But when and where did one ever find the woman who willingly acted on the precept?
This much by way of putting the reader in personal touch with Trollope’s ideas when he set to work on Can You Forgive Her? That novel was the product of the same period as The Small House at Allington; its monthly parts began while The Cornhill was still unfolding the tale of the wrongs suffered at Crosbie’s hands by one of Trollope’s nicest and most guileless maidens. Except for the jilting common to both, Can You Forgive Her? presents a complete contrast to The Small House at Allington. Among the novels belonging to the earlier sixties, it has more of kinship to Orley Farm than to any other. Its comedy is quite as often and as suddenly changed for melodrama, or even tragedy. Indeed, throughout these stories of the period now under consideration, one of Trollope’s leading ideas is that the thinnest possible partition divides human contact in the most civilised society from primitive savagery, and that the withdrawal of certain artificial restraints may mean a relapse into the reign of crime.
It was of course a mere coincidence, but the interrogative title, Can You Forgive Her? reminds one that in 1859, five years earlier, there had appeared a novel by another author also propounding a question on its first page. This was Bulwer-Lytton’s What Will He do with It? The individuals about whom that inquiry is made equal in variety and multitude those whom Trollope’s readers are asked whether they can pardon. Both books, however, beyond this, resemble each other in the adroit connection of the central plot with the several underplots and the personal relations borne by the characters in the one to those in the other. It is an old story told by Trollope himself long before he put it into his autobiography how the movement of Can You Forgive Her? was originally designed for stage representation and put into a play, The Noble Jilt, never acted or accepted. More closely analytical of feminine motive, conduct, and ethics than anything he had yet written, Can You Forgive Her? forms a link uniting Trollope’s purely social stories with those which were political as well. Now, for the first time, the shadow of the august party chief as well as social Grand Seignior, the Duke of Omnium, throws itself over the incidents and personages so far as these belong to politics. One of the reasons for their unfavourable comparison with the Barchester company is that they come after it. But of this presently. To-day Can You Forgive Her? acquires a new interest from the fact of its showing its author as the pioneer of the problem novel, the point of which generally comes to this—how to act in the conflict between passion or self-indulgence and the laws of good behaviour. Semiramis, an Uebermensch of the earlier world, solved it in one way, Libito felicito in sua legge. A gallant French dragoon officer, discussing the matter with a decadent, suggested another solution. “Je trouve ça tout simple, c’était son devoir.” Trollope’s way out of the difficulty is that, in the long run, fortune and fate show themselves on the side of good and true hearts. Consequently, these can afford to wait upon events. From representative English girls of the upper class and grass-widows, to stateswomen and potential duchesses, every one has more or less, and generally more, to be forgiven.
The various lady schemers had, according to Trollope the fashion of the sex, laid their plans with what they congratulated themselves must prove an infallible ingenuity. Alas! upon all such projects rests some blight of miscarriage. Time, place, opportunity, and character, all in turn, have been inaccurately judged. The organising faculty and providential power on which the leading ladies pique themselves would, but for certain happy accidents, have resulted in misadventure or downright disaster. Hence throughout this story, beneath a surface of feminine scheming or social frivolity, there runs a tragic undercurrent, and the novel, as a whole, formed a satire, in some passages of a very lurid kind, upon the shallowness of woman’s overrated wit and the hollowness of her worldly wisdom. The dramatis personæ of both sexes are perpetually heading for the precipice that means ruin. Will they, is the question the reader finds himself constantly asking, by some better influence be brought into the pathway of redemption?
The she of the opening chapter, whom you are to forgive if you can (only one, by the way, of the many needing forgiveness), belonged to a family some of whose various members suggest more than an accidental resemblance to the ancestral Trollopes. So, at least, it is with Squire Vavasor, Vavasor Hall, Westmorland. This hot-headed, ignorant, honest old gentleman shuts himself up in his northern home because it is there alone that parliamentary reform has had no power to alter the old political arrangements. His younger son, John Vavasor, like Anthony Trollope’s father, came up to London as a barrister early in life, only to fail, or at best to make a bare livelihood. He differs, however, from his obvious prototype, the unsuccessful agriculturist of Harrow Weald, in finding a wife with a competence as well as rich in aristocratic connections. The relatives of this lady, née Alice Macleod, are still debating whether they shall or shall not condone her indiscretion, when she dies, leaving the widower with a little girl, her namesake, on whom exclusively her fortune is settled. This daughter grows into the heroine round whom the interest of the story centres.
John Vavasor and his daughter Alice have a comfortable house in Queen Anne Street; though the father, living much at the old university club, seldom dines at home, except when he entertains. Other stories produced during the Can You Forgive Her? period, and presently to be noticed, contained much satire upon the religious school whose manifestation Trollope disapproved, or whose sincerity he suspected. Even in Can You Forgive Her? there occur on an early page some words uncomplimentary to evangelicalism, as well as perhaps intended to suggest that Alice Vavasor might have less to be forgiven if she had been brought up in a different spiritual atmosphere, for her aunt, Lady Macleod, widow of Sir Archibald Macleod, K.C.B., suffered from two of the most serious drawbacks to goodness that afflict a lady. A Calvinistic Sabbatarian in religion, she was, in worldly matters a devout believer in the high rank of her noble relatives. She could worship a youthful marquis, though he lived a life that would disgrace a heathen among heathens. She could condemn men and women to eternal torments for listening to profane music in the park on Sunday. Yet, as Trollope emphasises, she was a good woman, giving a great deal away, owing no man anything, and striving to love her neighbours. Then she bore much pain with calm unspeaking endurance, and lived in trust of a better world. In the case of her so-called niece, but in reality her cousin, she had been one of the family commission responsible for Alice’s nurture from her infancy.
Other circumstances were, or had been, equally little favourable, as Trollope would have one understand, to the formation of Alice Vavasor’s character. She had not long been out of the nursery before, notwithstanding Lady Macleod’s remonstrances, she was sent to a foreign boarding school. After that, she lived for a time with her strait-laced, narrow-minded aunt at Cheltenham. Her years there were passed in a chronic state of rebellion against her surroundings. When she could stand them no longer, she arranged with her father that the two should keep house together in London. That experiment had been going on so long that in the opening chapter Alice has passed her twenty-fourth birthday. Father and daughter, beneath the same roof, lived independently of each other. Alice’s absolute control of the fortune inherited from her mother makes her the mistress not only of the house but of herself. She does the honours of her father’s table on the understanding that when she sits at its head no guests connected with the peerage, on the one hand, or the Low Church party, on the other, are to be present. Had she further stipulated for a sprinkling of Anglican bishops and ambassadors, she would no doubt have had her way. In a word, this young lady’s will had never been crossed, nor had she any opportunity for consulting the preferences of others till the particular love affair with the suitor, pressed on her by the whole family, and indeed at the beginning favoured by herself, John Grey. He, though her first formally betrothed, was not her earliest declared lover; for her cousin George Vavasor had won her temporary affections before John Grey’s turn came. From that entanglement, however, she was supposed to have freed herself some two years in advance of her introduction into these pages. Lady Macleod’s praises of the Cambridgeshire squire, now her husband-elect, set the bride that was to be on doubting whether he was suited to her. The young lady even asked herself whether she should not make the amende to George Vavasor for his dismissal by again taking him into favour.
To that end is working George Vavasor’s sister Kate, who finds it consistent with her sincere friendship for Alice to promote her unscrupulous and impecunious brother’s suit with all the unconscionable ingenuity of her sex. The latest device in that direction is a Swiss tour. On this George is to escort the two ladies, his sister Kate and his cousin Alice. From this event grow the chief incidents and complications, serious, or farcical or both together. Already the young lady, as masterful as she is capricious, has broken John Grey to harness by ignoring his reasonable feeling that if the two ladies need a cavalier for the conventional, perfectly safe and easy Swiss round, they would find one more appropriate in himself than in a possible rival. The nephew and destined heir of a wealthy Cumbrian squire, George Vavasor has expectations, but not the command of ready money necessary for his parliamentary ambitions and his general habits of life. Alice Vavasor’s inherited income would supply him with the requisite funds. The varying fortunes of the two lovers, played off by Alice against each other through most of the chapters, are diversified by sketches of George Vavasor’s doings in politics, or in the hunting-field. And these are alternated with various episodes testing or illustrating the unselfish devotion of John Grey.
While occupied with describing in his novel George Vavasor’s return to Chelsea, Trollope himself was looking out for a parliamentary seat. How it fared with him in that quest will presently be related with all due and new details. Meanwhile, it may be said in passing that the comic business between George Vavasor and the parliamentary agents, Scruby and Grimes, is taken literally from all that Trollope went through himself. Equally autobiographical are the Roebury Club passages, with the entire account of George Vavasor’s hunting arrangements and runs over the Midland and East Anglian pastures. A brewer or two, a banker, a would-be fast attorney, a sporting literary gentleman, and a young unmarried M.P., without any particular home of his own in the country, formed the Roebury Club, whose headquarters were at the King’s Head or Roebury Inn. There they had their own wine-closet, and led a jolly life. George Vavasor himself did not regularly belong to this society; he could not but see something of its members out of doors, while they, on their part, criticised him after no complimentary fashion. “He’s a bad sort of fellow,” said Grindley, “he’s so uncommonly dark. He was heir to some small property in the north, but he lost every shilling of that when he was in the wine trade.” “You’re wrong there,” commented Maxwell, “he made a pot of money in it, and had he stuck to it, he would have been a rich man.” Such is a fair specimen of Trollope’s efforts to lighten the dark shadows cast on his pages by George Vavasor’s forbidding personality and sinister career.
But these portions of the story are provided with a more sustained and effectively humorous contrast in Mrs. Greenow and her courtship by the military adventurer Captain Bellfield, and the well-to-do Norfolk farmer, Cheesacre. The widowed and well-dowered relative of the Vavasors shares her younger kinswoman’s contempt for the conventional advice about being off with the old love before being on with the new. Here and there, she suggests a family likeness to the widow Barnaby in the story of that name, written by Trollope’s mother. That does not prevent the husbandless lady and the two competitors for her hand being really original creations. How the rival pursuers of the widow’s purse and person, with laughter-moving ingenuity, try to outwit each other and to commend each his own unselfish devotion to the lady; how she in her turn sees through both, fools them to her heart’s content, and, womanlike, finally takes the military scamp, is told by Trollope with a humour for which he owed little to his mother, and in which he was excelled by none of his contemporaries. Mrs. Greenow herself, like the others, may need forgiveness, but will be at once unanimously pardoned for her very innocent flirtations.