In this story, as in so many others of Trollope’s, the best scenes bring forward characters concerned only in a secondary way with the central narrative. Madame Gordeloup, the most enjoyable and essentially Dickensian portrait in the gallery, has made Lady Ongar’s acquaintance during her widowhood’s earliest days; small of stature, she acts in everything with quickness and decision, and flavours all her words with vehemence. Her character may be read in her eyes, whose watchful brightness makes them seem to emit sparks. At this point of the story Harry has not come into the title. Captain Archibald Clavering, Sir Hugh Clavering’s brother and heir presumptive, is in want of just such a wife as Lady Ongar might make him. Widows are proverbially wooed with more success through the good offices lent by a friend of their sex than directly. In Madame Gordeloup, with her clear brains, tactful manner, knowledge of her own sex generally, and of Lady Ongar in particular, Captain Clavering sees the exact agent for furthering his matrimonial designs. Before committing himself to Madame Gordeloup, he takes into his confidence a seasoned and resourceful club friend, Captain Boodle. There now follows a delightful succession of scenes between the highly endowed little Polish lady and Clavering’s representative, the gallant Boodle. Their only practical upshot is Archibald Clavering’s parting with £70 to the quick-witted Madame Gordeloup. The one parallel of these passages is that portion of Dombey and Son that recalls the intervention on Captain Cuttle’s behalf with Mrs. MacStinger, his landlady.
CHAPTER XII
RELIGIOUS ORTHODOXY AND OPINIONS
Anglican orthodoxy and evangelical antipathies imbibed by Trollope in childhood—His personal objections to the Low Church Party for theological as well as social reasons—His characteristic revenge on Norman Macleod for extorting from him a Good Words novel—Rachel Ray a case of “vous l’avez voulu, George Dandin”—And instead of a story for evangelical readers a spun-out satire on evangelicalism—Its plot, characters, and incidents—Nina Balatka regarded as a problem Jew story—Linda Tressel to Bavarian Puritanism much as Rachel Ray to English—Miss Mackenzie another hit at the Low Church—Its characters and plot—The Last Chronicle of Barset and The Vicar of Bullhampton—Their serious elements, as well as social photographs and occasional touches of satire against women, ever doing second thing before first and then doing the first wrong—Both novels illustrate Trollope’s views of the tragic volcano ever ready to break out from under the social crust.
THE beginnings of Anthony Trollope’s religious sympathies came from his own home. The social and moral influences that he, as a boy, unconsciously imbibed here were altogether anti-evangelical. John Wesley died in 1791, leaving behind him the contemptuously called “Methodies.” Charles Simeon, whose Cambridge disciples were scornfully known as “Sims,” lived till 1836. Between those two dates, practically indeed up to 1850, weekday religion was only in vogue among distinctively evangelical surroundings, though in 1850 Charlotte Yonge’s writings began to exercise a sort of spiritual missionary force in High Anglican households. Into a Low Church environment Anthony Trollope had not been born. His grandfathers on both sides, clergymen of the orthodox, highly respectable, and not unamiable kind, were disposed, by ancestral or aristocratic tradition, towards sacramental Anglicanism. Like the rest of Trollope’s clerical relatives, they boasted their doctrinal descent from the High Church divines of the Stuart period, and would have disapproved as much as was done by the lady who wrote The Heir of Redclyffe any violation of an habitual reserve on all religious subjects except upon devotional occasions.
With all the children of Thomas Anthony and Frances Trollope the Church catechism, with the epistles and gospels of the season, was included in the home lessons. Anything more than that would have been called evangelical or Low Church. As in other upper middle-class households of the time, so beneath the Trollope roof it became the rising generation’s fixed idea that Low-churchism must be a mark of vulgarity, a sort of spiritually parasitic growth, flourishing, alas, among the small tradesmen, whose sons were educated at some private venture schools, but happily unknown in the superior educational or social soil, which grew something better than English grammar and arithmetic. From the nursery, these notions had been confirmed in Anthony Trollope, not only by the pervading sentiments or table-talk of his elders, but by the official authority of his mother’s old friend and frequent visitor, Dr. Nott, one among the Winchester canons, whose spare figure, pale, delicate features, black gaiters reaching to the knee, spotlessly white neckcloth of many folds, and elegant Italian scholarship, suggested not a few touches for cultured and cosmopolitan Dr. Stanhope in the Barchester group. Dr. Nott, an exemplary priest of his period, had been one of the Princess Charlotte’s tutors, and had initiated the structural repairs that prevented Winchester Cathedral from falling into ruin. His periodical calls upon Mrs. Trollope became the occasion for an examining review of the children—were they good, obedient, truthful, and industrious? When answering, one day, these questions, Anthony and his elder brother Tom volunteered the statement that, if they were not quite everything which could be wished, it was because of their nurse Farmer being an Anabaptist. Such heterodoxy, Dr. Nott admitted, might be deplorable, but did not, he added, absolve the children from the duty of subordination. This was resented by the two brothers as a snub, and intensified their disgust with schismatics, including Low Church of every degree.
In 1837 Mrs. Trollope’s bitter attack upon evangelicalism in The Vicar of Wrexhill deepened still further her children’s loathing of “Methodies” and all whose religious faith did not conform to a gentlemanlike Anglicanism. How these preferences and prejudices coloured Barchester Towers and the novels that followed, it has been already pointed out. Not that Trollope grew up into an irreligious or other than God-fearing man. It was indeed to some extent the intellectual man’s contempt for the crass, ignorant infidelity of the time that, as years went on, deepened his respect for genuine piety in all its manifestations, and made his strictures upon certain of its unseasonable and mischievous phases so different as to tone and spirit from the satire of Dickens upon the same phenomena. His turn of mind was not fervently devotional, but for spiritual as well as social reasons he disliked Churchmen of Mr. Slope’s variety. His great ground of quarrel with evangelicalism was its tendency to divorce conduct from religion. The Mosaic law and ritual were confessedly so exacting as to be suited only for the earliest stage of the Divine revelation. They were superseded entirely by Christianity, independent, in its pure and early form, of all externals, but progressively overloaded with superstitious ceremonies and doctrines, some of which the Protestant Reformation was said to have abrogated. Evangelicalism, however, with its ruthless insistence on a series of psychological experiences and of emotional developments, as the indispensable tests of genuine conversion and effectual deliverance from the wrath to come, instituted a kind of subjective ordeal, in comparison of which the yoke of Hebrew formalism was easy and the burden of Popish ritual light.
A man could know for certain whether he had or had not performed the religious acts enjoined on him by his spiritual superiors; but could not, in the nature of things, be equally sure of having realised all the ghostly sensations, and of having exactly attained to that frame of mind necessary, as he was told, for salvation. The first stage in the process prescribed for all penitents by the evangelical doctors, the being brought under conviction of sin, might seem simple; but how long was that phase of agony to last, or, if the painful experience were not followed by a consciousness of peace and pardon, did it mean that the Divine wrath was not to be appeased? About this the evangelical teachers shrank from committing themselves, with the result, as it seemed to Trollope, that the newly wakened soul must be left indefinitely to torment itself with doubts whether its failure to pass, in the orthodox order, from distress and disturbance to peace and joy, might not imply guilt beyond all hope of pardon. At the best these disabling agitations could not fail, while inflicting torment on those who suffered them, to disqualify human beings for the performance of their daily duties to each other, as well as to make religion itself, not an invigorating inspiration, but a paralysing terror.
In a word, evangelicalism, as conceived of by Trollope, puzzled, perplexed, and irritated him. Of the evangelical teachers, with the shibboleths they parade as well as the stultifying inconsistencies these imply, he would say, “Your profession does not make you a Christian. For that, you must act like one. Yet,” he added, “we are told good works, though the test of religion, are also a snare, and certainly make for perdition if performed by those not in a state of grace or merely as moral duties.” “You tell me,” I once heard Trollope say to an evangelical monitor perhaps almost old enough to have sat under Grimshaw or Romaine, “that, in effect, virtue becomes vice if its practical pursuit be not sanctified by a mystical motive not within the understanding of all. Such a theory, I retort, can in its working have only one of two results—the immorality of antinomianism, or a condition of perplexity and confusion which must drive men from religion in disgust and despair.”
Barchester Towers contained Trollope’s earliest embodiment of Low-churchmanship in Mr. Slope, with his baneful influence on Mrs. Proudie. Primarily the Barchester bishopess personified the tendency of her sex to mistake worry for work and fuss for energy. In simple truth, the Established Church was to Trollope, from his pervadingly official point of view, a branch of the Civil Service, which could not properly be carried on if irregular influences and emotions or imperfectly qualified persons were allowed to have a voice in it. Hence the famous caricature of the she ecclesiastic in 1857.
In the year now reached by this narrative, 1863, Trollope renewed his attack upon the religionists he detested, after a fashion and under circumstances that give to the book Rachel Ray a genuine biographical significance. The genesis of Rachel Ray is indeed throughout a revelation of its author’s idiosyncrasies, shown perhaps even more in the facts connected with its publication than in the unrelieved bitterness of its sectarian strictures. Trollope, at the time of its publication being arranged for, was in the full tide of his success and fame. He could make his own terms with editors or publishers. Good Words, when—from 1862 to 1872—conducted by a Presbyterian minister, Norman Macleod, though in no sense a denominational organ, could not afford to fly in the face of evangelical prejudices. Naturally Trollope understood this so well that when applied to by its editor for a story, he deprecated the offer on the ground of his not being a “goody-goody” writer, as well as of his inability or indisposition to suit his sentiments or his language to Macleod’s public. In reply to those objections, the novelist received from the editor the promise of a free hand and the assurance that no attempt to gag him should be made. Trollope therefore reluctantly accepted the engagement, and proceeded to fulfil it in a temper deeply resenting the pressure that had been placed upon him. “Vous l’avez voulu, George Dandin;”[24] caveat emptor: on such principles Trollope made the bargain and set to work. For, if Good Words would not have the novel, a forfeit could be squeezed out and another publisher found. This is what actually happened. The author’s misgivings were fulfilled to the letter. The magazine manager sent back to the author the manuscript, accompanied by the fine, and the book found its publishers in Chapman and Hall.