, how Trollope, good and virtuous man though he be, delights in their existence, plays with their mannerisms, condemns indeed their sad vices, but reluctantly, as though, in spite of himself, he must sympathise with their vitality. Is it not a witness to some secret power in him that he never permitted full rein, that these three women are more alive in their little fingers than almost all his hesitating heroines together?
An honest full portrait of Lizzie Eustace or Sophie Gardeloup and might not our whole estimate of Trollope be amazingly altered? Yes, the things that he knew and was never permitted to tell us.
But the power of The Claverings lies in atmosphere rather than in character. Sophie Gardeloup is the atmosphere — she brings it with her, the meanness and shabbiness and malice, the impudence and cheek and impertinence, the pluck and the self-reliance and the sangfroid, the humour and cynicism and general disbelief in any of the human virtues.
Her story matters nothing; it is in fact never clear to us. Beyond the fact that Julia Brabazon’s marriage to Ongar brought on her heels this pack of needy blackmailing adventurers there is no story. Pateroff and Sophie will get from her what they can. At the end they abandon the game, and are off hunting in other directions. The story is nothing, the atmosphere everything.
Her determination and courage are beyond all praise. When her dear friend Lady Ongar is at last resolved to abandon her, even the inconvenient closeness of a carriage on the way to the Yarmouth pier cannot hamper her determination to remain.
When they were in the carriage together, the maid being then stowed away in a dicky or rumble behind, Sophie again whined and was repentant.
“Julie, you should not be so hard upon your Sophie.”
“It seems to me the hardest things were spoken by you.”
“Then I will beg your pardon. I am impulsive. I do not restrain myself. When I am angry I say I know not what. If I said any words that were wrong I will apologise and beg to be forgiven — there — on my knees.” And, as she spoke, the adroit little woman contrived to get herself down upon her knees on the floor of the carriage. “There; say that I am forgiven. Say that Sophie is pardoned.” The little woman had calculated that even should her Julie pardon her, Julie would hardly condescend to ask her for the two ten-pound notes.
“Madame Gardeloup, that attitude is absurd: I beg you will get up.”
“Never, never till you have pardoned me.” And Sophie crouched still lower, till she was all among the dressing-cases and little bags at the bottom of the carriage. “I will not get up till you say the words, Sophie, dear, I forgive you.”
Then I fear you will have an uncomfortable drive. Luckily it will be very short. It is only half an hour to Yarmouth.”
“And I will kneel again in board the packet; and on the — what you call — platform — and in the railway carriage — and in the street. I will kneel to my Julie everywhere, till she say, Sophie, dear, I forgive you.”
Madame Gardeloup, pray understand me; between you and me there shall be no further intimacy.”
“No!”.
“Certainly not. No further explanation is necessary, but our intimacy is certainly come to an end.”
“It has?’
“Undoubtedly.”
“Julie!”
“That is such nonsense. Madame Gardeloup, you are disgracing yourself by such proceedings.”
Oh, disgracing myself am I?’ In saying this Sophie picked herself up from among the dressing-cases, and recovered her seat. “I am disgracing myself! Well, I know very well whose disgrace is the most talked about in the world, yours or mine. Disgracing myself; — and from you? What did your husband say of you himself?”
Lady Ongar began to feel that even a very short journey might be too long.
Her obstinacy, courage, adroit swiftness in suiting herself to any mood or occasion deserve a better reward than they receive here. But we need not pity her. As we watch her, at the close of this chapter in her history, we know that there are many more victims waiting for her. Is she not at any rate conqueror this far, that she steps out of the book with the gay Captain Boodle under her arm? —
For a moment these continental adventures of Trollope’s force us to hesitate. The old eternal cry of the popular novelist that once he has made a success he is never again to be allowed to follow his own free will was scarcely Trollope s. He chose his own direction freely, but he did try, on two occasions, and nearly on a third, to see how far his freedom would carry him — whether, without his name, his books would smell to the public as sweetly. He found, alas, that they did not.
So characteristic were these two attempts of his natural honesty that it is worth while to give his own account of this matter. Moreover, this question is as interesting to-day as it was fifty years back:
From the commencement of my success as a writer, which I date from the beginning of the Cornhill Magazine, I had always felt an injustice in literary affairs which had never afflicted me or even suggested itself to me while I was unsuccessful. It seemed to me that a name once earned carried with it too much favour. I indeed had never reached a height to which praise was awarded as a matter of course; but there were others who sat on higher seats to whom the critics brought unmeasured incense and adulation, even when they wrote, as they sometimes did write, trash which from a beginner would not have been thought worthy of the slightest notice. I hope that no one will think that in saying this I am actuated by jealousy of others. Though I never reached that height, still I had so far progressed that that which I wrote was received with too much favour. The injustice which struck me did not consist in that which was withheld from me, but in that which was given to me. I felt that aspirants coming up below me might do work as good as mine, and probably much better work, and yet fail to have it appreciated. In order to test this I determined to be such an aspirant myself, and to begin a course of novels anonymously, in order that I might see whether I could obtain a second identity — whether as I had made one mark by such literary ability as I possessed, I might succeed in doing so again.
In 1865 I began a short tale called Nina Balatka, which in 1866 was published anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine. In 1867 this was followed by another of the same length calle
d Linda Tressel. I will speak of them together, as they are of the same nature and of nearly equal merit. Mr. Blackwood, who himself read the MS. of Nina Balatka, expressed an opinion that it would not from its style be discovered to have been written by me; but it was discovered by Mr. Hutton of the Spectator who found the repeated use of some special phrase which had rested upon his ear too frequently when reading for the purpose of criticism other works of mine. He declared in his paper that Nina Balatka was by me, showing I think more sagacity than good nature. I ought not, however, to complain of him, as of all the critics of my work he has been the most observant and generally the most eulogistic. Nina Balatka never rose sufficiently high in reputation to make its detection a matter of any importance. Once or twice I heard the story mentioned by readers who did not know me to be the author and always with praise; but it had no real success.
The same may be said of Linda Tressel. Blackwood, who of course knew the author, was willing to publish them, trusting that works by an experienced writer would make their way, even without the writer’s name, and he was willing to pay for them, perhaps half what they would have fetched with my name. But he did not find the speculation answer, and declined a third attempt though a third such tale was written for him.
Nevertheless I am sure that the two stories are good. Perhaps the first is somewhat the better, as being the less lachrymose. They were both written very quickly, but with a considerable amount of labour, and both were written immediately after visits to the towns in which the scenes are laid, — Prague mainly and Nuremberg.
Of course I had endeavoured to change not only my manner of language, but my manner of story-telling also; and in this, pace Mr. Hutton, I think that I was successful. English life in them there was none. There was more of romance proper than had been usual with me. And I made an attempt at local colouring, at descriptions of scenes and places, which has not been usual with me. In all this I am confident that I was in a measure successful. In the love, and fears, and hatreds, both of Nina and of Linda there is much that is pathetic. Prague is Prague and Nuremberg is Nuremberg.
Yes, and Trollope is Trollope. It is difficult, when re-reading these little stories, to believe that there were not many others beside Hutton who discovered the authorship. But perhaps when he wrote these three tales — the third of them, The Golden Lion of Granpère, a story of the Vosges mountains, and a delightful little story too — he did not make them of a sufficient weight to test his problem sufficiently.
They are slight, and Linda Tressel is too lachrymose as he confesses, the local descriptions are a little forced and laboured as though he were not quite as yet working in the medium to which he was accustomed, but they have a different charm and freshness from all the other works of Trollope and should be read by every lover of Barchester just to see how that Cathedral close and those English country lanes can stretch to new ranges of hill, strangely twisted roofs and chimneys, coloured market-places, and the piercing silver range of the Vosges.
He went yet wider afield in the two Australian novels, Harry Heathcote and John Caldigate, and in the New Zealand fantasy The Fixed Period. Harry Heathcote is an easy little Christmas story, pleasant to read, and of no critical importance. John Caldigate is, I think, one of his failures as atmosphere. He was never long enough in Australia for the Australian chapters to ring true, but the plot is one of his most interesting, ingenious, elaborate, and unexpected. The pages about the Civil Service make an instructive contrast with those of twenty years before in The Three Clerks.
The Fixed Period is the story of an imaginary country in the year 1980. New Zealand rises to the mind as one reads. The idea of the compulsion on all persons over sixty to commit suicide is interesting, especially now perhaps in our overcrowded and wildly competitive world, but Trollope’s attempts at prophecy are too unconvincing to be absorbing.
These landscapes mark Trollope’s attempts to escape. In that they fail as they must always fail. But before leaving them one scene rises to the memory — that of Louis Trevelyan in He Knew He was Right, parted from his wife, revengeful, suspicious of all the world, slouching, unshaven in his dressing-gown, in a dreary empty villa on a lonely hill near Siena, hallucinated by his fancied injuries until he is near madness — and alone, alone in body, in spirit, in madness — had these pages of all Trollope’s work escaped from some generally devouring fire what would we have said? Why, that some English Stendhal or Balzac had been lost to us. We should have talked of his great morbid talent, his strange fantastic vision, his dark poetry. The novel, as a whole, is long, dreary, and monotonous, but this one passage is enough to show us the countries in which Trollope might have dwelt — had he been of other times, other manners.
But he was not, and with a quick swing of anticipation one returns to the very heart of his own landscape, to two books which are almost as simple as nursery tea and have indeed something of the air of that happy ceremony, Trollope seated on a high chair, his legs tucked under him, licking his pencil while the pictures fly across his vision. It may seem improper to speak of The Vicar of Bullhampton in this idle fashion because in it Trollope made one of his most active attempts to free himself from the moral tyrannies of his readers. This story was selected by Henry James in his Partial Portrait as being especially worthy of attention, and he says of it that it “is a capital example of interest produced by the quietest conceivable means”. That is rather a back-handed compliment, perhaps, when one remembers that in this book Trollope thought that he was here at his most daring. If Henry James is referring with especial emphasis to the atmosphere, however, he is speaking correctly. This novel and Rachel Ray are the two of all the lengthy list in which Trollope most nearly approaches the temper and spirit of Jane Austen, approaches that great writer possibly more closely than any other novelist in the English language. There are many Jane Austen figures scattered about the novels — Lady Lufton is one, Archdeacon Grantley another, Lady Julia de Guest, Lady Aylmer, Mark Robarts — a number come to the mind; but these two novels, The Vicar of Bullhampton and Rachel Ray, secure exactly her atmosphere of a world sufficient to itself, entirely isolated in its own interests, having all the excitement and drama of the larger world, but played within a kingdom consecrated to domesticity, rustic horizons, or ballrooms where everyone is gay as though they were born only this morning and had but now opened their eyes upon an astonishingly amusing landscape, and a landscape confirming only the minor actions of life, a dropped handkerchief, an incipient cold, a fault at cards, an unexpected rencontre in a country lane. Again one must apologise to The Vicar where the figure of Carrie Brattle, who is suspected of leading an immoral life, is surely too violent a subject for so gentle a summary. But in the end she is not. The Vicar’s boldness in sheltering her and her brother is hushed at last until it echoes through the final pages like the whispers of two old maids over a cup of tea. Trollope had not after all sinned very seriously against the social conventions of his time.
Best figure in the book is Jacob Brattle, one of the truest rustics in English fiction. He stands out indeed against those autumn and winter backgrounds of which Trollope is so fond — those still, soundless days when last leaves are lazily falling through the air, a cart rattles down the road, smoke floats in a grey plume gently upwards from some cottage chimney and Brattle stands there, half animal, half human, as obstinate as he is gloomy, as gloomy as he is courageous, hemmed in by troubles — moral, financial, domestic — that he cannot understand, but is too proud to question. Such a figure is really one of Trollope’s glories, one of the grand examples of the fineness and authenticity of his unique gifts.
Rachel Ray contains no figures as striking as the Brattle family, but its landscape is as feminine as though Trollope had been an elderly spinster with a passion for high tea and excited Church gossip. It was the Church gossip in this book, in fact, that brought him into trouble. The novel had been intended to run as a serial’ in the chaste pages of that popular magazine Good Words, which, if it publis
hed some of the mildest stories on record, contained also many of the world’s loveliest engravings.
It was all the fault of Dr. Norman Macleod, who, when he commissioned a novel from Trollope for his magazine, added that he was sure that he would be safe in his hands. Trollope warned him, but Dr. Macleod was insistent, and then after all the story was rejected. And why? “Because”, Trollope tells us, “there was some dancing in one of the early chapters, described, no doubt, with that approval of the amusement which I have always entertained; it was this to which my friend demurred.”
Beyond question the morals of the readers of Good Words were well protected!
But Rachel Ray is not to be read now either for its loose morality or for its startling characters. In the figures of Mrs. Prime and the horrible Mr. Prong Trollope has a chance of shooting at that Mid-Victorian Nonconformity that he so thoroughly detested, but they are caricatures rather than living portraits. Luke Rowan is not bad as a hero and not good either, Rachel is a pleasant and, for once, determined heroine. The book lives still because of its delicate little scenes of comedy, the meeting of the lovers, Mrs. Tappitt’s ball, the bedroom confidences of the Tappitts, Rachel’s talks with her mother.
Would not Fanny Price and Miss Bates and Mrs. Norris have been at home in such a world as this? Here is an incident at the Tappitt ball:
Mr. Griggs came up and with a very low bow, stuck out the point of his elbow towards Rachel, expecting her immediately to put her hand within it.
“I’m afraid, sir, you must excuse Miss Ray just at present. She’s too tired to dance immediately.”
Mr. Griggs looked at his card, then looked at Rachel, then looked at Mrs. Cornbury, and stood twiddling the bunch of little gilt playthings that hung from his chain.