Misery was being prepared for someone - Trollope, The Duke's Children, and the last bit of the horse

The Duke’s Children (1880) ends Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series, with the story shifting from Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium and in the previous novel an unhappy Prime Minister of England, to his children, particularly his eldest son.  Trollope’s series of novels do not work the way such creatures work today – Palliser is only a minor character in several of the novels in the series that bears his name – but he legitimately aged, developed, regressed – changed, is what I am trying to say since his introduction in a synergistic subplot of The Small House at Allington back in 1864.

This, to me, is close to the whole point of writing novels as a series, as an extended serial.  It allows the fictional passage of time to line up with the actual passage of time, resulting in some powerful effects, which I have tossed aside by reading the books at a rate of two per year.

Bluntly, the last two books, The Prime Minister and this one, are on the weaker side, but good enough that I don’t care.  The problems the Duke and his children face recapitulate a number of the most important themes of the series, the fox hunting scenes do not go on all that long, the new plotline about horse racing – well here’s what Trollope says about that:

How that race was run… the present writer having no aptitude in that way, cannot describe.  (Ch. 17)

Some of Trollope’s fox hunts have a sportscaster quality – heaven help me, he is going to call the entire match – so even though several of the greatest scenes in the 19th century novel are horse racing scenes, I did not quite trust Trollope on this matter.  But everything’s fine.  It’s just a way to get rich characters to do a lot of idiotic gambling, and it keeps the “con man” theme of the series going, in the fine minor character Major Tifto.

The minor characters are at their usual level, like the equally fine Miss Cassewary:

‘That's d---- nonsense,’ said the Earl.  Miss Cassewary gave a start, – not, we may presume, because she was shocked, for she could not be much shocked, having heard the same word from the same lips very often; but she thought it right always to enter a protest.  (Ch. 9)

This chapter is entitled “’In media res,’” and it includes the only extended metafictional joke in the book, another old theme brought back for a last run, as Trollope tells his reader that he is going to start in the middle of a plot (“but only for a branch of my story”), putting the cart before the horse, the horse being all of the exposition, but warns that however much he tries to hide it the horse will still be there.  Then throughout the chapter he points out whenever the characters discuss their backgrounds or whatnot by saying things like “This is another bit of the horse.”

Two lines that summarize much of the emotional content of the novel:

Mary, who watched it all, was sure that misery was being prepared for someone.  (Ch. 59)

‘Young ladies generally have a bad time of it.’  (Ch. 53)

As in George Meredith’s The Egoist from just a year before – I wonder if Trollope knew it – five characters need to be arranged into couples; thus the misery, thus the bad time.  No, not for everyone.

Trollope would die two years later, and this novel would have provided a natural and satisfying close to his career, but he published at least four more novels in the last two years of his life, so forget that idea.

They should never cheat her back into happiness - Trollope's suffering martyrs

The political plot of The Prime Minister is almost entirely free of ideas, of ideology.  Yet the novel turns out to be a kind of study of ideology, but the ideologue is over in the story about the bad marriage.  The husband is the con man, who believes whatever is useful at the moment.

His wife, Emily, though, is a true believer.  She believes in Victorian wifely duty.  Much of Emily’s side of the novel is spent with her thoughts on her wifely duties, her commitment to be the perfect, diligent, obedient wife.  As her marriage collapses, and her husband proves to be a bad man, even abusive (verbally, when he says “damn,” or I guess “d---,” which in context – Ch. 47 – is not ridiculous), Emily moves away from him, but slowly, by inches.  So these interior monologues or internal arguments are not only aggravating because they justify a sympathetic character’s suffering but because they are highly repetitive, the same arguments again and again with a slight change with each repetition.  Trollopian repetition in the service of psychology.

By the end of the novel, everyone – family, friends, author, and likely reader – is against Emily as she refuses to accept a happy ending, armed with “nothing but the stubbornness of her own convictions” (Ch. 79).  Should I be cheering her on or begging her to drop her martyrdom?  “They should never cheat her back into happiness…” (Ch. 70).

This is all psychologically and ethically insightful, but for long stretches it is no fun.

Meanwhile, the most powerful man in the world, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, is being put through a parallel story, which is hilarious and perhaps the most ingeniously crafted aspect of the novel.  He suffers as Prime Minister first because as head of a coalition government he is not allowed to do anything, and he was never more than a technocrat, Trollope’s way of diminishing his perfect gentleman and Great Man.  As he persists in the position, though, he stubbornly begins to enjoy his suffering as a sign of his great virtuousness.

A novel of martyr complexes.

My favorite passage in the political story comes from his wife, the former Lady Glencora, the Duchess, when she describes how she would behave as PM, entirely credibly.  The Prime Minister is effectively an argument for having women in Parliament.

“I begin to see the ways of government now.  I could have done all the dirty work.  I could have given away garters and ribbons, and made my bargains while giving them.  I could select sleek, easy bishops who wouldn’t be troublesome.  I could give pensions or withhold them, and make the stupid men peers.  I could have the bog noblemen at my feet, praying to be Lieutenant of Counties.  I could dole out secretaryships and lordships, and never a one without getting something in return.”  (Ch. 56)

She would be more successful because more corrupt, less perfect.  I believe every word of it.

My favorite passage in the marriage story involves hats and umbrellas (Ch. 69).  The political plot is mostly abstract, the Wharton marriage much more concrete, with more clothes, meals, furniture, streets, all of that.  Curious.  A good subject for a post I’m not going to write.

In a sense he was what is called a gentleman - Trollope's long concern with con men

Trollope had been working on con artist-like characters at least since Framley Parsonage (1861) – maybe since Barchester Towers (1857) if Slope counts – but the explicitly public face of the Palliser novels concentrated his attention.  The con man in Can You Forgive Her? (1865) briefly becomes a Member of Parliament.  The most prominent one in The Way You Live Now (1875) – not a Palliser novel but written amidst them – creates a financial bubble.  Lizzie Eustace, the greatest of them all (The Eustace Diamonds, 1873), is merely a celebrity, I guess, but one reason she is the best is because she knows how to ride over difficulties to get to the next con.  Also, she’s enormous fun.

Ferdinand Lopez is, in this company, incompetent.  He peaks early in The Prime Minister, creating enough glamour and smoke to cause a lot of damage, especially to Emily Wharton, who marries him, and, by a chance shot, to the Prime Minister of England.  Lopez tries to get into Parliament, but fails.  He tries to corner a market, but fails.  He marries wealth, but fails to get his hands on much of it.

He believed in the guano and he believed in Mr. Wharton, but it is a terrible thing to have one's whole position in the world hanging upon either an unwilling father-in-law or a probable rise in the value of manure! (Ch. 25)

The bit I bolded was surprisingly earthy, and direct.  Lopez’s value is directly tied to the value of manure.  And at least manure is good for something – it is another speculation, in kauri gum, a “substitute” for amber, that really does him in.  The other nice point in this quotation is the word “believed,” which is what makes him a real, if mediocre, confidence artist.  He believes in his own con, at least at any given moment, as necessary.

“To give him his due, he did not know that he was a villain” (Ch. 54).  That line comes early in a great chapter where Lopez tries to work his magic on Lizzie Eustace, not knowing, apparently, that you can’t con a con.  At least a worse con won’t beat a better.  The chapter is humorously ironic for readers of The Eustace Diamonds and likely a little baffling for others, but who is reading The Prime Minister who has not read The Eustace Diamonds?

The con man character, in its male form, is a distillation of Trollope’s long-running critique of and unease with the idea of the “gentleman.”  Trollope cleverly misdirected me early in the novel by emphasizing the prejudices of Lopez’s enemies – that Lopez is foreign (a Portuguese father), or that he is Jewish (without evidence) – prejudices that are all too gentlemanly.  Only later does he reveal that Lopez is a sham.

In a sense he [Lopez] was what is called a gentleman. He knew how to speak, and how to look, how to use a knife and fork, how to dress himself, and how to walk.  But he had not the faintest notion of the feelings of a gentleman. (Ch. 58)

The Duke, the Prime Minister, the other male protagonist, is the epitome of the English gentleman.  In his story, it is the strength of his gentlemanly feelings that cause him to suffer, that in fact provide his side of the novel’s plot.  Trollope finally, in The Prime Minister, draws a line.  The gentleman should be like this to prevent that – the rise of the Lopezes.  We need the standards.  We are too easily fooled.

He began to foresee that he had a bad time before him - Trollope's Prime Minister had me worried

The first quarter of The Prime Minister (1876), the fifth of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, had me worried for the first quarter or so.  Was this one going to be merely ordinary?

Trollope had spent the first quarter of The Way We Live Now (1875), his previous novel, introducing characters – so many characters – and enough subplots that I wondered, at the three-quarters mark, how he was going to wrap them all up.  But here, there are only two plots, two parallel stories.

One has Plantagenet Palliser, who Trollope introduced way back in The Small House of Allington (1864), become Prime Minister – see title – as head of a coalition government, a clever device because it completely strips politics of any relation to policy.  The politics become as pure as possible.  The only function of the Prime Minister is to remain Prime Minister.  The only goal of politics is the continuation of politics.  It is the perfect environment for Trollope’s game of Fantasy Parliament, and suggests why this is one of the few great novels about politics and also why there are so few novels about politics that are any good at all.

The other plot is – why it’s just a Victorian marriage plot! again! – charming, handsome, risk-loving, exotic Ferdinand Lopez wants to marry the lovely, incidentally wealthy Emily Wharton.  His charm and other gifts mean his star is on the rise, but Emily’s father is prejudiced, her family is against her, etc.

At about the quarter mark, the obstacles disappear, the couple marries, and the marriage plot turns into a plot about marriage, a bad marriage.  Trollope, that enemy of suspense, openly declares the husband a con man:

Ferdinand Lopez was not an honest man or a good man. He was a self-seeking, intriguing adventurer, who did not know honesty from dishonesty when he saw them together.  (Ch. 24, “The Marriage”)

The marriage is much more interesting than the courtship.  The main characters – Lopez, Emily, and her father – are much more interesting within the marriage story than the courtship story.  The marriage story has the disadvantage of being quite unpleasant, a painful story.  But it is interesting.

At the same time, the political story became less about politics and more personal, more about the psychological effects of the powerful role on the PM and his wife, one of Trollope’s greatest characters.  They’re not so happy, either.

Nor is The Prime Minister especially funny.

Because the novel is well over 900 pages long, a quarter of the novel is a long stretch.  I would guess that readers who have found other Trollope novels slow and repetitive will lose patience with this one.   I wondered, around page 200, if I would have anything to say about this book.

He began to foresee that he had a bad time before him.  (Ch. 9)

And he – Mr. Wharton, the father – does.  But I did all right.  A day or two more on The Prime Minister, then.

Not a vestige of propriety, or any beastly rules to be kept! - angry, cruel Trollope

Three more examples of Trollope’s use of the sympathy device.  The Way We Live Now is Trollope’s angriest novel (disclaimer: that I have read).

First, the inversion and eventual removal of sympathy, Trollope playing against the natural tendency to fall in line with the interests of whichever character happens to be in front of me.  Some of the funniest scenes star a group of degenerate proto-Wodehouse characters, dissolute noblemen squandering their money, status, and livers.  Bertie without Jeeves and with a gambling problem.

One of them describes their club:

“Not a vestige of propriety, or any beastly rules to be kept!  That’s what I liked,” said Nidderdale.  (Ch. 96)

I know Trollope well enough to know that in the ethos of his novels, these are the words of a monster.  And Nidderdale is hardly the worst of them.

A different one, worse but also not the worst, Felix Carbury, gets the most attention, the closest interior inspection.  Trollope gives him a chance to reform.  The key moment is when he discovers that a friend cheats at cards and is bothered.  Perhaps cheating at cards is wrong.  And if that is wrong, a number of ideas follow.  Trollope brings the character, and my sympathy, up to a precipice.  Do we dare jump?

The villain of the novel, Melmotte the financier, is a blank for most of the novel, but Trollope eventually takes him up, too.  In ordinary terms, the possibilities for sympathy are limited here.  Trollope even waits until he has committed a plain crime to spend time alone with him.  A character in Orley Farm (1862) commits a similar crime, yet receives the full sympathetic attention of the narrator.  Melmotte is allowed to induce pity while also indicting himself.  And even the narrator will not quite follow him to the end of his story.  No, reader, I will not put you in danger by suggesting you pity that.  A bit like what George Eliot does in Adam Bede, but with an easier case.

The complex case in The Way We Live Now is that of Georgiana Longestaffe, an aging (you know, 28) aristocrat who has priced herself too high in the marriage market and is ready to start cutting deals.  Georgiana is awful – sarcastic, peevish, petty, shallow.  Hilarious as a background character, but what a surprise when I found that she got her own subplot.  What a character to spend time with.  I knew that The Way We Live Now had an anti-Jewish component; it is pretty much entirely contained in this subplot.  One way to create sympathy around a bad person is to make everyone around her worse.  The narrator, usually plenty chatty, keeps his mouth shut during these scenes.

By the end, I had plenty of sympathy for horrible Georgiana, who was making the best of a bad hand.  Well done, Trollope.

Georgiana’s subplot was cruel, in the fictional sense.  The Way We Live Now is Trollope’s cruelest novel (disclaimer as above).  It is most exquisitely cruel in this line, near the end:

How Mr. Flatfleece went to law, and tried to sell the furniture, and threatened everybody, and at last singled out poor Dolly Longestaffe as his special victim; and how Dolly Longestaffe, by the aid of Mr. Squercum, utterly confounded Mr. Flatfleece, and brought that ingenious but unfortunate man, with his wife and small family, to absolute ruin, the reader will hardly expect to have told to him in detail in this chronicle.  (Ch. 96)

Dolly Longestaffe is Georgiana’s appalling brother.  Mr. Flatfleece is nobody, just a name and a function, turned into a character, barely, with one phrase just before his ruin, along with a “wife and small family” who are introduced only to be instantaneously crushed by the narrator, who blames the unfeeling, impatient reader, me.

The question for me now is: did Trollope become angrier and crueler in spite of his gentleness towards his earlier characters, or because of it?  Does sympathy destroy sympathy?

Good enough for sympathy - the usual thing in The Way We Live Now

Narrative contains within it a powerful tendency towards sympathy.  Anthony Trollope is more aware of this than most writers, or at least he openly writes about the effect in his novels.  My favorite example is when in The Eustace Diamonds he titles a chapter “Too Bad for Sympathy.”  Lizzie Eustace is a bad, bad person; please, reader, show some dignity and stop sympathizing with her, no matter how much fun she is or how much worse the people around her are.

In the Barchester novels, no one is too bad for sympathy, not even Mrs. Proudie.  Bad people begin to appear in the Palliser novels, just one in Can You Forgive Her?, a little circle of them around Lizzie Eustace, a couple of villains in the Phineas Finn novels.

The Way We Live Now inverts the ratio.  Maybe seven characters in the large cast are ordinarily decent human beings.  The rest are bad, some bad enough to be evil, by which I mean they do harm to others.  Trollope spends plenty of time in the heads of some of the worst of the characters.

Several of the plots rely on the usual novelistic sympathy.  A decent person makes a foolish decision and I am led to sympathize with the attempts to deal with the consequences, and perhaps even the mistake itself.  Like I would have behaved any better, right?

Thus the two love triangles that fill much of the novel – I guess one is more of a love trapezoid, but I will ignore that.  Will Paul Montague be able to marry Hetta Carbury or will he succumb to his American fiancée Mrs. Hurtle, who once killed a man?   For almost half of the novel, the point of view is restricted to Montague, so when he breaks with and parts from Mrs. Hurtle in Chapter 47, it was a surprise when Trollope followed not Paul but Mrs. Hurtle to her room to reflect on what it all means.  The narrator restores sympathy.  That shooting was in self-defense.

My favorite example, because it is so minor, is the paragraph where sympathy is extended to the Emperor of China, who is enduring an English dinner party:

… that awful Emperor, solid, solemn, and silent, must, if the spirit of an Eastern Emperor be at all like that of a Western man, have had a weary time of it. He sat there for more than two hours, awful, solid, solemn, and silent, not eating very much, – for this was not his manner of eating; nor drinking very much, – for this was not his manner of drinking; but wondering, no doubt, within his own awful bosom, at the changes which were coming when an Emperor of China was forced, by outward circumstances, to sit and hear this buzz of voices and this clatter of knives and forks.  “And this,” he must have said to himself, “is what they call royalty in the West!”

The Way We Live Now is as much about status as money.  “[T]he changes which were coming,” yes.

Tomorrow, then, the other mode, the inverted sympathy, the refusal of sympathy.  Ambiguous sympathy.  The variety of modes are part of the complexity of the novel, part of what makes it so interesting.

devoted to Literature, always spelling the word with a big L - The Way We Live Now

When I read on vacation I do not take notes, and with a long, complex book I cannot write much without notes.  I read The Way We Live Now (1874-5) while on vacation, therefore etc. which is a shame since I have come to think it’s the best Anthony Trollope novel of the dozen I have read.

With most novelists, once I have read twelve of his books I would not be so wishy-washy about which is best.  With Trollope, who knows, there might be a dozen more that are better.  I doubt it, but I don’t know.

The Way We Live Now is Trollope’s longest novel, which turns out to be one reason I thought it his best.  On the one hand, it is just more Trollope stuff, the kinds of characters and situations he had been inventing and rearranging for thirty years, but in this case more means not just more characters than usual, more social range, and a greater intricacy of plot.  I felt that Trollope had pushed himself to his limit, like this was the most complex artistic object he could create.

The center of the novel is short-fingered vulgarian Augustus Melmotte, a big money con artist, a one-man financial bubble.  His schemes entangle a range of other characters, whose schemes in turn entangle others, and on like that indefinitely, I mean logically, the only limit being the cognitive and artistic capacity of Trollope.  The cast of characters is genuinely huge, ranging socially from a farmer’s daughter to the Emperor of China, swear to God.

Why not keep going?  Why can’t the cast be the entire population of England, or Earth, and the story be everything that happens to everyone everywhere?  The first two hundred pages or so of the book suggested a theoretical novel which consists of nothing but the introduction of new characters.  The Way We Live Now was serialized, and I at times felt I was doing it an injustice by reading an episodic chunk every day for twenty days rather than every week or month.  Perhaps time should pass for me as it does for the characters, and as it did for the original readers.

Trollope begins the novel with a cruel trick – the other thing that makes this his best book is its conceptual trickery.  The phoney baloney con game that starts the novel, long before Melmotte’s worthless Mexican railroad shares, is publishing, or literature, or books.  The first con we see is the act of writing a book.

She spoke of herself in these days as a woman devoted to Literature, always spelling the word with a big L.  (Ch. 1)

But her book is an inaccurate pop history worth about as much as those railroad shares and would be literally worthless if it not puffed up by corrupt magazine editors and reviewers (“It must be confessed that literary scruple had long departed from his mind”).

The chapter is quite funny, but the subject is too trivial to sustain an 800 page serial novel, and if Trollope had attempted it he probably would have died in an enraged apoplexy before he finished it.  Best that he displaced his anger onto the financial sector.

He had almost ceased to hope for anything except the end of it - that is not my experience of Phineas Redux

The property of manliness in a man is a great possession, but perhaps there is none that is less understood…  (Ch. 68)

Phineas Finn possesses the ideal characteristics of a gentleman – discretion, integrity, courage, good looks, wit but not too much wit, smarts but not etc., (the list of Finn’s virtues could go on and on), and most importantly a willingness to work.  The Trollopian gentleman has a purpose; the exact value of his purpose may not matter much.  Finn’s chosen work, in politics and government, is a tough road without money, and then is some discussion in Phineas Finn about whether he is too hasty – perhaps he should work for decades as a lawyer and then run for office – but the author seems to be on Finn’s side.  Give it a shot.  The perfect gentleman knows how to take risks.

It is the idlers who disgust Trollope, author, over the course of thirty-five years, of seventy or so books.

What I want to get at is what Trollope does with the ideal he has established.  He crushes it. He accuses his gentleman of murder and puts him on trial and in the newspapers.  A few friends believe he is innocent, more say he is innocent, others deal with their conscience in different ways.  Trollope allows Finn to be almost strong enough for his ordeal:

He had become almost numb from the weariness of his position and the agonising strain upon his mind. The gaoler had offered him a seat from day to day, but he had always refused it, preferring to lean upon the rail and gaze upon the Court [Finn stands during his entire trial!].  He had almost ceased to hope for anything except the end of it.  He had lost count of the days, and had begun to feel that the trial was an eternity of torture in itself. At nights he could not sleep, but during the Sunday, after Mass, he had slept all day.  Then it had begun again, and when the Tuesday came he hardly knew how long it had been since that vacant Sunday.  (Ch. 64)

It is this delay in the trial, entirely because of evidence in his favor, that knocks the strength out of him.  Once acquitted, he falls into a state that looks suspiciously like clinical depression.  He recovers through the continued and thoughtful assistance of his friends.  Trollope is redoing Reverend Crawley’s humiliations in The Last Chronicle of Barset, but with a character who is a gentleman, not a saint.  A different set of virtues.  They are saved in the same way, too, socially.

Almost all novels are social in the sense I mean here, but Trollope’s are moreso, and the Palliser novels even more than that.  There is a thought that could use some development.  Maybe with the next novel.   Thus the repeated, perhaps even repetitive gossip passages, or the characters who function as a chorus. Trollope’s social intricacies are closer to Proust’s than Balzac’s.

It is quite interesting to see Trollope but his creation in prison and break his spirit while the world watches.  Not what I was expecting from the novel.

I could have written a similar piece about one of the women in the novel, who in a parallel plot is similarly crushed, not by prison but by her bad marriage, and since she does not have the social support enjoyed by Finn, and is not the character in the title, she will have a harder time recovering.  She suffers more for her mistakes than does Finn.  Her story, the novels B plot, may even be a little more interesting.  Her story was also a surprise.  It is, oddly, a bit like Gwendolen Harleth’s story in Daniel Deronda, published two years later.  Maybe Eliot stole it from Trollope.  Ha ha ha!  If she did, it was fair game.

Everything else I might say about the novel is an incidental point – e.g., look, it is the return of the dirty, clever defense attorney Chaffanbrass, who I last saw in Orley Farm! – but I think I will retire Phineas Redux.

were it even desirable to maintain a doubt - Trollope writes a murder mystery

In Phineas Finn, the title character, an ambitious yet conscientious young Irishman of good family but little means is elected to Parliament with the assistance of a number of prominent women.  He is extremely good-looking, but also an embodiment of Trollope’s complex ideas of gentlemanliness.  To stay in Parliament, he both needs to marry well and to balance the interests of his party against his own integrity.  By the end if that novel, he has retired from the field in a novelistically satisfying manner.

That novel had more marriage proposal scenes than any Trollope novel I have encountered, including, thankfully Phineas Redux, which only has a half dozen or so, three of which are explicitly comic relief.  That still sounds like a lot.

Phineas returns to Parliament in Phineas Redux, and the romantic question returns, too; it is the position of the various women that takes so many pages to establish.

The reader, if he has duly studied the history of the age, will know that the Duke did make an offer to Madame Goesler, pressing it with all his eloquence, but [plot plot plot]  (Ch. 17)

The phrase in bold translates as “if he has read Phineas Finn.”  I believe Trollope meant that as a joke, but it no longer is – what better way to study the history of that age than read Trollope novels?

What a surprise, given all this, when in Chapter 47, Phineas Redux turns into a murder mystery, with police detectives and private detectives and clues and red herrings.  Did Phineas Finn, in a fit of rage, murder his political enemy in a dark alley?  Few writers today would wait until page 510 to spring the murder on their readers, but regardless, things should really cook now.

Except that now Trollope faces a serious problem.  He is employing an omniscient narrator, and unlike more shoddy writers understands what an omniscient narrator is.  Trollope does not cheat.  So Phineas Redux is a murder mystery for all of 24 pages, as the narrator visits various characters to get their reaction to the murder – the poison of gossip and rumor is a major theme of the novel – but soon enough, he has to move Phineas back on stage, and then, in my favorite passage in the novel, the mystery is called off due to the integrity of the narrator, a thematic parallel with the strict integrity of Phineas himself:

The reader need hardly be told that, as regards this great offence, Phineas Finn was as white as snow. The maintenance of any doubt on that matter, – were it even desirable to maintain a doubt, – would be altogether beyond the power of the present writer.  The reader has probably perceived [he has!], from the first moment of the discovery of the body on the steps at the end of the passage, that Mr. Bonteen had been killed by that ingenious gentleman [that other guy].  (Ch. 49)

The phrase in bold is concentrated Trollope.  It is not desirable to maintain a doubt.  Your desire for suspense in fiction is a moral flaw.  Trollope does generate a certain amount of suspense during the trial of Phineas Finn – will he be hanged by the neck until dead? seems unlikely – of the cheaper kind by using a trick I had previously seen in The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866-7), in which the narrator is only omniscient regarding occurrences and characters in Great Britain.  Fog in Channel; continent cut off.  So the author has to dispatch characters to Europe to learn what is going on there.  An arbitrary but clear rule.  It is probably for the best that so few of his readers seem to notice what a formalist Trollope was.

taking the pernicious draught with his cheese - Phineas Redux is a sequel

The title is the first sign of trouble.  Phineas Redux (1873-4) is the first true sequel in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series, and perhaps his first true sequel ever, certain portions of the later Barchester books aside.  Most of the plotlines successfully resolved in Phineas Finn (1867-8) are now dissolved, stirred back into the pot to be re-resolved, along with another plot from the intervening The Eustace Diamonds (1871-3) the resolution of which was impossible to believe.  I knew Lizzie Eustace would be back.  Like Glencora Palliser, she is too much fun.  As a character, Phineas Finn is less fun; as a novel, Phineas Redux is less fun.

For 150 pages, maybe 200, Phineas Redux was the most slack, the most minor, Trollope novel I have read, although it is only my eleventh – but eleven is a lot, right, with most novelists I could make confident generalization, while with Trollope and the other forty novels out there I can only guess.  Some of them must be slack to the point of immobility.

By slack, I mean that a novel-length portion of the 880 page novel is spent rearranging and reinflating the characters, who in this analogy are not marionettes, as I usually describe fictional characters, but balloons, apparently.  The fox hunting scene, obligatory in late Trollope, is introduced almost immediately, but even it seems perfunctory.  Around page 100 there is an actual scene, what a relief, in which the central balloon takes on flesh at a miser’s dinner:

There was some very hot sherry, but not much of it.  And there was a bottle of claret, as to which Phineas, who was not usually particular in the matter of wine, persisted in declining to have anything to do with it after the first attempt…  He played with his fish without thinking much about it.  He worked manfully at the steak. He gave another crumple to the tart, and left it without a pang.  But when the old man urged him, for the third time, to take that pernicious draught with his cheese, he angrily demanded a glass of beer.  The old man toddled out of the room, and on his return he proffered to him a diminutive glass of white spirit, which he called usquebaugh.  (Ch. 10)

Even slack Trollope is amusing, even without a “pernicious draught with his cheese,” and the fact is that four novels into this series I do have a stake in the characters and an interest in what Trollope will do with them.  The reader impatient with Trollope will not make it to Ch. 22, p. 234, when a media satire subplot starts up that is something new and savage.  But what is that reader doing with the fourth volume of a Trollope series?  Is it the only book in the cabin?  In which case, he likely will finish it, having little choice, plus halfway through the novel turns into a murder mystery, and it takes a reader of strong character not to finish a murder mystery.

I’ll undo some of the above tomorrow.  The second half of Phineas Redux is a lot more interesting than the first half, that is all I am trying to say here.

Trollope judges people who are false and bad and selfish and prosperous to outward appearances

Poor Lizzie!  The world, in judging of people who are false and bad and selfish and prosperous to outward appearances, is apt to be hard upon them, and to forget the punishments which generally accompany such faults.  (Ch. 21)

One of Trollope’s more Thackeray-like pronouncements, an outrageous statement presented as if it is an ordinary novelistic insight.  Lizzie is the character who “liked lies, thinking them to be more beautiful than truth” (Ch. 79), much like many novelists, and many readers of novels.  Of course he, and I, sympathize with that terror Lizzie.

That last line, from the end of the novel, comes just as the romantic fate of Lady Eustace is resolved, as she deals with the novel’s final marriage proposal.  Her marriage plot is anti-romantic, since even a sympathetic reader can only hope that she escapes all of the horrible people, many even worse than her, who want to marry her.  The only decent candidate is already engaged to a traditional Trollope heroine, the kind of character who might be the romantic lead of a Barchester novel, another of the novel’s romances made unsatisfying by the behavior of at least one member of the couple.

The romantic prospects of a good person serve as one kind of foil to poor Lizzie’s trouble.  The other foil is a nightmare, wholly negative.  If you have ever wondered about the problems of the arranged and semi-arranged marriages of the Victorian upper classes, for example the sexual problems, Trollope hits the problem head-on in The Eustace Diamonds.  Whatever damage Lizzie and her husband might do to each other, her marriages will always be a kind of comedy, while the story of Lucinda Roanoke is the tragedy.

“He'll offer tomorrow, if you'll accept him.”

“Don't let him do that, Aunt Jane.  I couldn't say Yes.  As for loving him; – oh, laws!”

“It won't do to go on like this, you know.”

“I'm only eighteen; – and it's my money, aunt.”

“And how long will it last?  If you can't accept him, refuse him, and let somebody else come.”

“It seems to me,” said Lucinda, “that one is as bad as another.  I'd a deal sooner marry a shoemaker and help him to make shoes.”

“That's downright wickedness,” said Mrs. Carbuncle.  And then they went down to dinner.  (Ch. 37)

I guess at this point the plot still seems like comedy.  That line about making shoes looks like a joke.  The response – “wickedness” – cannot be meant seriously.  But the former is not, the latter is.  As the story moves along, the engagement continues only because Lucinda is too weak to be wicked, either by breaking off the engagement or worse.  “It was her lot to undergo misery, and as she had not chosen to take poison, the misery must be endured” (Ch. 62).  Her lover’s kiss is pollution – “[n]ever before had she been so polluted.”

And the cause of the tragedy is this, and only this: that the wealthy Lucinda wants to live at a higher level of comfort and status than her existing, substantial wealth allows.  She is rich, but in her imagination is very rich.  This is actually her wickedness.

See, as an aside,  the amazing paragraph in Chapter 9, which describes a household of “poor rich people – if such a term may be used” which consists of a mother and her “seven unmarried daughters” who must get by on an investment income of £3,000 (somewhere between $120,000 and $240,000 U.S. dollars), which only allows them a staff of fourteen, if I counted right.  No novelist understands money better than Trollope.

That is enough about The Eustace Diamonds, I suppose.

Now there had come one glorious day - a Trollope proposal, a Trollope hunt

I have mocked Trollope for his excessive number of proposal scenes – Trollope had mocked himself for the same thing – but The Eustace Diamonds only has maybe six proposals, far fewer than in the previous Palliser novel, Phineas Finn, where they became an aggravation.

In smaller quantities, I can be more impressed with Trollope’s inventiveness.  Sir Florian Eustace is proposing to Lizzie Greystock.  One proposal out of the way, and we are still in Chapter 1:

The speech he made was somewhat long, and as he made it he hardly looked into her face.

But it was necessary to him that he should be made to know by some signal from her how it was going with her feelings.  As he spoke of his danger, there came a gurgling little trill of wailing from her throat, a soft, almost musical sound of woe, which seemed to add an unaccustomed eloquence to his words.  When he spoke of his own hope the sound was somewhat changed, but it was still continued.

I do not think of Trollope as much of a descriptive writer, but “a gurgling little trill of wailing” is pretty good.  And the most effective touch is that her strange sound adds color to his speech, or so he thinks, since I take that as Sir Florian’s thoughts, or illusions.  In other words, the beautiful, penniless, deceitful adventuress has hooked the rich, “vicious and… dying” baronet but good.  By the end of the chapter he is dead and Lizzie is a rich widow in possession of the diamond necklace that gives the book its title and the plot its momentum.  Again, I mean  by the end of Chapter 1 – this novel really cooks at first.

The six Barchester books had no hunting scenes.  I believe that Trollope, in real life, had not yet become a fox-hunting addict when he began that series, and as we know from Framley Parsonage, clergymen should not hunt.  All four non-Barchester novels I have read feature long, detailed hunting scenes.  When he is interested enough, Trollope cannot stop himself from describing a scene in detail – every horse, every obstacle, every movement of the game.  Some readers must find these chapters as dull as a play-by-play of a fictional baseball game.  Trollope does make use of these chapters, so they are not entirely there for his own Fantasy Fox-hunting entertainment.  The hunt in Chapter 38, for example, results in, what else, a  proposal.

I will save that for tomorrow, though, and turn to the poor fox:

They were off again now, and the stupid fox absolutely went back across the river. But, whether on one side or on the other, his struggle for life was now in vain.  Two years of happy, free existence amidst the wilds of Craigattan had been allowed him. Twice previously had he been “found,” and the kindly storm or not less beneficent brightness of the sun had enabled him to baffle his pursuers.  Now there had come one glorious day, and the common lot of mortals must be his.  (Ch. 38)

Trollope is so fluid – “They” are the hunters, “stupid” and “absolutely” are their words, collectively.  It is practically dialogue, from when one of the huntsman recounts the hunt at the pub.  Omniscient Trollope takes the reins and begins sympathizing with the fox – he sympathizes with everyone – and the rhetoric heightens, including some pleasing indulgence in the pathetic fallacy, entirely appropriate, since what reader will not feel the pathos of the death of the fox?

He was astonished to find how sweet a thing was poetry - Trollope characters read

Should I write about the books in The Eustace Diamonds.  Whenever I can, I write about the books.  They are so much fun.  Even a shortage of books is fun:

“There isn't anything for you to do.  There are Miss Edgeworth's novels down-stairs, and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in my bed-room.  I don't subscribe to Mudie's, because when I asked for ‘Adam Bede,’ they always sent me the ‘Bandit Chief.”  (Ch. 34)

John Sutherland did the notes in the Penguin edition I read.  He tells me that the lending library would substitute books if it thought your request was unsuitable, so the shocking Adam Bede is replaced by The Bandit Chief; or Lords of Orsino. A Romance (1818).  The poor heroine, Lucy Morris, not the pathological liar but the novel’s more traditional heroine, is being punished for the sins of her fiancée here by being forced to live with a woman who has only four books.  If I thought summaries of novels were of much value I would explain why.

Lucy has her own book, too, Proverbial Philosophy by Martin Tupper, a poem in three volumes with a “theme of self-help.”  What a dreadful thing to be stuck with.  I would have Pride and Prejudice and Castle Rackrent memorized by the time I left that house.  In her previous house, this character had “catalogued the library” (Ch. 3) for fun, so that is who she is.

Most of the reading in the novel is done by the false heroine, the actual protagonist, the “dishonest, lying, evil-minded harpy” (Ch. 11) Lizzie Greystock, Lady Eustace who in a bold break from novelistic tradition is not led to her ruin by over-indulgence in novels but by her love of poetry, especially Romantic poetry, in particular Byron and Shelley.

“Ah,” she would say to herself in her moments of solitude, “if I had a Corsair of my own, how I would sit on watch for my lover's boat by the sea-shore!”  And she believed it of herself, that she could do so.  (Ch. 5)

She means this Corsair, the Byronic Corsair from The Corsair (1814), the one with a “forehead high and pale” and “sable curls in wild profusion.”

The comic high point of the thing is the three page scene in Chapter 21 in which Lady Eustace reads Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813), sacred text of the radical Chartists, en plain air.  “Her darling ‘Queen Mab’ must be read without the coarse, inappropriate, everyday surroundings of a drawing-room…”  But the bench is too uncomfortable and “there were some snails which discomposed her.”  Finally, she makes it through the first stanza, “eight or nine lines,” which are so magnificent that she memorizes them.  She never progresses a line farther with Queen Mab:

As she grew older, however, she quickly became wiser, and was aware that in learning one passage of a poem it is expedient to select one in the middle, or at the end.  The world is so cruelly observant now-a-days, that even men and women who have not themselves read their "Queen Mab" will know from what part of the poem a morsel is extracted, and will not give you credit for a page beyond that from which your passage comes.

Again, we are in Chapter 21 – yes, I read the novel.  Trollope rubs in the joke at the beginning of the next chapter, noting that Lady Eustace had meant to finally read The Faerie Queene at this time, but due to distractions reads even less of it than the Shelley poem, instead wasting her time with novels.

My title is from the first chapter; the theme runs through the entire book.  Trollope always does the same thing, I always think, but I am always in some ways wrong.

‘Umpty Dumpty was a hegg - Trollope fails to invent the detective novel

The great Victorian novelists all missed a great opportunity.  I cannot see how they did not see it.

The Eustace Diamonds is plotted around a terrifically expensive diamond necklace – who is the proper owner, who is the actual owner, how to move it from place to place, that sort of thing.  It is not a McGuffin in that plenty of meaning is attached to it, and to the iron box in which Lizzie Eustace keeps it, by the characters.

The police become involved, and for two chapters out of eighty The Eustace Diamonds recognizably becomes a detective novel.  The detectives are Officers Bunfit and Gager of Scotland Yard.  Bunfit has interrogated a suspect, Billy:

“And what did he say to that, Mr. Bunfit?”

“Well he said a good deal.  He's a sharp little fellow, is Billy, as has read a good deal.  You've heard of ‘Umpty Dumpty, Gager?  ‘Umpty Dumpty was a hegg.”

“All right.”

“As had a fall, and was smashed – and there's a little poem about him.”

“I know.”

“Well: – Billy says to me: ‘Mr. Camperdown don't want no hinformation; he wants the diamonds.  Them diamonds is like ‘Umpty Dumpty, Mr. Bunfit.  All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put ‘Umpty Dumpty up again.’“

“Billy was about right there,” said the younger officer, rising from his seat.  (Ch. 57)

If more detective novels were written like this, I would read more detective novels.  Trollope here approaches the sublimity of Blind Man with a Pistol (1969) by Chester Himes, of the conversations between Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones.  In the second chapter of the mystery, Officer Gager makes perhaps the boldest move I have ever seen a police detective make.  How I wish I could read a novel starring Gager and Bunfit.  Perhaps someone has written such a thing.  Those are the kinds of books people write now.

Dickens has the Inspector Bucket chapters in Bleak House (1852-3), Collins practically invents the detective novel with The Moonstone (1868) and Sergeant Cuff, and here Trollope takes the trouble to invest Gager and Bunfit with some personality, and none of these popular commercial writers ever think to use their characters again, even with the example of Poe’s Dupin stories.  Collins is the real puzzler, but it is clear enough that Trollope had a great deal of fun in these two chapters.  But I know why he didn’t he do it again.

Trollope hates secrets.  The only thing he keeps from his readers is the future, as if his imagination does not allow time to pass until it has been written down.  Several chapters earlier he had already explained the mystery.  “The chronicler states this at once, as he scorns to keep from his reader any secret that is known to himself.”  So ends Chapter 52, which features events that cheaper writers would extend for suspense.

It is hoped that the reader, to whom every tittle of this story has been told without reserve, will remember that others were not treated with so much open candour.  (Ch. 56)

This is one of the oddest sentences I have ever seen in a novel.  After 500 pages, Trollope feels he needs to remind readers of the rules of his fiction, to remind them that the characters do not know everything the readers know.  I almost feel insulted.  But Trollope has become anxious that he has introduced too much suspense into his novel, that the readers have become too interested in the mechanics of the crime, that perhaps they are even doubting the omniscience of the narrator despite – or because of  - his protests.  The Eustace Diamonds was serialized in monthly four-chapter chunks, so it is possible that Trollope had picked this idea up from actual readers.  Or maybe it was all in his imagination.

So Trollope was not going to invent the ongoing series of detective novels, is what I am saying, even if he came close.

With whom are we to sympathize? - the great and only aim of The Eustace Diamonds

Anthony Trollope books have become comfort reading for me, in the sense that after seventeen encounters with his books I do not have to spend much time learning the rules of his fiction.  I have long overcome the most of the initial resistance that a text presents to a new reader.  There is always some resistance – who are these people, and why them, and that kind of thing.  But in The Eustace Diamonds (1871-3), begun at age 56 after writing dozens of novels, Trollope is not going to make any major changes to how he presents information, or the kinds of details he emphasizes.  I know what I need to pay attention to now, on this page.  Or I think I do.

I suppose this is not what many people mean by “comfort reading.”  Maybe I should call it comfortable reading.  Some readers relish the work in establishing the rules of a text, while others see it as a burden, thus the demand for novels in long series.

These are the opening lines:

It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies – who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two – that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself.  We will tell the story of Lizzie Greystock from the beginning, but we will not dwell over it at great length, as we might do if we loved her.  She was the only child of old Admiral Greystock, who in the latter years of his life was much perplexed  by the possession of a daughter.  (Ch. 1)

I would like to go longer; the first paragraph is so good, Trollope in his cruel, funny Evelyn Waugh mode.  Even if this Trollope novel is a Trollope novel like other Trollope novels, the author must keep himself entertained, so he takes as a protagonist someone unusual for him, a bad person.  Trollope’s sympathy project, the heart of his fiction, is the demonstration that much behavior that looks bad is merely weak, and thus deserving of sympathy at least at the distance of fiction.  He challenges himself in The Eustace Diamonds by writing about a woman who is an ignorant and  pathological liar,  “Too Bad For Sympathy” as the title of Chapter 35 calls her, who will definitely not “assume the dignity of heroine in the forthcoming pages” (Ch. 3)

“The major was not so well acquainted with Lizzie as is the reader, and he pitied her,” writes the bullying author in Chapter 68 after one more of Lizzie’s lies and after 600 pages with Lizzie as protagonist, but not heroine, so that the good joke here is after all of those pages with Lizzie and her thoughts, many readers will have felt some pity before the stern author reminded them that she is not weak, but bad.

That “Too Bad For Sympathy” chapter begins with an amazing four page attack on his readers.  It is the hero of the novel who has been behaving badly, so the narrator must defend him.

But why should one tell the story of creatures so base?  One does not willingly grovel in gutters, or breathe fetid atmospheres, or live upon garbage…

With whom are we to sympathize? says the reader, who not unnaturally imagines that a hero should be heroic.  Oh, thou, my reader, whose sympathies are in truth the great and only aim of my work, when you have called the dearest of your friends round to your hospitable table, how many heroes are there sitting at the board?...

The persons whom you cannot care for in a novel, because they are so bad, are the very same that you so dearly love in your life, because they are so good.

It is very clever, the way Trollope sets up his omniscient narrator as the heavy, making me argue against him in Lizzie’s favor, but with the arguments he had made 300 pages earlier.  The ethical argument of The Eustace Diamonds is not the comfortable part.

Short story oddities by Anthony Trollope and Charlotte Mew - it made a claim to something like supremacy of charm

The logical step following The Father and Miss Julie is The Dance of Death, but right now I am going to take a one-post break from Strindberg while another subject is fresh in my mind.  I have returned, briefly, to A. S. Byatt’s Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), and I am worried that if I wait I will not have as much fun mocking the stories I read today.

To be clear, Byatt’s anthology has been a treat to paw through, and now I hope someday to read ‘em all.  But one admirable feature of the book is Byatt’s complete lack of interest in compiling the best English short stories.  She went for the oddest, or the oddest given the need for a certain number of famous names.

Story 1: “Relics of General Chassé: A Tale of Antwerp” by Anthony Trollope (1860), the only Trollope short story I have ever read.  It is an elaborate joke based around two related points, the fun to be had with a fat clergyman who has lost his pants, and the impropriety, within the world of the story and in the text itself, of uttering a specific word:

‘He has lost his things,’ and I took hold of my own garments.  ‘It’s a long story, or I’d tell you how; but he has not a pair in the world till he gets back to Brussels, – unless you can lend him one.’

‘Lost his br–?’ and he opened his eyes wide, and looked at me with astonishment.

‘Yes, yes, exactly so,’ said I, interrupting him.  (54)

How do the ladies address the problem?

‘We just found a pair of black –.’  The whole truth was told in the plainest possible language.

‘Oh, Aunt Sally!’  ‘Aunt Sally, how can you?’  ‘Hold your tongue, Aunt Sally!’  (59)

Trollope was quite inventive in the many ways he dodges the word “breeches.”  The story also has some reasonable satirical points to make about celebrity and about dignity carried to far, not that any reader will learn anything he didn’t know.  Byatt picked the story for the writer’s trick, the telling of a story based on a forbidden word.

Story 2: “A White Night” by Charlotte Mew (1903).  Mew is worth knowing about for her own sake.  Virginia Woolf called her “the greatest living poetess” based on her 1916 collection The Farmer’s Bride, which is why I try not to make such generalizations without a hundred years hindsight, since the greatest living “poetess” at the time was either Anna Akhmatova or Marina Tsvetaeva.

In the story, English tourists have accidentally gotten themselves locked in a remote Andalusian church, where they witness the Spanish monks commit a terrible ritual murder.  I know, a return to The Monk in 1903!

It’s the style, though, that had me laughing here.  The tourists have reached the isolated Spanish village:

In its neglect and singularity, it made a claim to something like supremacy of charm.  There was a quality of diffidence belonging to unrecognised abandoned personalities in that appeal.

That’s how I docketed it in memory – a city with a claim, which, as it happened, I was not to weigh.  (141)

I don’t know, maybe you like it.  I know what the last bit means – they leave the town without exploiting it – but “unrecognised abandoned personalities,” if you say so.

Whenever Mew turns to abstraction she uses this Jamesian mode.  It sound like James to me.  The story begins with a frame, an imitation of the beginning of the Turn of the Screw (1898):

‘The incident,’ said Cameron, ‘is spoiled inevitably in the telling, by its merely accidental quality of melodrama, its sensational machinery, which, to the view of anyone who didn’t witness it, is apt to blue the finer outlines of the scene.  The subtlety, or call it the significance, is missed, and unavoidably, as one attempts to put the thing before you, in a certain casual crudity, and inessential violence of fact.’  (139)

Not “inevitably,” pal – it’s just the way you tell it.  And the curious thing is the mismatch between voice and subject does not spoil the central horror of the tale at all.  Accentuates it, if anything.

An extension of the idea of literary sympathy bounced off of the Phineas Finn chapters about politics.

The first Palliser novel, Can You Forgive Her?, had politics in it, just a little.  It is only minimally about politics.  A reader is not asked to be particularly interested in the political activities of the characters, in what a politician in Parliament in the 1860s actually does.  One prominent character, for example, when elected to Parliament does nothing at all.

This character runs for Parliament almost as an investment, or a gamble.  Phineas Finn, the hero of the second novel in the series, has not only ambitions but beliefs and even ideas.  The political side of the novel – remembering that 70% of the book is about the love troubles of Finn and his friends – is very much about what he does in Parliament:  how he speaks and votes, what it means to be a member of a party, and what it means to work in a ministry.  In the latter, Finn’s specialty turns out to be the financing of Canadian railroads.  Trollope does, happily, spare us too much detail about that.

But he does not spare us what we might now call the wonkery of the main issue that runs through the five years covered in the book, the issue of Reform, the issue that earns its generic name, since it is so purely concerned with the functioning of politics – who has the right to vote and how much does their vote count?  In other words, as tedious a political subject as I can imagine to a reader not especially interested in politics.

I began to wonder about those readers.  However much we might flatter or delude ourselves, we can’t be interested in everything, and political reform in mid-19th century England seems like one of many reasonable places to draw a line.  I Care; I am Interested; I am Curious; I Just Can’t Bring Myself To Care.

Personally, that last category has shrunk over time.  Classical music, dance, religious painting, abstract painting, wine, fashion – at some point, thankfully long ago for many of them, something I did care about finally got a hook into the subject I did not think I would ever care about.  Often learning the history of the field helped, but sometimes it was the luck of seeing a particular performance.

By definition, because I do not care about them, it is difficult to think of subjects that still belong in the category.  From experience, one I am sure of, from going to art fairs and museums, is jewelry.  I can look at pottery with active pleasure, billing and cooing over glazes and artistic flaws, but a case of jewelry is instantly exhausting.  I need to sit down, over there, where I can’t see the jewelry.

Some of the political chapters in Phineas Finn must be, for some readers, like cases of jewelry.

Literature has the curious effect of making us care about things we do not care about, if only – often for only – the length of the work.  I care because the heroine cares; I sympathize with her so I join in with her interests.  Or I care, temporarily, because I sympathize with the implied author and want to help him out with whatever he is trying to accomplish.

If there is a well-made novel that is actually about jewelry, with lots of descriptions of jewelry, I should try to read it, just to test this idea.  Can fiction make me care even about this?

The bewildered brain of a poor fictionist - Phineas Finn's recommended course of reading

The disadvantage of reading a Trollope novel on vacation is that I take few notes and thus have forgotten where the juiciest lines are.  True of any novel, I suppose, but the plushness and repetitiveness of the Trollope works against me.  That line I want could be anywhere.

No, wait, I found this one:

He had recommended to her a certain course of reading, – which was pleasant enough; ladies like to receive such recommendations; but Mr. Kennedy, having drawn out the course, seemed to expect that his wife should read the books he had named, and, worse still, that she should read them in the time he had allocated for the work.  (Ch. 23)

I thought bookish people would enjoy it.  The “ladies like” bit is hilarious; that he “expect[s] his wife should read the books” is sublime.  The next line: “This, I think, was tyranny.”  Mr. Kennedy and his wife are newlyweds.

The main thrust of Phineas Finn is about the title character’s ambitions for his political career, but two of the side plots are about the ambitions of women, who are no less ambitious but live under much worse constraints than Finn.  The wife in the passage above, the former Lady Laura Standish, should be in parliament herself, perhaps even in place of Phineas Finn, but since that is impossible she has to direct her energy elsewhere, resulting in the terrible mistake of her marriage.  “[A] certain course of reading,” how awful.

That genial, sympathizing omniscient narrator is fairly restrained in Phineas Finn, a younger, high-spirited Trollope having purged most of his meta-fictional impulses way back in Barchester Towers, although there is one glorious eruption in Finn, when Trollope feels he needs to move into forbidden territory and write up a meeting of Cabinet Ministers:

And now will the Muses assist me while I sing an altogether new song?  On the Tuesday the Cabinet met at the First Lord's official residence in Downing Street, and I will attempt to describe what, according to the bewildered brain of a poor fictionist, was said or might have been said, what was done or might have been done, on so august an occasion.  (Ch. 29)

Trollope says that he, “[t]he poor fictionist,” the “strictly honest fictionist,” is used to getting things wrong (“He catches salmon in October; or shoots his partridges in March”) and suffering the rough correction of critics, but when dealing with, for example, legal matters he at least has lawyer friends from whom he can ask advice.  He does not know anyone in the Cabinet, so he just has to make up the whole thing.

But then, again, there is this safety, that let the story be ever so mistold, – let the fiction be ever so far removed from the truth, no critic short of a Cabinet Minister himself can convict the narrator of error.

A fortuitous result of this meta-fictional fussing is that the chapter is the most finely described scene in the novel, the only one where Trollope describes the furniture, including the “certain papers which lay upon a side-table, – and which had been lying there for two years, and at which no one ever looked or would look.”  Soon enough, the scene shifts to an all-talk format, but not until the imaginative hard, fun work has been done.

Mr. Clarkson was fond of poking fires - specific Phineas Finn

Phineas Finn was in one significant way the weakest of the mere nine Anthony Trollope novels I have read.  Twenty-plus years and twenty-plus novels into his career, with Phineas Finn Trollope comes close to abandoning any kind of physical or sensory description of the world of his novel.  He takes it all for granted – the clothes, the furniture, the arrangement of rooms, even the appearance of characters.

Yet there is a huge mass of detail, as in the novel’s first two sentences:

Dr. Finn, of Killaloe, in county Clare, was as well known in those parts, – the confines, that is, of the counties Clare, Limerick, Tipperary, and Galway, – as was the bishop himself who lived in the same town, and was as much respected. Many said that the doctor was the richer man of the two, and the practice of his profession was extended over almost as wide a district.

The paragraph continues with information about Dr. Finn’s reputation, family (Phineas Finn, the novel’s hero, is his only son), pecuniary history, and his favorite cliché.  Every detail except perhaps the last is not sensory and immediate but social.  The information the reader needs is how characters exist in relation to each other: status, wealth, power, and attitude.  A scene is then a passage in which these bundles of status, attitude, etc., by which I mean characters, are arranged in varying configurations so that they can converse.  A scene in Phineas Finn is almost all talk – chatter, flirting, debate, advice.  Everything important is between quotation marks.

There are few exceptions.  Phineas has been visited by an unpleasant bill-broker who commandeers the fire:

“I can pay no part of that bill, Mr. Clarkson.”

“Pay no part of it!” and Mr. Clarkson, in order that he might the better express his surprise, arrested his hand in the very act of poking his host's fire.

“If you'll allow me, I'll manage the fire,” said Phineas, putting out his hand for the poker.

But Mr. Clarkson was fond of poking fires, and would not surrender the poker.  “Pay no part of it!” he said again, holding the poker away from Phineas in his left hand.  (Ch. 21)

In most scenes in Phineas Finn, the characters might as well be disembodied word balloons.  Lots of writers do that kind of thing well.  And that is setting aside the times, increasingly frequent as the novel nears its ends, when the conversations turn into debates about the duties of a parliamentarian or the role of the wife in a marriage.  These passages are period pieces, artistically null.

The poker scene should make it clear that I am not demanding dazzle, nothing like the elaborate descriptions of pumpkins and cheeses I can find in an Émile Zola novel, but rather a sense of imaginative integration of character, language, scene, and action, like when the traveling salesman in Orley Farm springs onto a painted table.  This is close to what I think of as the finest, rarest kind of fictional art.  I am also skeptical of Zola’s baroque lists, which go to the other extreme.  And there are, of course, other kinds of fictional art, many kinds, some of which can be found in Phineas Finn.

In France I read Phineas Finn

Since I went to Europe, I read a Trollope novel.  No, there is no logic there, but it has become a pattern.  Phineas Finn (1867-8), the second book in the Palliser series, was the novel I took this time.  The book is well suited to reading in interrupted chunks, a chapter or a serialized cluster of chapters at one sitting.  I can take advantage of Trollope’s repetitions, which in mass can be maddening, but with some distance I don’t mind the gentle reminders – where was that character’s last scene, how did we leave that subplot?

Trollope is always careful about the passage of time in his novels, keeping all of the characters and threads consistent, which I suspect I find psychologically helpful.  It is easier to put the book down for the day when I come to a “time passes” transition.  Let some actual time can pass along with the fictional.  And more time passes in Phineas Finn than in any other Trollope novel I have encountered.  A Barchester novel might cover five months; Phineas Finn needs five years.  So there are plenty of breaks.

The title character is young, smart, and handsome.  He falls in with a powerful set who assist him, with the help of a lucky accident, to become a Member of Parliament at age twenty-five.  Finn has talent but little money, and this is a time when the MPs had no salary, so a central surface theme of the book is how a successful career in politics can be pursued without money.  In reality, the main theme is how such a career can work for a young man without sex.  The bulk of the book is about Finn’s romantic troubles: who should he marry, who can he marry?  Some of those women have their own money, tying the two ideas together.

I am joking, just a bit, but this story could not work in a French novel.  M. Finn would have an affair with his maid or the wife of the Minister under whom he serves, and thus carry on his political work without distraction.  The Irish Finn, who has no other outlet, falls deeply in love with, it seems, every young woman he meets.

My guess is that 70% of the book is about Finn and women, 30% about politics and vocation.  Many readers likely find that ratio to be unbalanced, with much too much detail about the minutiae of offices, political intrigues, and colonial policy towards western Canada.  I would not have minded a shift the other way, with a little less romantic stuff.

Somewhere – if I  could only remember where – I read an anecdote about Trollope coming to breakfast – he wrote every day before breakfast – and announcing that he had just written his fiftieth – or more likely his five hundredth – proposal scene.  Phineas Finn by itself has at least eight (8) proposal scenes involving a total of two men and four women.  Five of the proposals involve Finn.  The other three are all between the same couple, the man proposing to the same woman repeatedly.  One of the proposals comes after she has accepted him.  That is a lot of proposal scenes, although I guess I exaggerated when I said there were five hundred.  Fifty novels, eight proposals per novel, so that’s four hundred tops.