Trollope’s first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran—“The best Irish story that has appeared for half a century”—Clever effects of light and shade—The story’s principal characters and their allegorical significance—Typical sketches of Irish life and institutions—The working of the spy system in detection of crime—Some specimens of Trollopian humour—The Kellys and the O’Kellys—Trollope’s second literary venture—Links with its predecessor—Its plot and some of the more interesting figures—The squire, the doctor, and the parson.
HAD Anthony Trollope’s first novel found many Irish readers before the trial in the Tralee courthouse, Isaac Butt might have based upon it some more interrogatories or sarcasms than those recorded in the last chapter, to prejudice his audience against its author. He would have found his material in the trial scene at Carrick towards the story’s close. In 1844, the year of his marriage, Trollope had been moved from his station in western Ireland to Clonmel in the south. By this time he had not only completed the plan, but had written a volume of his earliest novels. In his Autobiography, as well as in the text itself of The Macdermots, the circumstances out of which his first attempt at fiction grew have been explained by the author in words that, transferred to Mr. Thorold’s introduction,[5] need not be repeated here. The book itself had been begun in September 1843. Finished at Clonmel, it was taken by its author in 1845 to England. On this occasion he approached no publisher directly, but placed the manuscript in his mother’s hands, to do with it what she could. Her good offices secured its publication on the half-profit system by Newby in 1847.
The critics were very generally against this initial venture, which, for all practical purposes, fell indeed still-born from the Press. Naturally the author considered it a failure. Here, however, he was less than just to himself; for, if it had gone very wide of immediate success, it belonged to that class of miscarriages which nevertheless to the judicious seem as full of promise as Benjamin Disraeli’s maiden speech. The collective wisdom of the Commons would have none of that; but individual members, who were also seasoned and trustworthy judges, predicted great things for the parliamentary débutant on the strength of those rhetorical extravagances which had been laughed down. So with The Macdermots of Ballycloran. The professional reviewers had little but what was contemptuous to say about it. There were others—reviewers in their time—whose knowledge of literature generally and of Ireland in particular made their opinion worth having. These soon recognised in the book a true picture of the country, a correct insight into its people, real felicity as well as power in seizing the genius of the place and time, and bodying it forth in words. Such were William Gregory himself, whose house had really been the cradle of the story, and his friend, possessed of a literary taste not less sound than his own, Sir Patrick O’Brien, M.P. for King’s County during most of the Victorian age. These, and others equally competent to form an opinion in such a matter, did not hesitate to call Anthony Trollope’s earliest work the best Irish story that had appeared for something like half a century.
Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) had introduced readers to the first unconventional Irishman they had seen for generations. This was Thady Quirk, who, unlike his predecessors in fiction, contrived to express himself without a stage brogue, and supplied entertainment as well as, when necessary, information, though not decorating every other sentence with a bull. As a fact, Trollope probably borrowed nothing from Miss Edgeworth. The only resemblance between Castle Rackrent and The Macdermots is to be found in the truth to nature, the freshness, the simplicity, and the strength common to each. Had he, however, incurred such an obligation, he would but have followed the example of Sir Walter Scott, who, it will be remembered, attributed his own Waverley to the inspiration of the Irish authoress. About the same time that Anthony Trollope was busy on his first novel, Emily Brontë had been achieving immortality with her single romance. Wuthering Heights and The Macdermots of Ballycloran resemble each other in that they are moving and powerful rather than pleasant reading. Both writers were possessed, in a degree equally deep and overpowering, by their different subjects. Gloom pervades the atmosphere of each. But whereas the sombreness of Wuthering Heights lacks relief throughout from any gleam of humour or even light, the tragic effects of The Macdermots are heightened by the social incidents and conversational by-play that form the staple of successive pages or even chapters, amid the squalor, the misery, the sin, and the horrors following each other thick and fast as the story approaches its blood-stained climax. Reading Shakespeare with her sons, Frances Trollope had pointed out the art with which the coarse dialogue of the watchmen in Macbeth, the grave-digger’s mirthful memories of Yorick in Hamlet, and the nurse’s frivolities in Romeo and Juliet are the skilfully planned preludes that, through force of contrast, intensify the terror and melancholy of the appalling sequel. There is something not unworthy to be called Shakespearean in the transitions that mark Trollope’s first novel. The peasant marriage-junketings, the race dinner with the ball to follow, contrast with and heighten those later acts of the drama where the curtain rises on the battered and bleeding body of the villain of the piece, while his avenging murderer stands, a doomed man, at the gallows’ foot, and his victim succumbs to the long drawn-out agonies of the ordeal which had deprived her of fair fame, of home, of brother, as well as the, through all, blindly loved author of her guilt.
Trollope’s first two novels, like a few more, following after a long interval and to be examined in their proper place, dealt exclusively with Ireland and the Irish as he had seen both during the earlier years of his acquaintance with the country. The waste of gifts, of energies, and the persistent refusal profitably to employ qualities and occasions out of which fortunes might be made, had appealed to Trollope’s sense of pathos, directly he began to know the country. Long after their crazy roof-trees had ceased properly to shelter them from the wind and rain, starving families refused to exchange their homes for the large workhouses that now studded the land. The fortunes of men and women who ought to have been leaders of the middle class were melting to nothingness before the fire of failures and losses that seemed as irresistible as fate. A sort of dry-rot, as Trollope put it, moral and intellectual not less than material, seemed preying everywhere on the vitals of the people. And this in a land whose men lacked few endowments which, with due discipline and direction, would have brought them success, and whose daughters abounded in the beauty, brightness, and grace that are heaven’s best means for making homes happy and refined. Miss Edgeworth in Castle Rackrent, it has been seen, tells her story through the medium of an old dependent of the place before its fortunes had quite gone. In the opening pages of The Macdermots, Trollope employs for the same purpose the guard of the Boyle coach. His are the reminiscences out of which the novelist manufactures the fall from their high estate of a family boasting the inevitable Irish kings for their ancestors. For the rest, the sketches of place and character are from what Trollope saw with his own eyes while going his Post Office rounds, or from what he had picked up while staying with his friends at Coole Park.
The head of the household, Larry Macdermot, known only by his Christian name to his children, to his tenants, who seldom pay their rents, and to his creditors impatiently waiting to foreclose their mortgages, is a whining, helpless imbecile, in years little, if at all, past middle age, but, from the combined effects of misfortune and whisky-soaking, already in his dotage. As a younger son, Larry’s father had inherited some six hundred acres, let in small holdings, and a house recently constructed for him by a builder named Flannelly, who has, of course, a mortgage upon it. This roof, now sadly out of repair, just sheltered Larry himself, his daughter Feemy, and his son Thady, who acted as his bailiff. The young man keeps up the pretence of transacting the business of the property by passing a few hours every morning in a tumble-down room which he calls his office. Thady’s parts, like many of his qualities, are naturally good. He is neither a profligate nor a drunkard, but the poverty, squalor, and ignorance in which he has been brought up have starved the energies that, in happier surroundings, might have retrieved the fortunes of a race whose degradation, never out of his sight or mind, keeps him in a chronic condition of grievance and discontent. By a few quiet but skilful touches in Trollope’s best manner, signs in Thady of sensitiveness to the jeopardised Macdermot honour gradually reveal themselves. They mark the slow dawn of a presentiment that he is the agent chosen by fate for punishing him who has inflicted the one foul stain yet possible on the Macdermot honour.
Ballycloran itself, with its down-at-heel occupants, typifies allegorically, with sustained power and rugged picturesqueness, the agricultural and pastoral Ireland which Trollope had seen and studied in all its varieties. Less indomitably idle than his drivelling father had always been, as well as in all respects a better man, Thady might have been trained to a life of family and national service. His habitually dormant powers might at any time have been roused to vigorous, fruitful action but for the deadening and demoralising influence of his environment. Innocent and ignorant of the sins of cities, he was comparatively free from the commonest vices of the country. Father Mathew’s mission had not yet inflamed the Irish peasantry with a passion for temperance; but without any such teaching, Thady Macdermot had never fallen a victim to strong drink. His chief enemy was his own temperament, which, when we first meet him, it is clear may, in some unforeseen conditions, be suddenly and dangerously kindled into ferocious passion. Less from any words escaping him on the subject than his habitual air of sullen and silent preoccupation do we know that he thinks of little else than his own decadence from his forefathers. He had always felt that his family was sinking lower and lower daily, without finding it in him to arrest the process for the future, or move a finger in repairing the ruin of the past. Therefore he had only become more gloomy, more tyrannical. His one companion and his only resource is his pipe, his one employment to fill and refill it. Into such a lot neither pleasure nor excitement could enter, and, especially for a Celt, Trollope would have his readers feel, that way madness lies.
Thus, through the gradual development of the plot, we know instinctively that some Nemesis will declare itself on an existence which has lost the force or the desire to rise out of an atmosphere whose slow poison has stunted and deformed its growth. In its joylessness as well as in its decline from the better fortunes of earlier days, the picture of Ballycloran not only reflected the prevailing depression, agricultural and industrial, of the country, but harmonised with the lamentations from fashionable lips over the final eclipse of the gaiety of its capital. Irish society leaders of the good old days, when the sporting season did not keep them to their castles in Connaught or Ulster, used on a grand scale to keep up their houses in Fitzwilliam or Merrion Square in their native metropolis. All that had gone. Huge, overgrown, vulgar London had snuffed out select, elegant, and refined Dublin, whose stately quadrangles and picturesque avenues were deserted by their proper occupants for some spick-and-span new mansions which stared one out of countenance in Tyburnia, or some more modest tenement in a dingy angle of Mayfair. The glories of the Viceregal Court had long since begun to pale. The impatiently waited royal visits that it was hoped might bring compensation were as yet repeatedly delayed. In this way the fair city on the Liffey had been largely shorn of its attractions and pleasures, just as the rich soil of the surrounding country was impoverished by ignorance and neglect. Some hint of this formed the minor key in Trollope’s powerful and pathetic dirge over the progressive extinction of the family lamps at Ballycloran. In certain details, therefore, as well as in general idea, the Macdermots formed the microcosm of an entire people. Its genius, always feminised as Erin, is appropriately personified by the daughter of the ill-starred house, on the common ruin of whose members the curtain falls. Trollope’s Irish experiences, as has been already said, gave him some acquaintance with the Young Ireland movement, and its combined appeals to the patriotic and romantic sensibilities, as well as to the cupidity, of a populace readily lending itself to the wiles of skilled agitators.
The oratorical or literary blandishments of Smith O’Brien’s self-summoned and mercenary camp-followers caught their victims in snares exactly paralleled by the novels with which Feemy had debauched her imagination and by the appeals of the lover who wrought her overthrow. Her picture given in the first chapter of the story is a delineation of racial features not peculiar to any one epoch of Irish narrative. The girl’s temperament is that of her nation; her form and figure are the perennial attributes of those belonging to her sex and class. Here is the daughter of the Macdermots, the incarnation of her country. At the age of twenty, when the reader first sees her, Feemy was a tall, dark girl, with that bold, upright, well-poised figure so peculiarly Irish. She walked as if all the blood of the old Irish princes was in her veins. Her step, at any rate, was princely. Feemy also had large bright-brown eyes, and long, soft, shining, dark-brown hair, which was divided behind, fell over her shoulders, or was tied with ribbons. She had the well-formed nose common to all of those coming of old families; and a bright olive complexion, only the olive was a little too brown, the skin a little too coarse. Feemy’s mouth, moreover, was half an inch too long. But her teeth were white and good, and her chin was well turned, with a dimple large enough for any finger Venus might put there. In all, Feemy was a fine girl to a man not too well-accustomed to refinement. Her hands were too large and too red, but if Feemy had got gloves enough to go to Mass with, it was all she could do in that way. For the rest, she was as badly shod as gloved. She shared, therefore, with her other beautiful countrywomen an entire absence of the neatness whose attraction, did they but understand it, for men might have prevented their appearing so often as poor Feemy too usually appeared.[6] In the figure thus described, there lay energies and passions as strong as those concealed in her brother, if only any object stimulating their fair and wholesome exercise had presented itself.
“Men, some to business, some to pleasure take,
But ev’ry woman is at heart a rake.”