How, after all these years, will the novel strike the reader to-day? Trollope affected to see the specific reasons of the rejection by Macleod in its praise of dancing as a healthy and innocent recreation. Nothing of the sort. Nor, it is certain, would any controversial passages, however little in harmony with Presbyterian ideas, have made Macleod pronounce it impossible. As it was, the story served Trollope as the vehicle, less of his own notions about spiritual truth and falsehood than of his inveterate and violent antipathies to certain manifestations of the religious spirit in individuals and in daily conduct. For the first time since the Slope episodes in Barchester Towers, he saw and used his opportunity for letting the evangelicals have it. All that they did or thought, and the most typical members of their class, were depicted with not less personal bitterness against their religious faith than was displayed, in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by the historian Gibbon towards the primitive Christians as the great disturbing and anti-social force of the second and third centuries. Wherever evangelicals are found or whithersoever these pietists go, they bring with them discomfort, suspicion, and ill-will. They may not be chargeable with those sins of the passions that are the infirmities of manlier natures. They therefore hold themselves entitled to unlimited indulgence in scandal-mongering, backbiting, and other social devices for gratifying their sense of power, by making all those about them uncomfortable.
In the course of his sojourns at or near Bath, Cheltenham, and other West of England resorts, Trollope had personally experienced and resented the widespread ascendency, social and political, of the Low Church Party. For that reason the scene of Rachel Ray is laid in that South Devon district which, within Trollope’s recollection, had been torn by ecclesiastical feuds arising from differences about the costume proper to be worn during the conduct of divine service. This suggested to Thomas Hood his clever lines, less well-known now perhaps than they deserve to be:
“I see there is a pretty stir, about things down at Exeter;
Whether a clergyman should wear a black dress or a white dress.
For me I neither know nor care whether a clergyman should wear a black dress or a white dress.
I have a grievance of my own, a wife that preaches in her gown,
And lectures in her night dress.”
The local quarrels thus satirised by the humorist, much and widely talked about at the time, long left the clerical atmosphere of the neighbourhood in a highly electrical state. While local animosities were at their height, Trollope had been on Post Office duty in the south-west of England. In the Baslehurst of the story, and in other Exeter suburbs, he describes the points at which, for the moment, evangelicalism had triumphed. Here, during the fifties, he had his veritable originals: the severe, imperious Puritan, Mrs. Prime, and the younger sister Rachel whom she bullies, living with their mother Mrs. Ray, a sweet-tempered, gentle, loving woman, endowed with a still attractive person, having much in common with her second born, Rachel, and, like her, somewhat tyrannised over by the elder of her two daughters. The husband survived by Mrs. Ray is a good specimen of Trollope’s terse character-sketching. He managed the property of dean and chapter, knew the rights and wrongs of prebendaries, minor canons, vicars choral, and even choristers. He had, however, passed away long before the story opens, and is only mentioned to point the contrast of the widow’s earlier orthodox clerical surroundings with the irregular spiritual influences that now agitate her home.
When we make this lady’s acquaintance, there is in progress, beneath her roof, a pitiless attempt on the part of the elder sister, Dorothea, by rigorous evangelical discipline, to crush worldliness out of the younger, her mother’s favourite, who gives the title to the novel. A long course of Calvinistic bullying has almost broken Mrs. Ray’s spirit. To that tyranny of soul Miss Ray has never quite surrendered herself. Its shadows fall, however, heavily enough over her young life; the iron of its terrors and threats had begun to penetrate her inmost being, when Luke Rowan’s appearance flashes a ray of hope upon her overcast life. The new-comer to Baslehurst is the partner in the brewery, hitherto entirely in the hands of Mr. Tappitt. The Tappitts, at whose house Miss Ray first meets Rowan, fervently admire the Low Church clergyman Mr. Prong. This pastor resembles the Barchester Mr. Slope, not only in being generally objectionable, but in the same mercenary attachment whether to Mrs. Ray herself or to her widowed daughter, Mrs. Prime, as Slope conceived to Mrs. Bold.
The incidents of the story naturally grow out of Rachel Ray’s courtship by the latest addition to the brewery staff, less welcomed by the Tappitt circle than tolerated as a worldly intruder whose salvation is rather a matter of prayer than of belief. Doleful indeed are the prognostications of the results likely to follow their acquaintance called forth by Rowan’s earliest tête-à-tête with Miss Ray. This, really the opening scene in the action of the story, gives Trollope scope for the humour that alone redeems from failure a story as painful as The Kellys and the O’Kellys, without the pathetic power and witty relief that have made his second novel worthier of republication than Rachel Ray.
Before passing to another book with which Rachel Ray tempts comparison, something must be said about the new experiment of which Linda Tressel formed the second product. Change of scene, of characters, and of interest, as well as anonymity of authorship, in the year of his departure from the Post Office, 1867, marked Trollope’s dual venture. Each owed something to the stimulating and instructive society in which Trollope found himself as the guest of the famous editor and publisher to whom he had been introduced years earlier by John Forster, but whom he scarcely knew well till the Scotch tours that Post Office duties or holiday recreation called him to make during the nineteenth century’s second half. In the case of both stories, also, the skill with which the local colour was laid on struck all critics, not less than the truth to life with which the essentially German characters, with their social and moral backgrounds, were depicted.
Nina Balatka came first of the two in 1867. Its scene is laid in Prague, the old Bohemian capital. Here there exists a large Jewish colony. Among its members, the distinction between Hebrew and Gentile is marked with such depth and bitterness that an intermarriage between the two races is considered degrading to each. The girl who gives her name to the story, a broken-down tradesman’s daughter, and the niece of a rich merchant Zamenoy, has given her heart to an Israelite engaged in commerce, Anton Trendellsohn. This suitor, in his many dealings with old Balatka, Nina’s father, has shown himself a considerate creditor. The roof beneath which Nina lives is legally due to him for her father’s debts. Trendellsohn, however, has not even pressed for the title deeds. These would establish his right to the property, but are now in other Jewish hands, those of Zamenoy. The lover’s generosity and self-sacrificing devotion to Nina are accompanied by all the suspicion of his race and by a characteristic resentment of the overreaching practised, as he considers, on him. The Zamenoys, representing the evil genius of the story, are only bent on breaking off the engagement of the two lovers. As the first step to that end they contrive to secrete the title deeds, now wanted by Trendellsohn, in his sweetheart’s desk. Next they tell Trendellsohn that the girl he loves has appropriated them. A search is made, the documents are found in the place described by the Zamenoys, and Trendellsohn believes that he has been fooled. The lovers part. About the same time old Balatka dies. Deserted alike by the man to whom she has given her heart and by her rich relations, who have gone over to the Zamenoys, Nina resolves on suicide. With Trendellsohn at length, love proves a stronger motive than greed. A messenger from him arrives bidding Nina return to her place in his heart. Thus, happily, in marriage, ends the story, really remarkable for clever analysis of motive in the conflict with the essentially Hebraic Trendellsohn between the passion for a woman and for real estate.
The situation had the undoubted merit of originality as well as of being artistically presented in a singularly suitable environment immemorially associated with congenial traditions. The story’s success in magazine shape was afterwards heightened by its anonymity, and by the extent to which the studied air of secrecy enveloping the composition and all to do with it piqued curiosity. In London, at any rate, the first to solve the mystery was R. H. Hutton of The Spectator, not only the subtlest literary critic of his time, but an omnivorous reader of novels, with an instinct for discovering in their most commonplace occurrences and least likely characters a new revelation of their author’s personality and mental habit. He had already watched and commented on Trollope’s evolution from the domestic to the cosmopolitan stage. He knew Trollope’s turns of expression and leading ideas about the human combat of interest with feeling from his social conversation as well as his books. Dining at a table near Laurence Oliphant’s at the Athenæum, with no other companion than the last chapter of Nina Balatka, he received and soon afterwards uttered, the inspiration: “The ‘great unknown’ of the Blackwood story is Anthony Trollope.” Intimate with the Blackwoods though he was, Oliphant was not fully assured of the facts; “I believe,” he said oracularly, “they are satisfied with its reception.” Such proved to be the case. Although, as John Blackwood put it, not selling, it was telling. Blackwood’s London manager, one of Trollope’s Garrick intimates, received orders from Edinburgh to encourage Trollope, with “the author of Nina Balatka” for his pen name, to let the Magazine have another novel from his pen.
This second book, by the title of Linda Tressel, began its course some five years after the publication of Rachel Ray, and introduced its readers to an interest, personal or spiritual, of much the same sort. The locality had changed from Exeter to Nuremberg. Here, at The Red House, lived the eponymous heroine in charge of her aunt. This relative, Frau Staubach, however well-meaning or conscientious, lacked the gentleness, the grace, and the feminine charm generally, of her English prototype, the mother with whom Rachel Ray passed her time. Yet, though in a less degree than the Devonshire widow, who sat under Mr. Prong, the petticoated pietist of Nuremberg is a kindly woman at heart. Only the iron creed, which makes her whole being so grievous a burden to herself and to those about her, constrains her to see wickedness in joy; in every form of pleasure a species of profligacy; in all love for children a pernicious indulgence endangering their eternal welfare; and, in every woman, Satan’s easy prey, until guarded by a middle-aged, respectable, unlovable and austere husband. Such a one she has found for her niece in her lodger, Peter Steinmarc. He has the recommendation of being small-minded, selfish, ugly, and so just the man destined to make unhappy for life a bright, handsome, high-spirited girl, such as her own young ward. In the English story, the destined victim, after a comparatively short captivity, escapes her doom, though not before her whole nature has suffered from the ordeal. The spirit of Rachel Ray’s Bavarian sister of misfortune is not easily worn out; but, eventually, her spirit is broken, and she is proclaimed the bride-elect of the odious consort selected by her aunt. At the psychological moment, however, Death, the deliverer, steps in; poor Linda dies before being called to put on her wedding dress. Her remorseless aunt watches her slow departure from life without pity or tears, but in a spirit of half-vindictive satisfaction with the order of fate. After Linda Tressel has breathed her last, Frau Staubach, with all the self-complacency in the world, relapses into a chronic state of puritanical morosity, more dark and odious than that which had been so far her normal condition. In this novelette there are none of the humorous flashes constantly enlivening Rachel Ray. Its monotony of unrelieved sadness becomes fatal. One can scarcely, therefore, be surprised that Blackwood did not press its author for further anonymous ventures.