Excursions in Victorian Bibliography. Michael Sadleir
despite its obvious weaknesses of construction, a freshness and charm that is very pleasing. Mrs. Prime and her horrible clerical admirer are frankly caricature, but that they should be so is not unnatural, seeing that they represent the very puritanism that the book is intended to attack.
In Miss Mackenzie we are given the story of a spinster of thirty-five, to whom unexpectedly a small fortune is bequeathed. She becomes immediately the quarry of fortune hunters—shabby social, religious, and commercial. Some of the best scenes in the story are staged in Littlebath, where Miss Todd and Miss Baker (who help to retrieve The Bertrams from disaster) make welcome reappearance. As satire the novel is more dexterous than Rachel Ray, but it lacks the attraction of a real Trollope heroine, and throughout has a faint tinge of the sordid. It is interesting to note on page 242 of the second volume a mention of Lady Glencora Palliser, whom Trollope had 'presented' in Can you Forgive Her?
Not until 1875 did Trollope publish another definitely satirical novel. When he did so, the event marked an important stage in his evolution as a novelist. Critics had begun to grumble at comedies of manners, which spoke of the suavity of yesterday rather than of the competitive hustle of to-day. England was moving step by step along the road to commercialism. Trollope, with his county and clerical families, his political aristocrats and comic tuft-hunters, was shrugged aside as out of date. Such treatment was intolerable, and, with a gesture half impatient, half appealing, he sent out into the world The Way We Live Now. This long and crowded novel—perhaps, with the exception of The Last Chronicle of Barset, the most abundant of all his books—presents, in the person of Mr. Melmotte, the financial magnate of alien origin proper to a truly modern story of English life. Whether the cavillers, whose complaints spurred Trollope to so violent an effort, admitted, after reading The Way We Live Now, that the old dog could in truth out-modern the best of them, history does not relate; but undeniably this book, in which he asserted his vitality and showed that in the matter of satiric observation he was well abreast of the times, has no lack of vigour or luxuriant invention.
That Mr. Scarborough's Family (1883) may reasonably be said to conclude the list of Trollope's satirical novels is perhaps disputable. And yet, because its power is mainly ironic, I prefer to mention it here rather than treat of it as a purely social story. A while ago one example was quoted of a first-rate book from Trollope's last period. Mr. Scarborough's Family is another.
An aged and wealthy cynic suddenly (and, as it turns out, with deliberate falsehood) makes public the illegitimacy of his eldest son. With the complications of inheritance, with the changing relations between old Mr. Scarborough and his two sons, of whom the elder is now destitute and the latter coldly triumphant in his unexpected good fortune, is involved an elaborate second plot, centring round the love story of an amiable young man, whose fortunes depend on the favour of a peevish and eccentric uncle. Analysis of a tale so full of happening and character is impossible in a few lines. Sufficient to say that Mr. Scarborough's Family, were it not for the date on its title-page, might be thought to belong to a much earlier period, not only of Trollope, but of fiction as a whole, to a period more lavish than subtle, more genial and full-blooded than detached and sensitive.
With The Three Clerks (1858) opens the chronology of those novels which, although partially satirical, are in the main straightforward stories of English cultivated life. The Three Clerks is one of the few Trollope novels that has been seriously overrated. In its pages Mr. Chaffanbrass, the notorious Old Bailey lawyer, makes his first appearance, but he is infinitely more effective in Orley Farm and in Phineas Finn than at his first entrance on the Trollope stage. In so far as The Three Clerks gives a picture of the Civil Service that the author himself knew, it has documentary value, but as fiction it is formless and flaccid. Its young women are wholly devoid of that freshness and frankness that place Trollope, as a creator of femininity, apart from all other novelists of his generation; its menfolk are either riotous dummies like those in Smedley's novels, or prigs and villains, compounded so slavishly by recipe as to have little meaning beyond that of the conventional types they represent.
Of Orley Farm (1862) it is unnecessary to speak, the novel being one of the two or three outside the Barchester series which are still read to-day. The Belton Estate (1866), on the other hand, badly needs rehabilitation. Henry James, in a review written when quite a young man, concluded a long paragraph of hostile criticism with the words: “The Belton Estate is a stupid book.” One may venture that the obtuseness was not all on one side. Using a cast of four principal and as few subsidiary characters, Trollope fills three good volumes with the matrimonial dilemma of Clara Amedroz, who has to choose between the uncouth, well-to-do farmer to whom passes her thriftless father's estate, and the polished, self-seeking Captain Aylmer—in parlance, though not in fact, also her cousin—who offers her marriage because at the deathbed of his rich aunt and as part condition of becoming her heir he swore to do so. The Belton Estate has, to a greater degree than any other of Trollope's books, that art of concealing art which delights one type of mind, but by another is dismissed as “stupid.” In a sense it is the most difficult to appreciate of all the important novels, and, were an examination in Trollope a thing of practical import, the examining board would be wise to make this book the test question of their paper.
The Claverings (1867) and He Knew He Was Right (1869) are very long books, each of which turns on a theme highly characteristic of the author. Mention has already been made of Julia Brabazon, heroine of the former book, who jilts the nobody she loves for a rich invalid peer. The price she has to pay is counted in full in the pages of The Claverings, which also introduce a number of excellent characters, from Sir Hugh Clavering, hard, savage, and selfish, to Sophie Gordeloup and her scoundrelly brother, who play so desperately for the wealth and person of Lord Ongar's lonely and embittered widow. He Knew He Was Right describes the steady growth in a husband's mind of unjust suspicion of his wife's fidelity. As a crescendo of hysterical mistrust, the book is a fine piece of sustained writing. As a novel, it would be gloomy and distressing but for an admirable and humorous by-plot laid in cathedral Exeter. It would, perhaps, be hypercritical and unappreciative of his adroit handling of incident to blame the author for the very liberal use of coincidence with which he aids the progress of his story.
Of the six social novels that remain, one is first-rate, three are very good second-rate, one is ordinary second-rate and the last frankly bad. Is He Popenjoy? (1878) may rank with The Claverings as a book undeservedly excluded from the upper room of every Trollope-lover's mind. The Dean of Brotherton, son of a jobmaster, father of the heroine and ultimately grandfather of a marquis, is a Trollope dignitary of the first water. His daughter is as eminent in the world of heroines as is her father in that of ecclesiastics. She is gay, loving, whimsical, courageous, and always natural. Her dour husband with his excessive sense of duty and inadequate sense of humour; her aristocratic sisters-in-law, shrouding in ill-nature and good works the emptiness of their lives and purses; the society siren; the society matchmaker; and perhaps above all the ill-tempered, dissolute marquis, on the legitimacy of whose son turns the whole mechanism of the story, are each one of them fictional characters that only a master could create.
Ralph The Heir (1871)—the plot of which was pirated by Charles Reade and dramatized under the title Shilly Shally—contains some good characters and perhaps the best parliamentary election of all those contrived by its author. The troubles and difficulties of the shy, ineffective Sir Thomas Underwood, and the determination of Mr. Neefit, the breeches-maker, to buy up a bankrupt young squire as husband for his daughter would give distinction to any story. Lady Anna (1874) is a delicate elaboration of Trollope's favourite motif—projected or (as in this case) actual misalliance. The American Senator (1877) contains some excellent hunting and much good general observation. Ayala's Angel (1881), like The Belton Estate but less pronouncedly, is a book that must be read to be realized, for it is quiet Trollope and a thing of shades rather than one of definite, contrasted colours.
There remains Marion Fay (1882), once again a tale of misalliance. This is undeniably the worst book that its author ever wrote. Everywhere but here he contrives to keep either his hero or his heroine (and more frequently both) sympathetic, sensible, and convincingly normal; but in Marion Fay he sinks to mawkishness and to a deathbed scene that is frankly inexcusable.
Plenty of novels still remain of this astonishing and untiring writer. They may, however, be somewhat summarily dismissed. The most interesting