Dr Thorne - Anthony Trollope [9]
It is physical appearance that attracts his young men and women to each other – that and comparable age. Class is important too, but to be readily dismissed if the money is there. Mr Moffat’s father was a tailor but this does not prevent Squire Gresham from giving his consent to the match, and we suspect that Louis Scatcherd’s father’s having been a stonemason militates against his eligibility far less than his vulgar manners and dissolute life. In both cases the money is there. Money is to make all things smooth in Doctor Thorne. But it would be a mistake to see Trollope as in any way approving this Mammon worship or rushing merrily towards an unmitigated happy ending, so facilely ensured.
From another point of view, as A. O. J. Cockshut points out, the ending is a gloomy one.4 The de Courcys and Lady Arabella have their philosophy of life vindicated by Frank’s marriage, for Mary is base-born and Mary is rich. They always said that Frank must marry money and he has done so, proving them right and their hateful, mercenary and callous attitude viable. We are tempted to ask why Trollope did not allow Sir Roger’s will to be declared invalid, the estate to be lost and Frank and Mary to live the much vaunted quiet life as Barsetshire (or Australian) farmers.
The answer, does not lie only in his personal wish to make his novel a comedy, fulfil his brother’s plot outline and please his public. He was a deep-thinking, self-questioning man, and if the darker outlook he was to develop was still in the future, shadows of it cast themselves on the years before. There is no doubt of his profound inner condemnation of such as the de Courcys and, along with it, his inescapable observation that their mores did prevail in the society he saw around him. Their ways were the ways of the world, and it was realism and approximation to contemporary life that he sought.
His exhaustive analysis of the brutish effects an excess of wealth can have on men and women was yet to come. The Way We Live Now was not to be written for another seventeen years. But Lady Arabella’s fawning adulation of Mary once she has been assured that Sir Roger’s fortune is to be hers (’My daughter! my child! my Frank’s own bride!’), an odious and chilling display, rivals any scene in that novel, the masterpiece of his later years.
Just as a recollection of George Eliot brings to mind that deep, prc-Frcudian intense examination of human motive, and thinking of Thomas Hardy recalls glorious evocations of a lost rural beauty, so with Trollope it is ‘scenes’ we remember; such set-pieces as Mrs Proudie’s first encounter with the Archdeacon, the breaking of the news to Lily Dale that her lover has jilted her, Johnny Eamcs, the Earl and the bull, and, in Doctor Thorne, Frank with his aunt, Augusta with Lady Amelia and the magnificent Scatcherd deathbed. Though he knew it so well, Trollope had no interest in descriptions of the countryside, unless it was to be bought, sold or hunted over. He scarcely ever describes what his people wear or has much to say about the interiors of their homes. Like some other writers of prose fiction, he was unsuccessful when he tried to write for the stage. Yet his ear for dialogue was so fine that we know, by some kind of natural perception, that this is precisely the way our Victorian forebears spoke, not a word too many or too few, not a wrong emphasis or grating phrase.
No great gift of visual imagination is needed to ‘see’ his people as they encounter each other in their drawing rooms and stable-yards, country lanes or cathedral closes. Trollope brings them before us, less by description than through their own intensely individual utterance. Across a hundred and thirty years they live for us still, vibrant with life, charged with their creator’s own formidable energy. This is one of the reasons why he is not only read so constantly and is so many readers’ favourite author but is re-read, along with Jane Austen and Dickens, perhaps more than