CHAPTER XIII

PEN AND PLATFORM POLITICS

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 of _The St. Paul’s Magazine_--_Phineas Finn_--Some remarks on Trollope’s _Palmerston_--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 in _The Prime Minister_--The close of the political series comes with _The 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 of _Oliver Twist_ the 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 of _Vivian 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 of _Pelham_, 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 political tradition 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 effective _Runnymede Letters_ and 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 of _Vanity Fair_ was 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 I expected, 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 his _Lord 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), like _Rachel Ray_ of 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 social order 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 worse second 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 of _The 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 from Mr. 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 “double event” 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, in _Ralph 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 namesake as 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’s _Henrietta 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 as Buridan’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 his _congé_ to Ralph the Heir, and her hand to Ralph who is not the Heir.

“He that will not when he may, When he will he shall have nay.”

So it had befallen one of Trollope’s Three Clerks who loved the barmaid. So it was now to befall Ralph the Heir.

At the point now reached Polly’s reappearance effects a complete change in the situation. When he had formerly, as he thought for ever, bidden her farewell, Polly’s affection for him by its vulgar exuberance had jarred on the hard-up, but fastidious Heir. Now the young lady keeps him at a distance, repulsing him with piquant prettiness, only to attract him. The old flame of a mercenary passion is rekindled. After all there is no reason, Ralph the Heir admits, against Polly’s becoming a gentleman’s wife. So it is all arranged; even the happy day is provisionally mentioned. The nuptial settlements have been drawn up, but are still unsigned when, hey presto! fresh surprises all round, and instead of flirting, jilting, and all the rest of it, we are in the thick of a political fight, reflecting in each detail Trollope’s Beverley conflict. There is, however more than that. Ralph the Heir’s namesake, Squire Newton’s illegitimate son, falls out of favour with his father; Squire Newton himself breaks his neck out hunting. Thus by several undeserved strokes of luck the Heir enters upon his heritage. By this time, however, Sir Thomas Underwood has decided on re-entering public life. He has, he hopes, found the necessary seat in the borough of Percycross, _alias_ that Beverley contested by Trollope himself, and now satirised in _Ralph the Heir_. Underwood’s colleague in the fight is Mr. Griffenbottom; his opponents are Westmacott in the Liberal and Ontario Moggs in the Radical interest. The Tory triumph is followed by the unseating on petition of both those who have won it; the disfranchisement of the borough completes the barrenness of their victory.

Quite the best drawn figure amid the electioneering crush is the Radical candidate. Ontario Moggs belongs to a class of idealised Industrials brought into fashion by George Eliot, attempted also by Mrs. Lynn Linton, raised to their highest perfection in _Adam Bede_, and brought down to a more familiar level in _Felix Holt_. With that Radical, Ontario Moggs can at least hold his own. He is, it is true, something of a prig, with a solemnity of manner and a pompous pithiness of artificial phrase making him a little absurd. His real cleverness, however, is not below his conceit; his readiness of speech, quickness at the detection of fallacy and power of argument, justly entitle him to his high reputation at the Cheshire Cheese and other debating Clubs. During Trollope’s time the Labour member had still to win the vogue and power brought in by the twentieth century. Still the Moggs of _Ralph the Heir_ forms a creditable study of those captains of Northumbrian industry, some among whom were to win their way to the Treasury bench. By this time Ralph the Heir’s rejected love, Miss Neefit, has shed all her vulgarity. Realising the folly and danger of aspiring to the affection of her father’s trying and impecunious customers, she has the good sense to invest her fortune, hand, and heart in a life-partnership with a born gentleman, if of inferior station, like Ontario Moggs.

Trollope’s hard common sense, detective vigilance, refusal to be imposed upon, and absolute pitilessness for transgressors, when discharging his Post Office duties, represented only one side of his character. From another point of view his judgment and intellect were subordinate to his emotions. This sentimentalism showed itself equally in his politics and in his estimate of the personages to whom he introduced the public in his books; with those personal creations he lived, as he often said, so intimately as to be really hurt by his readers not taking the same interest in them as he did himself. Hence his mortification at the indifference largely manifested to the _dramatis personæ_ of the political novels that followed _Phineas Finn_. For those stories, now about to be considered, Trollope had prepared himself, not only by the ordinary experiences of London life, but by those of his Beverley campaign. He had also gone through a course of political reading, one of whose literary results was to be his book on Palmerston. This, though published subsequently to the political novels, had been written before them, and may be, for other reasons, appropriately mentioned now.

One Disraelian phrase, and one only, was sometimes quoted approvingly by Trollope. “The free patrician life” of England produced, he always held, the nation’s best rulers. Of that dispensation, in his patriotism, his sympathies, at once popular and aristocratic, in home affairs, and in his championship of oppressed nationalities abroad, Palmerston struck him as the best type of the time. For Trollope, too, there was something of natural congeniality in Palmerston’s schoolboy delight at those political doings which he loved to describe as “capital strokes, and all off my own bat,” in his brushes with the Court, and in his tit-for-tat with John Russell. When putting his Palmerston monograph together, he received useful hints and help from Sir Alexander Cockburn, whose friendship he owed to Sir Richard Quain. In this way, he found himself able to appreciate the value to Palmerston of the services rendered him by Sir Henry Bulwer during his Paris residence at serious continental conjunctures. Hence, too, Trollope could rate at its true worth Palmerston’s diplomacy, first, as shown by the quadruple treaty of 1834, secondly, by the quadrilateral treaty of six years later leading up to the London conference of 1840. Finally, Bulwer and Cockburn enabled him to correct the popular impression of English statesmanship abroad being overruled by the Queen and the Prince Consort, and to show that, throughout the Austro-Italian questions then in progress, the principles consistently held and carried out by our Foreign Office were not those embodying the regard for the Austrian Empire held at the palace, but of the zeal for Italian unity at that time animating the English people.

Some reference to current politics entered, as has been seen, into _Rachel Ray_ (1863). The subject was first made a prominent feature in _Can You Forgive Her?_ (1864). Here we are first formally introduced to more or less public personages with whom our acquaintance is now to be improved. Trollope had not been impelled to his Beverley candidature by any active share in the Gladstonian enthusiasm, then beginning to show itself throughout the country, nor can the Gladstonian lineaments be clearly traced in any of the parliamentary portraits whose gallery opens with _Phineas Finn_ (1869). The sorrows, the disappointment, the labours, and the other varieties of penance awaiting the average borough candidate, form the autobiographical element in the novel that marked the new period in Trollope’s life beginning with his retirement from the Post Office. After _Ralph the Heir_, _Phineas Finn_ takes the reader into the heart of the political system, at St. Stephen’s, in Whitehall, in Pall Mall, and in the country-houses, where leaders of parties, whether peers or commoners, Cabinet Ministers and all their hangers on, congregate. The electioneering reminiscences that give life and colour to _Ralph the Heir_ make it therefore a fit introduction to Trollope’s efforts in the new literary vein which, while a paid servant of the State, he did not think desirable to work.

That was not the only fresh test applied by him in this, his fifty-third year, to the loyalty of his readers. The example of famous or successful contemporaries always excited a spirit of emulation in Trollope. Not only had Dickens and Thackeray added to their reputation and wealth as magazine editors, but, in the same capacity, men of whom he thought so meanly as G. A. Sala and Edmund Yates had done well. The ex-Post Office surveyor, therefore, resolved to spend part of his freedom from official harness in the same _rôle_. The Virtues of City Road had just started a monthly, _The St. Paul’s Magazine_. Anthony Trollope, with Mr. Edward Dicey for his assistant, readily took the helm. He led off with an instalment of fiction different from anything else he had yet attempted. Had this not come after the Barchester series and therefore been judged by that earlier standard, it might have had as many readers if not admirers as the other pen and ink pictures of English life of which _The Warden_, in 1855, had been the first. _Phineas Finn_, that first showed Trollope as a political novelist, after having run through _The St. Paul’s_, was republished in two volumes octavo (Virtue and Co.), 1869. It was continued five years later with _Phineas Redux_. This originally appeared in _The Graphic_ and was republished (Chapman and Hall) in two volumes, 1874. The group of novels now referred to contained other works, to be mentioned in their proper place, and only ended with _The Duke’s Children_ (1880) two years before Trollope’s death. All these books are traversed by a slight connecting thread of name, incident, or character. As to this, however, it will be best to let these stories speak for themselves, beginning with the earliest of the number, _Phineas Finn_.

The personage giving his name to this book is the son of an Irish doctor, Malachi Finn, living at Killaloe, county Clare, well-known throughout the province of Connaught, possessing no private fortune, but a good practice and an expensive family. The household idolatry lavished upon the son is thus commented on by the shrewd, sensible father. “So far he seems as good as any other man’s goose, but much more evidence is wanted for establishing his claim to any qualities of the swan.” Phineas, however, is no sooner seen in London than he begins to be a success. Mr. Low, in whose chambers he reads law, who on his own account entertains but checks certain parliamentary ambitions, is a steady-going preceptor, social and legal, of the old school, who admonishes his pupil to beware of distractions from his professional training. Phineas, however, has already joined the Reform Club and found many good houses open to him. Among the earliest of his Pall Mall and Mayfair acquaintances Laurence Fitzgibbon, a happy-go-lucky Irishman, cleverly sketched after the manner of Charles Lever, is already in the House, and easily persuades Phineas that it is the only career worth pursuing. An opportunity soon comes; the Loughshane constituency wants a progressive candidate at the General Election; the Reform Club committee promises a liberal contribution to his expenses if Phineas will stand. Even thus Phineas’ allowance from his father must of course be increased. The Killaloe doctor, talked over by the ladies of his family, will do his very utmost to help his son in maintaining the new position. Phineas, accordingly, is returned to Parliament, and is still in his first session when, by sheer good luck, he gets an Under-Secretaryship. Then comes the first check; Phineas kicks over the traces on an Irish question. Mr. Monk may at some points vaguely reflect Gladstone. It is at least Finn’s loyalty to Monk which involves the loss of his Ministerial office, and, with it, of his seat for Loughshane, which, out of office, he cannot support in a style agreeable to his enlarged views of an M.P.’s social consequence.

Nothing therefore is to be done but to resettle himself in the land of his birth. Even after his retirement there come signs of returning luck in the shape of a Government post worth £1000 a year. That enables him to settle modestly in Dublin with his youthful sweetheart, Mary Flood Jones, for his wife. The heart which he can offer this excellent lady is no longer a virgin one, for during his London years he has had two or three serious love affairs. One of these, in its sequel rather tragic, has been with Lady Laura Standish, the impoverished Earl of Brentford’s daughter. That has been really a case of love at first sight on both sides, for Lady Laura, having given Phineas her affection at the beginning, does not conceal that he has it to the end. She only refuses him because her father’s poverty compels her to marry a rich plebeian, Mr. Kennedy, M.P., like Phineas himself, a political supporter of Plantagenet Palliser, who eventually becomes the Duke of Omnium. The handsome person and the shallow purse of the young Irish member have also appealed warmly to Madame Max Goesler, a rich widow; she has indeed, it having been apparently Leap Year, hinted to Phineas at the acceptance of her hand and fortune as the best way out of his money difficulties. This good-hearted, fascinating, and refreshingly straightforward lady, whom he, after becoming a widower, marries, had been suspected of angling for Planty Pal’s uncle, the reigning Duke of Omnium. At least the duke’s infatuation for “Mrs. Max” had filled Lady Glencora Palliser with a droll horror, lest the great man should actually make her his wife and become the father of an heir who would disinherit Planty Pal himself. Madame Goesler, however, has never any thought of aiming at anyone above her own social level. The gracious but decisive dismissal of her noble suitor converts Lady Glencora into her fast friend. Throughout the rest of the story and indeed afterwards, among all Lady Glencora’s intimates, none ranked so high in her regard and confidence as the sensible and kindly lady who had been wise enough to refuse a duke.

Out of Phineas Finn’s attachment to Lady Laura arises an entirely fresh entanglement of heart actually attended by results serious enough, and at one time threatening to change the whole current of the narrative. In Lady Laura’s drawing-room Phineas meets a beautiful heiress, Violet Effingham, the bride-elect of Lady Laura’s brother, the red-haired, red-faced, shaggy, and untamable Lord Chiltern, who bears something of a family likeness to the St. Aldegonde of Disraeli’s _Lothair_, but who really represents Trollope’s snapshot at the Lord Hartington of his own day, who died eighth Duke of Devonshire. The fact of Miss Effingham being thus bespoke does not warn off the philandering Phineas. Lady Laura has the mortification of seeing her own devotion to him requited by his deliberate attempt to cut out Chiltern, and so prevent the marriage that she had set her heart on for her brother. Still, she sits by, agonised at heart, but uncomplaining. Nor does the spectacle of Finn’s fickleness and shallowness lose him the love which, in spite of herself, he had won.

Her brother views matters less passively. He has rather liked Phineas, shown him much attention in London, mounted him on his most intractable hunter, Bonebreaker, in the eastern counties, and admired the success with which the doctor’s son from Killaloe has conquered that self-willed steed. He is not, however, prepared to tolerate Phin’s poaching on his manor. He will maintain the right to his sweetheart even at the price of blood. Eventually the two agree to settle it at the pistol’s point. Blankenberg in Belgium becomes the scene of a combat in which Phineas receives a not very serious wrist wound. This encounter has been called an anachronism; it disposes, the critics have said, if nothing else did, of the one merit, that of absolute truth to life in all details, specially claimed by Trollope for the novel. How stand the facts? Prince Albert, indeed, made duelling unfashionable; but there were several cases of duels fought in Victoria’s reign. Certainly, during the period of the Blankenberg encounter in _Phineas Finn_, hostile meetings at Boulogne were often the talk of the town. Only a generation and a half have passed since there still flourished at St. Stephen’s, and occasionally dined with Mr. Gladstone, the wonderful Ogorman Mahoon who, if report spoke truly, had once at least “killed his man.” In 1852 a Canterbury election dispute caused a duel between George Smythe, Coningsby’s original, and Colonel Frederick Romilly. About this time, too, is nearly the date at which an ordeal of the same kind was gone through by Reginald Russell in Paris.

Phineas Finn’s Irish exile was short. He had recently lost his wife in Dublin, when a letter from his old friend, Lady Laura Standish’s cousin, Barrington Erle, told him of just the thing to suit him in the shape of a parliamentary investment for a little legacy into which he had come. This was the vacant seat in Lord Brentford’s borough of Tankerville. To London therefore he hurries. In the solitude of his Jermyn Street Hotel he is surprised and gladdened by a letter from the former Violet Effingham, now Lady Chiltern, conveying a particularly cordial invitation to their country house, Harrington Hall. So he feels himself really on the way back to the old life formerly so much enjoyed and, as it seemed, but a few months since withdrawn from him for ever. But his welcome is not absolutely unanimous. Among those who, as a personal offence to themselves, resent his reappearance after having made up their minds that he was finally out of their way, Finn’s most malevolent ill-wisher is Mr. Bonteen. Phineas has just got back to St. Stephen’s as member for Tankerville; shortly afterwards goes into the Reform Club; here, stung by Bonteen’s remarks, he almost comes to blows with Bonteen; a little later he is seen walking home Mr. Bonteen’s way. The next morning Bonteen is found dead in a Mayfair alley with his skull broken, manifestly by such a pocket bludgeon as Finn is known to be in the habit of carrying for protection against garrotters. The Irish member’s arrest follows; it might have gone hard with him in court but for Madame Goesler’s resourcefulness, devotion, and ready wit. The tide of circumstantial evidence, so far flowing strongly against Phineas, now turns, and, thanks entirely to Madame Goesler’s vigilance and skill, gives Trollope the chance of a hit at his old enemies, the evangelicals, by setting in conclusively against a dissenting minister who now replaces Phineas in the dock, but just contrives to cheat the gallows. Phineas, of course, finds a rising statesman’s ideal wife in Madame Goesler, and is henceforth known as the prosperous middle-aged M.P.

Here, it will be seen, is the same blending as in _Orley Farm_ and _Can You Forgive Her?_ of tears with laughter, of the terrible with the ludicrous, and of more than melodrama with downright farce. The darker background to the social or political scenes is supplied chiefly by the relations between Mr. Kennedy and his wife, to whom might be added Phineas Finn himself. To begin with, Lady Laura Standish probably would never have become Lady Laura Kennedy if the handsome young Irishman who won her heart directly she saw him had pressed his suit with the audacity she perhaps looked for against that of the priggish and insipid Kennedy. As it is, loving him from the first, she nurses a steadily deepening passion for him till her widowhood, where Trollope with artistic delicacy leaves her, feeling no doubt that all the proprieties of fiction would be violated if married happiness were awarded to the two parties in a flirtation that, innocent throughout in itself, had been associated with such domestic discomfort and havoc. Take her for what the novelist meant her to be, Lady Laura, well thought out, firmly, not less than, at each point, consistently drawn, is a good specimen of the mid-nineteenth century society woman of the better sort. She had, indeed, her exact parallel in at least one commanding ornament of Mayfair drawing-rooms concerning whom Lord Beaconsfield said, “She needs only a husband of the right sort to be a statesman’s helpmate.” On both sides the Laura and Phineas friendship is pure throughout; it is only not absolutely without reproach because the lady refuses to give it up after her husband’s disapproval and jealousy have been plainly and, for success, too peremptorily signified. Kennedy commits that and other mistakes because he does not quite come up to the idea of Trollope’s perfect gentleman and man of the world. To begin with he is a devout Presbyterian; this defect alone was almost as fatal in Trollope’s eyes as it would have been with Charles II himself. When they are staying at Loughlinter Lady Laura complains of her headache and begs to be excused kirk. Kennedy delivers a little discourse on the malady of headache generally and his wife’s headache in particular. The ailment, he lays down, proceeds from either the stomach or nerves. In the former case the walk to church should prove beneficial; in the latter, the malady, he plainly intimates, comes from Phineas Finn. This insinuation acts as a last straw. Lady Laura Kennedy leaves her husband’s house and settles with her father abroad at Dresden. There Phineas is about to visit her when, before starting, he adds insult to injury by asking Kennedy whether he can take any message to his wife. This naturally leads to an angry scene between the two men shortly afterwards, with fresh violence on both sides.

Trollope loved newspaper writers even a little less than he did evangelicals; in _The Warden_ he had dealt some rather clumsy thrusts at them. In his later novels, including that now considered, he personifies them in the vulgar, unscrupulous Quintus Slide of _The People’s Banner_. This ruffian of the Press embitters and complicates the Finn-Kennedy embroglio for personal spite against Phineas and for the enlivenment of his own columns with some spicy personalities obtained from the now half-maddened Kennedy himself. Infuriated with jealousy because, not unnaturally, incredulous of the really Platonic conditions of his wife’s friendship with Phineas, Kennedy has one more personal passage with the Irish Member, noticeable only because it contains a repetition of the attempt at murder with a pistol that had already, when the quarrel lay between John Grey and George Vavasor, done duty in _Can You Forgive Her?_ As for Lady Laura, she lives out a faded life in attendance on her father, Lord Brentford, and only reappears in England to hear from her old lover of his intention to secure himself against pecuniary troubles in the future by persuading Madame Goesler to become Mrs. Finn. This is the second announcement of the same kind which poor Lady Laura has had to face; for some years earlier it was to her also he confided his intention of trying his chance with Violet Effingham. This is a little too much even for so fond and blind an admirer of Phineas as the widowed Lady Laura Kennedy. “Why,” she exclaims, “to me of all persons in the world do you come with the story of your intentions? I could bear it when you came to me about Violet, because I loved her even though she robbed me, but how am I to bear it now in the case of a woman I loathe?”

The curtain falls upon poor Lady Laura, sobbing her heart out upon the false one’s breast in Saulsby Park with self-reproaches for having worshipped him instead of her God; upon Phineas flourishing as Madame Goesler’s husband, a prosperous middle-aged M.P., refusing the offer of a place in Mr. Gresham’s Government because, as the newly made Mrs. Phineas Finn puts it, a rich wife’s husband can afford to prefer freedom to responsibility. The only figures of the Phineas group prominently reappearing in the subsequent political stories are Planty Pal transformed into the Duke of Omnium and his Duchess, formerly Lady Glencora. The new duke presides over no Cabinet, but takes a paternal interest in public affairs generally, and is specially delighted at the improved prospects of his old fiscal fad, decimal coinage. The duchess, having sown all her wild oats, settles down into a great political lady of the most aspiring and imperious kind. Her mistakes in that part illustrate Trollope’s favourite moral that the feminine ambition “which o’erleaps itself” spoils instead of adorns whatever it may touch.

There is little, as has been already said, in Trollope’s first two political novels to fix the parliamentary period to which they belong. As regards good looks, Phineas may have had something in common with Colonel King-Harman, whom the novelist occasionally met at the Arts Club, but at all other points Trollope’s Irish Member, by his fine presence, winning manners, and his return to St. Stephen’s after an interval of absence, suggests Sir John Pope Hennessy rather than any other representative of the Emerald Isle during the pre-Household Suffrage portion of the Victorian age. For the rest, Prime Minister Gladstone and Prime Minister Gresham only resemble each other in the first letter of their names. The future Lord Beaconsfield, however, is clearly meant by Daubeny. Disraeli is the subject of a verbal photograph as the brilliant and unscrupulous charlatan who dishes the Whigs, not over parliamentary reform but over Church Disestablishment. But the politician pitted against Daubeny bears scarcely a remote resemblance to Disraeli’s arch antagonist. Among those who resist Daubeny’s designs, the foremost, the already-mentioned Gresham, universally respected, admired, is too reserved and self-contained for popularity. He therefore recalls Sir Robert Peel rather than the most famous of Peel’s disciples or successors. Trollope’s Turnbull as the angular, inflexibly upright, middle-class M.P. shows no trace of the Cobden, John Bright, or any of that school reflected in the Job Thornberry of Disraeli’s _Endymion_. The fact of the publication of _Endymion_ being later, by some ten years, than that of _Phineas Finn_ does away with the suggestion that Trollope’s Turnbull was modelled from Disraeli’s Thornberry. In like manner Monk, Trollope’s ideal parliament man, is evolved entirely from his creator’s inner consciousness. So too Plantagenet Palliser had no original among the well-born, scientific financiers of the House of Commons in Trollope’s time, but merely personifies his creator’s notion of the pattern gentleman, the soul of honour and of chivalrous consideration in his treatment equally of Lady Glencora’s flirtations when his bride-elect and of her ill-devised socio-political strategies after she has become Duchess of Omnium. At each stage of his development from the Planty Pal of _Can You Forgive Her?_ to the inheritance of the ducal title in _Phineas Redux_, these aspects of his character are consistently, logically, as well as at every point effectively, sustained. When, in _Phineas Finn_, his uncle’s death sends him to the Upper House, to be known henceforth as the duke, while not holding office he becomes the oracle, the good genius and presiding potentate of his party.

_The Prime Minister_ (1876) shows him as the First Lord of the Treasury, always gracious, calm, and strong, though often harassed by his wife’s intermeddling in public affairs, and, as in the case of Ferdinand Lopez, by her patronage of discreditable supporters. For, if the duke be the ornament of his order and his vocation, Lady Glencora, since becoming Her Grace, has transformed herself into a satire upon feminine aspiration when untempered by true womanly feeling and good sense. The Duchess of Omnium was, I fancy, felt by Trollope himself to be, as he put it to me, _une grande dame manquée_. Trollope’s lifelong Harrow contemporary and loyal friend, Sir William Gregory, so often mentioned in these pages, called his Irish member a libel upon the Irish gentleman. The relations in which Phineas Finn stood to his own sex were those of Trollope’s duchess to the genuine great lady of existing political drawing-rooms. Of moral fibre, harder and coarser than when first introduced as the girlish but even then sufficiently shrewd Lady Glencora, she provokes, when seen in _The Prime Minister_, disadvantageous comparison with another politician’s wife, her equal in fortune, whom she once called an adventuress, but has since promoted to the first place in her friendship. Mrs. Max Goesler, now Mrs. Phineas Finn, who herself might have been a duchess had she liked, is a rising statesman’s model wife, knowing exactly when to help her husband by appearing in the foreground, and how to advance his interests by unadvertised activity behind the scenes. But then Mrs. Max was a real figure in the society of Trollope’s day, and the Duchess of Omnium was an abstraction.

The characters, however, in _The Prime Minister_, on which Trollope relied to popularise the book, by relieving the strain of the demand that the purely political portions made on the reader’s attention are those of Emily Wharton, whose life is marred by her marriage with the aspiring incarnation of city scampdom, Lopez, and of Arthur Fletcher, Emily’s blameless lover, who eventually becomes her husband. Trollope himself was never seen to greater advantage than in the best professional society. Especially did he shine when talking with doctors like his particular friend, Sir Richard Quain, or with lawyers of the old school such as he had first known from his father. Nothing, therefore, in _The Prime Minister_ is better than Emily’s father, the shrewd old-world barrister, reminiscent of the bygone legal celebrities, Jockey Bell, the first conveyancer of his time, or Leech, Master of the Rolls.[27] The snobbish and pretentious knave, Lopez, has entrapped into partnership in his commercial infamies a city drudge as low as personally he is harmless, named Parker. Not unworthy of Dickens, is the praise deserved by the simple and graphic drollery of Trollope’s description of Sexty Parker amid the mean surroundings of his suburban home, with his poor wife’s affrighted protests at the dangerous degree to which he is being made the tool of Lopez, or Parker’s picture on his seaside holiday, smoking his pipe and drinking his gin and water in the shabby villa’s porch, while his ill-clad and ill-nourished children make mischief of every kind in the stony and almost flowerless garden. An effective contrast to these scenes of squalid domesticity is forthcoming in the varied company at Gatherum Castle, now inhabited by Planty Pal as Duke of Omnium, and despotically managed by Lady Glencora as duchess, who, by way of forming a party of her own, has invited some rather shady guests. Among these is Lopez; how the duke sees through him, soon showing him the door, and how His Grace, beset by an uncongenial house-party, platonically consoles himself with Lady Rosina De Courcy as well as follows her advice to take care of his health by wearing cork soles, is told in Trollope’s best manner.

With this social by-play are mingled the Silverbridge parliamentary contests; here Beverley is drawn upon once more, and the election agents, Sprugeon and Sprout, are pen and ink photographs of Trollope’s Yorkshire friends. _The Prime Minister_ ends with the hideous suicide of the villain of the piece, Ferdinand Lopez. All the incidents leading up to that catastrophe make very unpleasant reading indeed.

Infinitely superior to _The Prime Minister_ is _The Duke’s Children_. Here our author regains his old and happier cunning in the portrait of Isabel Boncassen. This American beauty combines high intellectual power with absolute perfection of face and figure. Still more arresting is her English counterpart, Lady Mabel Grex. That heroine, an impoverished and profligate nobleman’s daughter, had passed scathless through the trying ordeal of her earlier days. Neither the keenness of her insight nor the strength of her will is impaired; her capacity of entire devotion where her heart is really touched has not suffered from any hardening experiences of life’s seamy side. Yet some time has to pass before she can do justice to these great qualities, though from the first she makes herself felt as the good genius of the story. Meanwhile, the widowed Duke of Omnium has had trouble both with his sons and daughter. These vexations to some degree involve Lady Mabel Grex. His eldest son, Lord Silverbridge, a good deal both of the scapegrace and the spendthrift, has managed to drop £70,000 on a single race. The duke’s only daughter, Lady Mary Palliser, is scarcely less unsatisfactory. With the pick of the peerage as well as the plutocracy to choose from, she perversely refuses to marry anyone but Frank Tregear, a Cornish squire’s penniless younger son. Frank, however, and Lady Mabel Grex are already the subjects of a reciprocal passion. This attachment is doomed for money reasons never to end in marriage. Even after she has convinced herself that this love is hopeless, Mabel Grex only becomes resigned to the inevitable after a long and agonised struggle with herself. It ends, however, in her accepting an offer from the duke’s heir, Silverbridge. At the same time Frank Tregear breaks off with Mabel and transfers his affections to the Duke of Omnium’s daughter, the already mentioned Lady Mary. Defeated at every point, as well as crushed under the burden of a hopeless love, Mabel Grex passively accepts the doom of aimless poverty and absolute desolation for the rest of her days.