Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  But the law and the gospel of Trollope, a prophet of as clear vision as need be, is that the thing which is must be, and that every one concerned must conform to it in mind and conscience as wisely and decently as possible. It is an immensely frank race, and what Trollope does is to show it with a frankness equalled by that of no other novelist, with a cold-bloodedness, and absence of disagreeable consciousness which almost command respect.

  IV

  Nothing could be more respectable than the open understanding, so impossible to two American mothers, between Lady Lufton and Mrs. Archdeacon Grantly that Lord Lufton and Griselda Grantly shall be brought together in such circumstances that the young man shall offer himself and the young girl shall accept him. The intended lovers are themselves in the plot, which miscarries because Lord Lufton, not caring for Griselda to begin with, sees Lucy Robarts at his mother’s house where he is meant to see no one but Griselda, and falls in love with Lucy. Griselda is so purely and entirely of her world that she finds no offence to her personal dignity and maidenly modesty in being put in a young man’s way for him to fall in love with. That is a perfectly right and proper arrangement; when he will not fall in love with her, she merely resents it in a brief, cold anger, and makes haste to accept another nobleman of higher rank and greater wealth than Lord Lufton.

  Trollope has shown no greater mastery than in the handling of this girl’s passive egotism and dull, glacial self-sufficiency. It is only such as most abjectly submit themselves to the world that most dominate it at last, and in the different books that record Griseida Grantly progress we see her grow naturally and logically, almost inevitably, from an unimpulsive, unresponsive young girl, into a great lady of fashion, a ruler in society. She is always rather stupid, and she never does or says anything to win her way to social supremacy. It may be said that this supremacy comes to her because she is fit for it, and knows how to keep it without the least pains or inconvenience. She is really, in her cold but perfectly adequate nullity, a wonderful achievement, and she is from first to last the same. But she is so null, so negative, that it is difficult to choose any passage which shall dramatically impart the notion of her; but the conversation which her mother has with her, when Mrs. Grantly comes to see her at Lady Lufton’s London house, and to find out how the land lies with regard to Lord Lufton, may serve at least as well as another. Toward the middle of this conversation the mother had to be frank since the daughter would not be.

  “‘What I particularly wanted to say to you was this:

  I think you should know what are the ideas which Lady Lufton entertains,’ ‘Her ideas!’ said Griseida, who had never troubled herself much in thinking about other people’s thoughts. ‘Yes, Griseida. While you were staying down at Framley Court, and also, I suppose, since you have been up here in Bruton Street, you must have seen a good deal of — Lord Lufton,’ ‘He doesn’t come very often to Bruton Street, — that is to say, not very often.’... ‘Of course he cannot be at home now as much as he was down in the country, when he was living in the same house,’ said Mrs. Grantly whose business it was to take Lord Lufton’s part at the present moment. ‘He must be at his club, and at the House of Lords, and in twenty places.’ ‘He is very fond of going to parties, and he dances beautifully.’ ‘I am sure he does. I have seen as much as that myself, and I think I know some one with whom he likes to dance,’ And the mother gave her daughter a loving little squeeze. ‘Do you mean me, mamma?’ ‘Yes, I do mean you, my dear. And is it not true? Lady Lufton says that he likes dancing with you better than with any one else in London,’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Griselda, looking down upon the ground.... ‘But young ladies must think of such things, must they not?’ ‘Must they, mamma?’ ‘I suppose they do, don’t they? The truth is, Griselda, that Lady Lufton thinks that if — Can you guess what it is she thinks?’ ‘No, mamma.’ But that was a fib on Griselda’s part.

  ‘She thinks that my Griselda would make the best possible wife in the world for her son; and I think so too. I think that her son will be a very fortunate man if he can get such a wife. And now what do you think, Griselda?’ ‘I don’t think anything, mamma.’...

  ‘You don’t think anything! But, my darling, you must think. You must make up your mind what would be your answer if Lord Lufton were to propose to you. That is what Lady Lufton wishes him to do.’ ‘But he never will, mamma.’ ‘And if he did?’ ‘But I’m sure he never will. He doesn’t think of such a thing at all — and — and—’ ‘And what, my dear?’ ‘I don’t know, mamma.... Lord Lufton thinks a great deal more of Lucy Robarts than he does of — of — of any one else, I believe,’ said Griselda, showing now some little animation by her manner, ‘dumpy little black thing that she is.’ ‘Lucy Robarts!... Lord Lufton, of course, is bound to be civil to any young lady in his mother’s house, and I am quite sure that he has no other idea whatever with regard to Miss Robarts. I certainly cannot speak as to her intellect, for I do not think she opened her mouth in my presence; but—’

  ‘Oh! she has plenty to say for herself, when she pleases. She’s a sly little thing.’”

  As the reader will have seen, Griselda was quite right, and indeed the one quality she had in positive measure was a subtle cunning, such as in higher minds serves the purposes of divination. She was equal through this, and through an absence of all tenderness, to most of the exigencies of life. Not through principle, but the want of it, she was able philosophically to endure things that wring the heart and break the spirit of other people. After her engagement to Lord Dumbello, while she was at her father’s house actively superintending the preparation of her trousseau, there came a rumor, which seemed only too well founded, that her betrothed had gone to Paris to break off the engagement, and her father decided on going up to London to see about it.

  ‘“Susan,’ said the archdeacon to his wife, just as he was starting; — at this moment neither of them was in the happiest spirits,—’ I think I would say a word of caution to Griselda,’ ‘Do you feel so much doubt about it as that?’ said Mrs. Grantly.... On the next morn ing Mrs. Grantly, with much cunning preparation, went about the task which her husband had left her to perform. It took her long to do, for she was very cunning in the doing of it; but at last it dropped from her in words that there was a possibility — a bare possibility — that some disappointment might even yet be in store for them. ‘Do you mean, mamma, that the marriage will be put off?’ ‘I don’t mean to say that I think it will; God forbid I but it is just possible. I dare say that I am very wrong to tell you of this, but I know that you have sense enough to bear it. Papa has gone to London, and we shall hear from him soon.’ ‘Then, mamma, I had better give them orders not to go on with the marking.’”

  I should be puzzled to point out a line in which I thought the artist had gone wrong in this extraordinary portrait. If he had done nothing else it would be sufficient to prove him a master; and it is only one of many masterpieces. It must have been one of the most difficult to do because the formula is so very simple. Not to have mixed other ingredients with the component parts of Griselda’s character, or not to have mixed the original ingredients in disproportion, is the highest proof of the artist’s mastery. She is never caricatured, never suffered to transcend the limits of her temperament. She is a disagreeable person, because she is cold and selfish, but she is not unjust, and she deserves at the hands of her creator the justice he does her in a final touch, and without which, perhaps, the picture would have wanted perfect relief. After her marriage Lucy Robarts met Lady Dumbello in London. “Lucy had felt that she had been despised by the rich beauty. She also in her turn had disliked, if she had not despised, her rival. But how would it be now? Lady Dumbello could hardly despise her, and yet it did not seem possible that they should meet as friends. They did meet, and Lucy came forward with a pretty eagerness to give her hand to Lady Lufton’s late favorite. Lady Dumbello smiled slightly — the same old smile which had come across her face when they two had been first introduced in the Framley dr
awing-room; the same smile without the variation of a line, — took the offered hand, muttered a word or two, and then receded. It was exactly as she had done before. She had never despised Lucy Robarts. She had accorded to the parson’s sister the amount of cordiality with which she usually received her acquaintance; and now she could do no more for the peer’s wife.” So to the end her perfect congruity is defined.

  ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S MRS. PROUDIE

  IF I have not yet said that I think Anthony Trollope the most English of the English novelists I will do so now. Of course Jane Austen and George Eliot might dispute this primacy with him, but both would fail in the comparison, the one because she was too witty and the other because she was too wise, faithfully to mirror the British spirit.

  The perpetual play of delicate sarcasm in Jane Austen’s books is as alien to the heavy sincerity of that simple sold as the deep psychological implications of George Eliot’s; but the make and the manner of Trollope are exactly interpretative of it. All is plain and open in his work; if there is any cutting or thrusting it is not such as leaves the subject to shake itself before it realizes a wound; if there is any philosophizing it is not of the accusing sort which makes the reader feel the fault or the fate of the character as bound with him; and yet Trollope was a true humorist, and as I have already insisted, a profound moralist. He surpassed the only contemporaries worthy to be named with him in very essential things as far as he surpassed those two great women in keeping absolutely the level of the English nature. He was a greater painter of manners than Thackeray because he was neither a sentimentalist nor a caricaturist; and he was of a more convincing imagination than Dickens because he knew and employed the probable facts in the case and kept himself free of all fantastic contrivances.

  I

  He was the author of more books than Dickens, and many more than Thackeray; but in the number of his creations he fell below either, because of his habit, acquired from Thackeray, of carrying the personages of one book into another. Thackeray did this with some half a dozen prominent people; Major Dobbin of “Vanity Fair” reappears in “Pendennis,” Pendennis reappears in “Philip,” and Beatrix Esmond of “Esmond” reappears in “The Virginians,” and so on; but Trollope’s principal books are all bound together by the continuity of the principal characters. We have again and again the Duke of Omnium and his congeners; Dr. Thorne and his kindred and connections come and go through different novels; and the Barchester series is a warp in which the same pattern of figures and faces is carried through from the beginning to the end: the Grantlys, the Hardings, the Dales, the Eameses, the Omniums, the Robartses, the Luftons, the Crawleys, and, above all, the Proudies.

  There is a fascination, which every writer of fiction will own, in recurring to a type once studied; but the novelist indulges this fancy at some risk of tiring his readers. The fact that he had tired his readers with Mrs. Proudie was brought rudely home to Trollope one day at his club, where he overheard the sighs and groans of a man who was sick of her, at finding her again in the novelist’s current story. Trollope says that he then and there resolved to kill her, and in that very story he made an end of her; but it seems to me that his resolution censured both the art and the courage of the novelist, who should have had a faith in himself and his work superior to his sense of any reader’s impatience, and should have been above suffering dictation from it It is certain, however, that he lost heart and put an end to the admirable (she was artistically most admirable) creature of his invention, to the lasting loss of all lovers of the true, if not the beautiful I will not be sure which book one first meets Mrs. Proudie in; one seems, after meeting her, to have known her always; but she pervades the whole Barchester series with her searching and persistent personality. Mrs. Proudie is not merely a shrew and a scold, though she is a shrew, and does scold the bishop dreadfully, and put him to shame before those who should believe him master in his house and office. It is less her ambition than her nature to govern, and she cannot help extending her domain from the bishop to the diocese, and meddling in things which it is mischievous as well as indecorous for her to concern herself ‘with. But in all this she is mainly of a conscientious zeal; she has done so much to forward the fortunes of her husband, and to promote his rise from among the inferior clergy to a spiritual lordship, that she cannot help arrogating power and attributing merit to herself in the management of his affairs. She has her strong likes and dislikes, and with other women she has her spites and jealousies; she wishes sometimes to put these women under her feet, and to trample on them after she has got them there. But though she makes her husband so unhappy and ashamed she does not mean to do so, or rather, she would not do so if she could have her way without doing so. The great thing, however, is to have her way, and whatever hinders her having it is for that sufficient reason wrong and wicked. The bishop himself, poor little, weak, yielding man, is wrong, and at least wickedly led when he opposes her, and in her great struggle with his clergy in the case of Josiah Crawley, the perpetual curate of Hogglestock, she brings the bishop to open shame, and through his shame to open rebellion. His rebellion takes the form of answering to all she says, “You have broken my heart,” and so sending her from him by mere refusal to be actively engaged in controversy, or even to be actively scolded. In this exile she suddenly dies. But I, for one, cannot rejoice in Mrs. Proudie’s untimely taking off, for when you have her at second hand a scold is purely amusing. Besides this, there is a pathos in her death which throws all her character into a softened relief. She dies partly because she does not know what else to do. She has finally and utterly failed, with the man she has always loved, in the method she has always successfully used with him, and she waits, bewildered and anguished, for some break of his intangibility in which she can take hold of him again in the old way. While she waits her spiritual pang translates itself into a physical pang, and she dies of heart-disease. She is no longer needed; she cumbers the man whom she has so valiantly championed even against his own comfort and quiet; she will be missed for a while, but she will not be truly lamented; she will be a mischief taken out of the world. I call this all very touching, and it reflects a light upon her whole story which keeps me from seeing her altogether hateful and harmful.

  II

  The moral and ecclesiastical struggle in which Mrs. Proudie closes with Josiah Crawley is the beginning of the end with her, as the reader will find somewhat over-duly recorded in “ The Last Chronicle of Barset.” That is a book largely imagined and in places amply realized, which as a whole faffs as distinctly of being a masterpiece as any great novel I know of. Trollope’s secondhand vice of twaddling Thackeraywise over his characters and situations comes to the worst in it, where the fag-ends of the Barchester series are gathered together in a loose and feeble intrigue. The tremendous conception of Crawley’s tragedy is suffered to become part and parcel of the prevailing weakness through the author’s willingness to eke out the interest by delaying the dénouement so long; but if that tragedy alone could have been openly treated and Crawley studied solely in his relation to the other human particles it magnetically attracted, the book would have been one of the great fictions of the world. As it is, second-rate and third-rate though it is, still it has the fascination which that pure, sad, half-mad soul never fails to exercise whenever he appears on the scene. With the dreadful accusation of theft which he falls under, after passing a check which he seems to have come by unlawfully, but which he cannot remember how he came by, he alone gives the story cohesion and unity; and it is his sorrow and his shame which bring Mrs. Proudie in enmity upon him.

  When the magistrates, his old friends and fellowclergymen, are constrained to commit him upon the charge to which he has laid himself open, Mrs. Proudie decides that it is high time the bishop should take some action concerning him; and she requires the poor bishop to summon him to the palace and make him show cause why he should not be suspended from his perpetual curacy at Hogglestock until a jury of his countrymen shall have acquitted him
of the charge. Then Crawley, being too poor to pay for a carriage, walks the long road from Hogglestock to Barchester in the cold and wet, and presents himself to his spiritual superior. But the superior of his spiritual superior is there also to receive the threadbare, muddy, majestic man, and the scene that follows is the representation of her determination to force herself into an affair which is none of hers, and his determination to keep her out of it.

  “‘You are very punctual, Mr. Crawley,’ said the bishop. Mr. Crawley simply bowed his head, still keeping his hands beneath his cloak. ‘Will you not take a chair nearer to the fire?’ Mr. Crawley had not seated himself, but had placed himself in front of a chair at the extreme end of the room, — resolved that he would not use it unless he were duly asked. ‘Thank you, my lord,’ he said, ‘I am warm with walking, and, if you please, will avoid the fire.’... Hitherto Mrs. Proudie had not said a word. She stood back in the room, near the fire, — more backward a good deal than she was accustomed to do when clergymen made their ordinary visits. On such occasions she would come forward and shake hands with them graciously, — graciously even, if proudly; but she had felt that she must do nothing of that kind now; there must be no shaking hands with a man who had stolen a check for twenty pounds I... ‘I hope your wife and children are well, Mr. Crawley.... I have felt for Mrs. Crawley very deeply,’ said Mrs. Proudie. Mr. Crawley had made up his mind that as long as it was possible he would ignore the presence of Mrs. Proudie altogether; and, therefore, he made no sign that he had heard the latter remark. ‘It has been most unfortunate,’ continued the bishop... ‘Far be it from me to express an opinion upon the matter, which will have to come before a jury of your countrymen. It is enough for me to know that the magistrates assembled at Silverbridge, gentlemen to whom no doubt you must be known, as most of them live in your neighborhood, have heard evidence upon the subject—’ ‘Most convincing evidence,’ said Mrs. Proudie, interrupting her husband. Mr. Crawley’s black brow became a little blacker as he heard the word, but still he ignored the woman. He not only did not speak, but did not turn his eye upon her.... ‘You would have been put in prison, Mr. Crawley, because the magistrates were of opinion that you had taken Mr. Soames’s check,’ said Mrs. Proudie. On this occasion he did look at her. He turned one glance upon her from under his eyebrows, but he did not speak. ‘With all that I have nothing to do,’ said the bishop. ‘Nothing whatever, my lord,’ said Mr. Crawley. ‘But, bishop, I think that you have,’ said Mrs. Proudie. ‘The judgment formed by the magistrates as to the conduct of one of your clergymen makes it imperative upon you to act in the matter,’ ‘Yes, my dear, yes; I am coming to that. What Mrs. Proudie says is perfectly true.... It is undoubtedly the fact that you must at the next assizes surrender yourself at the court-house yonder, to be tried for this offence against the laws,’ ‘That is true. If I be alive, my lord, and have strength sufficient, I shall be there.’ ‘You must be there,’ said Mrs. Proudie. ‘The police will look to that, Mr. Crawley,’ She was becoming very angry in that the man would not answer her a word. On this occasion again he did not even look at her....—’ Under these circumstances,’ continued the bishop, ‘looking to the welfare of your parish, to the welfare of the diocese, and allow me to say, Mr. Crawley, to the welfare of yourself also—’ ‘And especially to the souls of the people,’ said Mrs. Proudie.... The bishop paused, and Mr. Crawley bowed his head. ‘I, therefore, sent over to you a gentleman with whom I am well acquainted, Mr. Thumble, with a letter from myself, in which I endeavored to impress upon you, without the use of any severe language, what my convictions were.... Mr. Thumble brought me back your written reply,’ continued the bishop, ‘by which I was grieved to find that you were not willing to submit yourself to my counsel in the matter.’ ‘I was most unwilling, my lord. Submission to authority is at times a duty; — and at times opposition to authority is a duty also.... Opposition to usurped authority is an imperative duty,’ said Mr. Crawley. ‘And who is to be the judge?’ demanded Mrs. Proudie. Then there was silence for a while; when, as Mr. Crawley made no reply, the lady repeated her question. ‘Will you be pleased to answer my question, sir? Who, in such a case, is to be the judge?’ But Mr. Crawley did not please to answer her question. ‘The man is obstinate,’ said Mrs. Proudie.... ‘I forget where I was,’ said the bishop. ‘Oh! Mr. Thumble came back, and I received your letter; — of course I received it. And I was surprised to learn from that, that in spite of what had occurred at Silverbridge, you were still anxious to continue the usual Sunday ministrations in your church.’... ‘Had I been Mr. Thumble,’ said Mrs. Proudie, ‘I would have read from that desk and I would have preached from that pulpit. ‘Mr. Crawley waited a moment, thinking that the bishop might perhaps speak again; but as he did not, but sat expectant as though he had finished his discourse, and now expected a reply, Mr. Crawley got up from his seat and drew near to the table. ‘My lord,’ he began, ‘it has all been just as you have said. The circumstances are strong against me; and, though your lordship has altogether misunderstood the nature of the duty performed by the magistrates in sending my case for trial, — although, as it seems to me, you have come to conclusions in this matter in ignorance of the very theory of our laws,—’ ‘Sir!’ said Mrs. Proudie. ‘Yet I can foresee the probability that a jury may discover me to have been guilty of theft’ ‘Of course the jury will do so,’ said Mrs. Proudie.... ‘But till that time shall come, my lord, I shall hold my own at Hogglestock as you hold your own here at Barchester.’...