Portraits and Miniatures (25 page)

So I have no hesitation about putting Glasgow amongst the great cities of the world, and far higher than population alone would entitle it to be. I do so upon grounds of site, metropolitan atmosphere, industrial history, visual impact, educational and cultural resources, and the self-confidence of its inhabitants, powerfully expressed in the architecture of its industrial heyday a hundred years ago, almost equally well exemplified by the City Chambers, the Kelvingrove Gallery and the Central Hotel, the self-confidence always there if sometimes as nearly hidden as the River Kelvin is within its gorges, but strongly resurfacing within the last decade.

The renaissance of Glasgow has become a byword. The English city most like Glasgow is Liverpool, by virtue of its geography, the composition of its population, the historic nature of its trade, the eminence of its pre-1914 position ('Liverpool gentlemen and Manchester men' was the catchphrase) and the grandeur of its Victorian public buildings. The trough into which it descended was deeper than anything that has ever beset Glasgow. But when I went there two weeks ago I was struck by the fact that it seemed to have experienced an upturn in the past year or so. And the suggestion that aroused the greatest enthusiasm was that they might be following in Glasgow's path. At a time when
cities as big as Calcutta, as rich as Cleveland, as beautiful as Florence, decline more easily than they revive, Glasgow's experience of the 1980s, admittedly building on a very good base, but after a period of foolish disregard, may stand out as the epitome of recovery through quality and effort.

An introduction to
The Duke's Children

The Last of the six political novels and the penultimate book of Trollope's life,
The Duke's Children
is a classical and perfectly matured example of his style and method. It is the apotheosis of his chronicles of the unending and fluctuating war between love and property. Although this is a campaign unmitigated by any hope of complete victory for either side, it is in general one in which, under Trollope's guidance, the strictest rules of civilized warfare apply.

There is no place for methods of barbarism in Trollope. And this is particularly true of
The Duke's Children.
The commanders on both sides are of the highest possible rank, Napoleon and Wellington, as it were, and do everything at the right time, in a predictable way, which leads to a satisfactory conclusion after eighty chapters of easy-flowing narrative that are also a compendious and reliable guide to the high Whig world (with a few Tories allowed in) of 125 years ago.

‘The Duke', who combines an almost sacerdotal respect for aristocracy with firm attachment to moderate Liberalism, and great wealth with distaste for self-indulgence, is of course our old friend Plantagenet Palliser, who a million words and twenty years after grappling with decimal currency and marrying Lady Glencora MacCluskie, is Duke of Omnium and a former Prime Minister of a brief-lived coalition government. On the first page of this book Trollope kills off Duchess Glencora, a little cursorily considering how much spirit she had infused into the earlier political novels. I think his motive was probably the same as that
which makes many writers of detective stories kill the corpse before the reader has a chance of identifying with it. Trollope, who always operated on tight emotional rations, wished to get on as quickly as possible to the Duke's problem of being left with three more-or-less grown-up children, for dealing with whom his combination of gruff affection and stubborn censoriousness was peculiarly inappropriate, without diverting the reader's sympathy on to a character who was inessential to this story.

The three were the twenty-two-year-old Earl of Silverbridge, the nineteen-year-old Lady Mary Palliser and the eighteen-year-old Lord Gerald Palliser. The third never presumes to attract more of the reader's attention than is appropriate to a younger son, and confines himself to a few horse-racing and card-playing scrapes which are suitable to anyone called Lord Gerald and sufficient to get him sent down from Trinity College, Cambridge. The story centres around the other two and their inappropriate if wholly uxoriously directed amours.

Lady Mary falls determinedly in love with another younger son who is more presumptuous than her brother Gerald, particularly as he is the younger son not of a Whig duke but of a Cornish Tory squire, and who is adequately in love with her. Frank Tregear is a little two-dimensional but he is neither an upstart nor an adventurer, unlike Burgo Fitzgerald who in the dim and distant past had excited the emotions, but not, fortunately, the matrimonial determination, of Lady Glencora MacCluskie. He is indisputably if almost too resolutely a gentleman, the closest friend of Lord Silverbridge (which is considered in no way inappropriate), with whom he was at Eton and Christ Church. His family is said to be more ancient than the Pallisers, but he is not considered by the Duke, nor indeed by Silverbridge, who is devoted to him in every other way, to have sufficient substance to aspire to the hand of Lady Mary. This is despite the fact that the one thing Lady Mary does not need is substance, for the Duke, who has far more money than he thinks it decent to spend on himself or than is good for Silverbridge and Gerald, could provide for them many times over.

This provokes some fine animadversions on gentlemanliness
and who is and who is not appropriate to marry a duke's daughter:

‘He is a gentleman, papa.'

‘So is my private secretary. There is not a clerk in one of our public offices who does not consider himself to be a gentleman. The curate of the parish is a gentleman, and the medical man who comes here from Bradstock. The word is too vague to carry with it any meaning that ought to be serviceable to you in thinking of such a matter.'

‘I do not know any other way of dividing people,' said she …

Tregear then somewhat improves his position in the Duke's eyes by becoming a Member of Parliament, even if as a Tory, a party which the Duke, rather ahead of his time in this respect, regarded as socially as well as ideologically inferior. This, it might have been thought, would make Tregear's financial position more not less precarious, but this was never the core of the objection, and is more than compensated for by an increase of status and by the fact that it gives him some claim to have an occupation even if not a profession (although what profession would the Duke have wished him to follow?). More important than Tregear's advancement, however, is the Duke's softening under the unrelenting determination of Lady Mary, accompanied by the unanimous advice of all the duennas in sight that the alternative to allowing her to marry Tregear is to see her grow into a sour old maid.

Meanwhile, Silverbridge's affairs, assisted by his much greater freedom than that of his sister (‘How I do wish I were a man,' she said to him in his private hansom cab, ‘… I'd have a hansom of my own and go where I pleased'), developed in a more complicated way. He too was an MP for the wrong party although for the right place, the borough of Silverbridge (everything is almost too perfectly matched in
The Duke's Children).
He entered into a racing partnership with Major Tifto which led to his losing £70,000 on the St Leger, which was a lot of Victorian money even for the Omnium estates. (It was in fact exactly the sum which Trollope earned from his forty-seven novels.) He moved
from one girl to another. The first was Lady Mabel Grex, the daughter of a Tory earl of impeccable lineage, strained resources and mildly reprobate tastes, who was just respectable enough to have acquired a Garter. Lady Mab was pretty (in a way that sounded healthy rather than romantic), pert, self-confident, and to begin with a good sort, thoroughly prepared to marry Silverbridge, although in love not with him but with her cousin, the ubiquitous although self-controlled heart-throb Tregear. In addition she was thoroughly acceptable to the Duke.

She made the mistake of treating Silverbridge as though he were an immature boy, which he was. But that may well have made no difference, for he soon met the American Isabel Boncassen, whom Trollope comes very near to describing as the greatest beauty in the world. She was certainly a real girl of the golden west, or at least as far west as Fifth Avenue. She was on a long visit to Europe with her parents and seemed quite disposed to see it extended into permanence by a grand English marriage. The 1870s were the early days of the infusion of American blood and money into the upper ranks of the peerage, and Trollope was very
à la mode
in making this a central feature of the last of his political novels. In the earlier ones, around a decade earlier, ‘foreigners' were more typically represented by Madam Max Goesler, the lady of Austrian property who became Mrs Phineas Finn, or Ferdinand Lopez, the dago adventurer who ended by throwing himself under a train at Willesden Junction.

Miss Boncassen's mother was ‘homely' but her father Ezekiel Boncassen was given the appearance and dress of Lincoln, although he was rich with second-generation wealth, scholarly, and, in a homespun way, of refined manners. He was also spoken of as a possible President of the United States, which was odd, for no one of remotely his type got near the White House between John Quincy Adams fifty years before and Theodore Roosevelt twenty-five years afterwards.

The Duke of Omnium much enjoyed grave comparative political conversations with Mr Boncassen, found Mrs Boncassen inoffensive, Miss Boncassen decorative and ladylike, and invited them all to stay (together with Silverbridge, Lady Mary, Lady
Mab and the Phineas Finns) for two weeks at his lesser but more agreeable country seat in Yorkshire. He hoped that the visit would result in the arrangement of a marriage between Silverbridge and Mabel Grex, and was as amazed as he was dismayed when it was the New York girl who emerged as the winner of the duchess stakes.

Trollope is one of the four novelists who have given me the greatest sum of pleasure - ‘sum' indicating quantity as well as intensity. The other three are Proust, Waugh and Anthony Powell. This does not mean that I regard them as the four greatest. I have no doubt that Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Jane Austen and George Eliot, to name only an almost random half dozen, are in some sense ‘greater' than at least two, including Trollope, of my quartet. In the same way I accept that the cathedrals of Chartres and Bourges are ‘greater' than those of Chichester and Exeter, but the sum of pleasure from the latter two is none the less more, if only because I have visited them more often, partly through opportunity and partly through choice. And there is also the factor of special affinity, which, for example, and switching to art galleries, the Frick, the Moritzhuis and the Kelvingrove Gallery in Glasgow possess for me and the Kunsthistorische and the Rijksmuseum do not. And as Trollope is the most prolific of my four authors he has a strong claim to the highest position on a graph that measures output along one axis and pleasure-giving quality along the other.

Like many of my generation, I first encountered Trollope during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945 I bought and read about twenty-five volumes in either the little Oxford World Classics or Dent's slightly bigger Everyman edition. They cost about three shillings each and have survived fifty years very well. Then, unconsciously following fashion, I never read another word of Trollope for a quarter of a century. The news that Harold Macmillan had found him as addictive during government crises as Asquith had found letter-writing to ladies of fashion did nothing to stir me to emulation. In the 1970s, however, long after Macmillan's reading patterns had ceased to preoccupy gossip writers, I suddenly took Trollope up again and plunged deep into
the Barchester series, leavened with
Can You Forgive Her?
and
The Duke's Children
from the political novels.

In 1988 the invitation to write this introduction sent me back to a leisurely reading of the latter. I then made the mistake of postponing the execution of the writing task. This made me feel that I had to go back for yet a fourth time, although on this occasion reading quickly and under pressure. So this work is in the position, perhaps unique to a book not my own (in these frequency is dictated by the need for revision and proof-reading as well as by narcissism), of having been read four times. Even so, I found on the last go that the difficulty was not, as is often the case, that skimming led to aquaplaning so that I was soon hardly touching the surface, but that I could not bring myself to strike with sufficient ruthlessness from headland to headland but still wanted to re-explore, for the second time within little more than a year, every inlet of the convoluted coast.

What gives Trollope this strong if fluctuating attraction for me? Is it, as his detractors would have it, the comfortingly reliable pull of the second-rate? I do not think so. He was certainly not consistent, except in his output per hour. His quality varied enormously, both between books and within them, and the variation was accompanied by a remarkable lack of discrimination as a self-critic. He could write a novel as bad as
The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson
and one as good as
Phineas Finn: The Irish Member
within a year of each other, and not be aware of the difference in quality between them.

Nor was he nearly as pedestrianly plodding as his critics and sometimes he himself liked to pretend. He was prolix, partly because it was the fashion and partly because he was over-fluent, but in his better books, a few descriptive passages apart, he carried the reader over the ground with an easy momentum which belied his heavy frame and explained why he was so at home in the hunting field. His dialogue was always sure-footed.

This, however, is to some extent a defensive tribute, a refutation of those like Henry James who thought that Trollope was essentially a novelist for the unsubtle, even the stupid, in today's parlance a sort of chronicler for the saloon bar or the golf
clubhouse. His positive strength for me lies principally in his command over both the physical and the social topography of mid-Victorian England. Some of his work is like that Canaletto picture of Whitehall in which the detail was so accurate that, nearly two hundred years after it had been painted, the Westminster City Council find it a useful chart for drainage repairs.