CHAPTER TWELVE—A CLOSE CORPORATION
I.—TROLLOPE'S MRS. PROUDIE
NO ONE WHO HAS LIVED FOR ANY length of time in a cathedral town can fail to appreciate the perfection of Anthony Trollope's Barchester series of novels. In my opinion no more artistic achievement than the creation of Barchester and its people exists on the same scale in the English language. I do not think that there is a false note in any scene—a crude tone in any character. Certainly no writer ever dealt with the members of any profession with such completeness and without ceasing to interest a reader from page to page, from chapter to chapter, from volume to volume. Fancy any writer venturing upon five long novels with all the chief characters solicitors or solicitors' wives and daughters! Fancy a dozen medical men stethoscoping their way through a thousand closely printed pages! We know what military novels we have been treated to from time to time—stuff to send guffaws round every mess-room—as crude as the red of the tunics that gave the marksmen of other armies every chance in the old days.
The personages in Barchester Towers, The Warden, and The Last Chronicle of Barset are such finished pieces of characterisation that they strike one as being photographs from life. One feels that the author must have had intimate acquaintance with the originals of his portraits, as well as with their entourage, before he could produce such transcripts from nature.
I suppose there was a good deal of speculation when the Barchester novels were appearing as to the identity of the various cathedral dignitaries. It seems to me that such a “placing” of the people was inevitable. But an example was given me of the artistic way in which Trollope went to work in the case of one of his best remembered characters that let me see what a master of his art he was. I was some years under twenty when The Last Chronicle fell into my hands: it was the first novel of Trollope's that I read, so that was the first acquaintance I had with Mrs. Proudie. Before I had got through many chapters I knew that I was listening to the voice of the wife of an Irish Prelate—a lady whose character and temperament had been a twenty years' tradition in the household of which I was a member, and whose reputation had followed her from one city to another. The more I read of the book the more impressed I was that this lady had been the model for Mrs. Proudie in spite of the fact that the two had practically nothing in common—nothing except the essentials that go to make up a character.
Mrs. Proudie was a plain, rather stout little woman, but my Mrs. Proudie was a tall, slight, and undoubtedly beautiful woman, even when middle-aged—the most perfect type of the traditional aristocrat. It would have been impossible for her to do any of the pettifogging of Trollope's vulgar person, in the way that Mrs. Proudie did it, but it was quite clearly understood—by no one better than the Bishop himself—that she was the ruler of the diocese. She was the mother of a family every member of which was remarkably good-looking; but Trollope laid emphasis upon the commonplace daughters of the Proudies.