Dr Thorne - Anthony Trollope [7]
‘A very nice girl, Miss Beatrice; very nice.’
Now Mr Oriel was a modest man, and when thus addressed as to his future wife, found it difficult to make any reply.
‘You parsons always have your own luck,’ said Sir Louis. ‘You get all the beauty, and generally all the money, too. Not much of the latter in this case, though – eh?’
Writing in the happiest period of his career, Trollope was a long way from the darker time of the late sixties and seventies that saw the novels in which even he could be cynical and pessimistic. But since he attempted always to paint a true picture of life as it was, since he was a serious novelist, he could not leave out those facts and events which were the ugly underside of his age. Hateful as Sir Louis is, we are not allowed to forget the example he has had before him during his youth and adolescence; nor does Trollope gloss over the young man’s unfortunate infancy. One is driven to wonder what the psychiatrists of later ages would have had to say about the prospects of a child deprived of his own mother’s milk so that she, in desperate want, could serve as wet-nurse to the Greshamsbury heir.
It is no surprise that Sir Louis grows up with a chip on his shoulder, a determination to be taken for as good a gentleman as any of them, with as good a right to a ladylike wife, and a predilection for steering the conversation along the lines of his own abundant wealth and the impecuniosity of others. Sir Roger, his father, has ruined his health with brandy, but the son’s tipple, curiously – or perhaps not curiously – for the times, seems to be liqueurs. Though destined to the young and unmarried and to make way for Mary’s inheritance, Sir Louis has his own heirs in his creator’s subsequent fiction. Lucius Mason of Orley Farm has much in common with him, and Felix Carbury of The Way We Live Now is another parallel, corrupt, self-indulgent, indifferent to the anxiety of an affectionate mother, incurably idle. But of all of them only Louis Scatcherd is pathetic; only he succeeds in winning the reader’s sympathy by the waif-like quality he retains until the very end, so that in the midst of his brutish degradation it is ultimately the neglected baby, driven from his mother’s breast, that we see. ‘I do wish to do what’s right – I do, indeed,’ he tells the doctor. ‘Only, you see, I’m so lonely. As to those fellows up in London, I don’t think that one of them cares a straw about me.’
If The Warden and Barchester Towers, in their different ways, have promotion and disappointed hopes as their theme, the third novel in the sequence is about marriage and money. The cast of characters is not large, but among them are three married couples and three who are engaged. Trollope, himself a happily married man, looked on marriage as a state to which all right-thinking people should aspire, but at the same time he seems to have seen it as more a duty than a pleasurable or even idyllic style of life. He calls marriage the ‘bread and cheese’ of love. It is almost as if he saw it as a job of work, to be entered into as a career.’ Trollope habitually treats the period of engagement as happier than that which follows it and one that the girl at least would wish to be indefinitely prolonged. ‘Yes, very pleasant; very happy,’ says Beatrice Gresham to Mary. ‘But, Mary, I am not at all in such a hurry as he is.’ Men feel sexual desire; women apparently do not; and marriage has the curious property of transmuting the male nature into something transcendently spiritual.
Of the three engagements here described