The Small House at Allington Read online

  Juliet McMaster has discussed the importance of the ‘symbolically elephantine’ moth to which Lily – who files too near Apollo Crosbie’s rays – is compared; more apposite, though more prosaic, is the old parable of the ‘cup and the lip’ which crops up in the noel like a robust leitmotif. ‘Should there be such a fall… the cup would have been so shattered in its fall that no further piecing of its parts would be in any way possible.’ It is difficult to ignore the psychological contingency plans Lily makes for the hour of her disappointment, as if part of Crosbie’s appeal was the inevitability of his selling her short. Before he starts to temporize about her poverty (he had hoped Squire Dale might settle something on her) she assures the man whom she has ‘bowled over’ that she would let him get up quick enough, if he wished it. After a tearful night of self-communion she actually offers to release him, anticipating his vision of the unfashionable house and five children ‘somewhere near the New Road’; but, as Crosbie’s resolve wavers, Lily – appealingly overwrought as in the moonlit garden – takes his cowardly declaration of ‘indissoluble’ love at face value, sealing her embrace with the beautiful idealism of the words of Ruth. After his departure from Allington, Lily’s preparations for the crisis quicken. She declares she ‘could give him up tomorrow, if I could see anyone that could suit him better’. When he sends a meanly scrawled note instead of a love-letter she is already smoothing her path to old maindhood by hoping nothing will ever divide her from her mother. When Crosbie’s defection can be doubted to longer, Lily has already accommodated herself to the calmness of despair, as though a spectator at the great event of her life, and goes placidly down to breakfast. But she asks her mother ‘sternly’ for Crosbie’s ‘last words’, for she is already assembling the apparatus of luxurious disappointment with which she will gratify her inner life for the remainder of the novel. It is impossible to say that her behaviour from this point onwards is straightforwardly masochistic. Lily’s ‘light half-joking’ exterior, and her systematic physical cossetings, see to this. Her days are given over to what seems a productive course of reading, and though she contracts scarlatina, there is nothing wilful or manipulative about her illness. For much of the time her convalescence is ‘pert and saucy’. Only intermittently and in private does Lily relish brooding on her wrongs. She ‘must’ know the day of Crosbie’s marriage, and when it comes she rises late, shielding her body from the chill of Valentine’s morning with exquisitve self-gratulation, while her mind runs a vicarious errand to fashionable St James’s, Piccadilly. She shrinks from facing ‘the cold world beyond her bed’, because:

  ‘… the fire won’t go all around me, like the bed does. I wish I could know the very moment they’re at the altar. It’s only half-past ten yet… Oh, dear, I used to think so often of the letter that I should get from him on this day, when he would tell me that I was valentine.’

  After Crosbie’s marriage, Lily hatches an extraordinary sequence of fantasies, used to repel Eames’s proposal, but which nevertheless look as if they had been prepared in advance. ‘It is to me almost as though I married him’, she declares, suggesting, without theological justification, that in eternity her own claim to Crosbie’s hand will be as strong as the Lady Alexandrina’s. Eames’s suit, if accepted, would be to her a kind of adultery. She justifies her abandonment to a perpetual virgin ‘widowhood’ by invoking Victorian rhetoric regarding the fallen woman (Trollope has recently treated the potentially naughty Lady Dumbello to some). She must shun ‘the sin against which women should be more guarded than against any other’. There are, however, hints that despite her outward resolution she does not fully know her own mind. When she considers the possibility of the Lady Alexandrina’s death, and Crosbie coming to her in five years’ time, she declares that she ‘would still take him. I would feel myself constrained to take him.’ This does not square with her reception of Crosbie’s suit once it is actually renewed in The Last Chronicle of Barset. Yet if some of Lily’s behaviour smacks of disingenuousness and some of a formidably articulate masochism, critical motive-mongering is ultimately powerless to interpret her compelling malaise. It lies trapped in Trollope’s admirable dialogue. What is certain is that part of Lily’s appeal for the general reader lies in her psychic hidebinding, as Trollope wisely determined when he concluded in An Autobiography: ‘It was because she could not get over her troubles that [the public] loved her.’

  Crosbie has inevitably proved less fascinating to Trollope’s readers than Lily Dale, but it would be unfair to suggest with Hugh Walpole that he has no appeal.13 The early reviewers were closer to the truth when they saw in his predicament the book’s ‘finest indirect moral teaching’. In life we never get as close to the ambitious, fallible, self-seeking Crosbies as we are permitted in Trollope’s generous and painstaking art; it is early to forget how common are extempore moral and financial calculations of the kind Crosbie brings to bear on life’s crises, and how many men like Crosbie, ‘not altogether a villain’ and ‘just a fraction of a hero’, ‘see and approve the better course’ without necessarily taking it. Crosbie is a smaller man than he looks, as his dwindling official reputation and his slackening ability to impress hacks like his brother-in-law Gazebee and his ‘special friend’ Montgomerie Dobbs demonstrate as the novel proceeds. But he has at the same time a certain social rethlessness and efficiency, as Trollope’s intriguing opening metaphors show:

  He had set himself down before the gates of the city of fashion, and had taken them by storm; or, perhaps, to speak with more propriety, he had picked the locks, and let himself in.

  He is not a convenient man to displease: Lady Julia De Guest, the members of his Civil Service Board, and miscellaneous operatives of the De Courcy clan all taste his asperity in the course of the book. His resilient evasions when brought to the martial net, whether at Allington or Courcy Castle, have to be reckoned with. He has the self-seeker’s promptness to ‘teach himself that he is an injured man’, the timeserver’s consolation that he is motivated by principle, and the old sophistical placebo ‘that it was right to do what he wished to do’. He is accomplished in conventional amatory wisdom. His analysis of Eames’s calf-love for Lily, its adolescent ‘sense of grace’ and indulgences of pleasurable pain, is not at all injudicious, and he had developed a flexuous plausibility of manner that means he can speak ‘tender loving words’ while keeping his intellect free for nice self-questioning. Trollop’s anatomization of him is as plainspeaking as George Eliot’s of Arthur Donnithorne in Adam Bede, and his mature casuistries are certainly more disconcerting than Arthur’s puppyish vanity; yet Trollope’s compassion, characteristically open and generous, stops short of Eliot’s irony. The novelist’s careful transcription of Crosbie’s interior monologues leaves, as so often in Trollope, no room for overt moral censure.

  Crosbie is, moreover, with characteristic Trollopian farimindedness, placed at the centre of what is arguably the book’s finest single scene, his sojourn in Barchester in Chapter 16, on his way to Courcy Castle, Lady Alexandrian and martial ‘Nemesis’. It is here that attempts to exclude The Small House as Allington from the Barchester Chronicle seem least functional. For the habitué of Barchester the episode is pregnant with a sense of the intricacy of Trollope’s long-distance art, the rich rewards of his attentiveness and voluminousness. As A. O. J. Cockshut has pointed out, the events are unremarkable. To Crosbie they have ‘the sweet and sentimental flavour of an interlude irrelevant to the main concerns of his life. This is the great crisis of his existence and he has no idea of the fact.’14 Crosbie, passing the time between trains in Barchester Cathedral, hears the Litany chanted efficiently but at distressing length, comments idly while the verger peddles him half-a-crown of gossip, is shown a prize Portugal laurel by ex-Warden Harding, now a ‘fond garrulous old man’, and filters the picturersqueness of Hiram’s hospital through his apprehensions of Lily’s bearing him a family to match the fourteen children of Mr Quiverful, the present incumbent. Yet to the reader of The Warden there
are undertones of another day spent killing time long ago, when Mr Harding, about to resign the Wardenship, took refuge in Westminster Abbey from his brow-beating son-in-law and his moral dilemma, and himself became absorbed in the singing of the Litany. It is impossible to make much symbolic capital out of juxtapositions such as these in Trollope. They carry the unmeaning appositeness, the suggestively random association of such episodes in life, of recurring situations and contrasted personalities, the aesthetic satisfaction of contemplating from an enlightened distance the pattern of events in time. The means Trollope employs to construct the scene seem curiously simple; little more than still having Warden Harding and his belongings novelistically on hand three books after the great events of his life are over. But this is in truth one of his great creative strengths. When a month passes in the world of the novels, Trollope takes care, as he points out in An Autobiography, that ‘as here, in our outer world’ his characters shall be a month older; and he never exhausts their human possibilities first time round, as Henry James tried to do, by a process of artistic sublimation. The one exception to be found in James’s work is Christina Light (of Roderick Hudson), whom he resurrects in The Princess Casamassima only because her ‘ghost’ was especially importunate, fingering the windows and doors of the House of Fiction until he was forced to give her admittance ‘to testify that she had not been – for what she was – completely recorded’. More characteristically, Catherine Sloper in the final sentence of Washington Square turns to her embroidery and husbandless introversion ‘for life, as it were’, her fictional usefulness exhausted. James distrusted recurring characters. Dickens’s disappointing retrieval of Mr Pickwick in Master Humphrey’s Clock suggests that he probably felt the same way. Thackeray is not above inviting trusty old stagers back when inspiration suspiciously flags. But Trollope, who confessed that he lived with the shade of the slain Mrs Proudie ‘in the full reality of established intimacy’, never scrupled to write cameos for his old dramatis personae, and the undemanding artistic richness of Crosebie’s inset journey to Barchester is the result.

  The Small House as Allington stands at the crossroads of Trollope’s two great novel sequences, the Barsetshire and Palliser series, and a discussion of Trollope’s addiction to recurring figures is particularly appropriate when considering it. As Mr Harding looks back to the first characteristic success of Trollope’s career as a novelist, so Plantagenet Palliser, who first appears in Chapter 21 of The Small House, looks forward almost to its far end in The Duke’s Children. It appears Trollope was engrossed in the possibilities of his new characters by the time he got to the end of The Small House. Chapter 55, in which we heart the most and (for this novel) the last of the Pallisers, is the novel’s most congested chapter, not only settling the matter of Palliser’s flirtation with lady Dumbello, but also broaching the story of Lady Glencora in a couple of paragraphs that hurry her life to its first crisis, breaking off with a description of the outward trappings of the Palliser marriage, but with the inner drama of her heart unresolved. She is left poised between her gauchely dutiful and attractively authoritative husband, Plantagenet, and her exquisitely futile lover, Burgo Fitzgerald. Having excited his readers’ appetite for a sequel Trollope sat down to write one (Can You Forgive Her?) within six months, while The Small House was still undergoing its serial run, and even squeezed Lady Glencora into a comic chapter on charitable bazaars in his next novel, the decidedly unparliamentary Miss Mackenzie.

  Lady Glencora is held over for later treatment, but Palliser gets underway in The Small House. Taken in isolation the history of Palliser’s flirtation with the society beauty Lady Dumbello (formerly Griselda Grantly, the china-doll débutante of Framley Parsonage) is no more than a glittering up-market sideshow. It is possible to draw parallels between the Palliser underplot and the novel’s foreground drama. Chilly Griselda (who is patient only for the good things of the world) contrasts with the patient Grisel of Allington, Lily Dale; middle-class Griselda is born with a fashionable blandness to which blue-blooded Ladies Amelia and Alexandrina can only aspire; Plantagenet the workaholic sets off the more practical careerists, Eames and Crosbie. But the Palliser chapters in The Small House offer, in truth, little purchase for thematic counterpoint. Their real purpose is to introduce characters who will come to occupy thousands of fictional pages as ‘they grow in years’ and ‘encounter the changes that come upon us all’. Sometimes critics complain that Palliser’s gawky lovemaking in The Small House does not square with his unimpeachable integrity elsewhere in the canon (it is both morally careless and humanly gauche). There may be something in this. Yet the attraction between the impassive Lady Dumbello, too stiff to stoop to folly, and the dutiful but ungifted sociability of Palliser is not implausible. He is drawn, in his busiest and most responsible moments, to the outwardly undemonstrative and emotionally unchallenging, much as in The Prime Minister, elevated to the cares of high office, he is to take comfort in Lady Rosina De Courcy’s sanitive prosings about cork-soled shoes. Palliser may not yet have come to stand ‘more firmly on the ground than any other personage I have created’, as Trollope concluded in 1876; but Trollope is already arranging rewarding long perspectives for the character. Moreover, Trollope’s handling of him in The Small House is neither naïve nor tentative. Palliser’s established voice – prosaic, apparently prickly but really shy – sounds in his opening remark (he does ‘not see anything to laugh at’ in Earl De Guest’s misfortunes) and the manuscript of the novel, as Andrew Wright has demonstrated, shows fewer revisions than average in the scenes that feature Palliser.

  Johnny Eames, in one sense reborn into manhood at the end of The Small House, but also left equivocally to his mutton chop in a one-night stay at the Great Western Railway Hotel, is another character whose unfinished emotional business is allowed to stray into a later novel. Eames is inevitably coupled with Charley Tudor in The Three Clerks as a character exerting identifiable autobiographical force. Like the young Trollope, they are both junior Civil Servants, loose among the moneylenders and bar-room and lodging-house sirens of Victorian London (an early surviving letter of Trollope’s, printed as an appendix to the present edition, might well have been written to such a girl), and like him each is gifted with an imaginative life. Tudor converts his into a subsidiary career as flashy journalist and popular novelist; Eames, more captivatingly for readers of Trollope’s Autobiography, builds castles for Queen Lily in the air of his Sunday walks. Verbal parallels between these passages of The Small House and the third chapter of An Autobiography are close, and Eames’s juvenile predicaments mirror Trollop’s own; though just as Eames is unlikely to convert his wishfulfilment dreams into the creatively objective fantasies that spawned Trollope’s novels, there is little chance that the mature Johnny will tell us anything about his creator. Eames faces up to difficulties Trollope also encountered during his first six years in the Post Office, but few young clerks in the early-Victorian Civil Service could have avoided them. We learn in The Last Chronicle of Barset that Eames got into the service ‘before the present system of competitive examination had come into vogue’, much as Trollope himself was appointed to a clerkship in the Post Office by means of his mother’s influence with Sir Francis Freeling, the retiring Permanent Secretary. If these beneficiaries of patronage were not quite as idle or incompetent as Dickens’s Mr Wobbler in Little Dorrit, it is clear from Trollope’s handling of Messrs Corkscrew and Scatterall in The Three Clerks, and the muddleheaded Cradell in the present novel, that they could be pretty bad. A memorandum inserted into the Northcote–Trevelyan Report on the Permanent Civil Service (1854) speaks of ‘the idle, the useless, the fool of the family, the consumptive, the hypochondriac, those who have a tendency to insanity’ as those ‘commonly “provided for”, as the term is, in a public office’. Trollope’s immediate predecessor at the Post Office, one Mr Diggle, had been summarily dismissed. Eames himself makes no early mark, and Bradford Booth claims to have seen a Post Office minute listing the young Troll
ope as ‘a very bad clerk’. What Eames has in common with the young Trollope is a propensity to flourish after unpromising beginnings, and a corresponding inability to make out on eighty pounds a year. Trollope’s sympathy for the young man who comes to grief ‘on the rocks of metropolitan life’ early in his career is not only demonstrated in his moral support for Johnny Eames; a series of articles which he submitted to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1865, the year after The Small House at Allington appeared, demonstrate his sympathy with the plight of trying to live in London like a gentleman on salary of a hundred a year, a feat of domestic husbandry requiring ‘the courage of a hero, the self-denial of a martyr, and much more financial knowledge than generally falls to the share of a Chancellor of the Exchequer’.15

  Eames, like Trollope, is a late developer in a career that seems to encourage a protracted adolescence; his inner life flourishes under an outward social ungainliness, and acute self-consciousness leads to further gaffes and gawkiness. He is, in fact, a ‘hobbledehoy’:

  The true hobbledehoy is much alone, not being greatly given to social intercourse even with other hobbledehoys – a trait in his character which I think has hardly been sufficiently observed by the world at large. He has probably become a hobbledehoy instead of an Apollo, because circumstances have not afforded him much social intercourse; and, therefore, he wanders about in solitude, taking long walks, in which he dreams of those successes which are so far removed from his powers of achievement. Out in the fields, with his stick in his hand, he is very eloquent, cutting off the heads of the springing summer weeds, as he practises his oratory with energy. And thus he feeds an imagination for which those who know him give him but scanty credit, and unconsciously prepares himself for that latter ripening, if only the ungenial shade will some day cease to interpose itself.