THE PRIME MINISTER

by DAVID SKILTON

  Plantagenet Palliser was to be something quite outstanding as a political character:

  a Statesman of a different nature… a man who should be in something perhaps superior, but in very much inferior, to these men… one who could not become a pebble, having too strong an identity of his own…. He should have rank, and intellect, and parliamentary habits by which to bind him to the service of the country, – and he should also have unblemished, unextinguishable, inexhaustible love of country… as the ruling principle of his life; and it should so rule him that all other things should be made to give way to it But he should be scrupulous, and, as being scrupulous, weak.7

  The proposition that the office of Prime Minister cannot be filled with complete success by a morally scrupulous person – and in Trollope’s view ‘Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium, is a perfect gentleman’8 – is perhaps not very original, but it effectively disturbs any too easy assumptions we may make as to the morality of British public life, and of the constitutional compromise celebrated by Walter Bagehot. After all, the British system was intended to be run by gentlemen for gentlemen, and not by professional politicians for their like. If the office of Prime Minister could not be filled by such a one as Plantagenet Palliser, then by whom should it be filled? And if the highest office in the land was morally equivocal in this way, what of lesser institutions? From an idealist’s point of view, the Britishness – or rather the Englishness – which the novel celebrates temporizes dangerously with worldly values. This, of course, would come as no surprise to the generations of the English rulers who knew that their constitution was founded in just this sort of compromise. Victorian statesmen held it as dogma that the pragmatic English way was superior to French rhetoric and idealism, and the tyranny and bloodshed to which the latter were believed inevitably to lead. It was clearly better, in this view, to be ruled by gentlemen than by professional politicians. The Duke of St Bungay has a typically robust view of a gentleman’s need to overcome his finer scruples and accept power, upbraiding the Duke of Omnium over the latter’s dislike of dealing in politics with dishonest men: ‘According to that the honest men are to desert their country in order that the dishonest may have everything their own way’ (p. 480). We meet a parallel to this argument of expediency in The Warden when Archdeacon Grantly tells the saintly Septimus Harding that the older clergyman has a duty to go on drawing a comfortable income from the Church rather than leave it to be enjoyed by somebody less upright In Trollope’s fictional universe, moral scruple is often difficult to reconcile with the exigencies of life in the world.

  Such issues in the moral conduct of public life, rather than political principles themselves, are what Trollope delights in, for, as Enoch Powell among others has complained,9 politics as doctrine are not Trollope’s subject Nevertheless, the particular compound of materials in the Palliser novels has proved very successful. Trollope has been the favoured reading of a substantial number of politicians, including at least two Prime Ministers in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1878 the politician and historian A.W. Kinglake acknowledged his enthusiasm in a letter to the author; ‘I am always mindful of the un-numbered hours of pleasure that I owe to your delightful books. And, apart from the pleasure, it is so good for one… to see the play of healthful English life as you with your genius present it.’10 Few readers of a century or more later would think the matter was so uncomplicated. After all, some of Trollope’s novels which are now most respected, such as He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now, can scarcely be said to convey that ‘play of healthful English life’ that Kinglake picked out for special comment. Marital breakdown, kidnapping, insanity, ruthless speculation and cheating are more likely to have stuck in the modern reader’s memory. Of course it is probably true that a reader like Kinglake would have regarded these particular books as unpleasant aberrations in the Trollopian canon, but later generations have found them typical of Trollope’s works, in most of which disturbing undercurrents are now detected. The Prime Minister is an interesting case. The novel seems clearly to celebrate what according to Victorian myth was the most quintessentially ‘English’ of social groups, the squirearchy, whose virtues finally overcome the corrupt values of speculative capitalism. In the non-political plot, genteel Englishness is triumphant, an alien adventurer is expelled, and our English heroine rescued, while the political story-line tells us that although the practicalities of political life demand frequent moral compromise and social discomfort, a man of the highest rank can be found who for a brief interlude will bring to the office of Prime Minister an idealism which is rare amid the hurly-burly of government At first sight the evidence of The Prime Minister seems to be that there are great strengths in the English way of doing things, and great resilience in English political and social institutions.

  A brief look at the institution of marriage in The Prime Minister, however, should alert us to some unsettling features in the Trollopian universe. As so often in Victorian fiction, marriage is presented as the ideal career for a woman, and the culmination of her early struggles – so long, that is, as the spouse is responsible, English and of the landed or professional classes. Contracting an exogamous marriage nearly proves fatal for Emily Wharton, who in an emergency can only put herself under the protection of her father, a well-to-do lawyer. Unsurprisingly, the law provides little protection for a wife against her husband, but even in its own terms, the operation of the institution sounds corrupt The legal system is always an important presence in Trollope’s novels, and in this case it is the source of the wealth which Ferdinand Lopez wishes to acquire through his wife for speculative purposes. (In this, The Prime Minister dramatizes one aspect of the struggle between capitalism and the conservative values of the old professions.) Wharton himself, as a prominent barrister, should be ideally placed to protect his daughter, but he has to concede that Lopez is legally in the right in wishing to force her to accompany him to Guatemala, and that she can probably be saved only because, given the respective social positions of himself and Lopez, it is unlikely that any court would enforce the law against his daughter. The law, that is, does next to nothing for the wives of tyrannical husbands, but courts and judges can be expected to be swayed by the social standing of a party to an action. It is true that the first of a series of acts enlarging a married woman’s control over the assets she had brought into a marriage or earned since had been passed in 1870, shortly before the date of the action,11 but this was only the start of a reform still uncompleted a century later. A woman’s only protection – and a very partial defence it is – turns out to be that the men around her should behave ‘like gentlemen’. The adequacy of the law is shown to be one of the pious falsehoods society tells itself.

  Being married to ‘a perfect gentleman’ has its shortcomings too, as the Duchess has learnt over the years. It is scarcely necessary to rehearse the effects of the suffocating stereotypes imposed on even the most fortunate women by Victorian patriarchy: these things are now thoroughly documented; but the ways in which Trollope’s texts register them are not all recognized. Many critics have assumed unquestioningly that the views which Abel Wharton holds on marriage receive authorial endorsement. Women, Wharton says, must choose their husbands cautiously from among their own social kind, so that they can ‘honour and obey’ them appropriately. Although a man may survive the breakdown of a marriage, a woman cannot possibly do so. Once a woman is married, Wharton believes, she should remain married, whatever the circumstances: ‘If [a man] makes a mistake, it may be put right But with a woman’s marrying – vestigia nulla retrorsum. She has put off all her old bonds and taken new ones, which must be her bonds for life’ (p. 130).

  There is nothing unusual in these views at the time. On the other hand the literary allusion through which Wharton expresses them reveals things which are not officially acknowledged. Like many men of his educational background – including Trollope, his author – he has recourse to a tag from Horace to make his opinions resonate with his fe
llows. There was a habit of quotation from the classics, or from one of the Latin textbooks used at school, which used to reassure men of a certain class of the essential rightness of things, the comprehensibility of the world and their ability to communicate with their fellow men. As often as not a tag was used as a sort of catch-phrase, out of conversational habit, with scant attention to its meaning in its original context, and Trollope is showing Mr Wharton using one in just that way. Both Wharton and his interlocutor are perfectly content that they have communicated effectively, while reminding each other of their social standing by recalling their privileged schooling. What the text presents, however, is far more significant when the Latin words vestigia nulla retrorsum (‘none of the footprints lead back’) are interpreted in their context in the Epistle of Horace from which they come, and, although the fictional character is supposed to be ‘unaware’ of the fact, the tag actually provides a damaging comment on the very institution of marriage itself. In Horace’s Epistle (I.i), the prudent fox addresses the sick lion who has invited him to visit him and tend him: ‘The footprints frighten me, all leading towards your den, and none leading back.’ Wharton may intend to convey that a woman is destroyed if she walks out on her marriage, but behind the facile use of the quotation there is the image of patriarchal marriage as a sick lion which entraps and consumes its victims. Women might well be frightened by the footprints.

  Elsewhere Lopez obliquely expresses a rival myth about love and marriage when he quotes lines from The Bride of Abydos, one of Byron’s most passionate tales:

  Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,

  Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime!

  In this poem a tyrannical father kills his daughter’s lover as she attempts to elope, and the daughter in that instant dies of grief (p. 472). Lopez is here dramatizing himself as the romantic outsider, fighting against the archaic prejudice of the English Establishment. (It may be significant that in a letter Trollope refers to Lopez as ‘the soi-disant hero’, as though it is not the text which confers the status of hero on the character, but the character who claims it for himself.)12 In Lopez’s circumstances at that moment the quotation is ludicrously out of place, and the alien intruder is in any case well on the way to being vanquished. Yet we cannot be sure that we are not meant in part to accept Lopez as romantically attractive, and to admire his energy and intelligence as a contrast to the ineptitude and conceit of the well-to-do young men among whom he lives, such as Everett Wharton, who is eventually found a role when he inherits a country estate, and his shortcomings are at a stroke translated into squirely perfection.

  In fact the presentation of Lopez, well-educated, enterprising, eloquent and skilled in foreign languages, anticipates a remark of George Meredith’s to the effect that ‘English women and men feel toward the quick-witted of their species as to aliens, having the demerits of aliens – wordiness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, and empty glitter, the sin of posturing’.13 As John Fletcher says of Lopez, ‘He’s too clever, too cosmopolitan, – a sort of man whitewashed of all prejudices, who wouldn’t mind whether he ate horseflesh or beef if horseflesh were as good as beef’ (p. 141). For most readers, the problem with Lopez is to decide whether it is the narrator or the other characters who hate him because he is an outsider. There is, after all, plenty of English immorality to go round, and we do not know if the narrator wants us to attribute Lopez’s to his Portuguese-Jewish origins. Does all the racial prejudice in the novel belong solely to the other characters, or is the novelist behind the generally xenophobic and anti-semitic remarks and thoughts of many of the English characters? After all, a degree of xenophobia and anti-semitism (if anti-semitism admits of degrees) is part of the English Victorian identity, and Trollope was above all a recorder of contemporary Englishness. But is he also a sharer in it? When the narrator refers to Lopez as ‘a man without a father, a foreigner, a black Portuguese nameless Jew’, with ‘a bright eye, and a hook nose, and a glib tongue’, he is not speaking for himself, but anticipating old Mrs Fletcher’s reactions when she shall hear of Emily’s love (p. 136). As word of it spreads, the prejudice becomes even more grossly expressed, and racial terms are enrolled to help other characters’ ad bominem dislike. For example, Arthur Fletcher at first contradicts Sir Alured Wharton’s prejudiced racial description of Lopez, but then himself starts thinking of him as ‘greasy’. The slope from rivalry to racism is indeed slippery.

  The trouble begins for the reader with the opening words of the novel:

  It is certainly of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers and who were his grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society, and also of service to be able to speak of them as of persons who were themselves somebodies in their time.

  This certainly is a level-headed assessment of how high-Victorian society worked, as we learn from The Prime Minister and as we also know from extrinsic evidence. Whether it is the narrator’s statement as to how things should be ordered we cannot tell. If it is, then we assume that throughout the novel all the prejudicial remarks about Ferdinand Lopez in particular, and Jews in general, derive from the narrator, and ultimately from Trollope. Yet this is not the only possibility. After all, for many years Trollope’s favourite novel was Pride and Prejudice, and these introductory words may have an equivocal status rather like that of Jane Austen’s most famous opening sentence: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ We have no difficulty deciding that Jane Austen is being ironic, and that she would have us know that she is not implicated in the term ‘universally’. It is possible that Trollope is equally distant from his opening remark, and that he is not one of those who suppose that one ought to have to know one’s grandparents in order to advance in the world.

  As the novel progresses, we find that it is tirelessly concerned with questions of social standing and social conformity. Like so much of Trollope’s fiction it asks questions about belonging. Does Ferdinand Lopez belong to the class of gentlemen? Is he fit to belong to gentlemen’s clubs; and is he fit to belong to the ultimate London club, Parliament? The Prime Minister presents a world in which social status is of enormous importance to the people inhabiting it. Rank, title and office obviously have much to do with determining social position, but the fictional society is not a rigid hierarchy. The amount of attention paid to the question of where people stand is a clear sign of a social world full of people on the move. The inherited rules of precedence – establishing who walks in front of whom, and who leads whom to dinner – these are still in operation; but again and again social games are played out by the characters to determine or to reinforce their standing relative to each other, and the lives of many Trollopian characters are comedies or tragedies of social acceptance or alienation.

  In the world outside his novels, Trollope was a protagonist in just such a drama. Descended from landed gentry and related to a baronet, Anthony’s father brought the family perilously low through bankruptcy, clinging desperately to the educational and other trappings of gentility until rescued by the literary earnings of the resourceful Fanny Trollope, Anthony’s mother. During his miserable childhood and youth, Anthony himself nearly slipped over the precipice which divided middle-class respectability from disgrace. He was rescued by a lucky posting to Ireland, where he created an acceptable social persona for himself, and developed in confidence. He also began to write novels, which were scarcely successful until the fourth, The Warden, attracted notice. Four more novels followed, building him a very respectable reputation and some sales, until finally his return to a more responsible post in England at the end of 1859 happily coincided with the launch of his first serial fiction, and he achieved immediate, sensational success with Framley Parsonage. Publishing fiction gave him a feeling of social identity, when ‘people about me knew that I had written a book’.14 A fuller sense of belonging which came when he was accepted in London’s clubland c
ontrasted powerfully with the feelings of exclusion he had carried within him from his youth:

  I have ever had a wish to be liked by those around me, – a wish that during the first half of my life was never gratified. In my school-days no small part of my misery came from the envy with which I regarded the popularity of popular boys…. And afterwards, when I was in London as a young man, I had but few friends…. It was not rill we had settled ourselves at Waltham that I really began to live much with others. The Garrick Club was the first assemblage of men at which I felt myself to be popular.15

  By dint of hard work he had regained the social status his father had lost It is no wonder that all his life he retained an intense respect for work and a secure social standing. But the nostalgic appeal of the landed society he had only marginally experienced as a child also had a powerful hold over him. Only the pain of exclusion could make belonging so important.

  Similar feelings are dramatized in his novels. The desires to belong, to be recognized socially, and to enter Parliament are admirable, but the ‘correct’ way to achieve them’is through hard work. Excluded characters are vividly presented, and are often far worthier than those who are in place in society. Yet running counter to any sentiments which might upset the social order is the nostalgia for a world of landed wealth and security – a land Trollope had never really known, which may never have existed, and which would certainly have frustrated his energies grossly had he been condemned to live exclusively within it. It is no wonder that Ferdinand Lopez, like many adventurers, attracts some degree of sympathy by his resourcefulness and courage. Where, in contrast, would the world be if run entirely by Herefordshire squires? Yet finally the novel comes to rest in a nostalgic picture of landed society. The ending, like that of most novels, embalms a fictional world for ever more, just as nostalgia preserves as a static vision what once was dynamic.