Before breaking the entirely new ground on which he had for some time set his thoughts, Trollope produced at the end of the sixties a little group of novels in his earlier and happiest vein. The first of these, Miss Mackenzie (1865), forms something of a link between the narrative attacks on the religionism that was his bugbear and some at least among the social novels which followed it. In Miss Mackenzie the only clergyman drawn at full length, Jeremiah Maguire, is one among the several candidates for the heroine’s hand. He would have fared better in his wooing with more of the gentleman about him and less of an unmistakable squint. His chief rivals are Mr. Rubb, the business partner of Miss Mackenzie’s surviving brother, socially poor Maguire’s inferior, and the lady’s cousin, a poor baronet’s son, John Ball, whose suit eventually succeeds. At her first appearance, the lady who thus becomes a bride is thirty years old, has an income of £800 a year, and, by the death of her elder brother, for whom she kept house, has been left alone in the world. The chief feature in the story is the Rev. Jeremiah Maguire’s pertinacity in the effort to secure the sufficiently well-dowered lady. In that endeavour he has the support of the religious set at Littlebath, whose leaders are the Rev. and Mrs. Stumfold, and in which Miss Todd and Miss Baker, first heard of in The Bertrams, reappear.
Much of this, at first amusing enough, is so spun out as soon to become monotonous and gradually to lose all its point. To begin with, the satire lacked the merit of originality, and lost all freshness long before Trollope served up in Rachel Ray a réchauffé of the Slope passages from Barchester Towers. Dickens, indeed, had been the first (1836) to treat the public with its taste in the Stiggins of Pickwick, the predecessor of the Bleak House Chadband (1853). In Dickens’ hands it was good business enough, and served for a fresh spice to his fooling. Trollope, however, professed to delineate, not only the superficial humours associated with the graver subjects, but some at least among the spiritual or, at any rate, the deeper interests of the time. He ought not, then, to have been contented with reflecting the images, the ideas, and the jargon, which more than a quarter of a century earlier (1837) his mother, in The Vicar of Wrexhill, had echoed from the Stiggins of Pickwick, and which The Saturday Review had since hackneyed to death before Trollope unwillingly accepted his commission from the editor of Good Words. During the nineteenth century’s second half, the Prongs, whom Trollope hated, had ceased to be, to any marked degree, representative of provincial churchmanship. The commercial argument justifies, indeed, all this loose and spiteful vituperation of his pet religious aversions.
By 1860, however, Trollope had achieved a unique position as at once the founder and producer of fiction as a serious profession, which, followed a certain number of hours daily, cannot fail of yielding an annual income. The habit of, in his own phrase, exacting from himself so many words at a sitting could not but be unfavourable to excellence of execution, though it interfered marvellously little, if at all, with his variety and versatility. Those gifts, during 1867-8, he had exhibited in taking his readers from the familiar home scenes to the less known corners of continental Europe. Here his work, though passing muster sufficiently well with the public, did not promise the material success which he knew he could still command in other fields. Consequently, before venturing on the experiment to be recorded in the next chapter, he returned to the Barchester vein with the certainty, soon realised, of convincing publishers and public that it still contained ore not less valuable and pleasant than he had last drawn from it a decade ago. The extracts given at the close of the present chapter will show that from reviewers’ and booksellers’ point of view Trollope might well applaud himself on the reception of Rachel Ray. Nevertheless it was a novelist’s business to create. In Rachel Ray, he soon became conscious, to quote his own words to the present writer, of having set up certain religious or quasi-religious images chiefly, he admitted, for the purpose of belabouring them with verbal blows even as in The Old Curiosity Shop Quilp vents his hatred on Christopher Nubbles in attacks on the wooden figure to which he gives Kit’s name.
Nearly half a generation has passed since, during the eventful ramble, already described in its proper place, round Salisbury Close, there had occurred to him the earliest of those ecclesiastical varieties whose portraiture amid their domestic or social surroundings soon brought him fortune and fame. Before closing the gallery of these sketches, he would draw one more clergyman of the same honest, manly English type as Mark Robarts, and would show his readiness to recognise elevation of character and purity of soul when, if possible, existing in an ordained minister of the gospel of views as decidedly Low Church as the detested Mr. Prong himself. This latter purpose was accomplished by The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). Nothing could be more dramatically complete than the contrast presented to the sleek, luxurious divines, or the well-fed, well-clothed, muscular officials of the church militant, in whom the novelist delighted, than the austere, gaunt, ill-nourished, poverty-stricken perpetual curate of Hogglestock in the marsh. The chronic gloom of his constitutional melancholy is deepened and saddened by the sombre Calvinism of a creed that admits or asks no ray of relief for the hardship of a lot still representing, with not less of faithful cruelty than when Trollope wrote, the hard lives of so many among the most spiritually-minded, most industrious, and not the least well-educated of the country clergy. The Rev. Josiah Crawley’s great qualities, his concealed accomplishments, and his shrinking silent heroism, have won the admiration of the academic, highly-cultivated, and well-to-do Dean Arabin, who has married Mr. Harding’s favourite, youngest daughter Eleanor. This friendship of the prosperous Anglican official for the half-starved incumbent gives rise to the chief and only sensational episode of the book, at once revealing, as well as altogether caused by, Crawley’s utter lack of all business methods, forgetfulness of facts, and heedlessness of consequences. Nor, in these respects, is the daughter of Crawley’s old friend, the Warden, formerly the rich widow, Mrs. Bold, and now Mrs. Arabin, in all matters having to do with money much better.
The crisis of the novel has been brought about in this way. Lord Lufton’s agent has lost a cheque for £20 made payable to bearer, and afterwards found to have been used by Crawley in settling a butcher’s bill. Asked how he got the draft, he hesitatingly answered that no doubt it formed part of the sum paid to him by the agent as tithes. That, it soon appeared, was impossible, for the tithe payment some time since actually made had been, as was always the case, in bank notes. Then, after reconsidering the matter, Crawley revised his account; surely the cheque must have been part of a loan made by Dean Arabin. To him, now absent from his deanery on an Italian tour, inquiries were telegraphed, bringing the statement on the sum having been advanced by bank notes. Crawley’s continued inability satisfactorily to explain the matter now coincides with the agent’s declaration that he must have dropped the cheque while visiting Crawley’s house. Appearances, therefore, at every point are dead against the wretched perpetual curate, who had naturally excited or confirmed suspicions by the lame, and, as they have so far proved, baseless versions of the matter, stammered out by him in his agony. Crawley is known throughout the district for an upright, conscientious, as well as confused and muddle-headed man. His parishioners’ conversation on the subject, and, at last, their reluctant belief in his guilt are not only in Trollope’s best manner, dashed with humour and knowledge of nature, but echo with Shakespearean fidelity the words and thoughts sure to have been forthcoming in local gossip about such an incident. Briefly they are to this effect—“Well, we believe he’s a good man, and we think he wouldn’t have done it, but for being so dreadful poor.”
At last comes the explanation. When, overcome with the terrors of necessity and shame, Crawley accepted the Dean’s offer of money help, Mrs. Arabin left the room to get the cash. While absent, without her husband’s knowledge, she slipped into the envelope containing the notes an additional £20 in the form of a cheque. Crawley himself showed his usual negligence by not examining the contents of the envelope. With equally little wisdom, Mrs. Arabin never considered how her generosity might compromise the poor clergyman. Even these facts, however, do not fully clear up the mystery, for how did the cheque get into Mrs. Arabin’s hands? But that too proves to be quite a simple matter. Womanlike, as Trollope would have said, without the slightest aptitude for such affairs, she piqued herself on her ability to manage business concerns. She kept her own private banking account: by way of improving its figures she dabbled now and then in a few small speculations. In this way she had made the local inn her own property. The landlord and landlady whom she had put in, like the rest of their relatives, were always in difficulties. Lord Lufton’s agent, on going his rounds, had entered the small hostelry. Here he had dropped the cheque, which was promptly found by the innkeeper’s brother and used by him in paying certain arrears of rent. Thus the real thieves were the licensed victuallers, the tenants whom, without the Dean’s knowledge, Mrs. Arabin possessed. The excellence of women within their own department, their foredoomed and demonstrable blunders whenever they step out of it, were ideas tragically set forth in Orley Farm, and, with the accompaniments of less disaster, in Can You Forgive Her? The Last Chronicle of Barset gave the novelist not only the chance of reverting to them in a first-rate plot, but of doing some justice to the evangelical parson while, after an amusingly characteristic fashion, dealing a covert stroke of feminine satire.
The second of the two stories marking, for the present, Trollope’s farewell to the church, was The Vicar of Bullhampton. This was published in 1870, but mostly written a good deal earlier. Some of the incidents connected with its publication too truthfully exhibit its author’s temper in dealing with his publishers not less significantly than the recital of Mrs. Arabin’s blunders in disposing of the cheque which got poor Mr. Crawley into such trouble, recalling the view of feminine limitations that he never modified. Trollope, as usual, had been punctual to the day with the Bullhampton manuscript, for Bradbury and Evans’ Once a Week. He had scarcely delivered it when, to his indignant disgust, he received from the publishers a request that his “vicar” might be held over to make way for an English version of Victor Hugo’s L’homme qui rit. The want of patriotism implied in the new proposal roused Trollope’s resentment, he wished it to be understood, quite as much as did the disregard of his own convenience. A pretentious French Radical’s “grinning man” was, in an English magazine, to be reckoned of more account than a carefully prepared story of national life by an English gentleman, who, however liberal and advanced some of his views, had, in and out of print, always been the champion of English institutions. Worse even than this, it soon turned out that Trollope’s clergyman was not to see the light in Once a Week at all, but in another property of the same owners, The Gentleman’s Magazine. That closed the transaction in this quarter. The story, issued at once by Chapman and Hall, strengthened the ties already connecting his literary progress with the fortunes of that House.
At each successive stage of the novelist’s course, Trollope has already been shown to have gained in breadth and depth of outlook upon life, in power and certainty of character analysis, as well as in a dramatic perception of the potential tragedies belonging to everyday existence. He now habitually used the most ordinary conjunctures as agencies for disturbing, with their grave or grim issues, the decorous surface of conventionally monotonous and serene lives. In The Vicar of Bullhampton all this was exemplified after a fashion scarcely less striking than in Orley Farm or Can You Forgive Her?
Picture Trollope himself as having, at the age of twenty-three, found his way into Holy Orders, instead of the General Post Office, and Frank Fenwick, the before-mentioned clergyman, might well pass for a study of the author. Broad-shouldered and broad-minded, the young Bullhampton priest keeps all his powers of mind and body at the highest point of fitness. Just, generous, upright, and kind-hearted, he is ever ready to speak his mind, out of season perhaps as well as in it, and has all a healthy Briton’s determination not to let a mean advantage be taken of him, especially by those whose social ideas and antecedents differ from his own, or who offend any of his John Bull notions about honour and manliness. He finds in his wife a congenial, not too assertive, and sympathetic helpmate. Her great friend Mary Lowther, the heroine of the piece, is staying with them at the vicarage when the story opens; she has already a lover, favoured by the hospitable Fenwicks, a neighbouring young squire, Harry Gilmore.
Here, in passing, it may be pointed out that the locality, as the names used will suggest, has much to identify it with the midland counties and the north of England, to both of which Trollope, as a boy, had been taken more than once by his mother. On the other hand, both the Barchester local colour and nomenclature are throughout conspicuous by their absence. To resume our plot: while away from the vicarage on a visit to Miss Marrable, a maiden aunt, Mary meets and becomes engaged to a cousin, Walter Marrable, a wealthy baronet’s nephew, but himself without any visible means of subsistence. In that respect he resembles the young lady he loves. These money difficulties bring everything between the two young people to an end. Soon after what is supposed to be their final separation, Mary hears of her old lover’s engagement to his uncle’s ward, Edith Brownlow. In despair herself, and overcome by the persistent importunities of her friends, Mary Lowther accepts Harry Gilmore, only, however, to throw him over when Marrable, unexpectedly coming into his uncle’s property, renews his marriage proposals. Such, it will be recognised, is the regulation course run by true love throughout the whole extent of Trollopian fiction, making, in all that concerns affections, the last clerical story uniform with the books that had immediately or, at some distance of time, preceded it.