CHAPTER V

COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE AND ITS LITERARY FRUITS

Trollope’s _Examiner_ articles--Opposing religious experiences of boyhood and early manhood--Moulding influences of his Irish life--The cosmopolitan in the making--Interest in France and the French--_La Vendée_--Trollope’s relation to other English writers on the French Revolution--The moving spirits of the Vendean insurrection--Peasant royalist enthusiasm--Opening of the campaign--The Chouans of fact and fiction--A republican portrait-gallery--Barère--Santerre--Westerman--Robespierre--Eleanor Duplay.

At the time of their first appearance the two Irish novels just described were commercial and literary failures. They preceded, however, even if they did not help to bring about, a turn for good in their author’s fortunes. It was indeed only after the full establishment of Trollope’s reputation that both _The Macdermots_ and _The Kellys and the O’Kellys_ were shown by the reflected light of success to abound in promise. The discovery might have been made earlier had not the books long remained practically unknown. However, Dickens’ friend and biographer, John Forster, then the most formidable critic and exacting editor on the London Press, thought sufficiently well of Trollope’s work to commission from him for _The Examiner_ certain articles about the districts chiefly affected by the successive ravages of plague and famine in 1847. The broken fences, the deserted farms, and the monotonously endless stretches of misery and destitution in Trollope’s Post Office district, including Cork, Kerry, and Clare, were soon to be further disfigured by sights more terrible. Starvation did but prepare the way for the most hideous forms of new and ghastly disease.

Sufferers soon found their skins tight drawn, like a drum, to the face, and covered with small light hairs, as of those on a gooseberry. The poor wretches thus plague-stricken, having no longer roofs to shelter them, were huddled together in wigwams pitched under park walls, with no other food than that which the charity of the owners of these demesnes supplied. Conspicuous among the landlords who answered these appeals were Lord Dunkellin and Edmund O’Flaherty of Knockbane, near Galway. Out of all this misery, the political agitators, largely imported from the other side of the Atlantic, had begun in 1846 to make capital. This was their way of drawing Ireland into the subversive vortex which had already sucked in nearly the whole European continent. The appeal of the sedition mongers seemed to Trollope a failure, or at best but partially and superficially successful. As to the general condition in 1848, he told _The Examiner_ that it was not a revolutionary year, at least for Ireland. They talked about rows. But these, he said, existed only in newspaper columns. From Portrush to Waterford, and from Connemara to Dublin, there would be found no trace of any widespread, popular plan for converting peasant occupiers into sovereign proprietors. No one realised more fully than the Connaught crofter the folly and futility of the talk about abolishing the difference between employers and employed. In England, wrote Trollope, there was too much intelligence to look for any general improvement on a sudden. In Ireland there was too little intelligence to look for any improvement at all.

The English Government, now under Sir Robert Peel, had taken the first step towards relieving Irish distress by freeing the ports for the admission of foreign grain in 1846. Trollope himself had seen the universal alleviation following the arrival of Indian corn for the starving people. Next, Lord John Russell, as Prime Minister in 1847, instituted relief-works to help the unemployed masses. These measures were attacked from two different quarters. Among the Irish peasantry some complained of not being fed absolutely for nothing. The landed classes were disposed to doubt the necessity of any State interference at all. But in his third Irish novel, _Castle Richmond_ (1860), dealing with the famine period, Trollope himself testified to the alacrity shown by the territorial class in co-operating with the State. And Trollope was likely to be an impartial judge. His personal sympathies were not then with the Whigs. The English public man with whom he was chiefly in communication, the philanthropic Lord Shaftesbury, having served under Wellington and Peel, passed for a Conservative. The main points of his _Examiner_ articles have been already given. The whole little series formed an answer to the charges against ministers brought by their censors, alike in Press and Parliament. The seven years he had passed on the other side of St. George’s Channel had indeed been turned to such good account as to make him an authority on Irish affairs in their then most prominent aspect.

Meanwhile, by the personal intercourse of society, or by instructive and inspiring correspondence with useful friends, Trollope had improved his acquaintance with men, manners, and things in a way that was afterwards to bear literary fruit. Between 1846 and 1850, his mother still lived at Florence, and though Anthony did not actually visit Florence till 1853, he and Mrs. Trollope, during those years, held regular and copious communication with each other through the post. In this way many pleasant glimpses are caught of diverse personalities famous, or at least interesting. There is F. W. Faber, first met at Mr. Sloane’s, the wealthy Anglo-Florentine, who gave the church of Santa Croce its new front. To Faber, Trollope was apparently first attracted by his having been the most brilliant Harrovian of his time. This acquaintanceship at once deeply interested Mrs. Trollope, and was to have a lasting effect upon her son. His first religious lessons may have been those in the Church catechism. He had then been taken in spiritual charge by Cunningham, the evangelical vicar of Harrow, caricatured, it was generally believed, in Mrs. Trollope’s _Vicar of Wrexhill_. To that divine he did his best in the way of listening as a duty, but the copious interspersion of casual conversation by him and other Low Church teachers with scriptural tags and devout ejaculations first made Trollope secretly think he was talking nonsense. In this way the youthful Anthony imbibed a sceptical disgust for the social ways and religious tenets of all that school. Filled with these prejudices, he came under a spiritual influence very different from any of which so far he had any experience.

His Winchester days had closed with missing New College. A little later he found himself hopelessly beaten for a small entrance scholarship on a minor foundation at Cambridge. To both Universities he made several short visits. At Oxford he heard the future Cardinal Newman preach from the pulpit of St. Mary’s. The effect of those sermons was deepened by many conversations with the preacher, and afterwards with the already mentioned F. W. Faber, whose personal charm was felt as strongly by Anthony as it had been by his mother, through whom indeed the son first knew that accomplished divine and poet, both in his Anglican and his Roman stage. Not indeed that Anthony Trollope was ever near to becoming a partisan of either side. Still at the outset his sympathies were, as afterwards, inclined towards the moderate, lettered, and generally accomplished members of the High Church party. As a boy, while with his parents abroad, he had seen and liked the home life of Roman Catholics. During the interval that separated his Irish stories from his third novel, he turned to good account the opportunities provided him by his mother for improving his knowledge of continental institutions, secular or religious, and the personal types they tended to produce. At each fresh point of his literary evolution Trollope’s industry in some degree took on the colour of the surroundings amid which it was exercised. The earlier of his Irish books grew out of his Post Office work in the “Isle of Saints.” Between 1848 and 1850, his cosmopolitan training had begun, and indeed advanced some way. Some years later his _Tales of All Countries_ was to form a memorial of his experiences as a citizen of the world. Before these, came _La Vendée_. That novel, if written at all, would have been written probably in a very different manner but for the recent widening in his social, religious, and political horizons.

Trollope had been born amid the world-wide ferment of the ground swell following the great national convulsion in France with which the eighteenth century closed. Those commotions had seemed the more real and recent to his childhood from the constant conversational references to them as portending what England herself might expect. He had heard stories of the privations and hair-breadth escapes experienced by refugees from the reign of terror when struggling to place the Straits of Dover between themselves and their oppressors of the first French republic. In those parts of England from the first, at least by name familiar to him, he had seen the country houses where the royalist _émigrés_ had found an asylum more than once during the years between the murder of the French king and the Vienna Congress. He had heard English prejudice describe French loyalty to the old _régime_ as a mere pose, and Protestant prejudice refuse to see anything that was worthy the name of “true religion and undefiled” in the teachings of the Popish priesthood or in the daily life of their most loyal devotees. His more recent intercourse with men like Faber and Newman had, without leading him to a spiritual crisis, caused him to review and recast his religious conceptions. He had been taught as a boy to turn his back on all pre-Reformation doctrines and rites. His own experiences had now more than reconciled him to the working of the papal system in Ireland. On the whole he had found the Irish Roman Catholic priests kindly and far from bigoted men, honestly anxious to do their duty towards their flock, as well as towards the official representatives of that Protestant ascendency which in their heart they were bound to detest. Neither had Trollope, always open though his keen eyes were, known many authentic cases of priestly greed, intrigue, intolerance, or proselytism. The conventional charges, in fact, made by evangelicals against the hierarchy and officials of a foreign Church could from Trollope’s own experience be disproved. The mere fact of such accusations being brought deepened his distrust and dislike of Low Churchism and all its ways.

Possessed by such a spirit of reaction from the popular Calvinism which his mother had lashed in _The Vicar of Wrexhill_, he sat down, after _The Kellys and the O’Kellys_, to his third novel, _La Vendée_. By that time half a century had passed since the issues and methods of the French Revolutionaries, which destroyed Burke’s friendship with Fox, had left Whiggism in a state of intestine feud. An impulse such as had urged Coleridge and Southey into the Tory camp produced in Trollope a desire to write a story showing the French royalists in politics at their best, and the reasonableness of their religion as one by which to live and die. His public school associations had been genuine Wykehamist--that is to say, high Tory in Church and State. As a boy of fifteen he had heard of the “three days” which, on July 27, 1830, sent the last of the Bourbons, Charles X, from his French throne across the English Channel. At the age of thirty-three, while, as has been seen, going his Post Office rounds through Connaught, he had watched the progress of the second French Revolution of the nineteenth century. He might have been presented in his British asylum to the lately arrived “Mr. Smith,” who was none other than the Louis Philippe formerly, with the results already described, visited in his palace by Trollope’s mother. _Hodie tibi, cras mihi_, while _La Vendée_ was in course of preparation for the press, English Tories and many who were not Tories had persuaded themselves that reform in politics, dissent in religion, and the progressive removal of ancient landmarks in Church or State would gradually bring this country under the same pernicious influences as those which had unsettled and devastated the greater part of the world beyond the Dover Straits. In _La Vendée_ Trollope successfully fulfilled the twofold end of flattering conservative sentiment, religious or political, and of breaking comparatively fresh soil, as well as portraying new characters in a period that then seemed almost modern.

Readers of Disraeli’s novels will remember the advice urged by Rigby on Coningsby to “read Mr. Wordy’s history of the late war, in twenty volumes, proving clearly that Providence was on the side of the Tories.” No one knew better than Rigby’s reputed original, John Wilson Croker, or for that matter Disraeli himself, the compendious utility of Alison’s _History of Europe_. Elsewhere Trollope may easily have found the historic facts on which he based his third novel. From Alison he learned to deduce a moral in accord with the prevailing English sentiment. Like many of his countrymen who cared nothing for party, Trollope felt something of disgust at the Whig enthusiasm for Napoleon as the reconstructor of the European system, notwithstanding his rise to power by violating all those principles of civil and religious liberty which Whigs, by their historic traditions, were bound to hold sacrosanct. Without pretending to be a specialist in modern French history, Trollope knew enough of the country and the people to look for the real security of a gradual return to law and order, not in the exercise of coercive force by any individual however great, but in the national instincts and tendencies making for conservatism, political or religious, and, as he thought, underrated by recent English writers on the subject. This aspect of national character and life it became his business to bring out in _La Vendée_. His Irish stories had already maintained and illustrated the view that the Celt as he existed on the other side of St. George’s Channel could be as business-like, as thrifty, as sober in thought as the Saxon or the Lowland Scot himself. So _La Vendée_ was to dispose of similar fallacies about the French rooted in the English mind. Genuine religion could exist in a Roman Catholic land, as well as genuine loyalty and uncalculating patriotism among a people conventionally considered fickle, frivolous, and, naturally incapable of the patient, self-repressive, and sustained effort by which Northern nations are content slowly to await and effect the reforms that Southern races precipitate and mar by revolutions.

Trollope occupies a middle place among the three novelists of the Victorian age who have acknowledged the literary fascination of the French revolutionary period in some one of its aspects, or in the events growing out of it. Carlyle, essentially a humourist before being an historian, first made the subject his own, and in some degree helped by his research and method his successors in their treatment of it. Five years after Carlyle, Bulwer-Lytton wrote _Zanoni_, the earliest English novel descriptive of Paris during the Terror. Dickens’ _Tale of Two Cities_ came out some time later, in 1859. Trollope’s contribution, therefore, to the romance of the revolutionary series, chronologically might have owed something to Alison, who alone among those of an earlier date had touched the phases of the theme specially appealing to our novelist. In fiction the dates just given would exempt him from any suspicion of obligation to Bulwer or Dickens. His originality stamps itself on the opening chapter of _La Vendée_, and is consistently maintained throughout. Before the action of the novel begins, its royalist heroes can no longer doubt the resolution reached by the municipality of Paris that the king should fall. The Convention, in fact, was already founding the republic. The actual process, indeed, had advanced far enough to array the country gentlemen of La Vendée (1850) and their retainers in arms against the new _régime_. The entirely fresh descriptive feature of the opening chapters is the account of social Paris when the Jacobins were entrapping Louis XVI.

Here Trollope drew not on Alison, but the first-hand knowledge conveyed to him by his mother. Mrs. Trollope, in her turn, had been taken behind the political scenes of the period by the man whom the royalists in her son’s story agreed could alone save the throne. This was the same General Lafayette that Trollope’s parents had visited in his French country house and that always remained their chief friend abroad. During the early months of 1792, most of the _haute noblesse_ had exchanged the French capital for London or for the English country houses, many of them, as has been already said, familiar to Trollope. They left, however, behind them enough of wit, beauty, and fashionable brilliance to prevent the capital from losing its character of the Western world’s polite metropolis. The city, in a phrase of a contemporary writer, H. S. Edwards, that took Trollope’s fancy, from having been the Lutetia of the ancients had become the lætitia of the moderns. Intellectual interest in the progress of the Revolution, up to the beginning of the king’s imprisonment, had the effect of obliterating class distinctions. It produced a certain solidarity between the professional classes which supplied the revolutionary leaders, and the more enlightened of the aristocracy that, long since admitting the necessity of drastic social ameliorations, had, as Trollope summarises it, approved the early demands of the _tiers état_, had applauded the tennis-court oath, had entered with enthusiasm into the _fête_ of the Champ de Mars. These had credulously persuaded themselves that sin, avarice, and selfishness were about to be banished from the world by philosophy.

Bitter experience had already taught them their mistake. Philosophy placed no check upon human nature’s worst passions. The high-flown panegyrics on virtue in the abstract were practically consistent with the letting loose of the tiger and the ape in individuals. The feast of reason that followed the beheading of the king proved the introduction to the long-drawn-out orgy of fiends lasting till Robespierre’s death in 1794. What refuge could there be for the now undeceived dupes of their own fond expectations but in flight? Those who from the first had remained courtiers or royalists, and those whom a spurious philanthropy had caused to dally with wholesale homicide, hastened to put the English Channel between themselves and a capital and country from which had vanished all hope of personal safety or service to their fellow-men. Some gallant spirits had long lingered on near the place of the king’s confinement, refusing even now to despair of some happy chance that might favour his escape from his enemies, and enable his friends to conduct him permanently out of danger.

Such were the historical circumstances and actual conditions of the time without a knowledge of which Trollope’s third novel cannot be rightly understood. Its title came from the new republican name for the vintage districts of Anjou and Poitou, La Vendée (_vendange_). Those of its gentry who had rallied round the king were known in Paris as the Poitevins. The hope of which this little group supplied the leaders was scarcely so forlorn as it has been described since, during the seven years period covered by Trollope’s novel, the Vendean resistance to the Convention was carried on not only with unfailing courage but occasionally with substantial military success. In Paris, where the story opens, the Poitevins had attracted to their number some among the more moderate members of the Assembly, and particularly certain of those who had been officers of the royal bodyguard. They formed themselves into a club whose meetings were held in the Rue Vivienne. The last of these gatherings took place on August 12, 1792, and lasted just long enough to acquaint all present with the final and complete defeat of the moderates, who so far had clung to the conviction that in some unexplained manner the monarchy would be preserved from final overthrow. Against all gentler counsels, against, in Trollope’s words, the firmness of Roland, the eloquence of Vergniaud, the patriotism of Guadet, the brute force of Paris had prevailed.

Louis XVI, his worst enemies could not deny, had inherited none of his predecessor’s vices, and had shown himself the friend of popular rights. He had indeed actually himself convoked the Assembly that had no sooner come together than it resolved on his destruction. The Poitevins, however, had correctly estimated their resources in their respective neighbourhoods. With a good heart they now welcome and prepare for open war. When told that the sovereign’s defenders are outvoted in the Assembly and that resistance to the people is vain, they one and all protest against dignifying by that name the mob of blood-thirsty ruffians who for the time have the capital at their mercy. The real voice of the French people is for the monarch’s restoration to his rights. Under the Vendean gentry as leaders the masses will rise like one man against the demagogues who so foully misrepresent them. The real enemies of France and of the king are in each case the same men. To save the country from the usurpations of the Assembly falsely called national is also to deliver the lawful ruler from the dungeon to which, in the midst of this heroic oratory, comes the news of Louis having been consigned.

That for the present the mission of the patriots in Paris cannot proceed further is now admitted by all. Before, however, the patriots disperse, each to his own provincial neighbourhood, we have made acquaintance with the clearly and picturesquely characterised individuals of whom they consist. Its most prominent member, Lescure, is a type, historically true, of the educated and enlightened Frenchman, keenly alive to the abuses and evils of the aristocratic system that were at the root of popular degradation and distress. His mind had been nurtured, and his political education derived, from studying classical republicanism, as it existed in Athens and Rome. He was deeply read in Rousseau, Voltaire, and in the whole literature of the encyclopædists. An amiably philanthropic disposition had combined with tendencies of his intellectual culture to take for his watchwords Liberty, Fraternity, though not, it would seem, Equality. On perceiving the new movement to mean universal surrender to an ignorant and brutal mob, he drew back, to find himself gradually pressed into the presidency of the little Poitevin society. This personification of high-minded and cultivated philanthropy numbered amongst its followers the youthful heir to an ancient and wealthy territorial marquisate, Henri de Larochejaquelin.[8] His principles had been formed on those of his elder, Lescure, but his temperament, eager, impetuous, delighting in the rush and whirl of social gaiety, forms a contrast to his staid and judicious senior. In one respect he stands out as a product of the period. The new generation was often noticeable for the precocious manhood developed in the hothouse atmosphere of a convulsive epoch. Since reaching his seventeenth year, the young noble now mentioned, in consequence of his father’s ill-health, had taken upon himself the paternal estates’ management, and his sister Agatha’s guardianship.

Adolphe Denot is another who has a place in this little company. Born to a position of territorial ownership in Poitou, Denot represents in Trollope’s story the superficial votaries of political change, ready to take up with the newest mode in public affairs, without the trouble of inquiring into its significance or worth. Without Lescure’s historical knowledge and reflective habits, he belonged to the same section of French society as that in which Lescure had been reared. The earliest French protests against the tyranny of ages came from the French nobility themselves. Never in the theatre at Versailles had louder applause been excited than by the lines of Voltaire’s play, produced during the interval separating the first from the last quarter of the eighteenth century: “I am the son of Brutus, and bear graven on the heart the love of liberty and a horror of kings.” In the cheers that greeted these words, Trollope’s Denot might have followed the vogue by joining. J. J. Rousseau no doubt made himself personally responsible for the doctrine of the people’s sovereignty and its consequences. Before, however, its proclamation by him, Voltaire’s wit had secured the notion acceptance with rank, fashion, aristocracy, and even the Court circle. Recently, however, the enthusiasts for freedom in the royal playhouse had discovered everything which savoured of revolution to be insufferably vulgar. He had therefore gone over to Larochejaquelin’s lead, and enrolled himself under Lescure in the little Poitevin clique. Petted and caressed, as Trollope puts it, by the best and fairest in France, the revolution was still in its infancy when men discovered it to be a beast of prey, big with war, anarchy, and misrule.

The royalist organisation now described having been disbanded in the capital, the scene changes to those regions of southern France known as La Vendée. The country gentlemen of Anjou and Poitou were generally landlords of the smaller kind. They lived in comfort, but without any ambition for mere splendour. No pride in the antiquity of their race prevented their treating their tenants and household retainers less as dependents than equals. The instances of this now given exemplify Trollope’s favourite thesis that in a patrician dispensation characterised by thoughtfulness on the part of its controllers for those who live under it, there is more of the true democratic spirit than marks the most levelling variety of popular self-rule. The gentlemen of La Vendée have no sooner reappeared in their country homes than the counter-revolution, without any fostering agitation on their part, almost of its own accord sets in.

The Vendeans had heard from their rural seclusion of the king’s imprisonment, and of the insults offered by his republican jailors to the time-honoured ordinances of Church and State. There is no need for Lescure, Larochejaquelin, and the others to stimulate the local peasantry by fresh appeals against the emissaries of the detested republic. These only show themselves for the purpose of enrolling fresh conscripts, and forcibly apprehending a reluctant recruit. The spontaneous popular resistance ends in a pitched battle, with victory for the royalists. Operations are now on a larger scale. The struggle is no longer between small local garrisons on the one hand, and hastily levied, imperfectly disciplined royalist bodies on the other. Henceforth two armies, each tolerably marshalled and fairly equipped, meet each other in the field. Sieges are laid, attacks are delivered, sometimes repelled and sometimes succumbed to; all the combatants are engaged, towns are captured, private parks transform themselves into entrenched camps. Durbellière particularly, the country seat of the Larochejaquelins, becomes the theatre of a war conducted with sanguinary resolution on both sides, and with constantly varying fortunes. Among each host brave deeds in plenty are done. With the royalists the most picturesque, heroic, and victorious figure is that of Henri de Larochejaquelin, whose red sash and shoulder-band prove the same talisman of triumph as the snow-white plume of Henry of Navarre when he defeated the Duke of Mayenne at Ivry.

With the republicans too were to be found men equally capable or courageous, if less personally attractive. In the French romance that followed the Irish novels Trollope made no pretence of making his imagination the handmaid of history. Bulwer-Lytton, in _The Last of the Barons_, circumstantially constructed a bold and picturesque hypothesis as a plausibly conjectural explanation of the quarrel between Edward IV and Warwick. That was not at all in Trollope’s way. Equally little is his inclination, after the fashion of Sir Walter Scott, to play fast and loose with recorded facts, and to represent authenticated events in the light, and from the point of view, which happened to suit him. For the most part Trollope follows through every detail the accurate chronicle of the time. In one case, however, that he may account for the disappearance from his narrative of the character he calls Adolphe Denot, he departs from the historic record. According to Trollope, the Chouans, or Bretons who continued the Vendean War, followed a mysterious, if not an actually insane leader. The alleged mystery is mere invention. No personage of the period is more historical than Jean Cottereau, who from the first led the Bretons, and whose signal, the cry of the screech-owl (_chat-huant_), gave their name to the little Breton band. Nor can it be said that the historian’s version of events is, even for artistic purposes, improved on by the novelist’s discovery, in the Vendean leader, of Adolphe Denot, who, in an hour of what his friends charitably called mental aberration, had left the good cause of Church and King, had thrown in his lot with the revolutionaries. Since then he had remained out of sight.

At the point now under consideration, the novelist might indeed have done better, for himself as well as for his readers, had he exercised his fancy at least on the lines marked out by the historian. At the same time he deserves the praise of having caught the spirit of his period, as well as of having imbued his pages with a fair amount of genuine local colour. One word may be said about the pen-and-ink artist’s methods and the effect of his picture as a whole. The pervading tone, subdued if not, as in his first story, _The Macdermots_, sombre, at well-chosen points is relieved by the introduction of those lighter tints that Trollope’s quick eye for the humorous never failed in the right place to bring out. In the loyalist households, of the Vendean squires, the servants are treated less as inferiors than equals. Seeing in their employers their friends, and during war-time their comrades, they vie with each other in proving their devotion to the good cause. There thus sets in among them a generous rivalry as to who shall be nearest their lords in the hour of peril. Such a competition provides many happy openings for sketches of votaries of the sceptre and the crozier outdoing each other in the still-room and the servants’ hall.

There still remain Trollope’s estimates of the republican managers who, differing about much, agreed in calling the Vendeans mean curs, fit only for utter extermination. Six years earlier than the writing of _La Vendée_, Macaulay’s article on Barère had appeared in the spring number of _The Edinburgh Review_. The estimates of that particular revolutionary leader given by the historian and by the novelist generally agree with each other, but in every detail show the mutual independence of their writers. Macaulay’s account is an oratorical indictment, delivered in a more than usually impressive manner, and declaring that an amalgam of sensuality, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery, mendacity, and barbarity, such as in a novel would be condemned for caricature, was realised in Barère. Beside the essayist’s portrait of Bertrand Barère, place that in the novel which is our immediate concern, the one man, in a little party armed to the teeth, without sword, constantly playing with a little double-barrelled pistol, which he continually cocked and uncocked, and of which the fellow lay on the table before him. A tall, well-built, handsome man about thirty years of age, with straight black hair brushed upright from his forehead, his countenance gave the idea of eagerness and impetuosity rather than of cruelty or brutality. He was, however, essentially egotistical and insincere. A republican not from conviction but from prudential motives, he only deserted the throne when he saw that it was tottering.

For a time Barère supported the moderate party in the republic, and voted with the Girondists. He gradually joined the Jacobins, as he saw they were triumphing over their rivals. He was afterwards one of those who handed over the leaders of the Reign of Terror to the guillotine, and assisted in denouncing Robespierre and St. Just. He was one of the very few who managed to outlive the Revolution, and did so for nearly half a century. Nature had not formed him to be a monster gloating in blood. The republic had altered his disposition, and taught him, among those with whom he associated, to delight in the work which they required at his hands. Thus he became one of those who loudly called for more blood, while blood on every side was running in torrents. He too it was who demanded the murder of the queen, when Robespierre would have saved her. Before the Revolution he had been a wealthy aristocrat; he still wears the costume of his earlier period in the blue dress-coat, buttoned closely, notwithstanding the heat of the weather, round his body; the carefully tied cravat, disfigured by no wrinkle; the tightly fitting breeches that show the well-shaped leg. As a contrast to this sometime nobleman gibbeted by Macaulay, Trollope presents one to another notoriety of the period, known as the “King of the Faubourgs.” This was a large, rough, burly man, about forty years of age, of Flemish descent, by trade a brewer, by name Santerre, without fine feelings to be distressed at the horrid work set him to do, but filled with a coarse ambition, which made him a ready tool for the schemers who used his physical powers, courage, and wealth to their own ends.

The gallery given us by Trollope contains one more portrait, of fresher interest in itself, and not less life-like in its swift, sure strokes. Westerman in Carlyle’s description appears as an Alsatian. With Trollope he is a pure Prussian, a mercenary soldier who, banished from his native land, took service as a private in the army of the French republic, was soon promoted to be an officer, and after this promotion, foreseeing the future triumph of the extreme republicans, declared himself their adherent, and, joining Dumourier’s army, became that general’s aide-de-camp at the time of his attempt to sell the French legions to their Prussian and Austrian adversaries. Then Westerman left his master, and had since been the most prompt and ruthless military executioner of the Convention’s sternest behests. Westerman, as drawn by Trollope, is both soldier and politician. Two other military personages directing the campaign against the Vendeans, Bourbotte and Chouardin, take no interest in the affairs of State, and are merely rough, bold, brave fighters. Conspicuous among the Vendean leaders was Cathelineau. His spirited and fearless life’s work, crowned by a soldier’s brave death, excited the sympathetic admiration of the republic’s two military servants. That tribute to an enemy’s great qualities was enough to draw down upon them the anger of their superiors, especially of Barère. It was not, however, a time to visit such offences with a severe penalty. Both Bourbotte and Chouardin escaped without any formal reprimand.

To the sketch of Robespierre and the analysis of his character, Trollope, as might be expected, gives particular care. Here he supplements rather than follows those who before him had made this subject their own. “Seagreen incorruptible” was, says Carlyle, physically a coward, kept from flinching or turning tail only by his moral strength of purpose. Not so, is Trollope’s verdict. Courage indeed went conspicuously in hand with constancy of resolution, temperance in power, and love of country. If at the last he gave way, it was from the inward torment caused him too late by the discovery that his whole career had been a blunder, and that none of the objects which he had first set before himself were fulfilled. Poor mutilated worm, exclaims the novelist of _La Vendée_, what was there of pusillanimity in the remorse of conscience prostrating his whole physical frame, when he compared the aims which animated him at his beginnings with the results he saw all about him at his close? From Carlyle, Trollope knew of Mirabeau’s prophecy on hearing Robespierre’s maiden speech: “This man will do somewhat; he believes every word he says.” So staunch and sympathetic a Tory as Alison echoes as well as amplifies that view. And with him Trollope, who like many other writers about this period had learnt the usefulness of Alison, agrees.

To the English novelist, not less than to the English historian, Robespierre’s career stands out not as the offspring of any individual character, but as representing the delusions of the age. Chief among those errors ranked a belief in the natural innocence of man. With this fallacy had united itself another--the lawfulness of doing evil that good might come. Once exterminate by wholesale bloodshed all who embodied the debasing influences of a corrupt aristocracy, the masses would rise to the full height of their native greatness. Thus a triumphant democracy, enthroned upon mountains of patrician corpses, would wield its beneficent sceptre over a purified and reanimated society. Here as elsewhere agreeing with, perhaps indebted to, Alison, Trollope also speaks of Robespierre as omnipotent in Convention and in the Committee, but as having, too, his master, the will of the populace of Paris. In union with and in dependence on that, he could alone act, command, and be obeyed. Alison puts the same idea rather differently when he says: “Equally with Napoleon during his career of foreign conquest, Robespierre always marched with the opinions of five millions of men.”

Apart from the failure of moral fortitude and nerve which weakened and clouded his end, what particular feature in Robespierre’s temperament and life gave colour to the charge of cowardice that Carlyle at least considers so irrefutable? The answer is suggested by Trollope in what forms the most original passage in this portion of his story. One fond and tender dream Robespierre could never banish. Once let France, happy, free, illustrious, and intellectual, own how much she owed to the most disinterested patriot among her sons, Robespierre would retire to his small paternal estate in Artois; evincing the grandeur of his soul by the rejection of all worldly rewards, receiving nothing from his country but adoration. While in Trollope’s pages he is represented as preoccupied with visions like these, his garret is entered by a young woman, decently but very plainly dressed. This was Eleanor Duplay, who, when Robespierre allowed himself to dream of a future home, was destined to be the wife of his bosom and the mother of his children. Eleanor Duplay possessed no mark of superiority to others of her age (about five-and-twenty) and station. The eldest of four sisters, she specially helped her mother in caring for the house, of which Robespierre had become an inmate. With no political aptitude or taste of her own, she had caught, as she believed, political inspiration from his words, finding in his pseudo-philosophical dogmas, at once repulsive and ridiculous to modern ears, great truths begotten of reason and capable of regenerating her fellow-creatures.

Eleanor Duplay has a special object in approaching Robespierre at this moment, which brings her into the central current of the story. She had, in fact, undertaken to plead with her father’s lodger the Vendean cause. Both the girl herself, and the public opinion whose echoes she caught, were shocked by the wholesale massacre of women and children now going on in the doomed district after which Trollope called his story. What work, she had asked herself, when rallying her courage to the task, so fitting for the wife-elect of a ruler of the people as to implore the stern magistrate to temper justice with mercy? Her lover’s reception of the first hint at her prayer is not promising. The Vendeans, he says, must be not only conquered but crushed. The religion of Christ, he goes on, declares that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children to the third and fourth generation. Hence the babes must share the fate of their parents. As for the mothers, it is, says Robespierre, a false sentiment which teaches us to spare the iniquities of women because of their sex. This interview leads up to one of the most dramatic situations of the novel, and is so managed as during its progress to bring out in effective relief the feature of Robespierre’s character, which other expositors of it have noticed, but which none illustrated so fully as Trollope. Eleanor Duplay’s petition had not been completed when her lover’s suspicion--his predominating trait--expresses itself in an outburst of dark and terrible anger. In vain she assures him that no one has set her on to talk to him of this. In ordinary men suspicion sometimes clouds love; in Robespierre, as he is here described, it strangled the possibility of love at its birth.