At the point now reached Polly’s reappearance effects a complete change in the situation. When he had formerly, as he thought for ever, bidden her farewell, Polly’s affection for him by its vulgar exuberance had jarred on the hard-up, but fastidious Heir. Now the young lady keeps him at a distance, repulsing him with piquant prettiness, only to attract him. The old flame of a mercenary passion is rekindled. After all there is no reason, Ralph the Heir admits, against Polly’s becoming a gentleman’s wife. So it is all arranged; even the happy day is provisionally mentioned. The nuptial settlements have been drawn up, but are still unsigned when, hey presto! fresh surprises all round, and instead of flirting, jilting, and all the rest of it, we are in the thick of a political fight, reflecting in each detail Trollope’s Beverley conflict. There is, however more than that. Ralph the Heir’s namesake, Squire Newton’s illegitimate son, falls out of favour with his father; Squire Newton himself breaks his neck out hunting. Thus by several undeserved strokes of luck the Heir enters upon his heritage. By this time, however, Sir Thomas Underwood has decided on re-entering public life. He has, he hopes, found the necessary seat in the borough of Percycross, alias that Beverley contested by Trollope himself, and now satirised in Ralph the Heir. Underwood’s colleague in the fight is Mr. Griffenbottom; his opponents are Westmacott in the Liberal and Ontario Moggs in the Radical interest. The Tory triumph is followed by the unseating on petition of both those who have won it; the disfranchisement of the borough completes the barrenness of their victory.
Quite the best drawn figure amid the electioneering crush is the Radical candidate. Ontario Moggs belongs to a class of idealised Industrials brought into fashion by George Eliot, attempted also by Mrs. Lynn Linton, raised to their highest perfection in Adam Bede, and brought down to a more familiar level in Felix Holt. With that Radical, Ontario Moggs can at least hold his own. He is, it is true, something of a prig, with a solemnity of manner and a pompous pithiness of artificial phrase making him a little absurd. His real cleverness, however, is not below his conceit; his readiness of speech, quickness at the detection of fallacy and power of argument, justly entitle him to his high reputation at the Cheshire Cheese and other debating Clubs. During Trollope’s time the Labour member had still to win the vogue and power brought in by the twentieth century. Still the Moggs of Ralph the Heir forms a creditable study of those captains of Northumbrian industry, some among whom were to win their way to the Treasury bench. By this time Ralph the Heir’s rejected love, Miss Neefit, has shed all her vulgarity. Realising the folly and danger of aspiring to the affection of her father’s trying and impecunious customers, she has the good sense to invest her fortune, hand, and heart in a life-partnership with a born gentleman, if of inferior station, like Ontario Moggs.
Trollope’s hard common sense, detective vigilance, refusal to be imposed upon, and absolute pitilessness for transgressors, when discharging his Post Office duties, represented only one side of his character. From another point of view his judgment and intellect were subordinate to his emotions. This sentimentalism showed itself equally in his politics and in his estimate of the personages to whom he introduced the public in his books; with those personal creations he lived, as he often said, so intimately as to be really hurt by his readers not taking the same interest in them as he did himself. Hence his mortification at the indifference largely manifested to the dramatis personæ of the political novels that followed Phineas Finn. For those stories, now about to be considered, Trollope had prepared himself, not only by the ordinary experiences of London life, but by those of his Beverley campaign. He had also gone through a course of political reading, one of whose literary results was to be his book on Palmerston. This, though published subsequently to the political novels, had been written before them, and may be, for other reasons, appropriately mentioned now.
One Disraelian phrase, and one only, was sometimes quoted approvingly by Trollope. “The free patrician life” of England produced, he always held, the nation’s best rulers. Of that dispensation, in his patriotism, his sympathies, at once popular and aristocratic, in home affairs, and in his championship of oppressed nationalities abroad, Palmerston struck him as the best type of the time. For Trollope, too, there was something of natural congeniality in Palmerston’s schoolboy delight at those political doings which he loved to describe as “capital strokes, and all off my own bat,” in his brushes with the Court, and in his tit-for-tat with John Russell. When putting his Palmerston monograph together, he received useful hints and help from Sir Alexander Cockburn, whose friendship he owed to Sir Richard Quain. In this way, he found himself able to appreciate the value to Palmerston of the services rendered him by Sir Henry Bulwer during his Paris residence at serious continental conjunctures. Hence, too, Trollope could rate at its true worth Palmerston’s diplomacy, first, as shown by the quadruple treaty of 1834, secondly, by the quadrilateral treaty of six years later leading up to the London conference of 1840. Finally, Bulwer and Cockburn enabled him to correct the popular impression of English statesmanship abroad being overruled by the Queen and the Prince Consort, and to show that, throughout the Austro-Italian questions then in progress, the principles consistently held and carried out by our Foreign Office were not those embodying the regard for the Austrian Empire held at the palace, but of the zeal for Italian unity at that time animating the English people.
Some reference to current politics entered, as has been seen, into Rachel Ray (1863). The subject was first made a prominent feature in Can You Forgive Her? (1864). Here we are first formally introduced to more or less public personages with whom our acquaintance is now to be improved. Trollope had not been impelled to his Beverley candidature by any active share in the Gladstonian enthusiasm, then beginning to show itself throughout the country, nor can the Gladstonian lineaments be clearly traced in any of the parliamentary portraits whose gallery opens with Phineas Finn (1869). The sorrows, the disappointment, the labours, and the other varieties of penance awaiting the average borough candidate, form the autobiographical element in the novel that marked the new period in Trollope’s life beginning with his retirement from the Post Office. After Ralph the Heir, Phineas Finn takes the reader into the heart of the political system, at St. Stephen’s, in Whitehall, in Pall Mall, and in the country-houses, where leaders of parties, whether peers or commoners, Cabinet Ministers and all their hangers on, congregate. The electioneering reminiscences that give life and colour to Ralph the Heir make it therefore a fit introduction to Trollope’s efforts in the new literary vein which, while a paid servant of the State, he did not think desirable to work.
That was not the only fresh test applied by him in this, his fifty-third year, to the loyalty of his readers. The example of famous or successful contemporaries always excited a spirit of emulation in Trollope. Not only had Dickens and Thackeray added to their reputation and wealth as magazine editors, but, in the same capacity, men of whom he thought so meanly as G. A. Sala and Edmund Yates had done well. The ex-Post Office surveyor, therefore, resolved to spend part of his freedom from official harness in the same rôle. The Virtues of City Road had just started a monthly, The St. Paul’s Magazine. Anthony Trollope, with Mr. Edward Dicey for his assistant, readily took the helm. He led off with an instalment of fiction different from anything else he had yet attempted. Had this not come after the Barchester series and therefore been judged by that earlier standard, it might have had as many readers if not admirers as the other pen and ink pictures of English life of which The Warden, in 1855, had been the first. Phineas Finn, that first showed Trollope as a political novelist, after having run through The St. Paul’s, was republished in two volumes octavo (Virtue and Co.), 1869. It was continued five years later with Phineas Redux. This originally appeared in The Graphic and was republished (Chapman and Hall) in two volumes, 1874. The group of novels now referred to contained other works, to be mentioned in their proper place, and only ended with The Duke’s Children (1880) two years before Trollope’s death. All these books are traversed by a slight connecting thread of name, incident, or character. As to this, however, it will be best to let these stories speak for themselves, beginning with the earliest of the number, Phineas Finn.
The personage giving his name to this book is the son of an Irish doctor, Malachi Finn, living at Killaloe, county Clare, well-known throughout the province of Connaught, possessing no private fortune, but a good practice and an expensive family. The household idolatry lavished upon the son is thus commented on by the shrewd, sensible father. “So far he seems as good as any other man’s goose, but much more evidence is wanted for establishing his claim to any qualities of the swan.” Phineas, however, is no sooner seen in London than he begins to be a success. Mr. Low, in whose chambers he reads law, who on his own account entertains but checks certain parliamentary ambitions, is a steady-going preceptor, social and legal, of the old school, who admonishes his pupil to beware of distractions from his professional training. Phineas, however, has already joined the Reform Club and found many good houses open to him. Among the earliest of his Pall Mall and Mayfair acquaintances Laurence Fitzgibbon, a happy-go-lucky Irishman, cleverly sketched after the manner of Charles Lever, is already in the House, and easily persuades Phineas that it is the only career worth pursuing. An opportunity soon comes; the Loughshane constituency wants a progressive candidate at the General Election; the Reform Club committee promises a liberal contribution to his expenses if Phineas will stand. Even thus Phineas’ allowance from his father must of course be increased. The Killaloe doctor, talked over by the ladies of his family, will do his very utmost to help his son in maintaining the new position. Phineas, accordingly, is returned to Parliament, and is still in his first session when, by sheer good luck, he gets an Under-Secretaryship. Then comes the first check; Phineas kicks over the traces on an Irish question. Mr. Monk may at some points vaguely reflect Gladstone. It is at least Finn’s loyalty to Monk which involves the loss of his Ministerial office, and, with it, of his seat for Loughshane, which, out of office, he cannot support in a style agreeable to his enlarged views of an M.P.’s social consequence.
Nothing therefore is to be done but to resettle himself in the land of his birth. Even after his retirement there come signs of returning luck in the shape of a Government post worth £1000 a year. That enables him to settle modestly in Dublin with his youthful sweetheart, Mary Flood Jones, for his wife. The heart which he can offer this excellent lady is no longer a virgin one, for during his London years he has had two or three serious love affairs. One of these, in its sequel rather tragic, has been with Lady Laura Standish, the impoverished Earl of Brentford’s daughter. That has been really a case of love at first sight on both sides, for Lady Laura, having given Phineas her affection at the beginning, does not conceal that he has it to the end. She only refuses him because her father’s poverty compels her to marry a rich plebeian, Mr. Kennedy, M.P., like Phineas himself, a political supporter of Plantagenet Palliser, who eventually becomes the Duke of Omnium. The handsome person and the shallow purse of the young Irish member have also appealed warmly to Madame Max Goesler, a rich widow; she has indeed, it having been apparently Leap Year, hinted to Phineas at the acceptance of her hand and fortune as the best way out of his money difficulties. This good-hearted, fascinating, and refreshingly straightforward lady, whom he, after becoming a widower, marries, had been suspected of angling for Planty Pal’s uncle, the reigning Duke of Omnium. At least the duke’s infatuation for “Mrs. Max” had filled Lady Glencora Palliser with a droll horror, lest the great man should actually make her his wife and become the father of an heir who would disinherit Planty Pal himself. Madame Goesler, however, has never any thought of aiming at anyone above her own social level. The gracious but decisive dismissal of her noble suitor converts Lady Glencora into her fast friend. Throughout the rest of the story and indeed afterwards, among all Lady Glencora’s intimates, none ranked so high in her regard and confidence as the sensible and kindly lady who had been wise enough to refuse a duke.
Out of Phineas Finn’s attachment to Lady Laura arises an entirely fresh entanglement of heart actually attended by results serious enough, and at one time threatening to change the whole current of the narrative. In Lady Laura’s drawing-room Phineas meets a beautiful heiress, Violet Effingham, the bride-elect of Lady Laura’s brother, the red-haired, red-faced, shaggy, and untamable Lord Chiltern, who bears something of a family likeness to the St. Aldegonde of Disraeli’s Lothair, but who really represents Trollope’s snapshot at the Lord Hartington of his own day, who died eighth Duke of Devonshire. The fact of Miss Effingham being thus bespoke does not warn off the philandering Phineas. Lady Laura has the mortification of seeing her own devotion to him requited by his deliberate attempt to cut out Chiltern, and so prevent the marriage that she had set her heart on for her brother. Still, she sits by, agonised at heart, but uncomplaining. Nor does the spectacle of Finn’s fickleness and shallowness lose him the love which, in spite of herself, he had won.
Her brother views matters less passively. He has rather liked Phineas, shown him much attention in London, mounted him on his most intractable hunter, Bonebreaker, in the eastern counties, and admired the success with which the doctor’s son from Killaloe has conquered that self-willed steed. He is not, however, prepared to tolerate Phin’s poaching on his manor. He will maintain the right to his sweetheart even at the price of blood. Eventually the two agree to settle it at the pistol’s point. Blankenberg in Belgium becomes the scene of a combat in which Phineas receives a not very serious wrist wound. This encounter has been called an anachronism; it disposes, the critics have said, if nothing else did, of the one merit, that of absolute truth to life in all details, specially claimed by Trollope for the novel. How stand the facts? Prince Albert, indeed, made duelling unfashionable; but there were several cases of duels fought in Victoria’s reign. Certainly, during the period of the Blankenberg encounter in Phineas Finn, hostile meetings at Boulogne were often the talk of the town. Only a generation and a half have passed since there still flourished at St. Stephen’s, and occasionally dined with Mr. Gladstone, the wonderful Ogorman Mahoon who, if report spoke truly, had once at least “killed his man.” In 1852 a Canterbury election dispute caused a duel between George Smythe, Coningsby’s original, and Colonel Frederick Romilly. About this time, too, is nearly the date at which an ordeal of the same kind was gone through by Reginald Russell in Paris.