Part 11

The other humble man who proves his worth is Mr. Samuel Saul, the curate for Harry's father Mr. Clavering, a clergyman not given to work of any sort. Mr. Saul is introduced as a serious, conscientious young man who basically does all the work. (This is a mark against any claim that Mr. Saul may have to being a gentlemen. Gentlemen don't work.) Mrs. Clavering later reflects that her son Harry "would never excel greatly in any drudgery that would be necessary for the making of money."

But the humble Mr. Saul aspires to the hand of Harry's sister Fanny. No one in Fanny's family--her father the rector, her mother, or her brother Harry--could even consider such a thing; but Fanny, who initially acknowledges the impossibility of his suit, eventually does begin to consider it, and to consider that the only thing keeping them from being married is that his income as a curate is woefully inadequate. And Fanny rejects any suggestion that Mr. Saul is not a gentleman.

His initial proposal introduces us to him. Trollope specialized in proposals; there seem to be at least two or three in every book. And this one, which occurs in the rain, makes the reader thankful for a warm dry spot where he can only read about the rain. He persists with his statement of purpose in spite of the downpour, and she splashes herself as she forbids him to speak further. "She had her own ideas as to what was loveable in men, and the eager curate, splashing through the rain by her side, by no means came up to her standard of excellence."

But Mr. Saul's powers were not to be underestimated. He later makes another attempt, in which the author dissects Mr. Saul's victory. Fanny does not declare that she does not love him. Mr. Saul's gamesmanship requires a bit of leisurely explanation:

At this moment she forgot that in order to put herself on perfectly firm ground, she should have gone back to the first hypothesis, and assured him that she did not feel any such regard for him. Mr. Saul, whose intellect was more acute, took advantage of her here, and chose to believe that that matter of her affection was now conceded to him. He knew what he was doing well, and is open to a charge of some jesuitry. "Mr. Saul," said Fanny, with grave prudence, "it cannot be right for people to marry when they have nothing to live upon." When she had shown him so plainly that she had no other piece left on the board to play than this, the game may be said to have been won on his side.

Mr. Saul continued to play his hand bravely in his interview with Mr. Clavering, whose strongest card was that Mr. Saul, though a gentleman, was not in his class. And of course the nuances of class were to be of no avail in England in coming decades. Some would persist, but many of these nuances, which were relied upon by those such as Mr. Clavering, who did not work, would fall to the energy of such men as Mr. Burton and Mr. Saul, who did work. In this case, Mr. Clavering bravely declared that Mr. Saul would have to give up his pretensions for Fanny's hand, or leave the parish--which would have left Mr. Clavering without the services of someone to do his work for him. And Mr. Saul called his bluff, declaring that he would leave the parish rather than renounce his claim for Fanny's hand.

As it turned out, all parties stood their ground, and Fanny assumed the role of "a broken-hearted young lady." But this is fairy tale as well as soap opera, and all tears are wiped away in a series of events that open up the position of rector of the parish to the steadfast Mr. Saul, thus removing the last excuse the family had for opposing the union--somewhat to the sacrifice of "cakes and ale in the parish," to Mr. Clavering's regret.

Other less worthy persons claim the reader's attention, two of whom, Archie Clavering and Captain Boodle, provide a welcome bit of comic relief when Mr. Boodle, habitué of the racecourses and "fast friend" of Captain Archie Clavering, the ne'er do well brother of Sir Hugh Clavering, advises Archie about how to advance his courtship of Lady Ongar. Archie knows deep down that he has no chance. "In some inexplicable manner he put himself into the scales and weighed himself, and discovered his own weight with fair accuracy. And he put her into the scales, and he found that she was much the heavier of the two." But Boodle knows too much about horses to allow his friend to shortchange himself in his suit, comparing courtship to riding a trained mare: "I always choose that she shall know that I'm there." Use the spurs if you have to.

Needless to say, Archie's sense of his own weight is a more accurate predictor than Boodle's advice; but Archie and Captain Boodle also attempt to invoke the assistance of Lady Ongar's friend Sophie Gordeloupe, who routs them both. Madame Gordeloupe was a "Franco-Pole," who "spoke English with great fluency, but every word uttered declared her not to be English." In Trollope's English world, she was the classic devious foreigner. Some said that she was a Russian spy. "How could any decent English man or woman wish for the friendship of such a creature as that?"

Archie makes the first visit to the Russian spy, who quickly strips him of the twenty pounds he had tucked into his glove and ridicules him for offering such a paltry sum, demanding fifty pounds as a starter. "Yes, fifty--for another beginning. What; seven thousands of pounds per annum, and make difficulty for fifty pounds! You have a handy way with your glove. Will you come with fifty pounds tomorrow?"

After Archie's second visit succeeds only in Sophie's relieving him of fifty more pounds, Boodle is pressed into service for a third attempt. When Sophie asks him if Boodle is an English name, he replies, "Altogether English, I believe. Our Boodles come out of Warwickshire; small property near Leamington--doosed small, I'm sorry to say." When he utterly fails in his embassy, he feels "quite entitled to twit her with the payment she had taken," and asks about his friend's seventy pounds that she has taken. More ridicule. Boodle is routed. Madame Gordeloupe finds that longer speeches in a tongue not her own are more effective:

"Suppose you go to your friend and tell him from me that he have chose a very bad Mercury in his affairs of love--the worst Mercury I ever see. Perhaps the Warwickshire Mercuries are not very good. Can you tell me, Captain Booddle, how they make love down in Warwickshire?"

The women are strong. Julia Ongar plays her hand well. After terminating her love affair with young Harry Clavering because neither of them has any money, she goes in search of bigger game. "Julia had now lived past her one short spell of poetry, had written her one sonnet, and was prepared for the business of the world." She goes on to win the prize of her widow's bountiful settlement, but she then finds that she is accepted neither by the gentry nor by the servants at Ongar Park when she goes to occupy her new residence. And on learning that she has a losing hand to play against Florence Burton, she plays it with reasonable dignity. She is not, however, above a bit of revenge at the last, taunting Harry that Florence must be very beautiful. Not so beautiful, he says, but very clever.

"Ah--I understand. She reads a great deal, and that sort of thing. Yes; that is very nice. But I shouldn't have thought that that would have taken you. You used not to care much for talent and learning--not in women I mean."

Florence, for her part, is steadfast in her love and prepares to give it up when she senses that she has lost; but the leading lady often has the most stereotyped part to play. Florence's sister-in-law, Cecilia Burton, plays her supporting role well, taking the initiative in confronting Harry when he wavers, and doing it without informing her husband, who might forbid her to do so. The title of Chapter XXVII emphasizes her initiative: "What Cecilia Burton did for her Sister-in-law." And what she did is explained a bit after her effort: "Even Cecilia, with all her partiality for Harry, felt that he was not worth the struggle; but it was for her now to estimate him at the price that Florence might put upon him--not at her own price."

Harry Clavering's reflections on his situation bear the markings of authenticity. Trollope had met his new American friend, Kate Field, about three years earlier, and it is tempting to attribute these comments about how a man can love two women at the same time to his not-entirely-paternal interest in Kate.

Sir Hugh Clavering's death at sea permits the fairy tale ending. Fairy tale, yes; and soap opera plot, yes; but the nuances of Victorian society are exposed with such wit that _The Claverings_ is lifted well above the soap opera mark. It stands as one of my favorites of Trollope's novels, one that could readily be recommended to the reader who is not quite familiar with the author's name.

SEVERAL DEGREES OF STUBBORN

LINDA TRESSEL

Be advised and read no further, any to whom it is important that the ending of the book not be known before it is read. _Linda Tressel_ (1867) is one of Trollope's dark books--_Sir Harry Hotspur_ is another--in which the heroine does not fare well after being thwarted in trying to have a life on her own terms.

That a young woman should insist on such conditions in the nineteenth century would mark this as a work that could be used as a feminist text today; and perhaps it would be so used if it were a little less melodramatic--and if anyone knew anything about it.

Linda is a young woman who shows spunk and determination, but she falls victim to the stubborn steadfastness of purpose of her Aunt Charlotte, shown to be a religious zealot of the evangelical Protestant variety, and Aunt Charlotte's lodger, Peter Steinmarc, a Nuremberger of the slow-witted stubborn sort. Both are so extreme in their positions that they might be taken for caricatures were they not shown in such convincing detail.

The story is that of a motherless child who is taken under the wing of her Aunt Charlotte, a devout woman who "goes far beyond the ordinary amenities of Lutheran teaching." When Linda attains the age of twenty, she learns that Peter Steinmarc has offered to make her his wife. The reader is told that he has previously proposed many times to Charlotte Staubach, who declined the honor and reminded Peter that he would become owner of the house now in Linda's name, if he should become Linda's husband. On being told of his marital intentions by her Aunt Charlotte, Linda immediately refuses, but she becomes "very wretched." A few details tell why:

She told herself that sooner or later her aunt would conquer her, that sooner or later that mean-faced old man, with his snuffy fingers, and his few straggling hairs brushed over his bald pate, with his big shoes spreading here and there because of his corns, and his ugly, loose, square, snuffy coat, and his old hat which he had worn so long that she never liked to touch it, would become her husband, and that it would be her duty to look after his wine, and his old shoes, and his old hat, and to have her own little possessions doled out to her by his penuriousness.

This then is the story, and it plays out with the added complication of Linda's being in love with the young man who lives across the little river behind her house. He is in and out of jail because of his political radicalism, but Linda knows little of this. They attempt an elopement, but it fails when young Ludovic is apprehended by the police at the Augsburg station when their train arrives. Linda had the pluck to run away with Ludovic, and in the end she has the pluck to run away on her own, but though she confronts her aunt several times, she never can bring herself to face her and refute her. When Aunt Charlotte plays the prayer card, Linda never refuses to kneel and listen to the degrading and humiliating prayers offered on her behalf.

The feminist agenda was one that the conservative Trollope never subscribed to, but his stories were too true to life to conceal women's problems. Perhaps his stories got away from him, and the women's stories told themselves. In this one, poor Linda finds herself totally powerless under the domination of her aunt, as no man would be. The world appears to be conspiring to keep her from breaking out of her aunt's smothering sphere. When she leaves the house to go consult an old friend of her late father's, Herr Molk tells her that she should submit herself to her elders and her betters.

Trollope made little secret of his religious tastes--traditional Anglicanism, of the high church sort, but not papist. And he had no patience with any evidence of fanaticism in religion. "But there are women of the class to which Madame Staubach belonged who think that the acerbities of religion are intended altogether for their own sex. That men ought to be grateful to them who will deny?" Poor Linda's final escape is too late to save her; she makes her way to her uncle's house in Cologne, where her Aunt Grüner, a Catholic, tells her that her Aunt Charlotte's mistreatment of her comes of her religion.

"We think differently, my dear. Thank God, we have got somebody to tell us what we ought to do and what we ought not to do." Linda was not strong enough to argue the question, or to remind her aunt that this somebody, too, might possibly be wrong.

Linda's progressive downhill and melodramatic course makes for a rather grim story. Mercifully, it is a short one. The descriptions of Aunt Charlotte and of Peter Steinmarc leave little room for subtlety. However, Aunt Charlotte's breastplate of righteousness was not entirely without a few little chinks, as we see in her last encounter with Linda's wild lover. Trollope's description, I fear, will bring few feminists to his side:

He could get in and out of the roofs of houses, and could carry away with him a young maiden. These are deeds which always excite a certain degree of admiration in the female heart, and Madame Staubach, though she was a Baptist, was still a female. When, therefore, she found herself in the presence of Ludovic, she could not treat him with the indignant scorn with which she would have received him had he intruded upon her premises before her fears of him had been excited.

Like _Nina Balatka_, _Linda Tressel_ was published as an anonymous work; only later did Trollope declare himself as the author. It has been stated that he wanted to prove that he could write a different kind of novel, set in Europe. _Linda Tressel_ was clearly an effort to take his writing in a different direction. Though it was not a commercial success, it can hardly be dismissed. The story moves inexorably to a tragic ending for the heroine; the author stays on task with the progression of the story, but it is seasoned with bits of irony. The reader begins to suspect that there is heavy weather ahead as the storm clouds gather over the picturesque little red house in Nuremberg; perhaps it is the impact of the inevitable deluge that is so depressing.

THE DOWNSIDE OF CHIVALRY

HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT

Novels rarely have subtitles; Anthony Trollope certainly didn't bother with them. But _He Knew He Was Right_ is a sitting duck for a frivolous little subtitle. How about _But He Was Wrong_? Or maybe _But She Knew He Was Wrong_? Or perhaps, _But She Wouldn't Pretend That He Was Right_? But of course any subtitle would have been redundant. The five-word title tells it all. Of course he wasn't right. But he was stubborn. And she was stubborn. And in this case, it was a case of terminal stubbornness.

The problem with _He Knew He Was Right_ is that the man who knows he is right, Louis Trevelyan, fails to overcome his terminal stubbornness. Or perhaps we should refer to it as a paranoid personality disorder--or maybe as the prevailing diagnosis of the time: madness. Whatever we call it, it isn't pretty, and the story of his progressive delusion is not a pleasant one. Interesting, yes. So is _Crime and Punishment_. But both stories tell how someone happened to think and do the wrong thing, and these are unpleasant subjects. Both books dilute the dose with little subplots that add humor and diversion. But the main story line is still the main story line. Louis Trevelyan, a young husband, is annoyed by the daily visits to his wife by her godfather, Colonel Osborne, a bachelor with a reputation for pursuing beautiful young married women. He objects, she resents the objection, and both husband and wife shoot past the point of negotiation with their first discussion of the subject. Both are stubborn, things go downhill from there, and in the end Louis Trevelyan goes mad and suffers the consequences.

Trevelyan was set up by circumstances, and to understand some of these circumstances, we must take note of the laws of England at that time. English common law stated that in marriage, two became one, and that one was the husband in the eyes of the law. The husband was indeed the lord and master. In regard to children, John Stuart Mill wrote of the wife's subordination in marriage, "They are by law his children . . . . No one act can she do towards or in relation to them, except by delegation from him."

This was part of the system of coverture, in which a married woman surrendered her legal existence, which was suspended during her marriage, "or at least incorporated or consolidated into that of her husband, under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything." [1] The efforts of Victorian feminists, who considered this to be "marital slavery," led to the Married Woman's Property Act of 1882, twenty years after this book was written; but even this was only a partial solution. It was not until 1923 that grounds for divorce were made the same for both sexes, and divorce remained expensive until Legal Aid became available in 1949.

[Footnote 1: Sir William Blackstone's _Commentaries on the Laws of England_, 1765-1769]

With this as the law of the land, one can begin to see that a young husband, new to the demands of marriage, might feel that his very manhood required that he exercise his authority. (There is a downside to chivalry.)

And on the other side of the equation, we are told that Emily has been brought up away from England, in the Mandarin Islands, where she has developed an independent spirit. Friends of both parties urged them to soften their positions, but both felt that their honor was insulted, and that they could not retreat or compromise.

Today's reader observes pretty quickly in this disaster that such an impasse is less likely to occur these days because women have more rights. And though Trollope never officially endorsed the rights of women, he allowed Emily, and other women in other novels, to be compelling in their arguments. Emily voices these early in our story:

"It is a very poor thing to be a woman," she said to her sister.

"It is perhaps better than being a dog," said Nora; "but, of course, we can't compare ourselves to men."

"It would be better to be a dog. One wouldn't be made to suffer so much. When a puppy is taken away from its mother, she is bad enough for a few days, but she gets over it in a week . . . . It is very hard for a woman to know what to do," continued Emily, "but if she is to marry, I think she had better marry a fool. After all, a fool generally knows that he is a fool, and will trust someone, though he may not trust his wife."

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality," and we are mercifully diverted by the subplots, which occupy approximately fifty-four of the ninety-nine chapters of the 823-page book (one of Trollope's longest).

Miss Jemima Stanbury occupies a position of similar prominence among the subplots as she enjoyed in the city of Exeter. This is stated in a single sentence (of some length): "It is to be hoped that no readers of these pages will be so un-English as to be unable to appreciate the difference between county society and town society--the society, that is, of a provincial town, or so ignorant as not to know also that there may be persons so privileged, that although they live distinctly within a provincial town, there is accorded to them, as though by brevet rank, all the merit of living in the county." And Miss Stanbury was universally regarded as "county" rather than "town." "There was not a tradesman in Exeter who was not aware of it, and who did not touch his hat to her accordingly."

Miss Stanbury was rich. She had been engaged to a young banker, Mr. Brooke Burgess, who had jilted her, subsequently died, and left to her "every shilling that he possessed." And she, in her own romantic way, was determined that her inheritance should be hers only for life and that at her death it should revert to the Burgess family and not stay in her own family.

This is the formidable woman who paid for the education of Hugh Stanbury, Louis Trevelyan's best friend, and then cut him off from all support because he abandoned the study of law to write for the "penny press." She then wrote to Hugh's mother asking her to send her younger daughter Dorothy to live with her. "I shall expect her to be regular at meals, to be constant in going to church, and not to read modern novels."

The great problem for Miss Stanbury arose when her beloved niece Dorothy fell in love with and agreed to marry young Brooke Burgess, nephew of Miss Stanbury's late lover. But young Brooke was to inherit the Burgess wealth that Miss Stanbury intended to return to the Burgesses. And if he should marry her niece, it would diminish her posthumous triumph in returning the wealth. So he must not marry her niece. Her niece must marry Mr. Gibson, a young clergyman of Exeter.

Happy endings are permitted in the subplots, and the young people have their way. That is, most of them do. Miss Stanbury comes around with a late night change of heart and grants her blessing to Dorothy's marrying Mr. Burgess. Mr. Gibson receives his just reward. He is claimed by two sisters of the parish, one of whom so terrifies him that he reneges on his engagement to her, escaping her long kitchen knife when a kinsman is summoned to take it away from her, and Mr. Gibson then takes the younger of the two lovely sisters.

There is yet another subplot involving the Rowleys and the Stanburys. Hugh Stanbury, best friend of the unfortunate and stubborn Louis Trevelyan and rejected beneficiary of his Aunt Stanbury, is in love with Nora Rowley, beautiful sister of the also unfortunate and also stubborn Emily Trevelyan. But Nora's parents have their hearts set on her accepting the proposal of one Mr. Glascock, soon to be Lord Peterborough on the death of his father. A handsome and pleasant young man, his proposal comes only after the beautiful Nora has lost her heart to radical young Hugh Stanbury, and Mr. Glascock is refused. We then have the opportunity to follow Mr. Glascock on his journey to Naples to see his dying father, in the course of which he happens to travel with, by great coincidence, Louis Trevelyan himself, and two young Spalding sisters from America. This gives the young Trevelyan, separated from his wife, an opportunity to describe another variety of wives, the American ones, who are "exigeant--and then they are so hard. They want the weakness that a woman ought to have."

We see a good bit more of the Spalding family in Florence, where Mr. Glascock decides that the elder sister Caroline is his favorite, and after a suitable diversion to other subplots, the reader learns that they have become engaged, Caroline having demonstrated her wit with her response to his question about American "institutions:"