BOOKS.
PHINEAS FINN.*
Phineas Finn contains some of Mr. Trollope's best work, but it is not, as a whole, one of his very best tales. While far superior to the lower level of his novels,—stories like Miss Mackenzie or Rachel Ray,—it does not come up to the Small House at Allivton, or Framley Parsonage, or Can You Forgive Her ? and falls far short of the Last Chronicle of Barset. The run of the story is a little tame. Its most felicitous sketches, excepting only its most felicitous sketch of all, that of Lord Chiltern, are tame. The Irish hero is terribly tame,—if we may be allowed the bull. Of the four heroines, two at least are tame, and one, Lady Laura Standish, afterwards Lady Laura Kennedy, is scarcely a success. Even Madame Max Goesler, who is the best study of the four, wants definition. We scarcely feel that we know her even at the close, though we do feel a decided interest in her from her first appearance on the stage. Then the Parliamentary life is a little tame. Mr. Trollope sketches it too completely from the social side. As a mere reflex image of politics in London society it is as good as could be. But stronger political feelings than these go to make up a true politician, and we have only the faint drawing-room or club-room echo of those feelings. Even the political dinner-party at Mr. Monk's has no vivid life in it. There is a subdued tone about the conversation of all except Mr. Turnbull which is not natural. Mr. Turnbull, offensive as he makes himself, would have been hit much harder than he is by any true politicians in such a discussion. And prononee as Mr. Turnbull is, in his way, you see the hidden literary aim and purpose with which he is made to speak as he does, too clearly to accept the picture without hesitation. Like Dickens's pictures of American politicians in Martin Chuzzlewit, though, of course, leas caricatured, Mr. Turnbull is seen at once by the reader to be a political puppet played off by the author for his own objects. Then of him, as of all the other fictitious politicians, it must be said that there is not enough told to define him. Mr. Monk has some affinities with Mr. Cobden, but he is a keen opponent of the ballot, and in other characteristics, too, is not Mr. Cobden. Yet enough is not told of him to make his image clear. Mr. Turnbull has some poor flavour of the worst parts of Mr. Bright, but neither in genius nor any other quality but popularity, is he really much like Mr. Bright. Mr. Gresham ignores the past, and is therefore certainly not meant for Mr. Gladstone, yet it is a problem what he is meant for. We want to hear more of these men, if they are to interest us deeply. The political life scarcely supplies the animation which so much of the tale seems to want.
It has been objected to Mr. Trollope that his creations are too like real life for literature,—that what one really wants in literature are men and women not so much representative of average men and women, as typical of them, with something, however, of intensity and force and clearness of outline, which belongs more to exceptional than to average men and women, but which is necessary in order to furnish keys to human nature in general. It is said that Mr. Trollope's sketches are so like to those whom one actually meets in society that one learns no more from them than we should learn from those whom we actually meet in society. We do not think that Mr. Trollope is fairly open to this charge. His characters are usually quite as marked and strong in relation to modern society, as are Fielding's in relation to the more sharply classified and more strongly contrasted types of character of a far less uniformly developed and far more localized and
provincialized state of society. What we do think Mr. Trollope sometimes fails in, is in perceiving that there is, for most men at least, a depth of private character which barely gets to the surface of society at all, and which Mr. Trollope rarely ever indicates. Here, for instance, is Phineas Finn, who is an ambitious man and a warm politician, who is always in love with some lady or other, though the reader is always a little in doubt as to which, and who has apparently the intellect and heart to apprehend that there are plenty of considerations beyond that of mere success in life, and to look beyond it altogether. Yet we never see for a moment either the roots of his ambition, or the roots of his passions and affections, or the roots of his faith. lire never see him as he would see himself even for a chapter. Perhaps Mr. Trollope might say that Phineas Finn is intended to be, as Mr. Trollope intimated in his preface to the St. Pants Magazine, in which this tale first appeared, nothing very striking,—on the Phineas Finn. the Irish Member. By Anthony Trollope. With 20 Illustrations by J. E. Millais, R.A. 2 cols. London : Virtue and Co.
contrary, a man of rather ill-marked character, of somewhat fluid motives and purposes. No doubt ; but that would not prevent him from either fairly recognizing his own fluidity of nature, or not recognizing it. He must have had a private
life of either self-recognition or self-mistake. He must have either known that he was not up to his high ambitious purposes, for instance, or at all events have deluded himself into throwing the blame on circumstances. So, again, of the four ladies amongst whom he flutters about, without distinctly knowing when he passed from one to the other ;—we contend that he must have had some either true or false self-measurement in regard to this matter also. He must have either recognized that what he called love was not worth much, and was a faint watery sort of sentiment,—or he must have been a great adept in painting up the circumstances so as to excuse himself for his many transitions, and to persuade himself that there was a clear and well-marked watershed dividing the opposite water-courses of his various loves. No man could have made those visits to Madame Max Goesler described towards the end of the story, while he was absolutely engaged to Mary Flood Jones, without a good deal of inward reckoning with himself of one kind or other as to whether or not he had anything in him that he could properly call love,—yea or nay. Yet neither in his political ambition nor in his various love-passages do we ever find him taking any inward measure of himself, either for the purpose of making light of himself or for the purposeof caressing himself. The man is simply seen as he is seen in society,—not in the least as he would be seen by himself. The individual side of him,—the side of him known to no one but himself,—Mr. Trollope never paints at all. And of course he makes the same omission as to those master-thoughts which more or less mould all thinking and feeling men's career. Phineas Finn,—taking him as Mr. Trollope paints him,—must have had either a faith, or a reason for not having a faith, and in the last case, probably, a passionate regret that lie had none, or else it may be some faint selfcongratulation that he was strong enough to face the conclusion at which he had arrived that there was no resting-place for a faith. A man of such a type as his, in some of the circumstances of this story,—before the duel, for example, and still more perhaps in the last moments of indecision as to his political course on the Bill which led to his resignation,—must have gone down to the ultimate roots of human action, the deepest of all the considerations which actuate us. But if it was so with Phineas Finn, we never see it. Apparently, both in fighting the duel and in resigning his office, he was not only led by the poorest and most superficial motives,—that is not unnatural,—but was led by them without the forcible intrusion of better and higher motives. He does what is wrong and he does what is right alike without giving us any idea that such a thing as deep moral struggle can go on in the heart of man. Yet he is not a man without fine susceptibilities. He is meant to be a man, though of rather weak character, of some breadth of intellect and of much delicacy of sentiment. What, then, we regard as the true charge against Mr. Trollope,to which this novel is more open than any of his more carefully written productions, — is that he gives us no strictly individual life,— no life beneath the' social surface,—at all ; that he never completes the outline of any character as it might be observed in society, by sketching it as it would be seen and appreciated or misconceived and falsely coloured by the inner self. This criticism applies most to Phineas Finn, as one always expects a deeper knowledge of the leading character than of any other; but it applies also to every character of any prominence,— particularly to Lady Laura Standish, and to Violet Effingham, in some degree even to Lord Chiltern, only that Lord Chiltern's rather violent, not to say ferocious nature, pierces the crust of social convenances almost as the cone of a volcano is upheaved through the surface of the earth, and tells you more of what lies beneath than is told us in any other case.
Lady Laura Standish was a fine conception, but we cannot but be dissatisfied with the way in which she is worked out. Her amour propre, her love of influence, her eager active nature, her generosity towards those she loves, the absence of compunction or even fear with which she marries a man whom she does not love for the sake of gratifying her wish for social and political influence, the repulsion of which she is sensible against Mr. Kennedy's formalism, the bitterer rebellion she nourishes against his attempt to lecture and govern her, are all finely conceived and strictly natural. But we find it very difficult to reconcile her final breach with him and ultimate horror of him,—which is an element in her nature akin to that of her brother Lord Chiltern's,—with the calm indifference with which she first married him when preferring another. The nature of Lady Laura Kennedy in the latter part of the book seems more passionate, as well as less ambitious, than is consistent with her early conduct. The girl who could patronize Phineas Finn so generously, while refusing him in order to make a marriage of coneenanee, would scarcely have broken with her husband and scandalized the world simply because she
found her husband more didactic and obstinate and less considerate than she had hoped. Her soreness about Phineas Finn's
forgetfulness of his love for her is natural ; but the woman who could so successfully, so calmly, and with so munch dignity repress his love when she intended to marry Mr. Kennedy, would scarcely have reproached him so openly with his desertion afterwards. As a whole, Lady Laura Kennedy is not to our minds a coherent picture. And if, as is possible, the artist could have vindicated the truth of his drawing by displaying the deeper, the more solitary, elements of her character, he has failed to do so.
But if Lady Laura is very imperfect, her husband, the Right Honourable Robert Kennedy, seems to us a great triumph of Mr. Trollope's art, less interesting and striking, indeed, but quite as perfect as time violent Lord Chiltern himself. The silent, stiff luau, who is so taken by Lady Laura Standish's frank and eager manners before marriage, and so shocked by them after marriage ; who makes such dull persevering efforts to tame down his wife, and who gets so sullen when he finds her wits too many for him ; who was always master iu small timings in spite of her wits, and sickened her by the monotonous minutiae of his arrangements ; who wanted her to read all the books he named, and to read them in the precise times he named for them ; who would have no guests and no novels on Sunday, and would read aloud dull sermons in the evening after the double attendance in church ; who, when his wife was out of temper and out of spirits, would always propose to send for Dr. Macnuthrie ; and who, when they came to quarrel with each other, seriously proposed to devote an autumn and winter " to the cultivation of proper relations with his wife,"—studied, solemn, legal, decorous, pious Mr. Kennedy, with his terrible unconscious tyrannies, and his "suit for the restitution of conjugal rights" after his wife had deserted him, is as wonderful a picture as Mr. Trollope has yet drawn. It was a great idea, in itself, to conceive an attempt made to garotte such a man as this ; but it was a still greater stroke to picture him after Phineas Finn has saved him from the garotter's hands, as Mr. Trollope does, sitting for two or three days at home as stiff as a poker, and never speaking above a whisper,—absorbed in the shock to his throat and his self-importance, and in the danger to his life which he had so narrowly escaped. Mr. Trollope has never drawn any portrait more skilfully than the Right Honourable Robert Kennedy's.
Unless it be Lord Chiltern's. The savage and untamable element left in the English aristocracy, and in some of its very best specimens, was never so finely caught and painted as it is here. Lord Chiltern has something in him that reminds one of one of Mr. Trollope's most powerful sketches,—George Vavasour in Can You Forgive Her? But while George Vavasour is wholly selfish in his ferocity, Lord Chiltern is almost wholly generous, except so far as his ferocious self-will predominates over every other element, —his generosityincluded. There is something marvellous in the ease and rapidity with which, in a few love scenes, a few scenes of stormy altercation with his father and his friend and rival, and a hunting scene or two, the man's nature is delineated so fully on such slender materials. Except Mr. Kennedy, the reader knows no one so well as Lord Chiltern, and just as in the case of Mr. Kennedy, Lord Chiltern has scarcely uttered ten sentences before one becomes intimate with him,—in this case because his individual character breaks through all ordinary restrictions to express itself, — in Mr. Kennedy's case, because the individual character is identical with those restrictions, and is incarnate iu them. Thus the contrast between the two is exceedingly striking, and adds to the power of each sketch. While there are many sidesketches of great skill and humour,—as, for instance, that of the money-lender Mr. Clarkson, who worries Phineas Finn to be " punctual" with so much judicious torture,—the story of Phineas Finn will win permanent reputation for Mr. Trollope chiefly by the sketches of Lord Chiltern and Mr. Kennedy.
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