Part 13

Trollope handles the boy-girl scenes very well. But his forte is politics. He had run for a seat in Parliament once himself, and he had become sufficiently disillusioned to paint the political scene in some raw ways. Here we find Sir Thomas Underwood, who has retired from professional and public life to write the definitive biography of Sir Francis Bacon (but never actually takes pen to paper), deciding to try to re-enter Parliament via the rotten borough of Percycross, on the Conservative ticket. It so happens that one of the other contestants for one of the two Percycross seats is Ontario Moggs, a young radical rebel who preaches the virtues of labor unions and strikes, and who is also an ardent suitor for the hand of Polly Neefit. We follow Ontario to the Cheshire Cheese, the public house where he delivers impassioned orations; and we follow Sir Thomas in his reluctant efforts to canvass the electorate. Sir Thomas and his running mate, the incumbent Conservative candidate, win the election, but there is a petition--a demand for a recount and an investigation into possible improprieties in the election.

In the definitive moment of this story, Sir Thomas learns that his reluctant expenditures for campaign costs were only the first of the demands to be made on his purse. After apparently winning the election, he is persuaded by Mr. Pabsby, the Wesleyan preacher, to make a contribution for a new Wesleyan chapel. (Mr. Pabsby has been shown to us as having a "soft, greasy voice,--a voice made of pretence, politeness, and saliva.") But then Sir Thomas learns from his "supporters" that the election will probably be contested, and that he will need the loyalty of his supporters if he is to prevail. The list of requirements--personal donations for all the schools and all the churches, as well as fifty pounds for the old women of the borough at Christmas--goes on and on. Poor Sir Thomas. To make a long story short, he refuses any further favors, the petition overturns his election, and the investigation discloses that Percycross is such a corrupt borough that it has lost all its representation in Parliament.

Trollope occasionally indulged in dispensing little lessons in the facts of life. Early in the story Sir Thomas goes to Portsmouth to meet his newly orphaned nineteen-year-old niece, whom he has never seen. He has declared that he will serve as her guardian, and as he waits to meet her, he is apprehensive. And now as he observes all the men taking turns to offer her favors, he learns about "priority of service":

There are certain favours in life which are very charming,--but very unjust to others, and which we may perhaps lump under the name of priority of service. Money will hardly buy it. When money does buy it, there is no injustice. When priority of service is had, like a coach-and-four, by the man who can afford to pay for it, industry, which is the source of wealth, receives its fitting reward. . . . But priority of service is perhaps more readily accorded to feminine beauty, and especially to unprotected feminine beauty, than to any other form of claim. Whether or no this is ever felt as a grievance, ladies who are not beautiful may perhaps be able to say.

Walt Disney's film makers understood this in producing _Mary Poppins_, for whom "boxes and trunks seemed to extricate themselves." But even today one can hardly disagree with Trollope that "priority of service is perhaps more readily accorded to feminine beauty" than to any other claim.

It is difficult to dislike a genial friend. And Trollope rewards his readers with his genial approach to his fictional world. In this story Ralph "not the heir" suffers a major reversal of fortune when his father dies before completing the schemes that would have enabled Ralph, the illegitimate son, to inherit the estate and his father's additional fortune. Ralph "not the heir" had resisted ambitions to inherit the family estate. But he had requested permission to propose to the beautiful Mary Bonner when he anticipated some validation of his status. And now it seemed that he would be a "nameless" man without property or hopes of marriage to the woman he loved. At home, his butler continues to be solicitous for his employer's feelings. And the reader feels that the author of his distress has some compassion for the victim. So he does. But the realistic author also adds the butler's observation after finally leaving his young master: "I don't suppose it do come to much mostly when folks go wrong."

But the geniality of the story is shown as the author cruises confidently to his conclusion of the complicated affair, pulling the strings to the satisfaction of as many as possible. Ralph the heir finally receives a reward through the agency of Lady Eardham, mother of three eligible and more or less young daughters. Lady Eardham receives a letter from Polly Neefit's father telling her that Ralph is engaged to marry his daughter Polly. Of course she knows that Mr. Neefit is bluffing, but she shows the letter to Ralph so that he will know she has it. She invites Ralph to call on her the following morning, and when he does, he is toast:

Of course there was nothing done. During the whole interview Lady Eardham continued to press Neefit's letter under her hand upon the table, as though it was of all documents the most precious. . . . And, though she spoke no such word, she certainly gave Ralph to understand that by this letter he, Ralph Newton, was in some mysterious manner so connected with the secrets, and the interests, and the sanctity of the Eardham family, that, whether such connection might be for weal or woe, the Newtons and the Eardhams could never altogether free themselves from the link.

Her husband approves her work. The daughters certainly do not object. "The girls, who knew that they had no fortunes, expected that everything should be done for them, at least during the period of their natural harvest." And Augusta Eardham, the first fruit of this harvest, accepted her lot in life with equanimity. And it worked out all right.

Bickerings there might be, but they would be bickerings without effect; and Ralph Newton, of Newton, would probably so live with this wife of his bosom, that they, too, might lie at last pleasantly together in the family vault, with the record of their homely virtues visible to the survivors of the parish on the same tombstone.

This passage comes thirteen pages before the end of the novel. Had I been the editor, I should have insisted that this coda be placed at the very end.

A HARD CASE

THE GOLDEN LION OF GRANPERE

Michel Voss is a hard case. His second wife's niece, Marie, and his son (by his first wife) George want to marry each other. Marie has lived in the Voss household since becoming an orphan at age fifteen, and now at age twenty she is quietly running the family inn, the Lion d'Or at Granpere. But Michel thinks his son, about twenty-five years of age, should prove himself in the world before marrying. "I won't have it, George," he declares, and his word is law. And thereby hangs the tale.

Trollope loved the hard cases. Perhaps none was harder than Louis Trevelyan, whose terminal stubbornness was celebrated in _He Knew He was Right_. _The Last Chronicle of Barset_ revolves around the celebrated stubbornness of Josiah Crawley, the perpetual curate who walked miles through the mud to face down Bishop Proudie and his wife in a triumphant confrontation. Linda Tressel, in the novel bearing her name, falls victim to her Aunt Charlotte, a religious zealot who insists on a marriage that Linda refuses. Mr. Whittlestaff, in _An Old Man's Love_, resisted giving up his young fiancée to her young lover for long enough to make a short novel out of it. And there are others--strong characters whose steadfastness of purpose forces everyone else to bend or face a long struggle.

We are told that Michel Voss might have agreed to his son's marriage to his niece if he had been consulted beforehand. As it was, when he hears of it, he immediately determines that it is improper. Considering it his duty to make arrangements for his niece's welfare, he arranges what he thinks to be a suitable match with a prospering--though a bit effeminate--young man who calls at the inn while trading in textiles. M. Urmand suffers in comparison to George in Marie's eyes; to her he is simply a "rich trader," while George is a "real man."

Marie's relation to Michel, the master of the inn, is an interesting one. She supervises all that takes place at the supper table in the inn, "standing now close behind her uncle with both her hands upon his head; and she would often stand so after the supper was commenced, only moving to attend upon him, or to supplement the services of Peter and the maidservant when she perceived that they were becoming for a time inadequate to their duties." When urged by her uncle to sit at table next to Urmand, the anointed suitor, her only response is to gently pull his ears.

This is one of the short novels Trollope set in Europe in an effort to break away from the template of his portrayals of English life. _The Golden Lion_ is in Alsace-Lorraine, and in this memorable image of Marie, Trollope has epitomized the Continental culture, so foreign to the English. Can one imagine a young English woman standing behind her uncle with her hands on his head while supervising his table?

Michel is the character of interest. The others play their parts, with events propelled in large part because of lack of communication. When Marie learns that George is still serious about his love for her, she brings herself to vow that she will never marry M. Urmand; but it apparently does not occur to her that she can marry George without his father's permission. As for Michel himself, he appears to have painted himself into a corner. The Church will certainly be of no assistance to him. The Catholic priest is summoned to consult. "This was very distasteful to Michel Voss, because he was himself a Protestant, and, having lived all his life with a Protestant son and two Roman Catholic women in the house, he had come to feel that Father Gondin's religion was a religion for the weaker sex." He was not troubled by doctrinal differences, nor was he too particular about what betrothal meant. "He hardly knew himself how far that betrothal was a binding ceremony. But he felt strongly that he had committed himself to the marriage; that it did not become him to allow that his son had been right; and also that if Marie would only marry the man, she would find herself quite happy in her new home." Indeed, all Marie's senior advisors--her aunt, her uncle, the priest--fail to give her credit for having a mind, or rights, of her own. After a short time of marriage to her betrothed, she would be perfectly happy with her new domestic arrangements and forget all about the love of her youth.

Trollope does allow the postal service to play its role. When Marie decides to break it off with Urmand, she does so by writing him a letter, and not telling her uncle about it until the letter is safely on its way.

In the end, it's all worked out by the men. The matter is finally settled when M. Urmand comes to the Golden Lion to settle things, is avoided by Marie, and spends his time playing billiards alone. George is also on hand, and he manages to have some long tramps in the fields with his father, mostly discussing business affairs. Michel enjoys the walks with his son, and a satisfactory resolution ensues.

The story is paced with a light and masterful touch. A climactic scene between Marie and Urmand is followed by stepping away from Marie's little room to a long range view in the first line of the next chapter: "The people of Colmar think Colmar to be a considerable place, and far be it from us to hint that it is not so. It is--or was in the days when Alsace was French--the chief town of the department of the Haut Rhine." It is in this perspective that Michel rests from his decision-making labors to return to his genius for making plans, announcing his plan for a picnic the next day. It's too cold for a picnic, but all go. Urmand is shown to be a friend of the family, speeches are made, and toasts are drunk. All is well.

_The Golden Lion of Granpere_ is a short, straightforward little love story. It gets deeply enough into the details of running a rural inn in Alsace Lorraine to be entertaining. As is usual with Trollope, a number of lengthy paragraphs give the reader no excuse for not knowing exactly what each character is, or is not, thinking. Trollope the traveler learned enough about Europe for a few little short novels. Perhaps they afforded him the breaks he needed between the three-volume English blockbusters.

HOW TO BECOME A LADY

LADY ANNA

One doesn't discuss titles and honors much these days. We may even pretend that they don't matter much, and that in these days of democracy and equality we have no ambition for such frills. My wife and I recently spent half a day with a friend of two of our friends, and we were told before the meeting that he was the "Right Honorable" and had recently been made a Knight Companion in the New Zealand Order of Merit after a distinguished political career. Of course this was nothing that I would have mentioned to him; he dismissed very quickly even a comment of recognition I made on seeing his portrait over his staircase. But the title is out there, and I will be hard pressed to report our visit to any of our friends without making some offhand reference to the "Right Honorable."

We tend to smile at the emphasis placed on hereditary and acquired titles in Victorian England. They still exist, however, and the reader can hardly dismiss as completely dated the central role that the issue of a hereditary title plays in Anthony Trollope's _Lady Anna_. As the title of the novel indicates, the heroine is not just "Anna Murray"; she is "Lady Anna," and the story moves about the efforts of her mother to establish the legitimacy of the title. The plot is an ingenious, if improbable, one:

The unscrupulous Earl Lovel has married a commoner, but shortly after the marriage he informs her that he has previously married a woman in Italy, and that their marriage is not valid. This means that she is not his Countess, and their unborn child will not be legitimate. Needless to say, she does not take this well, and she spends the rest of her life fighting for her title and for that of her daughter. In almost fairy tale fashion, an humble tailor helps her in her struggle, providing encouragement and significant loans of money. In the fullness of time the tailor's young son and the Countess's young daughter move from being childhood friends to sweethearts, and they vow to marry each other. The tailor's son, Daniel Thwaite, becomes a radical advocate of equality for all and abolition of nobility.

The countess becomes obsessed with the defense of her title, and so vehemently does she oppose her daughter's preference for a commoner that she threatens violence and forcibly keeps her daughter sequestered from the young radical.

The late cunning Earl had so arranged his affairs that though his land and title would devolve upon his nephew, his immense wealth was in personal property--stocks and other investments that would go to the Countess and Lady Anna if his previous marriage to an Italian wife were not verified.

A young Earl Lovel appears, heir to the title and perhaps to the late Earl's wealth; whatever had happened in Italy is a great mystery, and the lawyers for the Countess and for the Lovel family fail to find any evidence that they consider strong enough to convince an English jury that an Italian woman should hold an English title. Facing a lengthy dispute, the lawyers for both sides of the family decide among themselves (!) that a compromise should be reached, and that it could best be accomplished by a marriage between the two sides of the family: the young Earl and Lady Anna.

The young Earl is agreeable to this, and he woos and proposes to Anna. All involved parties, most notably Lady Anna's mother, urge the match; but Anna and Daniel the tailor resist all these efforts.

In the presence of such fairy tale elements, the American reader might expect that the author's sympathies would lie with the young lovers, and their fate would constitute either a pathetic failure, or a true fairy tale ending with justice emerging triumphant, with a rousing authorial chorus. But the warring parties are a bit more complex. Daniel Thwaite is initially presented as "a thoughtful man who had read many books." But we are also told that Daniel Thwaite was a man of a certain power. "Men are persuasive, and imperious withal, who are unconscious that they use burning words to others, whose words to them are never even warm. So it was with this man."

And though Trollope had a predilection for the woman who has but one heart to give and never looks back, and though Lady Anna is stated to be one of this sorority--"She had given her heart to Daniel Thwaite, and she had but one heart to give"--it is at least granted to Lady Anna to have some daydreams: "She already began to have feelings about the family to which she had been a stranger before she had come among the Lovels. And if it really would make him happy, this Phoebus, how glorious would that be!"

Trollope was never one to use the blue pencil over passages that spelled out how his characters felt. Not for him the implications and brevity of a later day. We see Daniel Thwaite not as a pure young idealist, but as one with a flip side:

Sir William Patterson had given him credit for some honesty, but even he had not perceived,--had no opportunity of perceiving,--the staunch uprightness which was, as it were, a backbone to the man in all his doings. He was ambitious, discontented, sullen, and tyrannical. . . . Gentlemen, so called, were to him as savages, which had to be cleared away in order that that perfection might come at last which the course of nature was to produce in obedience to the ordinances of the Creator.

Development of this story provides no reassurance that Anna will escape from her troubles; after all, a significant mortality risk does accompany certain Victorian novels. As it turns out, her rescue does require a bit of stage business with the desperate countess attempting to use a pistol properly. But the story does evolve with credible development of character: Anna is indeed tempted to throw over her original lover and opt for the life of ease among the nobility. And the author does tell us, in one of his authorial asides, that if the countess and the lawyers had played their cards more skillfully, they might have persuaded Anna to give up Daniel Thwaite if they had given him his due for integrity and virtue instead of trying to persuade Anna of his greed for her money. However, their efforts to blacken him in her eyes only increased her determination to stick by the humble tailor no matter what.

Thwaite is shown to be corrupted to the extent that he will listen to Sir William Patterson, the Solicitor General, the lawyer for the Lovel family, when he explains things to him at the end. Sir William is shown to be the _deus ex machina_ who had also persuaded the Lovel family that there should be some accommodation with the Countess and her daughter Lady Anna. It is true that he had advocated a marriage of convenience, but as this became less likely, he still arranged a compromise between the Lovels and the Countess in court, conceding that the widowed countess's marriage was a legal and binding one. And he did this over the objections of members of the family--chiefly "Uncle Charles," the rector of Yoxham.

And so the "great decider of all things" comes to Daniel in the end and congratulates him on his success, and we find that Daniel likes and respects Sir William, though he attempts to maintain his total opposition to nobility in general and the Lovels in particular. This conversation is presented with skill and humor as the author takes the reader into his confidence, revealing what the story is all about. Here are Sir William's comments on the great theory of equality: "The energetic, the talented, the honest, and the unselfish will always be moving towards an aristocratic side of society, because their virtues will beget esteem, and esteem will beget wealth,--and wealth gives power for good offices."

The eloquence of the urbane lawyer is not lost on Daniel Thwaite. The reader comes to believe that Anna and Daniel have responded to circumstances and modified their views of the world somewhat. Not so the Countess. Determined to do anything to make a wealthy and respectable Lady of her daughter, the Countess disgraces herself and disappears.

One of the byproducts of the story is another of Trollope's portraits of the warts and all of the clergy, in the person of the rector of Yoxham, who never wavers in his opposition to the legitimacy of Lady Anna. This results in an entertaining example of how certain words could and could not be used in Victorian print:

"---- Sir William!" muttered the rector between his teeth, as he turned away in his disgust. What had been the first word of that minatory speech Lord Lovel did not clearly hear. He had been brought up as a boy by his uncle, and had never known his uncle to offend by swearing. No one in Yoxham would have believed it possible that the parson of the parish should have done so. . . . But his nephew in his heart of hearts believed that the rector of Yoxham had damned the Solicitor-General.

_Lady Anna_ is a fairy tale, as are many of the best stories. One can hardly do much better than to use a good fairy tale as a framework for entertainment, if the elements of originality are grafted onto the framework. In this case genial humor in the face of looming tragedy, and credible character development, allow the appreciative reader to go along for the ride, and the moments of pleasure justify the occasional tedium along the way.

TERRITORY FOLKS SHOULD STICK TOGETHER

HARRY HEATHCOTE OF GANGOIL

It was sheer coincidence that I happened to be reading Trollope's only Christmas novel--_Harry Heathcote of Gangoil_--on Christmas day. A Christmas story had been requested for the _Graphic_, and the resulting novel, which was Trollope's shortest, appeared in the 1873 Christmas issue of the magazine. To mark it as a Christmas story, it duly began, "Just a fortnight before Christmas, 1871, a young man, twenty-four years of age, returned home to his dinner about eight o'clock in the evening."

The author had just returned from a year's visit to his son, who was a sheep herder in Australia, and the character of Harry Heathcote was acknowledged to be based on his son. Australia was England's Wild West, and this story is a Western, with its issues resolved by a no-holds-barred fight between the good guys and the bad guys.

"Territory folks should stick together,/Territory folks should all be pals," is the teaching of the square dancers in Rodgers and Hammerstein's _Oklahoma_, but Harry Heathcote has not learned this bit of wisdom when he becomes suspicious that his neighbor Mr. Medlicot might even be involved in starting the fires that threaten his sheep, their pastures, and the fences that enclose the paddocks where they graze. Mr. Medlicot is a free-selector, one who purchases a relatively small piece of land and farms it, in this case raising sugar cane on 200 acres. Harry Heathcote, on the other hand, runs his sheep over a vast area, some 120,000 acres--"almost an English county"--but he doesn't own the land. He rents it from the English Crown, at so much per sheep, and he fears the encroachment on his acreage by the free-selectors.