Part 17

Two chapters of comic relief follow the end of Marion's tragedy, and the author's ironic touch is shown in his summation of the Civil Service, which had figured in the novel's subplots and was personified by Lord Persiflage: "Everybody knew that Lord Persiflage understood the Civil Service of his country perfectly. He was a man who never worked very hard himself or expected those under him to do so; but he liked common sense, and hated scruples, and he considered it to be a man's duty to take care of himself,--of himself first of all, and then, perhaps, afterwards, of the Service."

Interestingly, the word "consumption" is never mentioned. Trollope had written about Henry and Emily's illness in his autobiography, saying that though she was doomed and he knew it, the word was never spoken.

The edition published by the University of Michigan Press in 1982 features the original illustrations of William Small, in which we see the Marquis of Kingsbury (father of Lord Hampstead) looking remarkably like the author, who was used as the model for the Marquis.

No one can begrudge Trollope his novel about consumption. His brothers and sisters died from it, and he used his observations of his sisters to create Marion Fay. The tragedy of the fatal familial curse is presented, and, though it is quite sentimental, it is not badly done. The artist in Trollope knew that he had to leave ‘em laughing, and he backed away from the central sadness of the story to return to his objects of fun. Good. He was better at comedy than he was at tragedy.

THE DOG THAT WOULDN'T STAY UNDER THE BED

KEPT IN THE DARK

"Secret" is a powerful word--secret police, the Secret Service, The Secret Garden, a secret passage, family secrets, trade secrets, secret recipes, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." And secrets are sometimes too good to keep--"That dog won't stay under the bed." Such a secret is the subject of one of Trollope's last novels, _Kept in the Dark_, written in 1880. Relatively simple and short, the story is a cautionary tale, one of those that could be recommended as a lesson in life.

A man tells a new female acquaintance about a recently terminated engagement, and the young woman, who has also terminated an engagement recently, fails to respond with an immediate, "Oh, really! Why, that's just happened to me!" And then she feels that she doesn't want to take anything away from his story by sharing her own. And later he proposes to her, and for some reason she postpones making the full disclosure that she knows she must make. And then circumstances fail to provide her with a good enough opportunity; they part, to meet again only shortly before the wedding, and it gets harder and harder for her to tell her story.

Why doesn't she tell, the reader keeps wondering; and the reader is told, in great detail, why she dithers, and of the great pride of the new husband, whose wrath will now be terrible when he is told.

The frustrated reader is now diverted a bit by the closest thing to a subplot in this short and straightforward story line: the young bride (Cecilia Holt) has a friend, Miss Francesca Altifiorla, who is sufficiently bored with the advantages of the single life that she has been espousing to Cecilia, that it becomes clear that the great secret, which of course is known to everyone except the happiest of men (Mr. George Western) is not safe. Miss Altifiorla is not proof against the wicked plans for revenge being plotted by Cecilia's first fiancé, Sir Francis Geraldine, who is smarting from having been jilted with good cause. (Instead of continuing to court his prospective bride after the engagement was made known, he took himself off to the races at New Market, saying that he would be back in a few weeks in time for the wedding, thinking that his title and relative wealth gave him such privileges. Cecilia, with more spunk than either title or wealth, thought otherwise, summarily dismissed him, and then refused to tell her friends who had jilted whom, considering it to be a private matter.)

But the mischievous Miss Altifiorla succeeds in bumping into the recently liberated Sir Francis at the railroad station and subsequently sharing a compartment sitting opposite him on the way to London. From this point, things are foreordained. In the course of giving Sir Francis an opportunity of seeking revenge by letting Mr. Western know of his previous engagement, Miss Altifiorla even has a moment of glory as a temporary fiancée of Sir Francis in her own right.

Their short-lived engagement is the entertainment highlight of the book. Miss Altifiorla sets her trap in the railroad carriage with care and skill. "You know," she said, "that Cecilia Holt was my dearest friend, and I cannot bear to hear her abused." Sir Francis squeezes her hand as they part at Waterloo, and he proceeds to write his poison pen letter to Mr. Western. Considering Miss Altifiorla to be a broadminded woman, likely to tolerate his little ways, and as likely as any to serve his eventual need for a wife, he writes a much more cautious last paragraph in a letter to her: "Don't you think that you and I know each other well enough to make a match of it? There is a question for you to answer on your own behalf, instead of blowing me up for any cruelty to Cecilia Holt. Yours ever, F. G."

Here the clever Miss Altifiorla allows herself to be faked out, and she overplays her hand. Soon, "The milliners, the haberdashers, the furriers and the bootmakers of Exeter received her communication and her orders with pleased alacrity." Unfortunately for her, Sir Francis has already become a bit bored with the wit in her frequent and lengthy love letters; he seizes upon a gossipy mention of his projected marriage in the Exeter newspaper, protests in a follow-up letter to her that he may have expressed himself so badly in his previous letter that she may have understood more than he meant; and then he leaves for the United States.

But as for the husband who has been kept in the dark, and the wife who allowed such a thing to happen: we are given such detailed insights into their backgrounds, personalities, and thoughts that such an improbable understanding begins to seem credible. He takes himself off to Dresden in a huff. (One would think that there must have been a fraternity of fictional English exiles in Dresden, the apparent destination of choice for the disaffected.) He shows all the signs of terminal stubbornness, nursing his wounded pride and making generous provisions for his disgraced wife, who, in her own pride and stubbornness, refuses all such provisions. It becomes apparent that an intervention will be required to break the stalemate, and I had wondered if Sir Francis's disenchanted friend, Dick Ross, who told Sir Francis that he was doing an evil thing, thus giving up his friendship and patronage, would be the agent of reconciliation; but it turned out to be Mr. Western's sister, Bertha Grant, who left her husband and children to make the pilgrimage to Dresden to bring her brother to his senses so he could make the right decision.

It's a short book that tells its story in 176 pages, much less space than was devoted to the similar story of mutual pride and misunderstanding in _He Knew He Was Right_. Both are intimate stories of marital relationships. Cecilia Holt may be a little less headstrong than Emily Rowley, but Cecilia's pride is brought out by the mischievous letter of her "most affectionate friend, Francesca Altifiorla": "What has Mr. Western said as to the story of Sir Francis Geraldine? Of course you have told him the whole, and I presume that he has pardoned that episode."

The ploy worked. On reading it, Miss Holt's immediate reaction was that she had done "nothing for which pardon had been necessary."

Cecilia's lengthy reflections go further, of course; the more she procrastinates, the more she dreads the unveiling of the secret. Nothing is off the record, as celebrities and others have demonstrated many times. The more she dithers, the more, heaven help me, I sympathize with her husband. He deserved better. But he did overreact a bit. A little toot would have been in order. Victorian to the core, he indulged in a big toot.

Trollope excelled in the nuances of familiarity between man and woman. This comes across as another variation on the theme of poor communications; "secret" is not one of the better policies.

THE ADVANCE DIRECTIVE

THE FIXED PERIOD

Dr. William Osler, upon his retirement as head of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1905, delivered a speech, entitled "The Fixed Period," in which he alluded to Trollope's 1881 novel of the same name with comments which, to his astonishment and dismay, brought down a storm of journalistic and popular fury and mockery on his head. Sharing wry and politically incorrect observations which might better have been reserved for private conversation, Osler described two "fixed ideas well known to my friends": the comparative uselessness of men above forty years of age, and the complete uselessness of men over sixty. (Osler was sixty himself at the time.) He went on to describe the plot, which "hinges upon the admirable scheme of a college into which at sixty men retired for a year of contemplation before a peaceful departure by chloroform." The comments were made in an ironic and self-deprecatory mode, and Osler's colleagues congratulated him. Journalists, however, knew a good story when they found one, and Osler, who was leaving the United States to become Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, was made miserable by the exaggerations of mischievous newspaper reporters and the outrage of simple souls to whom it was not funny. "Oslerization" entered the language and was listed in some dictionaries as a synonym for euthanasia. [4]

[Footnote 4: Bliss, Michael: _William Osler: A Life in Medicine_, Oxford University Press, 1999]

And what was the fate of the author of the novel that Osler imperfectly recalled? (The planned technique was the letting of blood from the jugular vein, not chloroform. And it was done at age sixty-eight, not sixty.) Anthony Trollope was sixty-six when he wrote _The Fixed Period_. He described himself as an old man, and indeed he died of a stroke two years later, before publication of the novel in book form. Osler was one of the few who could appreciate its ambiguity and irony. The book sold only 877 copies, and the publishers lost money. [5]

[Footnote 5: Terry, R. C., editor: _Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope_, Oxford University Press, 1999]

It's a rather clumsy bit of science fiction, set in 1980, a hundred years ahead of its time. The location, Brittanula, is a small island about two hundred miles from New Zealand. (If the readers could imagine New Zealand, why not Brittanula?) Rapid transit is by steam tricycle. Under the leadership of the aptly named John Neverbend, the Parliament has decreed that each citizen is to be "deposited" in a College in a place called Necropolis at age sixty-seven, there to wait in contemplation until the end of the "Fixed Period" one year later.

Though the reviews of _The Fixed Period_ showed little appreciation for Trollope's whimsy, he was spared the violent reaction that Osler suffered. The serial magazine publication was anonymous, and the subsequent book publication was after Trollope's death. Even John Neverbend, the fictitious narrator of the tale, endured none of the ridicule heaped upon Osler. So popular and respected was Mr. Neverbend, President of Brittannula, that he was courteously and quietly, though firmly, whisked on board a steamship and deported to England.

Neverbend finally acknowledges that mankind was not yet prepared, even in 1980, for the obvious advantages of the "Fixed Period." Public works could be funded without debt if the cost of caring for the aged were eliminated. As an inducement to accepting the proposal, the "College" would be an approximation of some conceptions of Heaven on Earth. "There are twenty acres of pleasure ground for you to wander over." Interestingly, the honoree did not see his family. Neverbend, true to his name, never forsook his conviction; on board the English ship transporting him back to England, however, he did realize "how potent was that love of life which had been evinced in the city when the hour for deposition had become nigh."

Events on the island give Neverbend every opportunity to change his mind. His closest friend and colleague, Gabriel Crassweller, is several years older and is scheduled to be the first to be deposited. Even though Neverbend himself offers to do all the honors for his dear friend, Crassweller finds himself reluctant as the time approaches. Neverbend's son is in love with Crassweller's beautiful daughter Eva, and she seems more nearly able than anyone else to dissuade the old President from his fixed purpose. But she can't. The power of the English navy, with its 250-ton steam-swiveller gun, is required. Would this terrible weapon have really been used to level the city? "I don't know, Sir. There are some things so terrible that if you will only create a belief in them, that will suffice without anything else."

Reading the story more than a century after its appearance, the reader is brought up short by mention of the chimneys of the College and how they disturbed the neighbors--perhaps more than did those that later actually appeared at Auschhwitz. Eugenics, ethnic cleansing, and the Holocaust were far in the future in 1880. And current outcries about rationing of care and "death panels" indicate how sensitive the public can be about issues of "life and death" that may not be well understood.

_The Fixed Period_ is a clever joke that gets old pretty quickly. People have strong feelings about the sanctity of human life, especially when the issue becomes personal. There is a place for black humor, but it must be sought with great care. The appreciative target audience for Trollope's venture into such waters turns out to have been pretty small. Alas, this small audience happened to include a departing great physician.

DETAILS ABOUT ENTAILS

MR. SCARBOROUGH'S FAMILY

Our attorney smiled when he came to the passage, "heirs of his body," in going through our family legal documents, explaining that it was an archaic usage derived from old English law. The term, as used in a deed, creates a "fee tail," so that the property in question goes to the recipient and the heirs begotten by the landowner himself. (On the other hand, "fee simple" allows the property to be passed on to the property owner's heirs, whatever their parentage.) Land under these conditions was thus in tail, or entailed.

The law of entail, which was a prominent feature of Victorian English society, is the basis of the plot of _Mr. Scarborough's Family_. Entail was created in England in 1285 and was useful to feudal lords in keeping property in the family and undivided, with all the real estate going to the oldest son. Landed gentry tended to favor this arrangement, which promoted stability in feudal society; it was not favored by the monarchy or the merchants. Entail was abolished in England in 1925; in the United States, only four states still recognize entail. Similar goals may be achieved, these days, with trusts.

Mr. Scarborough, however, succeeds in overcoming the limitations of the entail. His property is entailed to his oldest son; since he can't do anything about that, he changes his oldest son. When Mountjoy Scarborough, his firstborn, demonstrates an addiction to gambling, Mr. Scarborough declares that Mountjoy is illegitimate, and he produces marriage documents from a marriage to Mountjoy's mother _after_ Mountjoy was born, thus making the gambling addict illegitimate. The second son, Augustus, becomes the eldest legitimate son. No one has any proof of an earlier marriage, and Mr. Scarborough has his way.

Since this was a "three-volume novel" (Trollope's last of this length), another plot was required, and it too involves an entail. Harry Annesley, declared in Chapter III to be "the hero of this story," is the recognized heir to the estate of his uncle, Peter Prosper, who is fifty years of age and has never married. Mr. Prosper, however, becomes cross with his heir, who has failed to show sufficient respect on his visits in his youth, and he begins to consider marriage to a forty year old woman in an effort to "beget issue," an heir of his own. This was a legal and accepted method of attempting to circumvent a burdensome entail, as opposed to Mr. Scarborough's iniquitous method of branding his eldest son as a bastard.

Lawyers are of course involved in Mr. Scarborough's attempt to circumvent the law, and the family lawyer is Mr. Grey. Trollope required many lawyers in his stories, but they generally are presented as two-dimensional role players. Mr. Chaffanbrass, perhaps the best known of Trollope's lawyers, exemplifies the doctrine that his duty is to his client. Defending Lady Mason in _Orley Farm_, "To him it was a matter of course that Lady Mason should be guilty. Had she not been guilty, he, Mr. Chaffanbrass would not have been required. Mr. Chaffanbrass well understood that the defence of injured innocence was no part of his mission." Mr. Camperdown, in _The Eustace Diamonds_, is a bird dog determined to solve the mystery of the diamonds, and he does so. Mr. Furnival, in _Orley Farm_, proves himself to be all too human in allowing himself to be diverted by the charms of Lady Mason. Sir William Patterson, the Solicitor-General in _Lady Anna_, is a powerful person, a _deus ex machina_ who forms his own opinion of how affairs should be arranged and attempts to order them so, with little regard for Mr. Chaffanbrass's scruples about limiting his efforts to the pursuit of his client's interests.

But we see Mr. Grey as we see none of Trollope's other lawyers because of his daughter Miss Dorothy ("Dolly") Grey, "motherless, brotherless, and sisterless," about thirty years of age, whom he sometimes calls into his bedroom in the middle of the night to discuss his cases. They also have more formal conversations, as in this discussion of the effort made by Mr. Scarborough and his younger son Augustus to settle Mountjoy's gambling debts. Here she tells her father that he should lay down the law to Mr. Scarborough:

"The law is the law," said her father.

"I don't mean the law in that sense. I should tell him firmly what I advised, and should then make him understand that if he did not follow my advice I must withdraw. If his son is willing to pay these moneylenders what sums they have actually advanced; and if by any effort on his part the money can be raised, let it be done. . . . Go there prepared with your opinion. But if either father or son will not accept it, then depart, and shake the dust from your feet."

I can't think of another such father-daughter relationship in any of Trollope's works. The above speech so reeks of wisdom that one suspects the author is merely using Dorothy as a mouthpiece for his own editorial comments on the affairs of his story.

Dorothy herself is one of Trollope's finest female characters. The one o'clock conversations, when she is summoned to her father's room by the "well-known knock" and "usual invitation," afford us an intimate understanding of them both. Unencumbered by devotion to a lover, she goes about her duties with a peculiar devotion that her father only begins to understand after he retires from his practice. She visits her aunt's family every day, though she does not care for them, turning "old dresses into new frocks." She has her own innings, in a sense, when her father presents his junior partner Mr. Barry as a suitor. She reads Mr. Barry's character better than her father has done, and she knows better than to accept his offer.

The woman in the story who is encumbered by devotion to a lover is Florence Mountjoy, who has fallen in love with Harry Annesley and has pledged herself to him by a nod of her head. "A man's heart can be changed, but not a woman's. His love is but one thing among many," she declares to Mountjoy Scarborough in declining his repeated proposal, affirming the doctrine to which so many of Trollope's heroines adhered. Florence shows spunk and determination, standing her ground against her mother, uncle and aunt in the British legation house in Brussels to which she has been brought to clear her head and heart of Harry Annesley.

Trollope was sixty-six years old when he wrote _Mr. Scarborough's Family_. He completed a short novel and almost completed another before dying of a stroke at age sixty-seven. His skills were undiminished. His overall themes and views were familiar ones; he was now looking at life, if not through a rear view mirror, at least with a bit more detachment and irony than in earlier decades. He was still able to generate and maintain detailed story lines, and he continued his mastery of showing many facets of his characters and events, mostly through revealing the inner thoughts of several characters.

Memorable characters continued to appear in his landscapes. Besides Dorothy Grey and her father, there is the old rascal, Mr. Scarborough himself. The others all marvel at successive revelations of his deviousness, and their assessments show us both him and them. All "London had declared that so wicked and dishonest an old gentleman had never lived." Mr. Barry, after traveling to Germany to unearth the documentation of his first marriage to the same woman, in an obscure village, concluded, "In my mind he has been so clever that he ought to be forgiven all his rascality." And now, "Everyone concerned in the matter seemed to admire Mr. Scarborough, except Mr. Grey, whose anger, either with himself or his client, became the stronger, the louder grew the admiration of the world." Mr. Merton, the medical apprentice who stayed with him the last three months of his life, concluded, "One cannot make an apology for him without being ready to throw all truth and all morality to the dogs. But if you can imagine for yourself a state of things in which neither truth nor morality shall be thought essential, then old Mr. Scarborough would be your hero. He was the bravest man I ever knew."

No Trollope novel is complete without several proposals of marriage, and this story includes four to Florence Mountjoy, some of them repeated; but the scene between Squire Prosper and Miss Thoroughbung, in which Mr. Prosper pursues his purpose of getting an heir to disinherit Harry Annesley, must rank near the top of all Trollope's proposals. Miss Thoroughbung is the sister of a brewer and has money of her own; she also has her own agenda, as Mr. Prosper learns. Her encouragement leads him to the point, and he recites one of the sentences he had composed for the occasion: "In beholding Miss Thoroughbung I behold her on whom I hope I may depend for all the future happiness of my life."

The engagement does not last; it falls afoul of the Victorian equivalent of the pre-nup, in which the would-be bride insists on bringing with her a pair of ponies and her friend Miss Tickle. Other financial considerations were negotiable, but the match founders on Miss Tickle and the ponies.

The visitor from the twenty-first century is allowed a few peeks into the world of the nineteenth: A visitor to Mr. Prosper's country place declines to stay for the night, pleading that he has neglected to bring a dress coat. "Mr. Prosper did not care to sit down to dinner with guests who did not bring their dress coats." And courtship follows its own protocols. Harry Annesley goes to Tretton Park when Florence Mountjoy is there, and he