Part 2

The test case in the story is not the Bishop, at the equivalent of over a million dollars a year, or even his son the Archdeacon at a third that amount--but Mr. Septimus Harding, precentor (music and choir director in the cathedral) and also warden of Hiram's Hospital. A gentle and kindly soul, beloved of the twelve old men in his charge in the hospital, Mr. Harding frequently plays his violoncello for them. As a more concrete gesture, he has voluntarily increased their daily pittance by two shillings, which amounted to some sixty-four pounds a year out of his own income.

Mr. Harding is father-in-law to the Archdeacon, and the Bishop appointed him to this coveted sinecure shortly after the marriage between Mr. Harding's daughter and the Bishop's son. All is harmonious until some of the citizens of Barchester begin to wonder whether John Hiram, founder of Hiram's Hospital by his will, intended the warden to live in such luxury as the estate now provided. (John Hiram died in 1434, more than a hundred years before the will of Sir William Cordbell of Melford Hall established the Hospital of the Holy and Blessed Trinity in Long Melford in 1573.) This campaign of reform is led by an idealistic young surgeon of the town, Dr. John Bold, who also happens to be a suitor for the hand of Mr. Harding's daughter Eleanor.

Caught up in such controversy, Mr. Harding emerges as one of Trollope's most memorable, and certainly most lovable, characters. The question of his excessive income is publicized in _The Jupiter_, a London newspaper somewhat reminiscent of _The Times_, by Tom Towers, a young muckraking investigative journalist. Mr. Harding begins to wonder whether he can continue to hold the position under these circumstances, but he must also deal with his son-in-law Archdeacon Grantly, an outspoken and intimidating champion of the Church, who obtains the opinion of Sir Abraham Haphazard, the Attorney-General. Sir Abraham declares that the point is "so nice" that the plaintiffs would run up fifteen thousand pounds in legal costs before having a chance to prevail.

Not only are the costs of pursuing the campaign prohibitive, but John Bold himself comes to think that his respect for the Warden and his love for the Warden's daughter Eleanor are such that he must drop the case. He finds, however, that the issue, fanned by _The Jupiter_, has already been decided in the court of public opinion.

So we see that the problem of Mr. Harding's generous income has few parallels in today's church. Should seminarians still be required to read it? Yes. I don't know of any other series of novels that shows the many facets of clerical personalities as they interact with one another and with the world. _The Warden_ introduces us to this community and is thus a prerequisite to an appreciation of _Barchester Towers_, _The Last Chronicle of Barset_, and the others in the series. In _The Warden_ we meet the old Bishop of Barchester, benign and gentle, never questioning the right of the Church to enjoy the blessings given to it by God; Archdeacon Grantly, a formidable defender of the faith who is not to be trifled with; and of course Mr. Harding, a quiet and somewhat timid man who comes to understand that his conscience commands him to assert himself.

I grew up listening to my father and grandfather discuss the preachers of the Little Rock Conference of the Methodist Church--their gifts and their shortcomings, their ambitions, their foibles. "Preachers are the most jealous profession there is," Dad explained to me. Several I knew only by name; several I came to know when they came to town and had dinner at our house. Not knowing about Anthony Trollope's novels, I couldn't look up anything they talked about in any book. It was apparent that church politics and the variety of clerical personalities would be a fertile field for the novelist.

No one has done it like Anthony Trollope. Individual preachers turn up here and there--Sinclair Lewis's _Elmer Gantry_; John Ames in Marilynne Robinson's _Gilead_; Father Jean Marie Latour in _Death Comes for the Archbishop_ by Willa Cather; and Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne's _The Scarlet Letter_. But these books deal with individual clergy; none get into the church and its politics as does Trollope's series.

Peter Raible writes in "Images of Protestant Clergy in American Novels" (Berry Street Essay, 1978) that the sexual activities of the clergy are represented disproportionately in fictional portrayals, at the expense of those whose achievements and shortcomings are in another realm. Surely he did not include Trollope in this generalization.

And for the sake of having a list, Kim Fabricius offers on the internet the following list of "Twenty great clergymen in novels:"

1. William Collins in Jane Austen, _Pride and Prejudice_ (1813)

2. Arthur Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne, _The Scarlet Letter_ (1850)

3. Father Mapple in Herman Melville, _Moby-Dick_ (1851)

4. Obadiah Slope in Anthony Trollope, _Barchester Towers_ (1857)

5. Charles François-Bienvenu Myriel in Victor Hugo, _Les Misérables_ (1862)

6. Edward Casaubon in George Eliot, _Middlemarch_ (1871)

7. Father Zossima in Fyodor Dostoevsky, _The Brothers Karamazov_ (1880)

8. Jean Marie Latour in Willa Cather, _Death Comes for the Archbishop_ (1927)

9. The young curate in Georges Bernanos, _The Diary of a Country Priest_ (1936)

10. The unnamed priest in Graham Greene, _The Power and the Glory_ (1940)

11. Father Paneloux in Albert Camus, _The Plague_ (1947)

12. Hazel Motes in Flannery O'Connor, _Wise Blood_ (1952)

13. Stephen Kumalo in Alan Paton, _Cry, the Beloved Country_ (1948)

14. Dean Jocelin in William Golding, _The Spire_ (1964)

15. Sebastião Rodrigues in Endo Shusaku, _Silence_ (1966)

16. William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco, _The Name of the Rose_ (1983)

17. Oscar Hopkins in Peter Carey, _Oscar and Lucinda_ (1988)

18. Clarence Wilmot in John Updike, _In the Beauty of the Lilies_ (1996)

19. Nathan Price in Barbara Kingsolver, _The Poisonwood Bible_ (1998)

20. John Ames in Marilynne Robinson, _Gilead_ (2004)

That this is by no means an authoritative or final list is shown by the absence of the illustrious Mr. Chadband of Charles Dickens's _Bleak House_, not to mention several more of the Barsetshire clergy, especially the Rev. Josiah Crawley of _The Last Chronicle of Barset_. But Trollope is the only writer who deals with a diocese full of preachers, and who presents so many of them as three-dimensional characters in their own right--not as caricatures.

Yes, seminarians should be required to read the Barsetshire novels--one a semester, perhaps.

THE CHURCH IN PEACE AND WAR

BARCHESTER TOWERS

Two passages come to mind from my first reading of _Barchester Towers_ over thirty years ago. The first is the Archdeacon's "Good Heavens!" upon leaving his first interview with Bishop and Mrs. Proudie; this steamy outburst occurs relatively early in the story, initiating Chapter 6, "War": as "smoke issued forth from the uplifted beaver as if it were a cloud of wrath," we find ourselves immersed in the pitched battle between the new bishop and traditional Barchester.

The second is the description of Ullathorne Hall, about midway through a fifteen-page chapter describing first Wilfred Thorne, Esq., and his sister, and then the features of the ancient house they lived in. The most tedious of these passages describes "three quadrangular windows with stone mullions, each window divided into a larger portion at the bottom, and a smaller portion at the top and each portion again divided into five by perpendicular stone supporters." I remember thinking when I stumbled onto it: Why was I made for the long and the painful passage I was subjecting myself to?

Since _Barchester Towers_, Trollope's best-known novel, may be the first, or even the last, of Trollope that some readers may encounter, these two passages need to be acknowledged--the first to illustrate his ability to stand far enough aside from the human drama to appreciate its occasional absurdity; and the second to recognize his tendency to indulge in sentimental reflections shared, no doubt, by a number of his countrymen, but lacking in relevance to readers of another background. And although I now consider Squire Thorne's pretensions to Saxon ancestry, and the house's "delicious tawny hue which no stone can give, unless it has on it the vegetable richness of centuries" to add charm to the book, Chapter 22 would surely be the first to go in any abridged edition of the work.

Why has _Barchester Towers_ outpaced the other novels in popularity? First, I think, because the characters are strong, memorable, in conflict with one another, and elicit just enough sympathy for their positions that the reader smiles and even laughs. There is no sugarcoating; this is no tract intended to bring its readers to commit their lives to the service of the Church of England. The reader sees the deficiencies of even the most virtuous, such as Mr. Harding, but there is also just a touch of sympathy for the worst of the villains, such as Mr. Slope and (perhaps, on a sunny day) Mrs. Proudie.

Trollope depicts the life of the church better than anyone else has done, before or since. He shows the affairs of the clergymen of Barchester much as he also shows us those of politicians, lawyers, merchants, and idle country gentlemen. Perhaps more than any other occupational group, the clergy of the close are bound together as an inner group, almost a fraternity. And this may be why clergy and politicians, the subjects of the Barsetshire series and the Palliser series, were such ready subjects for novel after novel: their professional association involved just enough interaction and jockeying for position to entertain the reader.

Several of the characters come to us from _The Warden_, chiefly Mr. Septimus Harding, the Warden himself, bruised from his attack in _The Jupiter_, the newspaper of the day. Mr. Harding has surrendered his position as Warden of Hiram's Hospital, feeling that he could not justify the high salary attached to the position, and not caring to attempt to do so. In this matter he was in direct opposition to the advice of his son-in-law Archdeacon Grantly, aggressive warrior of the Church Militant, and one who benefits even more from the riches of the church. The author must have gloated to himself as he set up the situation with which the story begins: the saintly Bishop Grantly, dear friend of Mr. Harding and father of Archdeacon Grantly, is about to die. His successor is to be named by the prime minister, who is sufficiently friendly to the Grantlys that he would be expected to name the archdeacon to succeed his father. But the government is about to fall, and the next prime minister would be expected to look elsewhere for a successor. If the bishop dies quickly, there would be time for the present prime minister to act. The poor bishop apologizes on his deathbed for taking so long.

And he does take too long. Though the conflicted archdeacon attempts to convey the news of his father's death to the prime minister before he leaves office, he does not succeed. A new prime minister makes the appointment, and the new bishop is to be a low churchman, one Dr. Proudie.

The supreme irony in this situation is not left to implication and inference, as we read of the disappointed Archdeacon Grantly's reaction:

Many will think that he was wicked to grieve for the loss of Episcopal power, wicked to have coveted it, nay, wicked even to have thought about it, in the way and at the moments he had done so.

With such censures I cannot profess that I completely agree. The _nolo episcopari_, though still in use, is so directly at variance with the tendency of all human wishes, that it cannot be thought to express the true aspirations of rising priests in the Church of England.

_Nolo episcopari_ is explained on the internet in _Trollope's Apollo: A Guide to the Uses of Classics in the Novels of Anthony Trollope_ (www.trollope-apollo.com), a project undertaken by students at Hendrix College under Professor Rebecca Resinski:

A Latin phrase meaning "I do not wish to be bishop." This is the appropriate response with which an individual should reply if he is offered the position of bishop in the church, even if he wishes to accept it. Trollope implies here that any other person, besides Bishop Proudie, would probably not want to be the bishop if he had to deal with Mrs. Proudie and her constant meddling; and thus, this person would actually mean _nolo episcopari_ when saying the phrase. [MD]

(It is worth noting that _nolo episcopari_ has survived in the Methodist Church to the extent that when Dean William Cannon was elected to the episcopacy in 1968, he protested, "Why, you can't elect me bishop. I didn't even bring my robes," in gentle mockery of the aggressive campaigns conducted by candidates for the episcopacy.)

Enter Mrs. Proudie, Barchester's answer to Lady Macbeth. A 1982 BBC production of _The Barchester Chronicles_ followed the text of _The Warden_ and _Barchester Towers_ quite closely, and the direction and acting were superb. Mrs. Proudie, though, gave me pause. On screen she is shown as a slender, scheming woman who narrows her eyes as she schemes. I think of her as a more straightforward champion of her own views, more given to the direct approach than to subtlety. She speaks early on the evils of Sabbath-traveling, and on the necessity for Sabbath Day schools. We can assume that she prompted the Bishop's chaplain, the sly Obadiah Slope, to preach the sermon against Mr. Harding's beloved high church music, leading the author to the following meditation on the sermon as an art form:

There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries, than the necessity of listening to sermons. . . . We desire, nay, we are resolute, to enjoy the comfort of public worship; but we desire also that we may do so without an amount of tedium which ordinary human nature cannot endure with patience; that we may be able to leave the house of God, without that anxious longing to escape, which is the common consequence of common sermons.

I should think that this paragraph alone should justify my contention that the Barchester novels, but particularly _Barchester Towers_, should be required study in all seminaries.

Mr. Slope goes on to use his position as chaplain to the bishop in a power struggle with Mrs. Proudie. He loses. He learns that Mr. Harding's daughter Eleanor Bold, recently widowed in a death between novels, has an income of a thousand pounds a year. (The mortality risk of the period between novels was significant in the Barsetshire and Palliser series, leading to the deaths of John Bold, Eleanor's suitor and husband in _The Warden_, and Lady Glencora Palliser, who did not survive the period between _The Prime Minister_ and _The Duke's Children_.) Having promised Mr. Harding's former position as Warden of Hiram's Hospital to Mr. Quiverful, whose twelve children in addition to his wife and himself provided "fourteen arguments in favour of Mr. Quiverful's claims," he then reverses his field and indicates to Mrs. Bold that through his efforts and kind services her father may yet be restored to his former position. But when Eleanor shows his subsequent letter on the subject to her father, Mr. Harding finds a reference to his daughter's "silken tresses," and Mr. Slope's scheme dies aborning.

Although Mrs. Proudie reigns triumphant throughout _Barchester Towers_ and goes on undeterred in subsequent Barsetshire novels, the reader derives some consolation from Mr. Slope's downfall. Indeed, he is refused by three women: one of the Bishop's daughters; Eleanor Bold (with a slap on the ear); and the infamous Signora Neroni. Ah, Signora Neroni! Somehow she and her family come across with more charm in the video presentation than in my reading of the book and listening to it on tape a few years ago. As feckless foils to the saintly Mr. Harding, and as legitimate targets for reform of the church, the reader may have limited patience with them. But brought to the screen by buoyant actors, they display the charm that enabled them to get by with so much in Barchester society. Trollope tells us that their heartlessness was accompanied by such good nature as to make itself "but little noticeable to the world." This introductory comment was, of course, absent from the video presentation, leaving the viewer to draw his own conclusions. But the mind of this puritanical reader, I'm afraid, was poisoned by the author's observation.

The father, Dr. Vesey Stanhope, is summoned home from Italy by the new bishop. Dr. Stanhope, it turns out, had gone to Italy for his health; he had had a sore throat twelve years earlier and had never returned. He brings with him his wife, two daughters and a son. The card of the younger daughter is decorated with a coronet, and it reads "La Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni--Nata Stanhope." She is somewhat indifferent to her situation of having married a captain of no birth and no property, leaving her with a young daughter but no husband, and a knee injury that she attributed to ascending a ruin, leaving her to walk with "the grace of a hunchback." And so she has chosen to be carried everywhere she goes.

Her brother Bertie, the son of a man without fortune, feels no obligation to earn his own bread. Madeline and Bertie prove to be rolling cannons on the decks of Barchester. The beautiful Madeline has separate and conspicuous _tête-á-têtes_ with the Bishop, Mr. Slope, Squire Thorne, and a newly arrived clergyman from Oxford, Francis Arabin. Bertie distinguishes himself at Mrs. Proudie's reception by remarking to the bishop that he once had thoughts of being a bishop himself. "That is, a parson--a parson first, you know, and a bishop afterwards. If I had once begun, I'd have stuck to it. But on the whole, I like the Church of Rome the best."

But one comes closest to feeling some sympathy for Mr. Slope--whom the author confesses that he himself does not like--when Signora Neroni uses an audience for the purpose of humiliating him. (This is after Mr. Slope has proposed unsuccessfully to Signora Neroni and to Eleanor Bold, and at a time when he has had his friend Tom Towers of _The Jupiter_ write in its pages that Mr. Slope would be the best candidate to replace the lately deceased Dean of the Chapter--a position that is to be offered to Mr. Harding and eventually accepted by Mr. Arabin.) Her morning _levée_ includes Mr. Thorne; Mr. Arabin ("It may seem strange that he should thus come dangling about Madame Neroni because he was in love with Mrs. Bold; but was nevertheless the fact"); Mr. Slope; and a couple of other young men about the city.

Bertie and Charlotte are spectators as she follows one thrust at Mr. Slope with another, saying that everybody knows that he is to be the new dean, passing over old men like her father and Archdeacon. She then taunts him with having been refused by Mrs. Bold, singing

It's gude to be off with the old love--Mr. Slope, Before you are on with the new. 'Ha, ha, ha!'

Mr. Slope's sins were such as to merit little mercy from the court of public and private opinion. And perhaps his punishment did fit his crime. But his punishment was severe.

This meeting was no serious interview. But Trollope does give the more serious sort its name in Chapter 29, "A Serious Interview," as described in the Introduction. Suffice it to repeat here, the Archdeacon assumes falsely that his daughter Eleanor Bold is likely to accept the suit of Mr. Slope. His wife had told him he would not prevail with Eleanor, but he was so sure he was right and that it was his duty to intervene, that he could not go to bed quietly. His wife, of course, was right.

_Barchester Towers_ is a comedy, and it has a happy ending, which required a good bit of doing by the author. Trollope self-consciously bemoaned the difficulty of pronouncing a credible happy ending to a novel; but he did it anyway.

TROLLOPE'S ALTER EGO

DOCTOR THORNE

_Doctor Thorne_ is a fairy tale. What else can one say after finishing a book in which the heroine, a poor girl of illegitimate birth but "the sweetest girl in the world," is changed at a stroke (although long anticipated) into the wealthiest heiress in the county, gaining the blessings of her lover's mother, Lady Arabella, for her marriage to the most eligible young bachelor in Barsetshire? So much for the plot. Trollope cared little, in general, for maintaining the reader's suspense and usually revealed in advance how it would turn out. But the questions are: What about the good parts? The serious interviews? The irony? The social satire? And though the general outlines of the plot are predictable, are there details that keep us going?

Few of Trollope's young lovers are very complex; the supporting characters are often the ones with interesting quirks and turns. The young may be true or false, or they may be first one and then the other (as Frank Gresham, heir to the rapidly disappearing Gresham estate, shows himself to be); and one often views such turns with the detachment of Olympian gods. What fools these mortals be! But Dr. Thorne, Roger Scatcherd, Lady Arabella: they have a history as well as a future, and there is more to learn about them as one turns the pages.

I think the book succeeds as comedy, not as romance. My second time through the story was through a reading by David Case, a genius of the spoken word, and his inflections bring out the comedy that the reader may not take the time to extract while merely gliding over the text.

One of the serious interviews, the confrontation between Doctor Thorne and Lady Arabella, is a masterpiece, as she strives to use her position as a De Courcy to separate his niece Mary Thorne from her daughter Beatrice, in order to prevent a union of Mary with her son Frank.

A student in the school of life could do worse than to use Trollope as a guide in playing this game. Dr. Thorne and Lady Arabella play their hands with skill and subtlety. And lest the student miss some of the finer points, the author provides a running commentary on how each is doing in the contest. Here Dr. Thorne responds to her suggestion that his niece has been throwing herself in the way of her son, asking, "What would my dear friend Mr. Gresham say, if some neighbor's wife should come and so speak to him? I will tell you what he would say: he would quietly beg her to go back to her own home and meddle only with her own matters." Lady Arabella cannot accept Dr. Thorne's unprecedented hint that she might be at the same level as common humanity. Declaring that it would not become her to argue with him, she ends the interview.

Dr. Thorne, we see, can take care of himself. One would expect him to perform equally well in his profession, though we see relatively little of his medical life. In contrast to a "surgeon," who would be addressed as "Mr.," Dr. Thorne was a "graduated physician," entitled to be addressed as "Doctor." There was a third class of medical practitioners in England, also descended from the medieval guilds, known as "apothecaries." They compounded and sold medications. Here also Dr. Thorne differed from his proud colleagues; he served as a dispensing apothecary as well as a physician, as did many other country doctors who were more concerned with their patients' comforts than with their own dignity. Dr. Thorne was reviled in the nearby towns of Barchester, home to a number of locally eminent physicians, and Silverbridge, home to a physician for some forty years. None of these dispensed medications.