The Framing of Brontë’s The Professor

 

Endnotes are in brackets.  References in parentheses are page numbers is the readily accessible Penguin edition edited by Heather Glen.

 

     Charlotte Brontë’s earliest work for publication The Professor remained unpublished until after the author’s death.  Perhaps the most prominent difference between The Professor and Villette, which she wrote next using portions of the earlier story, is the shift from a male to a female narrator, but the two works begin with markedly different perspectives as well.  Whereas the later novel opens with Lucy Snow’s first-person adolescent reminiscences, the first chapter of the earlier work, titled “Introductory,” covers similar ground, but in the form of a letter.  Both novels, however, end using the device of a slip in the narrative voice from past to present tense.  The Professor has been taken by some critics to be a premature false start as Brontë developed her professional writing skills, and the unusual device employed in the first pages of the book has been called “clumsy and artificial” and “an early gaucherie” by critics. [1]

     The opening letter might seem a vestige of the epistolary practice of Richardson and Smollett.  In earlier novels the pretense of the letter form supports the historicity of the text, reinforced by the reduction of some place names to initials as though to protect the characters’ privacy.  While a few novels like Robinson Crusoe that adopted the pose of recording literal truth were actually accepted by some readers as fact, once the device became familiar, it had the dialectic effect of representing a known literary artifice depicting lived reality, thus suggesting truth and falsity at once. 

      Yet Brontë’s use of this device has peculiar characteristics.  She would have the reader believe that Crimsworth came across the copy of a letter when he simply “found” it in his desk, and that this discovery of an aborted memoir led him to complete the story. 

     The fact that the letter was written, not received, by the persona telling the story shifts the reader’s perception more directly on its author.  Few enough people maintain copies of their own correspondence that this presentation alone draws attention.  Charles, the intended recipient of the letter, never appears at all, and the letter was never delivered as thee writer’s old schoolmate had moved.  Why had the narrator felt drawn to send an account of his life to this long-ago “acquaintance,” as Crimsworth calls him?

     One effect of this device is to emphasize the focus on the protagonist whose ego is a primary theme Brontë is to develop.  The letter is a curious document.  Though the point of the letter is to renew a relationship with an old schoolmate, it opens by declaring that neither of the two had been popular, Charles “sarcastic and cold-blooded,” and William “not strikingly attractive.”  Though exclusion by others might make the basis for the two outsiders to ally, Crimsworth says he cannot understand what “animal magnetism” joined them.  What is more, he declares that he felt (and presumably feels) himself superior.  He has no interest in the affairs of his correspondent.  “What you have been doing I know not, but you shall hear “how the world has wagged with me” he says imperiously.  The solipsistic letter goes on to detail his rebellion against the injustice he suffered at the hands of his brother.

     He notes at the end of the “Introductory’ chapter that, having leisure in  retirement, he had, apparently motivated by generosity, intended to describe his life for the “private benefit” of his acquaintance Charles.  Frustrated in that goal, he determined that his tale would have value “for the public at large,” in particular for the use of other educators for whom his experience, he believes, will prove instructive.  The presumption is palpable.

     The persona considers the account of his career a sort of self-help book, inspiring others to rise through discipline and work to affluence.  In this partial truth the tale bears some resemblance to the stories of Horatio Alger heroes and the deserving waifs of Charles Dickens, though in these cases the heroes’ ascents often depend on providentially charitable patrons, while William Crimsworth has only his own ambition.  Thus he represents a model of a kind of Calvinist capitalist, prospering through self-denial and looking out for the main chance.  Though his story is in part a guide to overcoming obstacles and climbing the economic ladder, Crimsworth is, as a recent editor noted a “disquieting” hero. [2]  While his calculating moves do bring him success, he often appears as unattractive, selfish, or aggressive.

    He must, it seems, strive against the world to attain his own felicity, suppressing his own feelings in pursuit of his larger worldly ends.  This includes the rejection of his relatives who suggest for him a marriage and settled living, then after a time of his brother with whom his relations had always been prickly  but from whom he had accepted a position.  Seeking his fortune by himself in the world, he succeeds as a schoolteacher (in French a professeur) first with M. Pelet and then with Mlle. Reuter through his forceful manner with the students.  His “system” for instructing pupils he found to have “dense intelligence” and “feeble reflective powers” was to lower his expectations radically, but then, “having brought down my lesson to the lowest level of my slowest student’s capacity,” to become suddenly a “despot,” insisting on “submission and acknowledgement of error, or ignominious expulsion.” (98)

     Even his love affair with Frances Henri is described in the same manner.  He is the master; she the faithful server.  Even so, she is obliged sometimes to object, “Monsieur, vous me faites mal; de grâce lâchez un peu ma main droite.” She addresses him as Master.  To him “reproofs suited her best of all” (204).  He has no interest in her feelings; their relationship is plainly portrayed in physical terms of domination and submission.  “My arm, it is true, still detained her, but with a restraint that was gentle enough, as long as no opposition tightened it.”  His heart, he says, is wholly taken up with “its own content” which he finds “fathomless.”  (248-9)  The happy ending’s evidence of his success are the acquisition of a devoted wife and child, hard-earned, without a doubt. 

     The price, then of worldly success for this wronged orphan is to “resist” any “impulse” to be  “warmer” or “more expressive” (204), and to be governed instead by “perseverance and sense of duty.” (159)  The darker elements of his state of mind are suggested by Crimsworth’s xenophobia and contempt for Catholicism as well as, more deeply, his susceptibility to depression, or “Hypochondria” (254)    

     A similar tension is evident in the book’s other generic conventions.  The plot follows the form of classic comedy in that a couple overcome obstacles, marry, and find a settled and serene life.  Yet it is evident that the love portrayed in The Professor is flawed, though perhaps only because it is all too human.  From another angle, the story is about how to succeed in business, a story of a clever lad who through determined efforts of his own, accomplished much.  Yet the reader will wonder whether the stern pedagogy and cagey dealings with employers are really to be recommended.  An anodyne slogan like “Hope smiles on Effort!” elides the issue of what sort of effort. (206) 

     In spite of all the conventional paradigms of a hero’s path to love and worldly prosperity, Brontë claims that her book is straightforward, unadorned realism.   She opens a chapter with a declaration that could open a manifesto.  “Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of everyday life.” (186)  In the novel’s preface Charlotte, writing under her pseudonym Currer Bell claims, “I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs.” (37)  In the preface of 1851, she says, as an explanation of the sobriety of the story: “In many a crude effort destroyed almost as soon as composed, I had got over any such taste as I might once have had for ornamented and redundant composition, and come to prefer what was plain and homely.”  The spare style of realism established in the opening letter asserts the book’s veracity. 

     The slide into the present tense in the last  pages (from 288) has the effect of casting the concluding scene as constant, a “happy ever after,” as though nothing of significance would later occur. Such a coda resembles the way some pop songs, instead of ending with an appropriate musical phrase, simply fade to silence or a final movie shot that rises into the air over the last scene.  While marking the end of the work in a conventional and recognizable way, at the same time the concluding present tense adopts the pose of portraying a scene immediately before the observer’s eyes, leaving the reader poised in the end as in the beginning between realism and convention, symbolic commentary and bare facts.

     Both opening and closing of The Professor indicate the tension between natural and artificial.  The reader must wonder whether Crimsworth is seeking to “live his dream,” as a modern idiom would have it, to fully become himself and escape from the limitations of his birth, or whether his ambition has led him to make a tortured topiary of his soul, in the effort losing real love, and perhaps a genuinely successful classroom as well. 

     The framing of the story in fact highlights its difference from Villette.  The opening pages reveal a far less attractive protagonist than Lucy Snow.  Crimsworth’s asperities reappear in Villette, though transferred to M. Emanuel.  Though Lucy may seem more deserving, her love affair ends, at best, in separation and ambiguity.  The Professor concludes with images of connubial bliss (though the reader may suspect that the real picture is more complex), while Villette ends in a note of sinister foreboding with howling banshees signaling lethal storms.  In spite of the common ground of the plots and even of the language, the first two novels Charlotte Brontë completed are for the reader independent of each other in direction and theme, though, had The Professor been published, Villette would never  have been written.

  

 

1.  Carl Plasa,  “Charlotte Brontë's Foreign Bodies: Slavery and Sexuality in ‘The Professor,’” Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Winter, 2000), pp. 1-28  “For many critics, the epistolary manoeuvre with which Brontë begins The Professor is both clumsy and artificial.”

2. Heather Glen in her introduction to the Penguin Classic edition.  Glen provides as well useful background on early nineteenth century self-help books.  

A Question of Tone in The Mill on the Floss

      The Mill on the Floss is a tragic story not alone in the essential sense that the principal characters die at the end.  The shadow of doom plays over Maggie and Tom even in their childhood when the real agonies of their lives lay far in the future.   At one point the narrator explicitly declares that the story is tragic, though admittedly in an unconventional way.  While the genre, she says, has customarily featured “lofty” heroes as the “source of that conspicuous, far-echoing tragedy, which sweeps the stage in regal robes, and makes the dullest chronicler sublime,” yet humbler people may likewise possess hubris (in Eliot’s phrase “pride and obstinacy”) and “have their tragedy too,” though often “of that unwept, hidden sort that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record.” (III, 1)  Written at a time when literary Realism was overtaking Romanticism, The Mill on the Floss sought to adapt the ancient form to modern experience by situating tragedy in a bourgeois setting familiar to many of the book's readers from lived experience. 

     The book closes in a pathetic scene in which Stephen and Philip separately visit Tom and Maggie’s grave.  The postmortem intimacy both between the siblings and between Maggie and her lovers, seems more sentimental than tragic, but the tone is thoroughly melancholy.  Their death in the flood had been repeatedly foreshadowed throughout the book not least in the unlikely legend of St. Ogg and its reprise in Maggie’s dreams while in the boat with Stephen. [1]  Though the fall of Jeremy Tulliver through his obstinate lack of judgement may be the central catastrophe of the plot, the focus is really on Maggie, the spirited girl too clever for her circumstances, too sensitive to avoid self-doubt and too emotional to act in a way others might find prudent.  Then, too, Tom is inherently kind but narrow-minded and stubborn like his father, Stephen is captured in languid insouciance until the crisis, while Philip Wakem, his father, the Dodson aunts, and virtually everyone in the story is portrayed as flawed to various degrees.  Even those who try to conduct their lives with moral sensitivity find their choices clouded by ambiguity and contradiction.  (The sole exception is good old Bob Jakin, whose dialect may sound comic, but who proves not only a loyal friend in spite of class division, but even a good investment advisor.)

     Yet the gravity of the situation in which Maggie and Tom find themselves remains latent for a long stretch.  For most of the volume the reader hears nothing of impending doom, but rather the voice of a warmly wise narrator, superior to the characters in knowledge and judgement, but not as much critical of them as gently amused and indulgent toward their all-too-human shortcomings.  While this sort of authorial attitude is generally foregrounded in predominately comic works, it is present in serious ones as well, occurring not only in Dickens and Trollope, but in George Eliot.  This tone is so dominant that passages might be found throughout her work.  The present analysis examines examples in “Mr and Mrs Glegg at Home” (Book I, Chapter 12).

     This odd condescension which views the characters as acting with incomplete knowledge or erring judgement is facilitated for a portion of the narrative by Tom and Maggie’s being still children, and the attitude is here intensified by the notion that St. Ogg’s at the time of the story was itself naive and young, a kind of immature village.

     Paradoxically, this trait is expressed even in calling the town “venerable,” which here sounds patronizing, as if to say “quaint,” or “curious.”  It is also said to be “familiar with forgotten years,” suggesting both a history and a failure to learn from it.  This phrase introduces a Romantic formulation of the past implying a misty, legendary history including “a Saxon hero-king” (who himself takes a retrospective view, thinking of “the scenes of his youth and love-time”).  The modern more sophisticated reader is urged to be indulgent, to “look with loving pardon on the inconsistencies” of village architecture.  The book’s “refined readers” are likely to feel condescension when regarding the country scene, as the author pays tribute to the readers’ refinement, graciously suggesting that their familiarity with such rural products as cheese and wool is not even in their daily use, but rather only “through the medium of the best classic pastorals.” [2]  The light tone is unmistakable.

     Eliot notes that in earlier years foreign wars had raged and civil conflict as well: “first Puritans thanked God for the blood of the Loyalists, and then Loyalists thanked God for the blood of the Puritans.”  The language suggests that there was no right and wrong cause; rather, each mindlessly reflected the fanaticism of the other.  St. Ogg’s was unconscious of the past, never educated by it, as the village had “inherited a long past without thinking of it.”  “The days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change it” for, after all, “for a long while it had not been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of men.”  Not only had religion as well as politics become routine, in general, “it was a time when ignorance was much more comfortable than at present.”

     As a leading example of such “ignorance,” the narrator notes that it was “a time when ladies in rich silk gowns wore large pockets, in which they carried a mutton-bone to secure them against cramp. Mrs Glegg carried such a bone, which she had inherited from her grandmother” in blind obedience to tradition.  She and her sister Mrs. Pullet are highly predictable, every appearance demonstrating anew the same characteristics: Mrs. Glegg’s lofty view of herself and her family and Mrs. Pullet’s vulnerability to melancholy and pessimism. 

     Mrs. Glegg may, one learns, look out from her front parlor to frown upon the “gadding about” of married women or out the back to reflect on her husband’s “folly” in maintaining elaborate gardens.  The reader, of course, is to feel altogether superior to both, gifted by the omniscient narrator with a vision nearly divine. The comedy widens from the lady herself to her entire sex; it emerges that “the responsibilities of a wife” include keeping a “check on her husband’s pleasures, which are hardly ever of a rational or commendable kind.” 

     Mr. Glegg is hardly more exemplary.  His energy might seem so, as might his delight in close-up studies of the natural history of his garden plot, yet we learn that he uses his observations to seek esoteric correspondences between the behavior of slugs and the like and events in the greater world.  This speculation is excused on the ground that he “had an unusual amount of mental activity, which, when disengaged from the wool business, naturally made itself a pathway in other directions.”  He, too, has a censorious side to his meditations, satisfied by considering the “contrairiness” of women of which his wife, of course, is an excellent example.  Both may appear foolish to others such as the narrator and the reader, but their foibles are invisible to themselves; both consider themselves to have good sense, though neither quite thinks that of the other, and the reader is entitled to look down on them all, albeit with an indulgent eye.

      If he is stingy, he is “a lovable skinflint.” If she sems in a foul mood, surely it is because she is one of those “who seem to enjoy their ill-temper.”  His difficult wife is only exhibiting “a too pungent seasoning that nature had given to [her] virtues.” As he has “an affectionate disposition,” he is inclined to accept her ways and, indeed, to take pride in “the tightness and emphasis” with which she rolled their table-napkins.  Mr. Glegg’s devotion to his garden may owe a good deal to his wish to escape the confines of his house, while his wife caricatures Maggie’s asceticism when she “made her tea weaker than usual this morning and declined butter” due to being annoyed.  The chapter’s final scene between them depicts their muted but habitual friction.  She is set on finding fault whatever he might do and he responds with some asperity, though the temperature never rises far.  The reader knows that the duet is enacted daily. 

     Despite their flaws – the main way in which each is described – neither is in any way wicked.  In fact, the entire book has no wicked characters.  Much of the narration is pitched on the level of social and psychological satire, colored with Dickensian warmth rather than Swiftian fierceness.  Perhaps for this reason the sudden denouement has struck so many critics as a fault.  The emotional engagement mounts to another plane from the practice of humor in which no one really is hurt and everyone strives to do well in a variety of absurd and ineffective ways to a sudden life-and-death crisis and the summation of two lives that had had more of privation and self-denial than of pleasures for years.  The shift from amusement to gravitas is abrupt.

     While combining comedy with tragedy would have seemed a breach of literary decorum in antiquity, by Horatian standards for instance, the mixing had come to be defended well before Eliot’s novel.  Samuel Johnson’s praise of Shakespeare, for instance, not only accepts the poet’s “mixing comick and tragick scenes”; he lauds such mixed compositions as exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination.”  As Johnson eloquently notes, in lived experience very often “the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another.”  [3] 

     At the same time that Eliot’s novel establishes new ground for realistic narrative, her loyalty to the Classical tradition, especially elements of Greek tragedy, remains. [4]  In The Mill on the Floss she insists on the emotional profundity of the experiences of ordinary, small-town citizens while at the same time reflecting their radically limited view.  Each is obliged at act on the basis of, at best, partial information.  It is then no wonder if worthy motives might motivate unworthy actions.  In the end the mingling of what the ancients would have thought incompatible, an impermissible violation of decorum, is justified for the simple reason that it reflects everyone's common experience.  Each of us is given an imperfect view of what is before our eyes, we are all like Oedipus oblivious, walking always directly toward our own undoing unaware of what lies ahead.  Literary decorum cannot govern life; each day presents a succession of moments of fatuous absurdity followed by sensitive concern, a satiric insight may be followed by deep empathy and ridicule may be jumbled with profound anxiety in a mélange reflected in the tonal range of The Mill on the Floss. 

 

 

 1. Among the studies of this device is Larry Rubin, “River Imagery as a Means of Foreshadowing in The Mill on the Floss,” Modern Language Notes, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jan., 1956).

2.  Proust, another writer captivated by memory, expressed great admiration for George Eliot and for The Mill on the Floss in particular.  Among the many studies of her influence on him are Ian McCall, “The Portrayal of Childhood in Proust's Jean Santeuil and Eliot's ‘The Mill on the Floss’", Comparative Literature Studies Vol. 36, No. 2 (1999); Kenichi Kurata, “George Eliot, Marcel Poriust, and the Logic of Desire,” The George Eliot Review 44 (2014), and Inge Crosman Wimmers, “Proust and Eliot: An Intertextual Reading,” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature Vol. 36, No. 1 (January 2012)

3.  “Preface to Shakespeare.”

4.  Fir a general treatment, see P. E. Easterling, “George Eliot and Greek Tragedy,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1991).

A Structural View of Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

     Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel has much to recommend it: a compelling plot that reserves its most dramatic turn for the end, figurative rhetoric that can mount and build like banks of clouds, and layers of irony highlighted by the constant choric commentary and wit of the mordant observations of The Pilgrim’s Scrip and Adrian’s sybaritic musings. Further, these thematic and stylistic qualities appear in a novel structured according to an elaborate design of bipolar oppositions which may be read as a great formal pattern unfolding in time rather like a fugue. This structure, implied by the references to “Magian” or Manichaean conflict, governs the entire work.
     It is far from clear just what the ordeal of the title might be. The word is used repeatedly with different implications throughout the text. It sometimes means Richard’s upbringing under his father’s notorious System, which would seem an appropriate focus, but in other passages it signifies simply his initiation into love (or adulthood more generally). Toward the conclusion the word is used (and capitalized) to refer to Richard’s confession of his infidelity to Lucy. Then, too, the reader thinks of his self-imposed ordeals of separation from her and his acceptance of the duel, an “ordeal” in almost the old technical sense of a sort of trial with God as judge. Over all, of course, hovers the legitimate sense of life as a whole constituting an ordeal. Over this most fundamental subject matter, in effect a story of Everyman in spite of Sir Austin’s singular notions (for Everyman is more peculiar than he may think), Meredith spins an elaborate interwoven texture in which warp is as significant as woof.
     This ironic ambiguity which critics take to be distinctly modern characterizes the entire novel. The book reads like a comedy throughout yet ends in pathos if not tragedy. Richard, the “Hero,” is often decidedly unheroic. Sir Austin, the philosopher, is far less philosophic than he thinks. On the other hand Austin Wentworth, who appears only now and then, is the sensible Austin, though he can do little to aid the others. Adrian, who is in truth only as much the “Wise Youth” as Richard is the “Hero” or Sir Austin the Philosopher, is in fact shallow and detached, passing his time in self-amusement spouting trifling witticisms each laden with further layers of irony. Lucy Desborough, nearly the only character other than Austin Wentworth to be presented in an altogether positive light, benefits from the lingering idealized convention of the irresistible love-object, a woman altogether virtuous, modest, and lovely. Still, she has her counterpart in Mrs. Berry who plays Emilia to her Desdemona. If Sir Austin is the man betrayed by trying to live too wholly in his brain, Hippias does little but complain of the burden of his body. For every type there is a countertype, for every assertion, its equally valid contradiction.
     The thematic pattern of the book is scrupulously dialectic. The opposition between science and philosophy on the one hand and human nature and common sense on the other is sustained throughout at a high state of tension. The author’s own experience of a faithless wife and his authorship of a volume titled The Pilgrim’s Scrip are two among many correspondences that would support the notion that Sir Austin in some sense represents the author. Yet he is regularly depicted as no less deluded, egotistical, and misguided for all his high principles. His “System” is the error that sets the plot in motion.
     Likewise, the epicurean wisecracks and arch rhetorical turns which constitute Adrian’s every speech seem at least as close to Meredith’s own convictions as Wilde’s were to his, but Adrian is characterized as shallow and incapable of either deep thought or feeling. In this way most every line that might seem an assertion of the author is no sooner uttered than the ground is cut from under it. The book is a series of mistaken or partial propositions, a catalogue of humors and of error.
     Clear as the point may be in the work as a whole, it is more precisely demonstrated in close reading. Though one might almost open to the book at random for evidence, I will cite only two passages, chosen very nearly at random.
     Chapter 29 begins with what Meredith terms a “necessary” prelude to Richard’s move toward decisive action. “Let it be some apology for the damage caused by the careering hero, and a consolation to the quiet wretches dragged along with him at his chariot-wheels, that he is generally the last to know when he has made an actual start.” Whereas one might expect a hero to be fully conscious and deliberate, to Meredith he is blundering as blindly as everyone else. Though much of the novel implies the impotence of science in the face of human nature and mere chance, he employs the language of the science of his day: “He may be compared to one to whom, in an electric circle, it is given to carry the battery.” The fact that the séance-like gatherings called electric circles or circuits since the eighteenth century, then popularized by Mesmer, would today be called pseudo-science only strengthens the point. According to Meredith, power is “all Fortune’s,” and humans can only caper comically and helplessly, the victims of ineluctable fate. The Pilgrim’s Scrip reinforces this idea, saying that to be “intent upon his own business” is “with men to be valued equal to that force which in water makes a stream.”
     This brief paragraph first evokes the traditional concept of a hero, then denies it by suggesting Richard’s lack of control over the consequences of his actions, describing him as no more the agent of his own life than is an electric current or the onward push of a river. There is of course a strong convention of heroes from Achilles to the Existential “man of action” who are ultimately unable to alter their fate, but whose nobility consists of their persistence, as they go down to defeat with courage, looking at reality without illusion. Richard on the contrary vainly imagines that he is captain of his destiny. Yet, as critically flawed as Meredith’s hero may be in his vanity and selfishness, most readers would sympathize with his romance across class boundaries. If to be a force of nature like that of electricity or flowing water is to be a hero, is not everyone likewise heroic? So in this opening paragraph, one can trace the hero made non-hero and back again multiple times, resulting in a rich ambiguity, a tense contradiction that flickers from one valid evaluation to its opposite, equally valid.
     The same paradoxical alternation of judgments is illustrated by Lady Blandish’s attitude toward Wordsworth in Chapter 26. She is discussing literature in a letter to Sir Austin after having, with some misgivings, assisted him in his plan to separate Lucy from Richard. Having said that she is repelled by Gibbon’s cynicism and impiety, she continues, “How different it is with Wordsworth!” Though this line might seem to introduce an enthusiastic endorsement, she follows immediately with, “And yet I cannot escape the thought that he is always solemnly thinking of himself.” Seeking to regain balance, perhaps, this line is succeeded by the defensive ejaculation, “but I do reverence him!” A few lines later he has become “a donkey,” though (we remain on a tightrope with the pole extending equally to the right and left) “a very superior donkey” whose most impressive quality is “stubbornness” as he is incapable of “sublimity. “I love Wordsworth best,” the paragraph concludes, “and yet Byron has the greater power over me. How is that?”
     This entire complex system is then itself ironized. To Sir Austin her confusion is explained, not by her humanity, but by her sex. “Women are cowards, and succumb to Irony and Passion, rather than yield their hearts [as he presumably believes he and Wordsworth do] to Excellence and Nature’s Inspiration.”
     Many students, and not a few of their professors as well, cherish the notion that one may apprehend truths about lived experience through reading literature, but the fact is that writers are not experts in philosophy, psychology, or science. Their skill is in writing. But, if they cannot prescribe answers, they can precisely and passionately, point to the questions most important to our species. They can then create the most affecting symphonies out of these very mysteries and ambivalences. A claim to solve the great issues that engage us all is in fact a confession of arrogance and reductionism. The great writers leave us always in suspense.

Trollope's Appeal

Page numbers refer to the Oxford World's Classics paperback edition.

     Traveling, I find myself indulging again in Trollope. Such a habit can last a lifetime. The man was prodigiously prolific, and most of his work occupies a reasonable plateau of quality. (Truth be told, his very best is little better than his worst.) As a popular novelist, his political views, conservative enough to be properly termed reactionary, were yet purged of unpleasantness apart from the wickedness of certain people who are unlike you or me. Decorated then with the mostly amiable eccentricities of us all, and even more with ladies both lovely and virtuous, his work confirmed the assumptions of a mainstream audience of middle and upper-class readers. And I venture to say that he remains so reassuring today because of the same utter conviction of the basic rightness of things.
     He is not so much a real partisan of the traditional, land-based England of old as he is given to nostalgia for it. A descendent of the eighteenth-century man of sensibility, he relishes a sweet, sad, “noble” feeling, though he is himself bourgeois and his heroes must be “manly,” however tender their relations to women, children, and the degraded poor. In Doctor Thorne, the narrator interjects a passionate claim that the nation is not fundamentally commercial, that trade cannot be a matter for pride or even real excellence (12-13) Rather, he celebrates an explicitly “feudal” system in which the landed aristocracy can be trusted to be sufficiently high-minded to rule in the interests of all. At the same time, he satirizes the de Courcys, recognizing every absurdity of a hereditary gentry.
     In Trollope one encounters complete a small, self-contained world, all the more perfect for its provincialism. Things come right in the end, though a weak character or two may be sacrificed to sentiment; the good are blessed and the vicious ruined. All received ideas are accepted and reinforced. A fellow like Doctor Thorne, though he may display excessive pride or obduracy, has a heart of gold, so he must prosper in the end. Part of the Doctor’s worth is that he possesses not only ethical integrity but also a belief in family and descent. Indeed, without this loyalty to a class to which he has only a tenuous claim, he would not seem quite moral in the world of the novel.
     Similarly, though Mary is a bastard, a status which has only recently lost its obloquy, she is also related to the house of Ullathorne and thus enabled to be refined and womanly. It is curious, and likely a reason Trollope, who defended psychological rather than plot-driven novels, himself did not care for this book, is that the narrative device of Mary’s inheritance, suggested by his brother, though it is held suspended for six hundred pages, easily guessed by the reader from the start. Mary is so nice; she must win out and marry joyfully in the end.
     As few of us, his readers, find ourselves at the top of the social pyramid, Trollope makes good fun of aristocrats. He may support a sort of feudal paternalism, but he satirizes its representatives regularly. The Duke of Omnium is such a very lofty nabob that he is treated at a distance, but the de Courcys are consistent figures of fun. Still, everyone’s worth is realized by their proper playing of a social role.
     Trollope’s treatment of his transgressive characters, those whose actions the reader can not applaud, those that go beyond idiosyncrasy, silliness, or a bit too much of a good thing, indicate the dangers of violating social norms.
     Scatcherd is the prime example of someone who has wandered from his place in the social structure. This upstart capitalist, having left his proper station, finds himself suffering. The uncouth tradesman, who represents the upward mobility possible in capitalism, is an errant alcoholic; in fact, his ascent to wealth and international stature is rather incredible, given his youth as a mason and a convict and his all-but-uninterrupted drunkenness. His unlikely success is marred not only by his own pathological drinking but also by a no-good son who shares none of his virtues while magnifying his every vice. Scatcherd himself reflects that he would have been more blessed had he remained a stonemason. As it is, he gains immense wealth only to have it revert to the local embarrassed squire who can, of course, make much better use of it. His wife gracefully retires from Boxall Hill, knowing that she never really belonged there.
     If the reprehensible tycoon is the book’s primary illustration of the frightful monstrosity of people’s rising above their stations, he has his junior partner in Moffatt. This low-born capitalist acts as a blackguard in jilting Augusta. His advocacy of extending the franchise and admitting Jews to Parliament is portrayed as disreputable vote-pandering as well as making him a “muff.” (207)
     In a turn typical of Trollope’s middle-class partisanship for the wealthy, Amelia finds Mortimer Gazebee altogether too low-born for Augusta to consider as a husband, and Augusta herself admits that such an alliance would be “derogatory.” (496). They consider nothing but class in their calculations and pose the frightening question: “If we were to act that way, what would the world come to?” she asks. When Amelia herself violates the class barrier by marrying the affluent attorney, this turn exposes the hypocrisy of the aristocracy without vitiating Amelia’s point. It is, after all, her failure to accept such a marriage. While well-born, she must be less than altogether noble.
     At times Trollope’s social ideal seems to veer backward even further than feudalism. Scatcherd’s murder of Henry Thorpe (who had seduced his sister) is all but approved by the narrator and by the authorities. As a more civilized citizen of higher rank (semi-civilized at any rate) Frank takes similar action against Moffat who has jilted his sister (but without having had sex with her) by horsewhipping him outside his club. Moffat, of course, being a bounder, folds without resistance, and the police, though they take Frank into custody, soon realize that he was doing what they consider the right thing. The proper social order, it seems, must be maintained by individuals taking “manly” action, ignoring the police, courts, and laws.
     Trollope opposes the modern wholesale, including science and technology. He often directly addresses the presumably bourgeois reader but, at a critical moment, he enlists an ostler as spokesman. This character, a sort of Victorian British Stepin Fetchit, whose quaint deficiencies are evident in his comic dialect and his lameness, remembers most fondly the old “duik” and doochess” and laments the loss of importance of the feudal seat, commenting, “the money did fly in them days!” (200) as though his sort would be much better off were it not for social progress.
     In the end it may be Trollope’s conservatism more than his great love for humanity that makes the work warm and comforting even to the more misanthropic. All literature both affirms and questions, reinforces and challenges our received ideas. While some works tend toward the critical side of the continuum, others, in particular popular works like Trollope, tend toward the affirmative, pleasing the reader with the sense that his beliefs are correct and the world is a basically benign place where things run on as best they may. People in Trollope are rarely troubled about their values or decisions. They may be discomfited by circumstance or by narrow-minded antagonists, but they muddle on in a fundamentally lovable manner that makes a narrative world like that of Doctor Thorne a singularly comfortable place to linger.