Stoic Week #6

Note: This is posted in observance of Stoic Week 2023. I observed Stoic Week in 2015. Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope wrote a biography of Cicero so I think it is safe to assume that Trollope had some familiarity with the Stoic orientation. At least, as a conservative and a moralist, Trollope thinks self-control is a key psychological strength and rationality a cognitive strength. So Stoic-leaning readers will find much food for thought in Trollope's Palliser novels (1864-76), which are like cushy plushy sofas, fun to cuddle into for 30 or 40 or 50 pages at a time, comfortably challenging with laughably unStoic characters.

My Blog Posts: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3| Day 4  | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7

Phineas Redux  – Anthony Trollope

Plot is not Trollope’s main concern. Instead, he focuses on the mysteries of his characters’ psychologies. For instance, married Laura Kennedy confesses her love for single Phineas Finn in a conversation with the wife of roughneck Lord Chiltern, Violet, who argues for Stoic discretion, even with one's self.

“...If a woman,—a married woman,—be oppressed by such a feeling, she should lay it down at the bottom of her heart, out of sight, never mentioning it, even to herself."

"You talk of the heart as though we could control it."

"The heart will follow the thoughts, and they may be controlled. I am not passionate, perhaps, as you are, and I think I can control my heart...."

For Trollope, thoughts and emotions are interdependent. We depend on our emotions to assist our rationality in defining to ourselves our own values, preferences, and aversions. Knowing what we control, we thus become our own people, not the tools and fools of louts who find it fun and useful to push us around. We are also responsible to use our innate rationality to control our excessive emotions. We had better think judiciously, lucidly in order to take the edge off envy, anxiety, contempt, pride, and despair and keep them from influencing us to the point where we make silly judgments and hare-brained decisions. Trollope gives us examples of characters who have failed to rein in their emotions and allowed passions to carry them into misery or transgression.

Lord Fawn gives the police such an inaccurate description that the wrong man is charged with murder and put on trial. And on the witness stand Lord Fawn’s testimony is so garbled that the innocent man is almost convicted. Lord Fawn is shaken over his part in nearly causing an injustice to occur. Though he has no evidence that people are scandalizing his name, he fears his reputation is in tatters. He hides himself and then quits London.

Robert Kennedy feels that wives must be obedient to their husbands’ wills and ways. A control freak due to insecurity, he is so demanding that that he drives his wife Lady Laura out of the house. In his loneliness and despair, he becomes obsessed with the delusion that Phineas Finn has broken up his marriage. The obsession drives him off his dot, as poor Louis Trevelyan’s did in He Knew He Was Right. Talk about a guy that needed moderation and self-control.

In the comic romcom subplot, country gentleman Mr. Spooner is refused by Adelaide Palliser. He clings to the irrational idea that is crazy for her to choose poverty with Gerard Maule, the poor aristo she loves, over wealth, ease, and comfort with Spooner’s prosperity. Spooner is so upended by her refusal that he predicts to wise Violet, with whom he’s had a heart-to-heart:

"I'd give half I've got in all the world," said the wretched man, "just to get it out of my head. I know what it will come to." Though he paused, Lady Chiltern could ask no question respecting Mr. Spooner's future prospects. "It'll be two bottles of champagne at dinner, and two bottles of claret afterwards, every day. I only hope she'll know that she did it. Good-bye, Lady Chiltern. I thought that perhaps you'd have helped me."

The funny pathetic line “I only hope she'll know that she did it,” calls to mind the Del Shannon song, "She hurt me so much inside. Now I hope she's satisfied." Talk about taking responsibility for one’s own feelings and after-dinner drinking habits. Blaming people for not helping him more, here's another guy that needs to work on techniques for cognitive distancing to reduce obsession.

Trollope implies counsel that if life plays a dirty trick on us and a loving family life, respect and esteem, wealth and worldly comfort elude our grasp – especially if the joys of romantic love are not ours to be had – we had better not throw our lives away in despondency but cultivate the courage and wisdom to carry on. Stiff upper lip, eh, what? Many certainties and pieties were overturned by the Great War, but Keep Calm | Carry On was still the byword during WWII and “mend it, fix it, make do, or do without” helped people during the austerity years that followed the war. Some would argue that Victorian stoicism lasted until the death of the princess (see controversial Granta piece).

Anyway, life – and, as we learned, times like pandemics - are long. It is in our own best interest to develop self-control and integrity to persist and resist, to work hard to be a creative critical thinker and live unhindered by nutty feelings.