Anglican orthodoxy and evangelical antipathies imbibed by Trollope in childhood—His personal objections to the Low Church Party for theological as well as social reasons—His characteristic revenge on Norman Macleod for extorting from him aGood Wordsnovel—Rachel Raya case of “vous l’avez voulu, George Dandin”—And instead of a story for evangelical readers a spun-out satire on evangelicalism—Its plot, characters, and incidents—Nina Balatkaregarded as a problem Jew story—Linda Tresselto Bavarian Puritanism much asRachel Rayto English—Miss Mackenzieanother hit at the Low Church—Its characters and plot—The Last Chronicle of BarsetandThe Vicar of Bullhampton—Their serious elements, as well as social photographs and occasional touches of satire against women, ever doing second thing before first and then doing the first wrong—Both novels illustrate Trollope’s views of the tragic volcano ever ready to break out from under the social crust.
Anglican orthodoxy and evangelical antipathies imbibed by Trollope in childhood—His personal objections to the Low Church Party for theological as well as social reasons—His characteristic revenge on Norman Macleod for extorting from him aGood Wordsnovel—Rachel Raya case of “vous l’avez voulu, George Dandin”—And instead of a story for evangelical readers a spun-out satire on evangelicalism—Its plot, characters, and incidents—Nina Balatkaregarded as a problem Jew story—Linda Tresselto Bavarian Puritanism much asRachel Rayto English—Miss Mackenzieanother hit at the Low Church—Its characters and plot—The Last Chronicle of BarsetandThe Vicar of Bullhampton—Their serious elements, as well as social photographs and occasional touches of satire against women, ever doing second thing before first and then doing the first wrong—Both novels illustrate Trollope’s views of the tragic volcano ever ready to break out from under the social crust.
THE beginnings of Anthony Trollope’s religious sympathies came from his own home. The social and moral influences that he, as a boy, unconsciously imbibed here were altogether anti-evangelical. John Wesley died in 1791, leaving behind him the contemptuously called “Methodies.” Charles Simeon, whose Cambridge disciples were scornfully known as “Sims,” lived till 1836. Between those two dates, practically indeed up to 1850, weekday religion was only in vogue among distinctively evangelical surroundings, though in 1850 Charlotte Yonge’s writings began to exercise a sort of spiritual missionary force in High Anglican households. Into a Low Church environment Anthony Trollope had not been born. His grandfathers on both sides, clergymen of the orthodox, highly respectable, and not unamiable kind, were disposed, by ancestral or aristocratic tradition,towards sacramental Anglicanism. Like the rest of Trollope’s clerical relatives, they boasted their doctrinal descent from the High Church divines of the Stuart period, and would have disapproved as much as was done by the lady who wroteThe Heir of Redclyffeany violation of an habitual reserve on all religious subjects except upon devotional occasions.
With all the children of Thomas Anthony and Frances Trollope the Church catechism, with the epistles and gospels of the season, was included in the home lessons. Anything more than that would have been called evangelical or Low Church. As in other upper middle-class households of the time, so beneath the Trollope roof it became the rising generation’s fixed idea that Low-churchism must be a mark of vulgarity, a sort of spiritually parasitic growth, flourishing, alas, among the small tradesmen, whose sons were educated at some private venture schools, but happily unknown in the superior educational or social soil, which grew something better than English grammar and arithmetic. From the nursery, these notions had been confirmed in Anthony Trollope, not only by the pervading sentiments or table-talk of his elders, but by the official authority of his mother’s old friend and frequent visitor, Dr. Nott, one among the Winchester canons, whose spare figure, pale, delicate features, black gaiters reaching to the knee, spotlessly white neckcloth of many folds, and elegant Italian scholarship, suggested not a few touches for cultured and cosmopolitan Dr. Stanhope in the Barchester group. Dr. Nott, an exemplary priest of his period, had been one of the Princess Charlotte’s tutors, and had initiated the structural repairs that prevented Winchester Cathedral from falling into ruin. His periodical calls upon Mrs. Trollope became the occasion for an examining review of the children—were they good, obedient, truthful, and industrious? When answering, one day, these questions, Anthony and his elder brother Tom volunteered the statement that, if they were not quite everything which could be wished, it was because of their nurse Farmer being an Anabaptist. Such heterodoxy, Dr. Nott admitted, might be deplorable, but did not, he added, absolve the children from the duty of subordination. This was resented by the two brothers as a snub, and intensified their disgust with schismatics, including Low Church of every degree.
In 1837 Mrs. Trollope’s bitter attack upon evangelicalism inThe Vicar of Wrexhilldeepened still further her children’s loathing of “Methodies” and all whose religious faith did not conform to a gentlemanlike Anglicanism. How these preferences and prejudices colouredBarchester Towersand the novels that followed, it has been already pointed out. Not that Trollope grew up into an irreligious or other than God-fearing man. It was indeed to some extent the intellectual man’s contempt for the crass, ignorant infidelity of the time that, as years went on, deepened his respect for genuine piety in all its manifestations, and made his strictures upon certain of its unseasonable and mischievous phases so different as to tone and spirit from the satire of Dickens upon the same phenomena. His turn of mind was not fervently devotional, but for spiritual as well as social reasons he disliked Churchmen of Mr. Slope’s variety. His great ground of quarrel with evangelicalism was its tendency to divorce conduct from religion. The Mosaic law and ritual were confessedly so exacting as to be suited only for the earliest stage of the Divine revelation. They were superseded entirely by Christianity, independent, in its pure and early form, of all externals, but progressively overloaded with superstitious ceremonies and doctrines, some of which the Protestant Reformation was said to have abrogated. Evangelicalism, however, with its ruthless insistence on a series of psychological experiences and of emotional developments, as the indispensable tests of genuine conversion and effectual deliverance from the wrath to come, instituted a kind of subjective ordeal, in comparison of which the yoke of Hebrew formalism was easy and the burden of Popish ritual light.
A man could know for certain whether he hador had not performed the religious acts enjoined on him by his spiritual superiors; but could not, in the nature of things, be equally sure of having realised all the ghostly sensations, and of having exactly attained to that frame of mind necessary, as he was told, for salvation. The first stage in the process prescribed for all penitents by the evangelical doctors, the being brought under conviction of sin, might seem simple; but how long was that phase of agony to last, or, if the painful experience were not followed by a consciousness of peace and pardon, did it mean that the Divine wrath was not to be appeased? About this the evangelical teachers shrank from committing themselves, with the result, as it seemed to Trollope, that the newly wakened soul must be left indefinitely to torment itself with doubts whether its failure to pass, in the orthodox order, from distress and disturbance to peace and joy, might not imply guilt beyond all hope of pardon. At the best these disabling agitations could not fail, while inflicting torment on those who suffered them, to disqualify human beings for the performance of their daily duties to each other, as well as to make religion itself, not an invigorating inspiration, but a paralysing terror.
In a word, evangelicalism, as conceived of by Trollope, puzzled, perplexed, and irritated him. Of the evangelical teachers, with the shibboleths they parade as well as the stultifying inconsistencies these imply, he would say, “Your profession does not make you a Christian. For that, you must act like one. Yet,” he added, “we are told good works, though the test of religion, are also a snare, and certainly make for perdition if performed by those not in a state of grace or merely as moral duties.” “You tell me,” I once heard Trollope say to an evangelical monitor perhaps almost old enough to have sat under Grimshaw or Romaine, “that, in effect, virtue becomes vice if its practical pursuit be not sanctified by a mystical motive not within the understanding of all. Such a theory, I retort, can in its working have only one of two results—the immorality of antinomianism,or a condition of perplexity and confusion which must drive men from religion in disgust and despair.”
Barchester Towerscontained Trollope’s earliest embodiment of Low-churchmanship in Mr. Slope, with his baneful influence on Mrs. Proudie. Primarily the Barchester bishopess personified the tendency of her sex to mistake worry for work and fuss for energy. In simple truth, the Established Church was to Trollope, from his pervadingly official point of view, a branch of the Civil Service, which could not properly be carried on if irregular influences and emotions or imperfectly qualified persons were allowed to have a voice in it. Hence the famous caricature of the she ecclesiastic in 1857.
In the year now reached by this narrative, 1863, Trollope renewed his attack upon the religionists he detested, after a fashion and under circumstances that give to the bookRachel Raya genuine biographical significance. The genesis ofRachel Rayis indeed throughout a revelation of its author’s idiosyncrasies, shown perhaps even more in the facts connected with its publication than in the unrelieved bitterness of its sectarian strictures. Trollope, at the time of its publication being arranged for, was in the full tide of his success and fame. He could make his own terms with editors or publishers.Good Words, when—from 1862 to 1872—conducted by a Presbyterian minister, Norman Macleod, though in no sense a denominational organ, could not afford to fly in the face of evangelical prejudices. Naturally Trollope understood this so well that when applied to by its editor for a story, he deprecated the offer on the ground of his not being a “goody-goody” writer, as well as of his inability or indisposition to suit his sentiments or his language to Macleod’s public. In reply to those objections, the novelist received from the editor the promise of a free hand and the assurance that no attempt to gag him should be made. Trollope therefore reluctantly accepted the engagement, and proceeded to fulfil it in a temper deeply resenting the pressure that had been placed uponhim. “Vous l’avez voulu, George Dandin;”[24]caveat emptor: on such principles Trollope made the bargain and set to work. For, ifGood Wordswould not have the novel, a forfeit could be squeezed out and another publisher found. This is what actually happened. The author’s misgivings were fulfilled to the letter. The magazine manager sent back to the author the manuscript, accompanied by the fine, and the book found its publishers in Chapman and Hall.
How, after all these years, will the novel strike the reader to-day? Trollope affected to see the specific reasons of the rejection by Macleod in its praise of dancing as a healthy and innocent recreation. Nothing of the sort. Nor, it is certain, would any controversial passages, however little in harmony with Presbyterian ideas, have made Macleod pronounce it impossible. As it was, the story served Trollope as the vehicle, less of his own notions about spiritual truth and falsehood than of his inveterate and violent antipathies to certain manifestations of the religious spirit in individuals and in daily conduct. For the first time since the Slope episodes inBarchester Towers, he saw and used his opportunity for letting the evangelicals have it. All that they did or thought, and the most typical members of their class, were depicted with not less personal bitterness against their religious faith than was displayed, in hisHistory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by the historian Gibbon towards the primitive Christians as the great disturbing and anti-social force of the second and third centuries. Wherever evangelicals are found or whithersoever these pietists go, they bring with them discomfort, suspicion, and ill-will. They may not be chargeable with those sins of the passions that are the infirmities of manlier natures. They therefore hold themselves entitled to unlimited indulgence in scandal-mongering, backbiting, and other social devices for gratifying their sense of power, by making all those about them uncomfortable.
In the course of his sojourns at or near Bath, Cheltenham, and other West of England resorts, Trollope had personally experienced and resented the widespread ascendency, social and political, of the Low Church Party. For that reason the scene ofRachel Rayis laid in that South Devon district which, within Trollope’s recollection, had been torn by ecclesiastical feuds arising from differences about the costume proper to be worn during the conduct of divine service. This suggested to Thomas Hood his clever lines, less well-known now perhaps than they deserve to be:
“I see there is a pretty stir, about things down at Exeter;Whether a clergyman should wear a black dress or a white dress.For me I neither know nor care whether a clergyman should wear a black dress or a white dress.I have a grievance of my own, a wife that preaches in her gown,And lectures in her night dress.”
“I see there is a pretty stir, about things down at Exeter;Whether a clergyman should wear a black dress or a white dress.For me I neither know nor care whether a clergyman should wear a black dress or a white dress.I have a grievance of my own, a wife that preaches in her gown,And lectures in her night dress.”
“I see there is a pretty stir, about things down at Exeter;Whether a clergyman should wear a black dress or a white dress.For me I neither know nor care whether a clergyman should wear a black dress or a white dress.I have a grievance of my own, a wife that preaches in her gown,And lectures in her night dress.”
The local quarrels thus satirised by the humorist, much and widely talked about at the time, long left the clerical atmosphere of the neighbourhood in a highly electrical state. While local animosities were at their height, Trollope had been on Post Office duty in the south-west of England. In the Baslehurst of the story, and in other Exeter suburbs, he describes the points at which, for the moment, evangelicalism had triumphed. Here, during the fifties, he had his veritable originals: the severe, imperious Puritan, Mrs. Prime, and the younger sister Rachel whom she bullies, living with their mother Mrs. Ray, a sweet-tempered, gentle, loving woman, endowed with a still attractive person, having much in common with her second born, Rachel, and, like her, somewhat tyrannised over by the elder of her two daughters. The husband survived by Mrs. Ray is a good specimen of Trollope’s terse character-sketching. He managed the property of dean and chapter, knew the rights and wrongs of prebendaries, minor canons, vicars choral, and even choristers. He had, however, passed away long before the story opens, and is only mentioned to point thecontrast of the widow’s earlier orthodox clerical surroundings with the irregular spiritual influences that now agitate her home.
When we make this lady’s acquaintance, there is in progress, beneath her roof, a pitiless attempt on the part of the elder sister, Dorothea, by rigorous evangelical discipline, to crush worldliness out of the younger, her mother’s favourite, who gives the title to the novel. A long course of Calvinistic bullying has almost broken Mrs. Ray’s spirit. To that tyranny of soul Miss Ray has never quite surrendered herself. Its shadows fall, however, heavily enough over her young life; the iron of its terrors and threats had begun to penetrate her inmost being, when Luke Rowan’s appearance flashes a ray of hope upon her overcast life. The new-comer to Baslehurst is the partner in the brewery, hitherto entirely in the hands of Mr. Tappitt. The Tappitts, at whose house Miss Ray first meets Rowan, fervently admire the Low Church clergyman Mr. Prong. This pastor resembles the Barchester Mr. Slope, not only in being generally objectionable, but in the same mercenary attachment whether to Mrs. Ray herself or to her widowed daughter, Mrs. Prime, as Slope conceived to Mrs. Bold.
The incidents of the story naturally grow out of Rachel Ray’s courtship by the latest addition to the brewery staff, less welcomed by the Tappitt circle than tolerated as a worldly intruder whose salvation is rather a matter of prayer than of belief. Doleful indeed are the prognostications of the results likely to follow their acquaintance called forth by Rowan’s earliesttête-à-têtewith Miss Ray. This, really the opening scene in the action of the story, gives Trollope scope for the humour that alone redeems from failure a story as painful asThe Kellys and the O’Kellys, without the pathetic power and witty relief that have made his second novel worthier of republication thanRachel Ray.
Before passing to another book with whichRachel Raytempts comparison, something must be said about the new experiment of whichLinda Tresselformed the secondproduct. Change of scene, of characters, and of interest, as well as anonymity of authorship, in the year of his departure from the Post Office, 1867, marked Trollope’s dual venture. Each owed something to the stimulating and instructive society in which Trollope found himself as the guest of the famous editor and publisher to whom he had been introduced years earlier by John Forster, but whom he scarcely knew well till the Scotch tours that Post Office duties or holiday recreation called him to make during the nineteenth century’s second half. In the case of both stories, also, the skill with which the local colour was laid on struck all critics, not less than the truth to life with which the essentially German characters, with their social and moral backgrounds, were depicted.
Nina Balatkacame first of the two in 1867. Its scene is laid in Prague, the old Bohemian capital. Here there exists a large Jewish colony. Among its members, the distinction between Hebrew and Gentile is marked with such depth and bitterness that an intermarriage between the two races is considered degrading to each. The girl who gives her name to the story, a broken-down tradesman’s daughter, and the niece of a rich merchant Zamenoy, has given her heart to an Israelite engaged in commerce, Anton Trendellsohn. This suitor, in his many dealings with old Balatka, Nina’s father, has shown himself a considerate creditor. The roof beneath which Nina lives is legally due to him for her father’s debts. Trendellsohn, however, has not even pressed for the title deeds. These would establish his right to the property, but are now in other Jewish hands, those of Zamenoy. The lover’s generosity and self-sacrificing devotion to Nina are accompanied by all the suspicion of his race and by a characteristic resentment of the overreaching practised, as he considers, on him. The Zamenoys, representing the evil genius of the story, are only bent on breaking off the engagement of the two lovers. As the first step to that end they contrive to secrete the title deeds, now wanted by Trendellsohn, in his sweetheart’s desk. Next they tell Trendellsohn that the girl he loves has appropriated them. A search is made, the documents are found in the place described by the Zamenoys, and Trendellsohn believes that he has been fooled. The lovers part. About the same time old Balatka dies. Deserted alike by the man to whom she has given her heart and by her rich relations, who have gone over to the Zamenoys, Nina resolves on suicide. With Trendellsohn at length, love proves a stronger motive than greed. A messenger from him arrives bidding Nina return to her place in his heart. Thus, happily, in marriage, ends the story, really remarkable for clever analysis of motive in the conflict with the essentially Hebraic Trendellsohn between the passion for a woman and for real estate.
The situation had the undoubted merit of originality as well as of being artistically presented in a singularly suitable environment immemorially associated with congenial traditions. The story’s success in magazine shape was afterwards heightened by its anonymity, and by the extent to which the studied air of secrecy enveloping the composition and all to do with it piqued curiosity. In London, at any rate, the first to solve the mystery was R. H. Hutton ofThe Spectator, not only the subtlest literary critic of his time, but an omnivorous reader of novels, with an instinct for discovering in their most commonplace occurrences and least likely characters a new revelation of their author’s personality and mental habit. He had already watched and commented on Trollope’s evolution from the domestic to the cosmopolitan stage. He knew Trollope’s turns of expression and leading ideas about the human combat of interest with feeling from his social conversation as well as his books. Dining at a table near Laurence Oliphant’s at the Athenæum, with no other companion than the last chapter ofNina Balatka, he received and soon afterwards uttered, the inspiration: “The ‘great unknown’ of theBlackwoodstory is Anthony Trollope.” Intimate with the Blackwoods though he was, Oliphant was not fully assured of the facts; “I believe,” he said oracularly, “they are satisfied with its reception.” Such proved to be the case. Although, as John Blackwood put it, not selling, it was telling. Blackwood’s London manager,one of Trollope’s Garrick intimates, received orders from Edinburgh to encourage Trollope, with “the author ofNina Balatka” for his pen name, to let the Magazine have another novel from his pen.
This second book, by the title ofLinda Tressel, began its course some five years after the publication ofRachel Ray, and introduced its readers to an interest, personal or spiritual, of much the same sort. The locality had changed from Exeter to Nuremberg. Here, at The Red House, lived the eponymous heroine in charge of her aunt. This relative, Frau Staubach, however well-meaning or conscientious, lacked the gentleness, the grace, and the feminine charm generally, of her English prototype, the mother with whom Rachel Ray passed her time. Yet, though in a less degree than the Devonshire widow, who sat under Mr. Prong, the petticoated pietist of Nuremberg is a kindly woman at heart. Only the iron creed, which makes her whole being so grievous a burden to herself and to those about her, constrains her to see wickedness in joy; in every form of pleasure a species of profligacy; in all love for children a pernicious indulgence endangering their eternal welfare; and, in every woman, Satan’s easy prey, until guarded by a middle-aged, respectable, unlovable and austere husband. Such a one she has found for her niece in her lodger, Peter Steinmarc. He has the recommendation of being small-minded, selfish, ugly, and so just the man destined to make unhappy for life a bright, handsome, high-spirited girl, such as her own young ward. In the English story, the destined victim, after a comparatively short captivity, escapes her doom, though not before her whole nature has suffered from the ordeal. The spirit of Rachel Ray’s Bavarian sister of misfortune is not easily worn out; but, eventually, her spirit is broken, and she is proclaimed the bride-elect of the odious consort selected by her aunt. At the psychological moment, however, Death, the deliverer, steps in; poor Linda dies before being called to put on her wedding dress. Her remorseless aunt watches her slow departure from life without pity or tears, but in a spiritof half-vindictive satisfaction with the order of fate. After Linda Tressel has breathed her last, Frau Staubach, with all the self-complacency in the world, relapses into a chronic state of puritanical morosity, more dark and odious than that which had been so far her normal condition. In this novelette there are none of the humorous flashes constantly enliveningRachel Ray. Its monotony of unrelieved sadness becomes fatal. One can scarcely, therefore, be surprised that Blackwood did not press its author for further anonymous ventures.
Before breaking the entirely new ground on which he had for some time set his thoughts, Trollope produced at the end of the sixties a little group of novels in his earlier and happiest vein. The first of these,Miss Mackenzie(1865), forms something of a link between the narrative attacks on the religionism that was his bugbear and some at least among the social novels which followed it. InMiss Mackenziethe only clergyman drawn at full length, Jeremiah Maguire, is one among the several candidates for the heroine’s hand. He would have fared better in his wooing with more of the gentleman about him and less of an unmistakable squint. His chief rivals are Mr. Rubb, the business partner of Miss Mackenzie’s surviving brother, socially poor Maguire’s inferior, and the lady’s cousin, a poor baronet’s son, John Ball, whose suit eventually succeeds. At her first appearance, the lady who thus becomes a bride is thirty years old, has an income of £800 a year, and, by the death of her elder brother, for whom she kept house, has been left alone in the world. The chief feature in the story is the Rev. Jeremiah Maguire’s pertinacity in the effort to secure the sufficiently well-dowered lady. In that endeavour he has the support of the religious set at Littlebath, whose leaders are the Rev. and Mrs. Stumfold, and in which Miss Todd and Miss Baker, first heard of inThe Bertrams, reappear.
Much of this, at first amusing enough, is so spun out as soon to become monotonous and gradually to lose all its point. To begin with, the satire lacked the merit of originality, and lost all freshness long before Trollope served upinRachel Rayaréchaufféof the Slope passages fromBarchester Towers. Dickens, indeed, had been the first (1836) to treat the public with its taste in the Stiggins ofPickwick, the predecessor of theBleak HouseChadband (1853). In Dickens’ hands it was good business enough, and served for a fresh spice to his fooling. Trollope, however, professed to delineate, not only the superficial humours associated with the graver subjects, but some at least among the spiritual or, at any rate, the deeper interests of the time. He ought not, then, to have been contented with reflecting the images, the ideas, and the jargon, which more than a quarter of a century earlier (1837) his mother, inThe Vicar of Wrexhill, had echoed from the Stiggins ofPickwick, and whichThe Saturday Reviewhad since hackneyed to death before Trollope unwillingly accepted his commission from the editor ofGood Words. During the nineteenth century’s second half, the Prongs, whom Trollope hated, had ceased to be, to any marked degree, representative of provincial churchmanship. The commercial argument justifies, indeed, all this loose and spiteful vituperation of his pet religious aversions.
By 1860, however, Trollope had achieved a unique position as at once the founder and producer of fiction as a serious profession, which, followed a certain number of hours daily, cannot fail of yielding an annual income. The habit of, in his own phrase, exacting from himself so many words at a sitting could not but be unfavourable to excellence of execution, though it interfered marvellously little, if at all, with his variety and versatility. Those gifts, during 1867-8, he had exhibited in taking his readers from the familiar home scenes to the less known corners of continental Europe. Here his work, though passing muster sufficiently well with the public, did not promise the material success which he knew he could still command in other fields. Consequently, before venturing on the experiment to be recorded in the next chapter, he returned to the Barchester vein with the certainty, soon realised, of convincing publishers and public that it still contained ore not less valuable and pleasant than he had last drawnfrom it a decade ago. The extracts given at the close of the present chapter will show that from reviewers’ and booksellers’ point of view Trollope might well applaud himself on the reception ofRachel Ray. Nevertheless it was a novelist’s business to create. InRachel Ray, he soon became conscious, to quote his own words to the present writer, of having set up certain religious or quasi-religious images chiefly, he admitted, for the purpose of belabouring them with verbal blows even as inThe Old Curiosity ShopQuilp vents his hatred on Christopher Nubbles in attacks on the wooden figure to which he gives Kit’s name.
Nearly half a generation has passed since, during the eventful ramble, already described in its proper place, round Salisbury Close, there had occurred to him the earliest of those ecclesiastical varieties whose portraiture amid their domestic or social surroundings soon brought him fortune and fame. Before closing the gallery of these sketches, he would draw one more clergyman of the same honest, manly English type as Mark Robarts, and would show his readiness to recognise elevation of character and purity of soul when, if possible, existing in an ordained minister of the gospel of views as decidedly Low Church as the detested Mr. Prong himself. This latter purpose was accomplished byThe Last Chronicle of Barset(1867). Nothing could be more dramatically complete than the contrast presented to the sleek, luxurious divines, or the well-fed, well-clothed, muscular officials of the church militant, in whom the novelist delighted, than the austere, gaunt, ill-nourished, poverty-stricken perpetual curate of Hogglestock in the marsh. The chronic gloom of his constitutional melancholy is deepened and saddened by the sombre Calvinism of a creed that admits or asks no ray of relief for the hardship of a lot still representing, with not less of faithful cruelty than when Trollope wrote, the hard lives of so many among the most spiritually-minded, most industrious, and not the least well-educated of the country clergy. The Rev. Josiah Crawley’s great qualities, his concealed accomplishments, and his shrinking silent heroism, have won the admirationof the academic, highly-cultivated, and well-to-do Dean Arabin, who has married Mr. Harding’s favourite, youngest daughter Eleanor. This friendship of the prosperous Anglican official for the half-starved incumbent gives rise to the chief and only sensational episode of the book, at once revealing, as well as altogether caused by, Crawley’s utter lack of all business methods, forgetfulness of facts, and heedlessness of consequences. Nor, in these respects, is the daughter of Crawley’s old friend, the Warden, formerly the rich widow, Mrs. Bold, and now Mrs. Arabin, in all matters having to do with money much better.
The crisis of the novel has been brought about in this way. Lord Lufton’s agent has lost a cheque for £20 made payable to bearer, and afterwards found to have been used by Crawley in settling a butcher’s bill. Asked how he got the draft, he hesitatingly answered that no doubt it formed part of the sum paid to him by the agent as tithes. That, it soon appeared, was impossible, for the tithe payment some time since actually made had been, as was always the case, in bank notes. Then, after reconsidering the matter, Crawley revised his account; surely the cheque must have been part of a loan made by Dean Arabin. To him, now absent from his deanery on an Italian tour, inquiries were telegraphed, bringing the statement on the sum having been advanced by bank notes. Crawley’s continued inability satisfactorily to explain the matter now coincides with the agent’s declaration that he must have dropped the cheque while visiting Crawley’s house. Appearances, therefore, at every point are dead against the wretched perpetual curate, who had naturally excited or confirmed suspicions by the lame, and, as they have so far proved, baseless versions of the matter, stammered out by him in his agony. Crawley is known throughout the district for an upright, conscientious, as well as confused and muddle-headed man. His parishioners’ conversation on the subject, and, at last, their reluctant belief in his guilt are not only in Trollope’s best manner, dashed with humour and knowledge of nature, but echo with Shakespearean fidelity the words and thoughts sure to have beenforthcoming in local gossip about such an incident. Briefly they are to this effect—“Well, we believe he’s a good man, and we think he wouldn’t have done it, but for being so dreadful poor.”
At last comes the explanation. When, overcome with the terrors of necessity and shame, Crawley accepted the Dean’s offer of money help, Mrs. Arabin left the room to get the cash. While absent, without her husband’s knowledge, she slipped into the envelope containing the notes an additional £20 in the form of a cheque. Crawley himself showed his usual negligence by not examining the contents of the envelope. With equally little wisdom, Mrs. Arabin never considered how her generosity might compromise the poor clergyman. Even these facts, however, do not fully clear up the mystery, for how did the cheque get into Mrs. Arabin’s hands? But that too proves to be quite a simple matter. Womanlike, as Trollope would have said, without the slightest aptitude for such affairs, she piqued herself on her ability to manage business concerns. She kept her own private banking account: by way of improving its figures she dabbled now and then in a few small speculations. In this way she had made the local inn her own property. The landlord and landlady whom she had put in, like the rest of their relatives, were always in difficulties. Lord Lufton’s agent, on going his rounds, had entered the small hostelry. Here he had dropped the cheque, which was promptly found by the innkeeper’s brother and used by him in paying certain arrears of rent. Thus the real thieves were the licensed victuallers, the tenants whom, without the Dean’s knowledge, Mrs. Arabin possessed. The excellence of women within their own department, their foredoomed and demonstrable blunders whenever they step out of it, were ideas tragically set forth inOrley Farm, and, with the accompaniments of less disaster, inCan You Forgive Her?The Last Chronicle of Barsetgave the novelist not only the chance of reverting to them in a first-rate plot, but of doing some justice to the evangelical parson while, after an amusingly characteristic fashion, dealing a covert stroke of feminine satire.
The second of the two stories marking, for the present, Trollope’s farewell to the church, wasThe Vicar of Bullhampton. This was published in 1870, but mostly written a good deal earlier. Some of the incidents connected with its publication too truthfully exhibit its author’s temper in dealing with his publishers not less significantly than the recital of Mrs. Arabin’s blunders in disposing of the cheque which got poor Mr. Crawley into such trouble, recalling the view of feminine limitations that he never modified. Trollope, as usual, had been punctual to the day with theBullhamptonmanuscript, for Bradbury and Evans’Once a Week. He had scarcely delivered it when, to his indignant disgust, he received from the publishers a request that his “vicar” might be held over to make way for an English version of Victor Hugo’sL’homme qui rit. The want of patriotism implied in the new proposal roused Trollope’s resentment, he wished it to be understood, quite as much as did the disregard of his own convenience. A pretentious French Radical’s “grinning man” was, in an English magazine, to be reckoned of more account than a carefully prepared story of national life by an English gentleman, who, however liberal and advanced some of his views, had, in and out of print, always been the champion of English institutions. Worse even than this, it soon turned out that Trollope’s clergyman was not to see the light inOnce a Weekat all, but in another property of the same owners,The Gentleman’s Magazine. That closed the transaction in this quarter. The story, issued at once by Chapman and Hall, strengthened the ties already connecting his literary progress with the fortunes of that House.
At each successive stage of the novelist’s course, Trollope has already been shown to have gained in breadth and depth of outlook upon life, in power and certainty of character analysis, as well as in a dramatic perception of the potential tragedies belonging to everyday existence. He now habitually used the most ordinary conjunctures as agencies for disturbing, with their grave or grim issues, the decorous surface of conventionally monotonous and serene lives. InThe Vicar of Bullhamptonall this wasexemplified after a fashion scarcely less striking than inOrley FarmorCan You Forgive Her?
Picture Trollope himself as having, at the age of twenty-three, found his way into Holy Orders, instead of the General Post Office, and Frank Fenwick, the before-mentioned clergyman, might well pass for a study of the author. Broad-shouldered and broad-minded, the young Bullhampton priest keeps all his powers of mind and body at the highest point of fitness. Just, generous, upright, and kind-hearted, he is ever ready to speak his mind, out of season perhaps as well as in it, and has all a healthy Briton’s determination not to let a mean advantage be taken of him, especially by those whose social ideas and antecedents differ from his own, or who offend any of his John Bull notions about honour and manliness. He finds in his wife a congenial, not too assertive, and sympathetic helpmate. Her great friend Mary Lowther, the heroine of the piece, is staying with them at the vicarage when the story opens; she has already a lover, favoured by the hospitable Fenwicks, a neighbouring young squire, Harry Gilmore.
Here, in passing, it may be pointed out that the locality, as the names used will suggest, has much to identify it with the midland counties and the north of England, to both of which Trollope, as a boy, had been taken more than once by his mother. On the other hand, both the Barchester local colour and nomenclature are throughout conspicuous by their absence. To resume our plot: while away from the vicarage on a visit to Miss Marrable, a maiden aunt, Mary meets and becomes engaged to a cousin, Walter Marrable, a wealthy baronet’s nephew, but himself without any visible means of subsistence. In that respect he resembles the young lady he loves. These money difficulties bring everything between the two young people to an end. Soon after what is supposed to be their final separation, Mary hears of her old lover’s engagement to his uncle’s ward, Edith Brownlow. In despair herself, and overcome by the persistent importunities of her friends, Mary Lowther accepts Harry Gilmore, only, however, to throwhim over when Marrable, unexpectedly coming into his uncle’s property, renews his marriage proposals. Such, it will be recognised, is the regulation course run by true love throughout the whole extent of Trollopian fiction, making, in all that concerns affections, the last clerical story uniform with the books that had immediately or, at some distance of time, preceded it.
Round this main episode is clustered another series of events, connecting the vicar with his parish. These furnish some of the best scenes in the book as well as serve to introduce the same kind of melodramatic element, first noticeable inDr. Thorne, afterwards receiving greater prominence inOrley Farm. Thus did Trollope practically acknowledge the influence upon the novel-reading public now firmly exercised by experts in sensational effects like Mrs. Henry Wood, Wilkie Collins, and Miss Braddon. Among the Bullhampton vicar’s parishioners are an unbending old miller, his daughter Carry, who has gone wrong, and his ne’er-do-well son, Sam Brattle, now under suspicion for a murder committed in the village. The Brattles are therefore an undesirable family. So thinks the Marquis of Trowbridge, the landlord of the murdered man. They happen to be tenants of Gilmore, who, meeting one day at the vicarage Lord Trowbridge, is asked point blank to clear his property of them. Here the vicar himself intervenes, turning on the Marquis with sharp words for his uncharitable and inexcusable demand. Lord Trowbridge, a pompous brainless peer, puffed up with the sense of his extreme importance, is for the moment too much overwhelmed by the parson’s audacity to say anything.
Presently, however, his feeling of offended dignity takes practical shape and prepares vengeance in giving a plot of ground, exactly opposite the parsonage gates, as the site for a Primitive Methodist Chapel, to the local minister of that sect, one Puddleham. This territorial donation soon proves to be not Trowbridge property at all. As a part of the glebe land it is at the vicar’s exclusive disposal. The Marquis, therefore, now suffers the furthermortification of being compelled to make a full apology to Fenwick for the infringement of his rights, as well as to pull down so much of the chapel as has been already built. All of this conclusively proves, to Trollope’s naïvely undisguised satisfaction, that Providence is on the side of the State Church. The sooner, therefore, Defoe’sThe Shortest Way with the Dissentersis literally adopted, the better for the peace, purity, and morals of the community. The same retributive poetical justice that deals so sharply with the Puddlehamites, with all poachers on the establishment’s preserves, and with their patron who wears the Trowbridge title, now befriends the Brattles. Sam turns out to be innocent; poor Carry, if she cannot regain her innocence, displays qualities which at least secure sympathy, and is prevented from falling over the rock of ruin to the lowest depth of degradation. The sturdy, hot-tempered old atheist, her father does not recant his theological heresies, but at least compares favourably with an evangelical Nonconformist.
Q.E.D. The favourable reception in store for the book is to be explained by other circumstances than the skill in the novelist’s technique running through its successive parts and the humour generally redeeming it from dullness. Low Churchmanship was becoming unpopular. Readers of the mid-Victorian epoch saw telling hits and lifelike portraits in what may to-day seem not much removed above the level of caricature. At the time, therefore,Rachel Raywon, not only a popular, but a literary success. The welcome given generally to it by the reviewers formed as great a compliment as Trollope had yet received from the Press. Among the religious papers, indeed,The GuardianandThe English ChurchmanleftRachel Rayand its companion stories severely alone,The Timesreviewer, however, recognised in it a new proof of Trollope’s insight into human nature and a fresh justification of the immense favour enjoyed by him with the most intelligent class of novel readers. “A delightful tale,” enthusiastically exclaims this critic, placing its author with Defoe and Richardson. “If,” it was added, “Trollope,like Defoe, has little imagination, what he possesses is so clear that we do not feel the want of suggestion; while his detailed knowledge of conventional custom is unsurpassed by the author ofClarissa.”
“O happy art of fiction,” gushes this enthusiast, “which can thus adjust the balance of fortune, raising the humble and weak to an equality in our hearts with the proud and great!” The eulogistic note thus sounded by the Choragus of the daily Press was at once taken up, prolonged, and swelled in the weekly journals. ToThe Athenæum,Rachel Rayseemed a book sure to do more than any critical protests to correct existing vices of public taste. The women of the tale were admirable, being treated with skill which must surprise even those to whom the author’s strength is most familiar. ToThe Spectator,Rachel Raydemonstrated that, as a censor, Trollope had gifts far above sarcasm, and that he had made good his place between Thackeray the satirist and Dickens the caricaturist.The Spectatorsubsequently hedges by admitting that the author ofRachel Rayleant rather in the direction of Dickens than of Thackeray, and that his powers fitted him less for satire than for caricature.The Saturday Reviewclosed an outburst of panegyric with a declaration that Trollope’s tact, discretion, and gentlemanly taste, combined with his literary power and his faculty of devising imaginary characters, made him eminently successful in describing the inner life of young women.
The Saturdayalone, in the Press, weekly as well as daily, noticed the attacks on evangelicalism as follows: “Mr. Prong is not an unfair representation of the lower clerical order in provincial towns; but the accuracy of the portrait does not make it a pleasant study, the foolish language, the pert fanaticism and the petty tricks of the worst evangelical class are not agreeable reading. Whatever of comic there is in them is soon exhausted unless the author glaringly exaggerates every symptom to spice his description.” The compliments forthcoming by the famous weekly then under Douglas Cook’s absolute editorial control, but owned by Beresford Hope and generallyreflecting its proprietor’s antipathies to all forms and expression of faith not distinctly Anglo-Catholic, admit of another explanation than its natural benediction on the religious portraits drawn by a writer who was then so much in its own way of thinking as Trollope. In 1864 Anthony Trollope’sNorth Americahad received such sharp treatment inThe Saturday Reviewthat his friends, G. H. Lewes and the famous lady bearing his name, were concerned to find some way of counteracting what they called the nasty notice. Eventually, some time later, Lewes himself did justice to Trollope’s transatlantic experiences inThe Fortnightly Review.
Before that he had succeeded in influencing an important section of the political Press in Trollope’s favour. Trollope’s next experiment in fiction, as well as certain events in his life connected with it, will form the subject of the next chapter.
Failures of literary men in the political world at the beginning of the nineteenth century—Trollope increases the number by going under at Beverley—“Not in, but in at the death”—Ralph the Heir—Its plots and politics—Trollope as editor ofThe St. Paul’s Magazine—Phineas Finn—Some remarks on Trollope’sPalmerston—In the heart of political society—The hero’s flirtations and fights in London—His final return to the old home and friends—Phineas Redux—Again in London—Charged with murder—Madame Goesler’s double triumph—Some probable caricatures—Trollope renews acquaintance with Planty Pal and his wife inThe Prime Minister—The close of the political series comes withThe Duke’s Children.
Failures of literary men in the political world at the beginning of the nineteenth century—Trollope increases the number by going under at Beverley—“Not in, but in at the death”—Ralph the Heir—Its plots and politics—Trollope as editor ofThe St. Paul’s Magazine—Phineas Finn—Some remarks on Trollope’sPalmerston—In the heart of political society—The hero’s flirtations and fights in London—His final return to the old home and friends—Phineas Redux—Again in London—Charged with murder—Madame Goesler’s double triumph—Some probable caricatures—Trollope renews acquaintance with Planty Pal and his wife inThe Prime Minister—The close of the political series comes withThe Duke’s Children.
“ANTHONY’S ambition to become a candidate for Beverley is inscrutable to me. Still, it is the ambition of many men, and the honester the man who entertains it, the better for us, I suppose.” So wrote Charles Dickens to Thomas Adolphus Trollope in the December of 1868. Exactly twenty-seven years before that date, the literary pre-eminence of Dickens, together with his championship, with pen and on platform, of social and administrative reform had, in 1841, brought the author ofOliver Twistthe offer of a seat for Reading. During the pre-Victorian age the future Lord Beaconsfield’s adventures in search of a constituency had begun in 1832, some five years after the completion ofVivian Grey. Disraeli’s contemporary in letters, and so a novelist older in point of years and fame than Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton came before the electors of St. Ives as the writer ofPelham, not to mention a novel and the prose or poetical miscellanies which had preceded it. Sixteen years after Dickens declined standing for the Berkshire capital, Thackeray (1857) unsuccessfully contested the city of Oxford. The politicaltradition had therefore been sufficiently confirmed and adorned by the leading fellow-craftsmen in his art by 1868. This was the year in which, at the General Election, Trollope tried his chance at Beverley. The illustrious precedents thus followed by him, though numerous, were not altogether encouraging. Benjamin Disraeli himself, in 1837, had owed his success at Maidstone not to his brilliant romance, or even to his effectiveRunnymede Lettersand telling pamphlets, but to his adoption by the sitting member, Wyndham Lewis, who held the place in his pocket.
At that date the popular tide had begun decidedly to turn against the Whigs. Even the famous and eloquent man of letters, then worth many votes to the Whigs on a division, T. B. Macaulay, had owed the opportunity of his memorable displays in defence of the Grey Reform Bill to his having been brought into the House by Lord Lansdowne for the family borough of Calne. Macaulay’s partner in the primacy of English letters, W. M. Thackeray, did not, in 1857, make much of a fight against Cardwell at Oxford. Yet in that contest Thackeray had enjoyed advantages entirely denied Trollope at Beverley. In the first place, Thackeray, as a member, of whom naturally it was proud, had the influence of the Reform Club at his back. Further, he had originally presented himself to the Oxford electors at the suggestion of a universally as well as an altogether exceptionally popular resident, Charles Neate, a Fellow of Oriel; with him Thackeray had long lived in affectionate intimacy. Under Neate’s personal guidance, and with him for prompter as well as introducer, the novelist canvassed the place and spoke from the hustings. Neate too, though unseated on petition, had carried the seat against Cardwell during the previous March. His own reputation was therefore concerned in seeing that his recently vanquished rival did not retrieve his discomfiture. Nevertheless, on the declaration of the poll, July 21 (1857), the author ofVanity Fairwas shown not only to have lost the day, but to have failed in favourably impressing any large body of the electors. “It is,” was Thackeray’s comment, “what Iexpected, and I take it as the British schoolboy takes his floggings, sullenly and in silence.” He had indeed scarcely reached his constituency before writing to Dickens. “Not more than 4 per cent of the people here, I have found out, have ever heard of my writings. Perhaps as many as 6 per cent know yours, so it will be a great help to me if you will come and speak for me.”
At Beverley Trollope had no person of commanding authority to speak for him at all; unlike Thackeray, he was not a member of the Reform. The managers at the Liberal headquarters gave him his first introduction to the place, where he found himself at least as well received as he could have expected. Some ten or fifteen years later the thought and reading involved in the preparation of his political stories and hisLord Palmerston(1882) had more or less familiarised him with the temper, the issues, and the personages of public controversy. It was without any of even that preparation that he began to canvass the Minster town of the East Riding.Can You Forgive Her?indeed (1864), likeRachel Rayof the same period, had contained passages casually mentioning rather than attempting to describe the war of parties at Westminster, or the appeals of the rival chiefs to the country. At the General Election, therefore, that made Gladstone for the first time Prime Minister, and brought our novelist as his supporter, Trollope knew little more of politics than average newspaper readers and a good deal less than the newspaper writers.
By his failure at Oxford in 1857, Thackeray, according to Trollope, was saved from a situation in which he could not have shone. Probably the same thing might have been said eleven years later of Trollope himself after the Beverley misadventure of 1868. As parliamentary candidates both men, indeed, belonged to the same description. Proud of being English gentlemen first and popular writers afterwards, they looked, in Trollope’s own words, upon a place at St. Stephen’s as the birthright of a well-born, well-bred, and well-to-do Briton.[25]Like others of the socialorder with which they identified themselves, their Westminster ambitions implied no more idea of being useful than does entrance into any first-class club. The real and serious difference between the two candidatures was this. At Oxford Charles Neate had long been watching for a vacancy which might suit Thackeray; the single reason that took Trollope to Beverley was its allotment to him in return for a contribution to the Liberal election fund. Beverley then possessed two members. The Conservative candidates were stronger than any likely to be found on the other side. Sir Henry Edwards had not only held the borough for the Conservatives before coming into the baronetcy, but afterwards had contributed to its institutions of all kinds so munificently as almost to have made its representation his own and his friends’ appanage. He had now chosen for his colleague Captain Kennard, who had already secured a good start of Trollope, and had spared neither labour nor money in locally ingratiating himself. On the other hand, Trollope soon made many friends who, in some cases, already knew his writings and were gratified to find in their author a gentleman with every mark of good breeding, as well as a shrewd, genial, and often delightful companion.
Trollope’s comrade in the fight, then Marmaduke Maxwell of Everingham, became subsequently Lord Herries and the Duke of Norfolk’s father-in-law; for him Trollope had all the personal charm which he had long found in his writings. The two representatives of Liberalism were thus well assorted, and each in his own way did yeoman service to the other. From his father, however, Trollope inherited an irritable intolerance of fools and bores; he found several of both among his Beverley friends. The business of electioneering degenerated into drudgery before it was half done. The hunting season was in full swing; Trollope felt that he should go out of his mind in disgust if he missed a few days off with the hounds. The recreation was not indeed enjoyed at the cost of the seat, because the Conservative success could never have been for a moment in doubt. It did, however, make the novelist play a worsesecond to Maxwell and so leave him even further behind the two Tory victors than might otherwise have been the case. Though Trollope fell short of success at Beverley, the invitation of his local friends to try again and the pressure of official Liberalism not to withdraw his name from the candidates’ list are enough to show that his failure had its redeeming points. His Post Office experience and his power, improved by the practice, of getting up and expressing himself on any subject would have helped him to make at least a respectable figure had he ever been returned. As a speaker, he not only exemplified his own counsel, already quoted, to those ambitious of addressing parliament, but he delighted without exception, and on both sides, his Beverley audiences by the sonorous delivery of virile periods, clothing in clear and terse phrase thoughts that were the condensed essence of practical wisdom and shrewd insight.
A few years after the election I happened to be visiting, at Brantingham Thorp, Mr. Christopher Sykes. He had himself between 1865 and 1868 filled the seat contested by Trollope in the latter year. Beverley lay within an easy drive. In my host’s old constituency there still flourished the local gentlemen who had vigorously worked with head, heart, and hand for Trollope. They included Mr. Charles Langdale, Mr. Alfred Crosskill, Mr. Daniel Bayes, Mr. Hawkshaw, the famous civil engineer—a connection by marriage of the great Josiah Wedgwood—Mr. Charles Elwell, and Mr. F. Hall ofThe Yorkshire Post, the oldest member of that newspaper’s staff, which indeed, before the journal actually started, he did much to get together. Both these last-named gentlemen, still, I am happy to know, alive and well, have themselves supplied me with some details and put me in the way of getting others. These authorities have made me independent of my own memory and even Trollope’s own reminiscences in the matter.
The county families of course threw their influence into the scale of Trollope’s Conservative opponent. The balance of speaking talent was undoubtedly on Trollope’s side; on the platform he derived his chief assistance fromMr. James Stewart, of Hull, from Colonel Hodgson, a very large employer of Beverley labour, and especially from Mr. William Carey Upton, a Baptist minister. During the struggle, the Conservatives paid our novelist a compliment he much appreciated by undertaking on their side to withdraw Kennard, if their opponents would scratch Trollope. This would have meant Sir Henry Edward’s and Mr. Marmaduke Maxwell’s uncontested return. The official Liberals might have accepted the suggestion, but the working men, deeply impressed by Trollope’s unconventional treatment of familiar subjects and the sense of intellectual power of all he said, would not for a moment hear of it, and this though Trollope almost ostentatiously failed to do himself and his supporters justice.
His sportsmanship formed a real point in his favour, for the Beverley electors, like other Yorkshiremen, love a horse, and are instinctively attracted to a bold rider to hounds. Trollope therefore did himself no harm by letting the householders see him in his top boots and pink riding through the streets on the way to a famous meet. His mistake was the selection for sport of a time at which his committee were working for him night and day, and his own presence could ill be dispensed with at public meetings or private conclaves. Liberalism’s association with Home Rule placed Trollope, in his later years, among the Conservatives. Had they enlisted his distinction, ability, and energy on their side at the first dissolution after the Derby-Disraeli Household Franchise Bill, he would undoubtedly have been found Sir Henry Edward’s colleague on the declaration of the poll. But in 1868 the Conservative educators, by their discovery of the Conservative working man, rode on a wave of popularity, rising in many places to enthusiasm. As for the “another attempt” mentioned by Trollope to his Beverley friends, that was never to be made, because, before the next general election, Beverley had lost its independent political existence, less, however, in consequence of its political corruption than by reason of certain municipal irregularities. As the judges who disfranchised the place themselves said, it was the “doubleevent” which secured the political extinction of the place. “I did not,” was Trollope’s characteristic comment on the whole affair, “get in, yet I was in at the death; for the effort of my defeat involved Beverley’s own parliamentary demise, under circumstances less tantalising than those of our friend Kinglake’s parliamentary extinction; for, unlike me, he got in only to be kicked out, while I at least had the satisfaction of seeing those who had walked over me faring worse than myself, inasmuch as they not only lost their seats but their money too.”[26]
Every incident, personage, or issue connected with Trollope’s electioneering errand to Yorkshire was, after his usual fashion, turned into “copy.” The novel thus inspired did not appear till 1871. It forms a well-written record of its author’s personal partialities or prejudices during the adventure already described. More than any of his books belonging to this period, it recalls, by the loaded colour of its lampoons and the unwonted bitterness of its satire, his mother’s way of dealing with the persons and things she had found disagreeable. For the rest, the humorous notes, whether in the way of local description or personal caricature, have, more frequently than is found in any other novel, a Dickensian ring. If occasionally laboured, as well as, for the most part, not below the average in writing, it is as regards plot almost as complicated and confusing as those parts of the Scriptural narrative dealing with the kings of Israel and Judah called by the same name. Not less baffling than to the Biblical student the rival Jehorams and Ahaziahs, are, inRalph the Heir, the two prominent personages named Ralph Newton. The story unfolds itself on these lines: Old Squire Newton of Newton Priory, a rich country gentleman, has only one child, Ralph, an illegitimate son, on whom all his love and hopes are fixed. His estates, however, are entailed on his nephew, another Ralph Newton, distinguished from his namesakeas Ralph the Heir. This young man, a spendthrift, equally weak and handsome, is universally admitted to be the best fellow in the world. His only enemy is the uncle whom the law compels to leave him the estate. His chief friend, formerly his guardian, is Sir Thomas Underwood—a former Solicitor-General—a widower living at Popham Villa, Fulham, with his two daughters. To this household is presently added a niece, Mary Bonner, from abroad. Ralph the Heir, now more than usually in debt, has his heaviest creditor in Neefit the tailor, whose hunting breeches—his speciality—are of world-wide fame.
Some critics have scented in Trollope’s Neefit a likeness to the Mr. Bond Sharp of Disraeli’sHenrietta Temple. The resemblance, however, is but imaginary, because Mr. Bond Sharp, though professionally a maker of clothes, is the idealised usurer of Disraeli and romance, while Neefit has nothing to do with professional money-lending, and only supplies Ralph with cash in the character of his future son-in-law, the husband-elect of his daughter and heiress, Polly. Hence his indignation when Ralph backs out of the match, although the would-be father-in-law gets his money back with interest, for the tailor’s daughter is not the only matrimonial string to his bow. Reflection and delay increase Ralph the Heir’s objection to entire pecuniary dependence on the tailor’s daughter and heiress as his wife. He has hit upon what may prove a more excellent way. True, his uncle, the present owner and occupant of Newton Priory, is strong and well enough to have many years of life before him. Still, some day, in the course of nature, the place must be Ralph’s. It’s money worth could never be such an object to him as now, when he knows not where to turn for funds. Why not, therefore, exhaust every possible means for converting his reversionary interest into ready cash. Rather than sell himself to father-in-law Neefit, with Polly for his bride, why not sell outright to his uncle for a good round sum, say £50,000, his Newton rights? Horace’s Ulysses, rent by the Circean and Penelopeian rivalries, and Captain MacHeath, divided betwixt Polly and Lucy, personify the failing of indecision as familiarly asBuridan’s ass itself. Both are almost outdone by the average Trollopian youth or maiden’s perplexity in the final selection of a lover from three or four candidates for the place. Most pre-eminently is Ralph the Heir, Ralph the wobbler. Having loved or talked about loving Polly Neefit, and ridden away, he goes through the farcical process of giving what he is pleased to call his heart first to Clarissa Underwood, next to Mary Bonner, and then to Clarissa again. At this point, however, that young lady has something to say, with the result of finding that not Ralph the Heir, but his younger brother, the Rev. Gregory Newton, is the right man for her husband. At the same time Mary Bonner similarly gives hiscongéto Ralph the Heir, and her hand to Ralph who is not the Heir.