By which familiar couplet Pope of course meant nothing more than that the essentially feminine and, it may be, entirely blameless appetite for enjoyment, for the most part only a love of change, is no more eradicable from the sex than love of power.
This maiden scion of a decayed stock rebelled with the whole strength of her being, not so much against the poverty or the meanness as against the intolerably dull sameness of life in the jerry-built tenement, now hardly fifty years old. The mortgage on this, held by its constructor Flannelly, places at his mercy the doomed remnants of those who had once owned the estate. Something has been already said about the popular Irish murmurs at the waning splendours of the Viceregal Court. The continuance of many material abuses might have been acquiesced in almost without complaint if Dublin Castle had become once more the living and shining centre of a social system ablaze with hospitalities, and communicating a sense of importance, stir, and of quickly circulating capital, such as would have gratified even those excluded from its entertainments. The time nominally taken by Trollope for his story is the nineteenth century’s third decade. He himself, we have seen, did not reach Ireland till 1841, and drew only what he actually saw. Nor, since his arrival, had anything happened to betray him into anachronism.
In the fifties, not less than they had done in the forties, the poets, prophets, preachers, and teachers of The Nation still expatiated in glowing terms on the good time coming when, with the aid of republican France, Ireland should receive from the statesmen who were her sons the glories of a new birth, and Dublin should once again be as it was when it had its own parliament sitting in St. Stephen’s Green. Like expectations had been encouraged in Feemy by the literature she loved. With the help of the saints and of luck, her novelists had taught her that a lover, brave, handsome, gallant, and sufficiently well-to-do, who would think of nothing else but pouring silver, gold, and precious stones into his sweetheart’s lap, would yet appear to her at some appointed time not known. For such a prospect she had fitted herself with some accomplishments. She could play on an old spinet which had belonged to her mother, she had made herself a good dancer, and found herself lifted into another sphere when, with the help of the music and the movement, she forgot in her partner’s arms the cares, the meanness, and the gloom of the family hearthside.
When alone, however, she still fed her fancy with the cheap, ill-printed, trashy, and mischievous books that were to the Irish girlhood in her day what the penny novelette and the sixpenny shocker have, since her time, become to readers of her age, sex, and condition on both sides of St. George’s Channel. While Feemy’s town sisters might have been in raptures over the broadsheets wherein an earthly paradise was promised by writers who addressed with equal skill the romantic taste of the kitchen and the political passions of the mob, Feemy was giving her eyes, her heart and soul to The Mysterious Assassin, as her only refuge from Thady Macdermot’s everlasting talk about potatoes, oats, pigs, and from the dread, darkening the household like a cloud, that, impatient for principal as well as interest, Mr. Joe Flannelly of Carrick-on-Shannon might come down upon Ballycloran, to make himself master of the place and all within it.
Well would it have been for the Macdermots had their fair representative sought no further distraction from her dulness than the trivial and vulgar reading that, whatever its faults, was not calculated to do more lasting harm to the reader than was received by town labourers and rural peasants from the tawdry sedition mongers of Gavan Duffy’s literary staff. Writing in the earlier forties, Trollope economised his approval of most English measures for reforming Irish abuses. Even when not bad in themselves, those expedients might be corrupted by the human agents to which they were entrusted. The establishment of an Irish constabulary force dates from Liverpool’s administration and Wellington’s Lord-Lieutenancy in 1823. Changes in that body continued to be made till the consolidation of the various Acts connected with the subject had for its sequel Sir Robert Peel’s establishment in 1836 of the Irish Constabulary. Just a generation later, at Queen Victoria’s command, this body became known by its present name, the Royal Irish Constabulary. The duties of this imperial force, from the first, included certain civil services not imposed upon policemen of the United Kingdom. Such are the yearly collection of agricultural statistics, the management of the decennial census, the conduct by auction sales of goods taken under distress warrants, the inspection of weights and measures, the practical administration of the Food, Drugs, and Explosives Acts. The Irish Constabulary, too, are charged with the prevention of smuggling and of illicit distillation. The officers of this force are now chosen by Civil Service examinations. Vacancies for district inspectors are filled, one half by cadets, and one half by selected constables of exceptional merit.
To this body in its earlier days, as reconstituted by Peel, belonged the evil genius of Trollope’s first novel, Myles Ussher. Captain Ussher was his local title; for the revenue police were at that time organised as a military force. He had of course received his appointment without submission to any educational test. The natural son of a wealthy landed proprietor in Ulster, he owed his appointment entirely to family influence. He could read, write, knew something of figures, and had once learned, but had long since entirely forgotten, some Latin grammar.
There are touches in the description of this man showing that the novelist had profited by the Ethics, which, to quote Trollope’s words to the writer, “at least helped me here, though they had not done so in the Oxford scholarship examination for which I read them.” For Ussher’s valour was the spurious courage that comes of ignorance, and arises in equal parts from animal spirits and from not having yet experienced the evil effects of danger rather than from real capabilities of enduring its consequences. In other words, we are told, never having been hit in a duel, he would have no hesitation in fighting one; never having had a bad fall on horseback, he was a bold rider; never having had his head broken in a row, he would readily go into one. To pain, if it were not absolutely disabling, he was indifferent, because, not having yet suffered its acute form, he lacked the imagination to make him realise the possibility of sometimes experiencing it to such a degree. This kind of courage is shrewdly declared by Trollope to be that by far the most generally met with, as well as fully sufficient for the life Captain Ussher had to lead. The quality that chiefly gave Ussher some vogue with the better classes of his district, was his unfailing self-confidence and unconcealed belief in his ability, whether in war or love, to carry through any purpose he had taken up. His keen, calculating Irish brain had taught him the universal readiness to accept men at their own valuation of themselves. Acting on that principle, he had created for himself an impression, strong everywhere but especially among women, of being irresistible in whatever he might take up, and of having received from fate itself a guarantee against failure, whether in things of business or of the heart. Add to all this that, in a country where a little money goes a long way, Ussher contrived to be always supplied with ready cash.
What wonder therefore if in this favourite of destiny Feemy’s novel-nourished, romance-excited, and ill-regulated fancy saw the realisation of her fondest visions? Of course the mounted policeman, with the graceful seat on his horse, the uniform which became his handsome figure so well, became to her one of the knightly figures with whom the writers that she loved had peopled her imagination. And then his conversation, resembling Othello’s, about “most disastrous chances, moving accidents by flood and field, and hair-breadth escapes” in the regions where his duty lay, “of rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven.” Feemy probably had never read Shakespeare, or she might have learned wisdom from Desdemona. A sense of Æschylean fate, no more to be shunned than softened, runs through this tragedy, whose closing acts are not without the strength and pathos of Dickens in Oliver Twist, and at some points touch the Shakespearean level. Feemy’s father may not, indeed, have loved Ussher, or even “oft invited him.” But not on that account a less frequent or warmly received guest, he rode from his barracks, three miles distant, at Mohill, to Ballycloran to pass almost daily a whole morning or evening. Captain Ussher’s local unpopularity as a Protestant and a remorselessly vigilant official was nothing to his disadvantage in Feemy’s eyes. She saw in it only a proof of her lover’s devotion to his duty, and of his heroic determination of not flinching from any risk of life or limb in fulfilling the obligations he had taken upon himself.
The one member of the Ballycloran household who sees through the policeman’s designs upon the girl is Pat Brady, Thady Macdermot’s counsellor, rent-collector, and factotum. Even Thady, but for hampering considerations, would not lack the spirit to repel Ussher’s advances, and by doing so secure his sister’s safety. What, however, he mentally asks, can he do? The exciseman, on the strength of a mere vague suspicion, is not to be forbidden the house. That at best would only provoke his sister’s indignant disgust. Thady therefore remains inactive, and the only effect of the vague hints and irresponsible suggestions received from different quarters is to intensify a silent, sullen hatred of the man. That, henceforth, by a series of slow degrees—the description of which is Trollope’s earliest exhibition of high literary art—becomes his ruling passion. Not that, even yet, he has in his heart doomed Ussher to death for his intrusions upon the fallen family’s hospitality, and for the scandalous gossip that is raised against Feemy. Till the final stage comes within sight, Thady’s detestation is for the most part speechless, except when the accident of Ussher’s voice or presence rouses the young man to a passing fit of uncontrollable fury. About this time Ussher made a professional coup which, while more than ever concentrating upon himself the ill-will of the district at large, and in particular of Thady Macdermot, showed such adroitness and such contempt of personal danger combined as to deepen poor Feemy’s admiration of her hero. A wretch named Cogan, a Government spy, disclosed all the secrets of the trade in illicit potheen: the men who chiefly conducted it, and the places where the run spirits were to be found. The pauper peasants had been driven to this traffic because it offered the only chance of avoiding starvation.
Ussher’s official triumph in running the “potheen men” to earth leads directly up to the catastrophe. It secures the policeman’s promotion, but inflames to madness his detestation by Thady, who, little better than a peasant himself, sympathises with the peasantry that Ussher is hunting down. Feemy, on the other hand, idolising her lover’s intrepidity, ignores the local misery that is wrought by his daring devotion to duty. She thus unconsciously widens the gulf between her brother and herself. Trollope’s Post Office discipline, hardening his sensibilities, and constantly giving a fresh edge to his natural acumen, fitted him successfully to investigate in all its workings the contraband spirits trade and the spy system used for its detection. This fact gave more than an ordinary novelist’s value to what he had to say on the subject. Among the lower classes, two typical specimens of the human degradation it works are seen in Joe Reynolds and Pat Brady. Reynolds is a mere desperado, waging a truceless war with the world and with law. Brady has never been reduced to Reynolds’ straits for money and food; indeed the occupation alone of squeezing arrears from the Macdermot tenantry has always placed him a little above the dread of starvation. Will the young master of Ballycloran be induced, through Brady as the tool of Reynolds, to join the “boys” in exacting reprisals for the harshness meted out to them by the law?