Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope
best. In the love with which she has been greeted I have hardly
joined with much enthusiasm, feeling that she is somewhat of a
French prig. She became first engaged to a snob, who jilted her;
and then, though in truth she loved another man who was hardly
good enough, she could not extricate herself sufficiently from the
collapse of her first great misfortune to be able to make up her
mind to be the wife of one whom, though she loved him, she did not
altogether reverence. Prig as she was, she made her way into the
hearts of many readers, both young and old; so that, from that time
to this, I have been continually honoured with letters, the purport
of which has always been to beg me to marry Lily Dale to Johnny
Eames. Had I done so, however, Lily would never have so endeared
herself to these people as to induce them to write letters to the
author concerning her fate. It was because she could not get over
her troubles that they loved her. Outside Lily Dale and the chief
interest of the novel, The Small House at Allington is, I think,
good. The De Courcy family are alive, as is also Sir Raffle Buffle,
who is a hero of the Civil Service. Sir Raffle was intended to
represent a type, not a man; but the man for the picture was soon
chosen, and I was often assured that the portrait was very like.
I have never seen the gentleman with whom I am supposed to have
taken the liberty. There is also an old squire down at Allington,
whose life as a country gentleman with rather straitened means is,
I think, well described.
Of Can you Forgive Her? I cannot speak with too great affection,
though I do not know that of itself it did very much to increase
my reputation. As regards the story, it was formed chiefly on that
of the play which my friend Mr. Bartley had rejected long since,
the circumstances of which the reader may perhaps remember. The
play had been called The Noble Jilt; but I was afraid of the name
for a novel, lest the critics might throw a doubt on the nobility.
There was more of tentative humility in that which I at last adopted.
The character of the girl is carried through with considerable
strength, but is not attractive. The humorous characters, which are
also taken from the play,--a buxom widow who with her eyes open
chooses the most scampish of two selfish suitors because he is
the better looking,--are well done. Mrs. Greenow, between Captain
Bellfield and Mr. Cheeseacre, is very good fun--as far as the fun
of novels is. But that which endears the book to me is the first
presentation which I made in it of Plantagenet Palliser, with his
wife, Lady Glencora.
By no amount of description or asseveration could I succeed in
making any reader understand how much these characters with their
belongings have been to me in my latter life; or how frequently
I have used them for the expression of my political or social
convictions. They have been as real to me as free trade was to Mr.
Cobden, or the dominion of a party to Mr. Disraeli; and as I have
not been able to speak from the benches of the House of Commons,
or to thunder from platforms, or to be efficacious as a lecturer,
they have served me as safety-valves by which to deliver my soul.
Mr. Plantagenet Palliser had appeared in The Small House at Allington,
but his birth had not been accompanied by many hopes. In the last
pages of that novel he is made to seek a remedy for a foolish
false step in life by marrying the grand heiress of the day;--but
the personage of the great heiress does not appear till she comes
on the scene as a married woman in Can You Forgive Her? He is
the nephew and heir to a duke--the Duke of Omnium--who was first
introduced in Doctor Thorne, and afterwards in Framley Parsonage,
and who is one of the belongings of whom I have spoken. In these
personages and their friends, political and social, I have endeavoured
to depict the faults and frailties and vices,--as also the virtues,
the graces, and the strength of our highest classes; and if I have
not made the strength and virtues predominant over the faults and
vices, I have not painted the picture as I intended. Plantagenet
Palliser I think to be a very noble gentleman,--such a one as justifies
to the nation the seeming anomaly of an hereditary peerage and of
primogeniture. His wife is in all respects very inferior to him;
but she, too, has, or has been intended to have, beneath the thin
stratum of her follies a basis of good principle, which enabled her
to live down the conviction of the original wrong which was done
to her, and taught her to endeavour to do her duty in the position
to which she was called. She had received a great wrong,--having
been made, when little more than a child, to marry a man for whom
she cared nothing;--when, however, though she was little more than
a child, her love had been given elsewhere. She had very heavy
troubles, but they did not overcome her.
As to the heaviest of these troubles, I will say a word in vindication
of myself and of the way I handled it in my work. In the pages of
Can You Forgive Her? the girl's first love is introduced,--beautiful,
well-born, and utterly worthless. To save a girl from wasting
herself, and an heiress from wasting her property on such a scamp,
was certainly the duty of the girl's friends. But it must ever
be wrong to force a girl into a marriage with a man she does not
love,--and certainly the more so when there is another whom she does
love. In my endeavour to teach this lesson I subjected the young
wife to the terrible danger of overtures from the man to whom her
heart had been given. I was walking no doubt on ticklish ground,
leaving for a while a doubt on the question whether the lover
might or might not succeed. Then there came to me a letter from a
distinguished dignitary of our Church, a man whom all men honoured,
treating me with severity for what I was doing. It had been one
of the innocent joys of his life, said the clergyman, to have my
novels read to him by his daughters. But now I was writing a book
which caused him to bid them close it! Must I also turn away to
vicious sensation such as this? Did I think that a wife contemplating
adultery was a character fit for my pages? I asked him in return,
whether from his pulpit, or at any rate from his communion-table,
he did not denounce adultery to his audience; and if so, why should
it not be open to me to preach the same doctrine to mine. I made
known nothing which the purest girl could not but have learned,
and ought not to have learned, elsewhere, and I certainly lent no
attraction to the sin which I indicated. His rejoinder was full
of grace, and enabled him to avoid the annoyance of argumentation
without abandoning his cause. He said that the subject was so much
too long for letters; that he hoped I would go and stay a week with
him in the country,--so that we might have it out. That opportunity,
however, has never yet arrived.
Lady Glencora overcomes that trouble, and is brought, partly by her
own sense of right and wrong, and partly by the genuine nobility
of her husband's conduct, to attach herself to him after a certain
fashion. The romance of her life is gone, but there remains a
rich reality of which she is fully able to taste the flavour. She
loves her rank and becomes ambitious, first of social, and then of
political ascendancy. He is thoroughly true to her, after his thorough
nature, and she, after her less perfect nature, is imperfectly true
to him.
In conducting these characters from one story to another I realised
the necessity, not only of consistency,--which, had it been maintained
by a hard exactitude, would have been untrue to nature,--but also
of those changes which time always produces. There, are, perhaps,
but few of us who, after the lapse of ten years, will be found to
have changed our chief characteristics. The selfish man will still
be selfish, and the false man false. But our manner of showing or
of hiding these characteristics will be changed,--as also our power
of adding to or diminishing their intensity. It was my study that
these people, as they grew in years, should encounter the changes
which come upon us all; and I think that I have succeeded. The
Duchess of Omnium, when she is playing the part of Prime Minister's
wife, is the same woman as that Lady Glencora who almost longs to
go off with Burgo Fitzgerald, but yet knows that she will never do
so; and the Prime Minister Duke, with his wounded pride and sore
spirit, is he who, for his wife's sake, left power and place when
they were first offered to him;--but they have undergone the changes
which a life so stirring as theirs would naturally produce. To do
all this thoroughly was in my heart from first to last; but I do
not know that the game has been worth the candle.
To carry out my scheme I have had to spread my picture over so wide
a canvas that I cannot expect that any lover of such art should
trouble himself to look at it as a whole. Who will read Can You
Forgive Her? Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister
consecutively, in order that they may understand the characters of
the Duke of Omnium, of Plantagenet Palliser, and of Lady Glencora?
Who will ever know that they should be so read? But in the performance
of the work I had much gratification, and was enabled from time to
time to have in this way that fling at the political doings of the
day which every man likes to take, if not in one fashion then in
another. I look upon this string of characters,--carried sometimes
into other novels than those just named,--as the best work of
my life. Taking him altogether, I think that Plantagenet Palliser
stands more firmly on the ground than any other personage I have
created.
On Christmas day, 1863, we were startled by the news of Thackeray's
death. He had then for many months given up the editorship of the
Cornhill Magazine,--a position for which he was hardly fitted either
by his habits or temperament,--but was still employed in writing
for its pages. I had known him only for four years, but had grown
into much intimacy with him and his family. I regard him as one
of the most tender-hearted human beings I ever knew, who, with an
exaggerated contempt for the foibles of the world at large, would
entertain an almost equally exaggerated sympathy with the joys
