Back to the Classics #24

I read this book for my second round of the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2020.

Classic about a Family. This 1879 novel is last of the six-novel Palliser series. In his autobiography, Anthony Trollope asked, “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?” Me, Tony, I would, though I confess a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic was the force that made so much reading happen. I wonder why Trollope hesitated to include The Eustace Diamonds in the Palliser list despite the fact that Lord Fawn, the old Duke, Madam Max, etc. make appearances. Did he forget, like the eldest daughter, “little Lady Glencora,”  of Planty Pal and Lady Glen slipped his mind?

The Duke’s Children - Anthony Trollope

The sixth and final political novel in the Palliser series stars ex-Prime Minister and Duke of Omnium Plantagenet Palliser. In previous novels his Parliamentary comfort zone was fenced with facts and figures, which were supposed to keep dishonest rhetoric and  the passions of political faction firmly out. His colleagues in Parliament saw him as a safe choice to become the Prime Minister in a coalition government, because he was narrow-minded and risk-averse, and had a strong sense of the proper ways to proceed with unavoidable change.

After the coalition folds, he misses his active public life though he is thin-skinned about criticism and not gregarious as a politician ought to be in a happy and free country. His colleagues want him back in government but he claims he is too disillusioned to return. But when having breakfast with his sons, he flies into a speech:

“A very great grind, as you call it. And there may be the grind and not the success. But—“He had now got up from his seat at the table and was standing with his back against the chimney-piece, and as he went on with his lecture,—as the word “But” came from his lips—he struck the fingers of one hand lightly on the palm of the other as he had been known to do at some happy flight of oratory in the House of Commons. “But it is the grind that makes the happiness. To feel that your hours are filled to overflowing, that you can barely steal minutes enough for sleep, that the welfare of many is entrusted to you, that the world looks on and approves, that some good is always being done to others,—above all things some good to your country;—that is happiness. For myself I can conceive none other.”

“Books,” suggested Gerald, as he put the last morsel of the last kidney into his mouth.

We hardcore readers are with Gerald when it comes to books over politics.

In his family life, indeed, the Duke’s self-centeredness is a problem.  He is very private and unforthcoming, with little inclination to express his feelings to his three adult but still single children. Like many cool distant introverts, however, his reticence in demonstrating bottled-up feelings makes him emotionally unstable when under stress.

And in this novel he faces many stressors in the form of his modern-minded children. He scarcely knows them, having seldom conversed with them or gotten a sense of their dispositions.

Out of his awareness, his daughter Mary has engaged herself to a young gentleman with a solid character but little fortune and no profession. The novel starts after this is a fact so we don’t know exactly how they fell in love, but we are told clearly Frank Tregear is not hunting a fortune. The fact of this engagement was, to the Duke’s mind, withheld from him deliberately by old family friend Mrs. Finn when she was informed. Mary tells the Duke she will always obey her father but she will also always love her man, no matter that the Duke thinks the match unthinkable on dynastic and other social grounds. The Duke puts her under house arrest and drags her to the continent where she is overcome with psychosomatic disorders.

His older son and heir – called Silverbridge (his title) but also named Plantagenet - has not only been expelled from Oxford for painting the Dean’s house scarlet and shares ownership of a racehorse with a bad friend but also has turned his back on the liberal political convictions of the family. This apostasy deeply pains the Duke, an intensely political man. After much shilly-shallying, Silverbridge tells his father he won’t marry English woman Lady Mabel Grex because he is going to marry wealthy vivacious American Isabel Boncassen. The Duke thinks Silverbridge is walking away from his duty as an heir.

“I thought you liked her, sir.”

“Liked her! I did like her. I do like her. What has that to do with it? Do you think I like none but those with whom I should think it fitting to ally myself in marriage? Is there to be no duty in such matters, no restraint, no feeling of what is due to your own name, and to others who bear it? The lad out there who is sweeping the walks can marry the first girl that pleases his eye if she will take him. Perhaps his lot is the happier because he owns such liberty. Have you the same freedom?”

The younger son Gerald has been sent down from Cambridge because he attended a prohibited horse race in which his brother’s horse was running. Gerald also loses thousands of pounds in a card game with a noble bad hat, a young throwback to 18^th century ethics-free nastiness. In a wonderful scene, the Duke upbraids Gerald but all his pearls as to the unwisdom of gambling fall right to the ground as the youth is only overwhelmed at the relief of being bailed out.

The Duke has always been a quiet person, given to peaceful pursuits like walking and reading. His refrain to his sons: “You do not quite understand me, I fear.” He simply can’t understand his high-spirited extroverted sons. He is shocked by his daughter’s defiant stand to love her commoner Frank Tregear. He is doubly shocked by his heir’s falling in love with the daughter of a rich American intellectual American. The world is changing too fast for him. Madame Max aka Mrs. Finn can help him only up to a point and the Duke has nowhere to turn, nobody to talk to, nobody to trust.

The book is worth reading mainly for Trollope’s tidy unwrapping of the lonely yielding of the Duke. But other characters show Trollope’s psychological astuteness too. Major Tifto induces Silverbridge to bet recklessly and ends up in a racing scandal. Clever and outspoken Lady Mabel Grex, daughter of a lord that would rather party and die than abstain and live, attracts Silverbridge’s romantic attention until her tragic fate overtakes her; her scenes with Silverbridge and Frank feature her scalding honesty. Trollope introduces witty and gorgeous Isabel Boncassen with zero satire and is even respectful with her father, though he speaks through his nose like the worst kind of American. Lord Silverbridge too grows in the novel, as a politician, as a would-be husband, and as a friend. The rackety Beargarden crowd puts in a couple of appearances especially the lazy and obtuse Dolly Longstaff.

And so the novel and the six-novel series ends, with our old friend the Duke thwarted but at least back in government again with a cabinet-level post. Nothing like work and duty fulfilled to take one out of one’s self. But though the young get what they want in this novel, the disappointed Duke, one feels, is in for an uncomfortable old age, watching the world grow less ethical, farther from the goals of a more just, more prosperous world for a greater number of ordinary people  – a money-mad world balefully examined in The Way We Live Now – a world blown up by the Great War and subsequent break up of numerous empires.