Phineas Finn’s Irish exile was short. He had recently lost his wife in Dublin, when a letter from his old friend, Lady Laura Standish’s cousin, Barrington Erle, told him of just the thing to suit him in the shape of a parliamentary investment for a little legacy into which he had come. This was the vacant seat in Lord Brentford’s borough of Tankerville. To London therefore he hurries. In the solitude of his Jermyn Street Hotel he is surprised and gladdened by a letter from the former Violet Effingham, now Lady Chiltern, conveying a particularly cordial invitation to their country house, Harrington Hall. So he feels himself really on the way back to the old life formerly so much enjoyed and, as it seemed, but a few months since withdrawn from him for ever. But his welcome is not absolutely unanimous. Among those who, as a personal offence to themselves, resent his reappearance after having made up their minds that he was finally out of their way, Finn’s most malevolent ill-wisher is Mr. Bonteen. Phineas has just got back to St. Stephen’s as member for Tankerville; shortly afterwards goes into the Reform Club; here, stung by Bonteen’s remarks, he almost comes to blows with Bonteen; a little later he is seen walking home Mr. Bonteen’s way. The next morning Bonteen is found dead in a Mayfair alley with his skull broken, manifestly by such a pocket bludgeon as Finn is known to be in the habit of carrying for protection against garrotters. The Irish member’s arrest follows; it might have gone hard with him in court but for Madame Goesler’s resourcefulness, devotion, and ready wit. The tide of circumstantial evidence, so far flowing strongly against Phineas, now turns, and, thanks entirely to Madame Goesler’s vigilance and skill, gives Trollope the chance of a hit at his old enemies, the evangelicals, by setting in conclusively against a dissenting minister who now replaces Phineas in the dock, but just contrives to cheat the gallows. Phineas, of course, finds a rising statesman’s ideal wife in Madame Goesler, and is henceforth known as the prosperous middle-aged M.P.
Here, it will be seen, is the same blending as in Orley Farm and Can You Forgive Her? of tears with laughter, of the terrible with the ludicrous, and of more than melodrama with downright farce. The darker background to the social or political scenes is supplied chiefly by the relations between Mr. Kennedy and his wife, to whom might be added Phineas Finn himself. To begin with, Lady Laura Standish probably would never have become Lady Laura Kennedy if the handsome young Irishman who won her heart directly she saw him had pressed his suit with the audacity she perhaps looked for against that of the priggish and insipid Kennedy. As it is, loving him from the first, she nurses a steadily deepening passion for him till her widowhood, where Trollope with artistic delicacy leaves her, feeling no doubt that all the proprieties of fiction would be violated if married happiness were awarded to the two parties in a flirtation that, innocent throughout in itself, had been associated with such domestic discomfort and havoc. Take her for what the novelist meant her to be, Lady Laura, well thought out, firmly, not less than, at each point, consistently drawn, is a good specimen of the mid-nineteenth century society woman of the better sort. She had, indeed, her exact parallel in at least one commanding ornament of Mayfair drawing-rooms concerning whom Lord Beaconsfield said, “She needs only a husband of the right sort to be a statesman’s helpmate.” On both sides the Laura and Phineas friendship is pure throughout; it is only not absolutely without reproach because the lady refuses to give it up after her husband’s disapproval and jealousy have been plainly and, for success, too peremptorily signified. Kennedy commits that and other mistakes because he does not quite come up to the idea of Trollope’s perfect gentleman and man of the world. To begin with he is a devout Presbyterian; this defect alone was almost as fatal in Trollope’s eyes as it would have been with Charles II himself. When they are staying at Loughlinter Lady Laura complains of her headache and begs to be excused kirk. Kennedy delivers a little discourse on the malady of headache generally and his wife’s headache in particular. The ailment, he lays down, proceeds from either the stomach or nerves. In the former case the walk to church should prove beneficial; in the latter, the malady, he plainly intimates, comes from Phineas Finn. This insinuation acts as a last straw. Lady Laura Kennedy leaves her husband’s house and settles with her father abroad at Dresden. There Phineas is about to visit her when, before starting, he adds insult to injury by asking Kennedy whether he can take any message to his wife. This naturally leads to an angry scene between the two men shortly afterwards, with fresh violence on both sides.
Trollope loved newspaper writers even a little less than he did evangelicals; in The Warden he had dealt some rather clumsy thrusts at them. In his later novels, including that now considered, he personifies them in the vulgar, unscrupulous Quintus Slide of The People’s Banner. This ruffian of the Press embitters and complicates the Finn-Kennedy embroglio for personal spite against Phineas and for the enlivenment of his own columns with some spicy personalities obtained from the now half-maddened Kennedy himself. Infuriated with jealousy because, not unnaturally, incredulous of the really Platonic conditions of his wife’s friendship with Phineas, Kennedy has one more personal passage with the Irish Member, noticeable only because it contains a repetition of the attempt at murder with a pistol that had already, when the quarrel lay between John Grey and George Vavasor, done duty in Can You Forgive Her? As for Lady Laura, she lives out a faded life in attendance on her father, Lord Brentford, and only reappears in England to hear from her old lover of his intention to secure himself against pecuniary troubles in the future by persuading Madame Goesler to become Mrs. Finn. This is the second announcement of the same kind which poor Lady Laura has had to face; for some years earlier it was to her also he confided his intention of trying his chance with Violet Effingham. This is a little too much even for so fond and blind an admirer of Phineas as the widowed Lady Laura Kennedy. “Why,” she exclaims, “to me of all persons in the world do you come with the story of your intentions? I could bear it when you came to me about Violet, because I loved her even though she robbed me, but how am I to bear it now in the case of a woman I loathe?”
The curtain falls upon poor Lady Laura, sobbing her heart out upon the false one’s breast in Saulsby Park with self-reproaches for having worshipped him instead of her God; upon Phineas flourishing as Madame Goesler’s husband, a prosperous middle-aged M.P., refusing the offer of a place in Mr. Gresham’s Government because, as the newly made Mrs. Phineas Finn puts it, a rich wife’s husband can afford to prefer freedom to responsibility. The only figures of the Phineas group prominently reappearing in the subsequent political stories are Planty Pal transformed into the Duke of Omnium and his Duchess, formerly Lady Glencora. The new duke presides over no Cabinet, but takes a paternal interest in public affairs generally, and is specially delighted at the improved prospects of his old fiscal fad, decimal coinage. The duchess, having sown all her wild oats, settles down into a great political lady of the most aspiring and imperious kind. Her mistakes in that part illustrate Trollope’s favourite moral that the feminine ambition “which o’erleaps itself” spoils instead of adorns whatever it may touch.
There is little, as has been already said, in Trollope’s first two political novels to fix the parliamentary period to which they belong. As regards good looks, Phineas may have had something in common with Colonel King-Harman, whom the novelist occasionally met at the Arts Club, but at all other points Trollope’s Irish Member, by his fine presence, winning manners, and his return to St. Stephen’s after an interval of absence, suggests Sir John Pope Hennessy rather than any other representative of the Emerald Isle during the pre-Household Suffrage portion of the Victorian age. For the rest, Prime Minister Gladstone and Prime Minister Gresham only resemble each other in the first letter of their names. The future Lord Beaconsfield, however, is clearly meant by Daubeny. Disraeli is the subject of a verbal photograph as the brilliant and unscrupulous charlatan who dishes the Whigs, not over parliamentary reform but over Church Disestablishment. But the politician pitted against Daubeny bears scarcely a remote resemblance to Disraeli’s arch antagonist. Among those who resist Daubeny’s designs, the foremost, the already-mentioned Gresham, universally respected, admired, is too reserved and self-contained for popularity. He therefore recalls Sir Robert Peel rather than the most famous of Peel’s disciples or successors. Trollope’s Turnbull as the angular, inflexibly upright, middle-class M.P. shows no trace of the Cobden, John Bright, or any of that school reflected in the Job Thornberry of Disraeli’s Endymion. The fact of the publication of Endymion being later, by some ten years, than that of Phineas Finn does away with the suggestion that Trollope’s Turnbull was modelled from Disraeli’s Thornberry. In like manner Monk, Trollope’s ideal parliament man, is evolved entirely from his creator’s inner consciousness. So too Plantagenet Palliser had no original among the well-born, scientific financiers of the House of Commons in Trollope’s time, but merely personifies his creator’s notion of the pattern gentleman, the soul of honour and of chivalrous consideration in his treatment equally of Lady Glencora’s flirtations when his bride-elect and of her ill-devised socio-political strategies after she has become Duchess of Omnium. At each stage of his development from the Planty Pal of Can You Forgive Her? to the inheritance of the ducal title in Phineas Redux, these aspects of his character are consistently, logically, as well as at every point effectively, sustained. When, in Phineas Finn, his uncle’s death sends him to the Upper House, to be known henceforth as the duke, while not holding office he becomes the oracle, the good genius and presiding potentate of his party.
The Prime Minister (1876) shows him as the First Lord of the Treasury, always gracious, calm, and strong, though often harassed by his wife’s intermeddling in public affairs, and, as in the case of Ferdinand Lopez, by her patronage of discreditable supporters. For, if the duke be the ornament of his order and his vocation, Lady Glencora, since becoming Her Grace, has transformed herself into a satire upon feminine aspiration when untempered by true womanly feeling and good sense. The Duchess of Omnium was, I fancy, felt by Trollope himself to be, as he put it to me, une grande dame manquée. Trollope’s lifelong Harrow contemporary and loyal friend, Sir William Gregory, so often mentioned in these pages, called his Irish member a libel upon the Irish gentleman. The relations in which Phineas Finn stood to his own sex were those of Trollope’s duchess to the genuine great lady of existing political drawing-rooms. Of moral fibre, harder and coarser than when first introduced as the girlish but even then sufficiently shrewd Lady Glencora, she provokes, when seen in The Prime Minister, disadvantageous comparison with another politician’s wife, her equal in fortune, whom she once called an adventuress, but has since promoted to the first place in her friendship. Mrs. Max Goesler, now Mrs. Phineas Finn, who herself might have been a duchess had she liked, is a rising statesman’s model wife, knowing exactly when to help her husband by appearing in the foreground, and how to advance his interests by unadvertised activity behind the scenes. But then Mrs. Max was a real figure in the society of Trollope’s day, and the Duchess of Omnium was an abstraction.
The characters, however, in The Prime Minister, on which Trollope relied to popularise the book, by relieving the strain of the demand that the purely political portions made on the reader’s attention are those of Emily Wharton, whose life is marred by her marriage with the aspiring incarnation of city scampdom, Lopez, and of Arthur Fletcher, Emily’s blameless lover, who eventually becomes her husband. Trollope himself was never seen to greater advantage than in the best professional society. Especially did he shine when talking with doctors like his particular friend, Sir Richard Quain, or with lawyers of the old school such as he had first known from his father. Nothing, therefore, in The Prime Minister is better than Emily’s father, the shrewd old-world barrister, reminiscent of the bygone legal celebrities, Jockey Bell, the first conveyancer of his time, or Leech, Master of the Rolls.[27] The snobbish and pretentious knave, Lopez, has entrapped into partnership in his commercial infamies a city drudge as low as personally he is harmless, named Parker. Not unworthy of Dickens, is the praise deserved by the simple and graphic drollery of Trollope’s description of Sexty Parker amid the mean surroundings of his suburban home, with his poor wife’s affrighted protests at the dangerous degree to which he is being made the tool of Lopez, or Parker’s picture on his seaside holiday, smoking his pipe and drinking his gin and water in the shabby villa’s porch, while his ill-clad and ill-nourished children make mischief of every kind in the stony and almost flowerless garden. An effective contrast to these scenes of squalid domesticity is forthcoming in the varied company at Gatherum Castle, now inhabited by Planty Pal as Duke of Omnium, and despotically managed by Lady Glencora as duchess, who, by way of forming a party of her own, has invited some rather shady guests. Among these is Lopez; how the duke sees through him, soon showing him the door, and how His Grace, beset by an uncongenial house-party, platonically consoles himself with Lady Rosina De Courcy as well as follows her advice to take care of his health by wearing cork soles, is told in Trollope’s best manner.
With this social by-play are mingled the Silverbridge parliamentary contests; here Beverley is drawn upon once more, and the election agents, Sprugeon and Sprout, are pen and ink photographs of Trollope’s Yorkshire friends. The Prime Minister ends with the hideous suicide of the villain of the piece, Ferdinand Lopez. All the incidents leading up to that catastrophe make very unpleasant reading indeed.
Infinitely superior to The Prime Minister is The Duke’s Children. Here our author regains his old and happier cunning in the portrait of Isabel Boncassen. This American beauty combines high intellectual power with absolute perfection of face and figure. Still more arresting is her English counterpart, Lady Mabel Grex. That heroine, an impoverished and profligate nobleman’s daughter, had passed scathless through the trying ordeal of her earlier days. Neither the keenness of her insight nor the strength of her will is impaired; her capacity of entire devotion where her heart is really touched has not suffered from any hardening experiences of life’s seamy side. Yet some time has to pass before she can do justice to these great qualities, though from the first she makes herself felt as the good genius of the story. Meanwhile, the widowed Duke of Omnium has had trouble both with his sons and daughter. These vexations to some degree involve Lady Mabel Grex. His eldest son, Lord Silverbridge, a good deal both of the scapegrace and the spendthrift, has managed to drop £70,000 on a single race. The duke’s only daughter, Lady Mary Palliser, is scarcely less unsatisfactory. With the pick of the peerage as well as the plutocracy to choose from, she perversely refuses to marry anyone but Frank Tregear, a Cornish squire’s penniless younger son. Frank, however, and Lady Mabel Grex are already the subjects of a reciprocal passion. This attachment is doomed for money reasons never to end in marriage. Even after she has convinced herself that this love is hopeless, Mabel Grex only becomes resigned to the inevitable after a long and agonised struggle with herself. It ends, however, in her accepting an offer from the duke’s heir, Silverbridge. At the same time Frank Tregear breaks off with Mabel and transfers his affections to the Duke of Omnium’s daughter, the already mentioned Lady Mary. Defeated at every point, as well as crushed under the burden of a hopeless love, Mabel Grex passively accepts the doom of aimless poverty and absolute desolation for the rest of her days.