Part 12

"Everything is an institution. Having iced water to drink in every room of the house is an institution. Having hospitals in every town is an institution. Travelling altogether in one class of railway cars is an institution. Saying "sir", is an institution. Teaching all the children mathematics is an institution. Plenty of food is an institution. Getting drunk is an institution in a great many towns. Lecturing is an institution. There are plenty of them, and some are very good--but you wouldn't like it."

Mr. Trollope must have had some unpleasant experiences with one or more American women who served as his model for Caroline Spalding's friend Wallachia Petrie, "the Republican Browning," a "poetess" and a feminist and an outspoken opponent of "European" ways. Inveighing against the "courtiers" of "Europe," Miss Petrie vows that "the courtier shall be cut down together with the withered grasses and thrown into the oven, and there shall be an end of them."

We may hope that the future Lord Peterborough will not be obliged to listen to such speeches at Monkhams, his ancestral home.

But all is not diversion with subplots. The main business at hand is the progressive madness of Louis Trevelyan, who has his young son snatched by his private detective Bozzle (a well-meaning agent who eventually allows his wife to convince him that his own suspicion is correct, and that Trevelyan is mad) and carries him off to Italy. There he becomes progressively weaker, failing to eat, and Emily comes to rescue her son and provide hospice care for her husband. Was he mad? The author answers that he was "neither mad nor sane--not mad, so that all power over his own actions need be taken from him; nor sane, so that he must be held to be accountable for his words and thoughts."

The case of Louis Trevelyan is a tough one. The author, noted for his realistic portrayal of the world, makes a convincing case. And one must remember that Trollope was, after all, a story teller; and the story of a man who went mad because his wife would not accept his authority--because she would not recognize his position as master of his house, where his word was law--was a story worth telling. The subplots and the comedy and the realism are all background, but the strange story is the event in the foreground. The story may have taken its author further than he had intended to go. His own comment on the novel in his autobiography has been often quoted and is worth reviewing:

I do not know that in any literary effort I ever fell more completely short of my own intention than in this story. It was my purpose to create sympathy for the unfortunate man who, while endeavouring to do his duty to all around him, should be led constantly astray by his unwillingness to submit his own judgment to the opinion of others. The man is made to be unfortunate enough, and the evil which he does is apparent. So far I did not fail, but the sympathy has not been created yet. I look upon the story as being nearly altogether bad. It is in part redeemed by certain scenes in the house and vicinity of an old maid in Exeter. But a novel which in its main parts is bad cannot, in truth, be redeemed by the vitality of subordinate characters.

It may well be that Louis and Emily Trevelyan got away from their creator, just as their quarrel took on a life of its own and got out of the control of its two participants. Even with an author who prided himself on discipline in his writing, the pen can sometimes take off with a will of its own. Though the author professed to be displeased with the result, most critics have viewed the result with more favor, and I am inclined to agree with them. As to the strangeness of the story, the more one sees of life, how can anyone say that anything cannot happen? The storyteller's job is to take strange stories and make entertaining stories out of them. When I was in training, one of my chief residents had a comment that he used for strange cases: "You see that sometimes."

He knew he was right, but he was wrong.

THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER

THE VICAR OF BULLHAMPTON

On the day that I finished reading Trollope's _The Vicar of Bullhampton_, the following appeared in an email from a friend: An Irish daughter had not been home for over 5 years. Upon her return, her father cussed her: "Where have you been all this time, you ingrate!" The girl, crying, replied, "Dad . . . I became a prostitute." "What! Out of here, you shameless harlot! . . ." "OK, Dad--as you wish. I just came back to give Mom this fur coat and you this new Mercedes Benz. . . ." "Now what was it you said you had become?" "A prostitute, Dad" "Oh, you scared me half to death, girl. I thought you said a Protestant."

This is one of the major plot lines of _The Vicar of Bullhampton_, though not its conclusion. Plots are standard and repetitive. The success of the work relies less on the plot than on its window dressing. Trollope's Carry Brattle has been gone from home, and everyone knows what she has become but delicacy forbids use of the word "whore." Her father forbids her return. Will she come back? How will she be received? This theme apparently was a daring innovation in the mainstream Victorian novel; Mary Magdalene rarely appeared in the printed pages of the nineteenth century.

Sensational as this story line was, the novel appears to move rather slowly. All plot lines revolve around Mister Fenwick, the vicar. He and his wife encourage their house guest, Mary Lowther, to accept the suit of Mr. Fenwick's best friend, Harry Gilmore. She doesn't love him; she refuses him and shortly after falls in love with her cousin Walter Marrable. She accepts his proposal, but they jointly agree to call it off when his prospects in life are ruined by his father's reckless wasting of Walter's inheritance. Against her better judgment she accepts Mr. Gilmore. Then Walter's prospects for an inheritance improve. So she breaks her engagement to Mr. Gilmore and resumes that with Captain Marrable. Like Alice Vavasor in _Can You Forgive Her?_ she becomes a double jilt, and she is roundly criticized by many for such grievous behavior.

Perhaps the most entertaining of the story lines is a church issue reminiscent of the Barsetshire novels. Mister Fenwick is insulted by the great landowner of the county, The Marquis of Trowbridge, and he succeeds in repaying the Marquis with more insults. Here Trollope's familiarity with church sensitivities brings us the Marquis's revenge: he allows a Methodist chapel (not a regular Wesleyan Methodist chapel, but a Primitive Methodist chapel) to be built across the road from the vicarage, where its ugly red bricks and loud discordant bells are a recurring nuisance to the vicar and his wife.

But then: the vicar decides to consider the chapel to be his hair shirt, and he obtains the promise of his wife (who will never open her front door to look at the chapel) not to mention it to him again. The vicar considers the matter closed; but his wife's sister visits with her husband, a distinguished barrister, who volunteers to investigate the matter. He discovers that the land on which the chapel is being built is glebe land! (Glebe land is that which belongs to the vicar for his personal farming or gardening.) And here the vicar refuses to shed his hair shirt.

His clerical mind allows him to demonstrate his virtue by tolerating the chapel, though his poor wife may be obliged to endure the sight and sounds of it without being allowed to complain to him. But the perpetrator of the chapel is not to be spared, and the vicar writes a stinging letter to the marquis, in which he explains the use of very strong words:

He showed the letter to his wife.

"Isn't malice a very strong word?" she said.

"I hope so," answered the vicar.

The pace of the gentle life in Victorian England was surely a leisurely one. This pace is reflected in the whole page that is given to the thoughts of the Marquis of Trowbridge when he receives the insulting letter from Mr. Fenwick; and his reflections are further supplemented by the author's reminding us, if it were not already evident, that the Marquis is an old fool:

His lordship's mind was one utterly incapable of sifting evidence--unable even to understand evidence when it came to him. He was not a bad man. He desired nothing that was not his own, and remitted much that was. He feared God, honoured the Queen, and loved his country. He was not self-indulgent. He did his duties as he knew them. But he was an arrogant old fool, who could not keep himself from mischief--who could only be kept from mischief by the aid of some such master as his son.

Trollope can be more pithy, as when he describes the Marquis's reception and reaction to the letter from the vicar: "His intelligence worked slowly, whereas his wrath worked quickly."

The vicar subsequently feels himself cheated of his revenge after the Marquis's son Lord St. George succeeds in "pouring oil on the waters." But others pursue the matter for him, and in the end the chapel is pulled down.

The vicar is actually rather well portrayed and could stand with his clerical brethren of Barsetshire if he were given six novels in which we could follow his career. He shows himself to be a naive clergyman who thinks he can intervene in the problems of a pretty, banished prostitute without incurring any risk to his reputation. He urges the miller Jacob Brattle to accept his daughter, ignoring the father's refusal to speak to him about Carry. He visits Carry's brother George, urging him and his wife to take her in, facing the wife's wrath after George advises him not to raise the issue with her. He visits Carry's brother-in-law Mr. Jay the ironmonger with similar lack of success. He visits Carry at the small town inn where she is staying and pays for her lodging. Just when the reader begins to wonder whether, in the words of the song in _The Music Man_, "Hester will win just one more A," the vicar's wife Janet finally persuades him to lower his profile in the matter, but he never seems to understand the damage of gossip.

His instincts are shown to be correct in his championing of Sam Brattle, who is accused of murder but subsequently exonerated, and of Carry Brattle, who returns home and finally regains her father's affection. Carry's return is after setting out on foot, exposing herself to the elements in desperation, half expecting to die of exposure as did Lady Dedlock in Dickens's _Bleak House_, and as Gerald Crich would do in D. H. Lawrence's _Women in Love_. Did such a recurrent fictional device reflect an occasional practice of the times?

Trollope is a chatty author. Had he been as reticent as twentieth century practitioners of minimalist fiction, we might not have had spelled out for our curiosity a definition of a gentleman, a recurrent source of fascination for Trollope. Miss Marrable is the author's agent who ponders the matter, concluding that money does not entitle a millionaire to be considered a gentleman. Attorneys don't make the cut by virtue of their profession. A son of a gentleman, however, could maintain his rank by earning his living as a clergyman, a barrister, a soldier, or a sailor. Physicians were not absolutely excluded from the ranks of the gentlemen, but a physician could never participate in the privileges accorded to the Law and the Church. There might be some doubt about the engineering profession, but any man who allowed himself to touch trade or commerce automatically excluded himself. Such men might be ever so respectable, "but brewers, bankers and merchants were not gentlemen, and the world, according to Miss Marrable's theory, was going astray, because people were forgetting their landmarks."

And it goes without mentioning that for Walter Marrable, the option of going to work to make money is never considered. His only recourse is to return to the army.

Obvious generalizations as to class have gone out of style. But Victorian England was a land of class and caste, as shown in this allusion to a hired hand in the mill: "His companion in the mill did not come near them, knowing, as the poor do know on such occasions, there was something going on which would lead them to prefer that he should be absent."

There's also a murder mystery. It occupies several chapters, but at the end it is dismissed with only the limited knowledge of the details told by Carry Brattle and her brother Sam, both witnesses at the trial.

The story of the Mary Magdalene, though innovative, is, after all, sentimental; the love story, perhaps considered essential to sell the book to the public, is tedious; the murder mystery is perfunctory; but I wouldn't miss the story of the Methodist chapel.

A TERMINAL AFFECTION

SIR HARRY HOTSPUR OF HUMBLETHWAITE

The beleaguered father of the twenty-first century might at first look with some longing to the mores of the nineteenth century and to _Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite_, in a time and place when a father's word was law, and a faithful daughter would not marry without her father's consent. It was not so simple, though, and that's what the book is about. The plot anticipates that of Henry James's _Washington Square_, written about ten years later about a family in New York.

Trollope presents the story in a short novel of 172 pages, which means there are no subplots. However, the reader is not shortchanged by any lack of reflections by and about the characters as each turn of the story unfolds. Whereas James regards his participants in a rather detached fashion, as a puppet master who pulls the strings and watches the unfortunate movements that may result, and with relative economy of words, Trollope regards his characters with as much affection as they deserve, spending paragraphs detailing all aspects of the situation as they may appear to each of them all along the way.

The daughter of a wealthy baronet falls in love with her cousin who is a spendthrift and unworthy of her. We must follow the ground rules of Victorian society--cousins may marry, and a father must decide whether to approve of his daughter's intended husband and is indeed obliged to investigate his character. In this case, we learn that the mortal sin committed by the suitor is that he cheated at cards. Remember T. S. Eliot's line about Macavity the Mystery Cat: "He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)"

For our later generation, Trollope is a patient instructor: We are reminded that an Englishman's home is his castle. "Nothing on earth should induce Sir Harry to see his cousin anywhere on his own premises."

In a society in which inheritance could be all important, the lover of the fox hunt was beginning to suspect that the laws of inheritance were not universally applicable: "And good blood too will have its effect--physical for the most part--and will produce bottom, lasting courage, that capacity of carrying on through the mud to which Sir Harry was wont to allude; but good blood will bring no man back to honesty."

He gives lessons in the art of negotiation: "Lady Elizabeth had not been instructed to propose a meeting. She had been told rather to avoid it if at all possible. But, like some other undiplomatic ambassadors, in her desire to be civil, she ran at once to the extremity of the permitted concession."

A serious interview ensues when George Hotspur plucks up his courage to ask Sir Harry for Emily Hotspur's hand. Two and a half pages of dialogue follow, during which George pleads his losing case well, leaving Sir Harry to decide: "He sat silent for full five minutes before he spoke again, and then he gave judgment as follows: 'You will go away without seeing her tomorrow.'" Trollope follows the narrative to a point further on, at which, "The process of parental yielding had already commenced."

Ever the patient instructor, he here teaches:

On all such occasions interviews are bad. The teller of this story ventures to take the opportunity of recommending parents in such cases always to refuse interviews, not only between the young lady and the lover who is to be excluded, but also between themselves and the lover. The vacillating tone--even when the resolve to suppress vacillation has been most determined--is perceived and understood.

Not always a dispassionate instructor, the compassionate narrator at one point has tender words for the doomed maiden: "Then he knelt down and prayed . . . that he might be as a brand saved from the burning. . . . Alas, dearest, no; not so could it be done! Not at thy instance, though thy prayers be as pure as the songs of angels."

The story is built with several materials familiar to Trollope readers: the faithful young woman who can never love another, whatever becomes of the love of her life; the father concerned with the integrity of his estate in generations to come; and the young man who never intends to work and would readily marry for money. Whereas, however, in other novels it all comes out all right (_Ayala's Angel_, for instance, is a comedy from first to last in which numerous young girls succeed in following their hearts without having to pine away) in this story the chips fall where they may, so the ending is a bit of a downer.

By all accounts Trollope considered himself rather a conservative citizen. But whether consciously or not, he holds up a number of Victorian conventions to the test of _reductio ad absurdum_ and shows their absurdity to a later generation, whatever his contemporary readers may have thought. No feminist, he showed the disadvantaged state of women in novel after novel. And although Father may often know best, his stubborn attempt to prove it might include the risk of disastrous consequences, as shown in _Sir Harry Hotspur_.

THE HEIR AND THE BASTARD

RALPH THE HEIR

There are two Ralph Newtons in Anthony Trollope's _Ralph the Heir_. One is nephew to the Squire of Newton Priory and is his heir. The other is his illegitimate son. So: why should the title not be _Ralph the Bastard_? First: this is a Victorian novel; such a title would have been unacceptable to Victorian society. Second: even though the squire's son shows himself to be more worthy than his cousin, the central figure in the story really is Ralph the heir. Trollope merely says that heroes of pure virtue and villains of unalloyed vice are rare.

This is what it is about: There was a complicated inheritance issue--not contested, just complicated. I had to draw a little diagram to get it straight, and I then had to refer to it time after time:

Ralph Newton, the old Squire | +-----------+-----------+ | | Ralph Newton Gregory Newton The Parson The Squire | | +-----+-------+ | | | | Ralph Gregory Ralph The Heir The Parson Not the heir

Gregory Newton the Squire, in his youth and before he became the Squire, traveled in Europe and fathered a child (whom he named Ralph, after his father); the mother died before their planned marriage. Outraged at his son's indiscretion, the old Squire then entailed the family estate to the second generation; that is, his son could inherit the estate and use it for life, but he did not have "power of appointment" (a phrase I learned when tracing my father's many trusts to their intended conclusions). That is, he could not pass it on. Unless the first born (Gregory the squire, who had fathered the illegitimate son) should marry and have a legitimate son, the family estate would go to the first born son of his brother Ralph Newton the parson. (We're talking about three Ralphs and two Gregorys in three generations here.) It so happened that Parson Ralph's first born son, Ralph the heir, was a playboy who acquired more debts than he could pay, and he wound up with two choices: marry for money, taking Polly Neefit, daughter of his tailor, who had loaned money to Ralph and would forgive his debts and give him enough money (twenty thousand pounds) to pay his debts and more; or "go to the Jews," that is, put up his birthright as security for a loan to pay his debts.

When Gregory the father of the illegitimate son heard of this (he had now become squire after the death of his father), he saw an opportunity to take the place of the Jews and basically buy the birthright of Ralph the heir, so that he could then pass it on to his own son, Ralph the bastard.

In considering Trollope's _John Caldigate_, I wondered at the way in which inheritance issues could yield such complicated plots. Obviously there were contested inheritances; today, even without primogeniture, children of a deceased parent often have bitter disputes over the rights to seemingly minor treasures of much greater sentimental than monetary value--not to mention disputes over significant property and money. But did it ever get this complicated? Who knows?

So much for the inheritance issue. There are complicated boy-girl issues also. Ralph the heir becomes the ward of Sir Thomas Underwood, a distinguished but now idle barrister. Sir Thomas has two daughters--Patience, the elder, plain and intelligent; and Clarissa, a beauty. He also has an orphan niece, nineteen years old and "the most lovely young woman he had ever seen," Mary Bonner. So as it starts out: Gregory the parson, brother of Ralph the heir, is in love with Clarissa; Clarissa is in love with Ralph the heir; Ralph the heir kisses Clarissa and tells her he loves her, but when he realizes he needs money he is persuaded by his tailor Mr. Neefit to propose to his daughter Polly. When Mary arrives on the scene he vows to propose to her; Mary keeps her own counsel, but Ralph "not the heir" falls seriously in love with her. Patience may have had some preference of her own but not the looks to express or pursue it.

This tangle of alliances and preferences is a bit like a murder mystery: can the reader guess who will wind up with whom? And in truth, the novel basically stands on its plot. Trollope is sufficiently realistic to show that Ralph never really reforms. One of the most interesting women is Polly Neefit, who is urged by her father the breeches-maker to accept Ralph the heir, after Ralph is persuaded by him to propose. She refuses him twice, first because she doesn't think he loves her, and then, after being somewhat mollified on that score, because he doesn't respect her father and although she could have any one of twenty young men, she has only one father.

Her first refusal is a classic Trollopian dialogue. He swears he can love her, but after a lengthy recitation of probabilities, she concludes: "I ain't come to breaking my heart for you yet, Mr. Newton."