This meeting was no serious interview. But Trollope does give the more serious sort its name in Chapter 29, "A Serious Interview," as described in the Introduction. Suffice it to repeat here, the Archdeacon assumes falsely that his daughter Eleanor Bold is likely to accept the suit of Mr. Slope. His wife had told him he would not prevail with Eleanor, but he was so sure he was right and that it was his duty to intervene, that he could not go to bed quietly. His wife, of course, was right.
Barchester Towers is a comedy, and it has a happy ending, which required a good bit of doing by the author. Trollope self-consciously bemoaned the difficulty of pronouncing a credible happy ending to a novel; but he did it anyway.
TROLLOPE'S ALTER EGO
DOCTOR THORNE
Doctor Thorne is a fairy tale. What else can one say after finishing a book in which the heroine, a poor girl of illegitimate birth but "the sweetest girl in the world," is changed at a stroke (although long anticipated) into the wealthiest heiress in the county, gaining the blessings of her lover's mother, Lady Arabella, for her marriage to the most eligible young bachelor in Barsetshire? So much for the plot. Trollope cared little, in general, for maintaining the reader's suspense and usually revealed in advance how it would turn out. But the questions are: What about the good parts? The serious interviews? The irony? The social satire? And though the general outlines of the plot are predictable, are there details that keep us going?
Few of Trollope's young lovers are very complex; the supporting characters are often the ones with interesting quirks and turns. The young may be true or false, or they may be first one and then the other (as Frank Gresham, heir to the rapidly disappearing Gresham estate, shows himself to be); and one often views such turns with the detachment of Olympian gods. What fools these mortals be! But Dr. Thorne, Roger Scatcherd, Lady Arabella: they have a history as well as a future, and there is more to learn about them as one turns the pages.
I think the book succeeds as comedy, not as romance. My second time through the story was through a reading by David Case, a genius of the spoken word, and his inflections bring out the comedy that the reader may not take the time to extract while merely gliding over the text.
One of the serious interviews, the confrontation between Doctor Thorne and Lady Arabella, is a masterpiece, as she strives to use her position as a De Courcy to separate his niece Mary Thorne from her daughter Beatrice, in order to prevent a union of Mary with her son Frank.
A student in the school of life could do worse than to use Trollope as a guide in playing this game. Dr. Thorne and Lady Arabella play their hands with skill and subtlety. And lest the student miss some of the finer points, the author provides a running commentary on how each is doing in the contest. Here Dr. Thorne responds to her suggestion that his niece has been throwing herself in the way of her son, asking, "What would my dear friend Mr. Gresham say, if some neighbor's wife should come and so speak to him? I will tell you what he would say: he would quietly beg her to go back to her own home and meddle only with her own matters." Lady Arabella cannot accept Dr. Thorne's unprecedented hint that she might be at the same level as common humanity. Declaring that it would not become her to argue with him, she ends the interview.