A POLITICAL NOVEL.
APOLITICAL novel is not as a rule attractive to the general public. It is apt to seem to them like a novel interleaved with newspaper. They love newspapers and they love novels, but they like them separate. When Disraeli wrote novels the ordinary reader made an exception. No doubt it was the genius of the novelist which partly led Lim to make it, but it was also the novelist's position. Disraeli, it was felt, wrote from the battlefield. His informa- tion came from the very front. His imagination gilded his work, but in the eyes of the public he was not drawing upon his imagination. He wrote of Governments and their intrigues as a man that had been there; he wrote of dukes and their glories as one who made them. He knew Society and knew the House of Commons, and he knew what connexion they had with each other. That connexion made a perfect subject for a novel—from the pen of a man who spent his time in both spheres. He did not, of course, write as a partisan, yet it is difficult to clear him from all accusation of a purpose. Every satirist bas a purpose, but it is not as a rule very patent. When Anthony Trollope began to write political novels he had, so far as appeared, no such facilities, and he certainly had no purpose whatever. His books were read because they were interesting, and they were interesting because of their realism. When he wrote " Phineas Finn," he set himself to reproduce the atmosphere of Westminster, just as in the Bavehester series he had set himself to reproduce the atmosphere of a cathedral close. How he came to be com- pletely cognisant of either the one or the other has never been entirely explained. No odour of sanctity and no ecclesiastical dimness hangs about his clerical portraits. The reader finds that the clergy are men of mixed motives like himself, not godless, but not altogether godly, and very anxious about sublunary matters. Trollope's politicians are treated in exactly the same way. They are not without patriotism, but they are not altogether patriotic. Between them and the reality of their patriotic professions stands what Trollope calls "the cake," i.e., the emoluments, tangible and intangible, which belong to the political service of the public— the good thing of which the opposite side always want more than their share.
The shadow of " the cake" falls everywhere over the pages of "Phineas Finn," yet the sun of patriotism still shines. Phineas himself, the handsome, pleasant political adventurer who is Trollope's hero, is a very poor man. His father can make him but a tiny allowance, and cannot promise him even that for an indefinite period. He realizes that he must get some of " the cake " or starve. The way to succeed in politics, in his day, was through the drawing-rooms of the great. In order to get it he makes some small sacrifices of conviction and some perhaps of dignity. Aware of his own charm, he lays siege to the hearts of political ladies as a means of advancement. Aware of his own somewhat flighty tempera- ment, he tries to believe that loyalty is a legitimate cover for want of independence. At the end, however, of the first part of the story, when a large slice of the cake is within his reach, he leaves it for conscience' sake, and, shutting the doors of Westminster and Mayfair behind his back, he returns to poverty, Ireland, and his first love.
In the sequel (" Phineas Redux") Phineas returns to London as a widower. His friends in the great world have completely dropped him during his absence. A man in a provincial Irish town with a wife and a small appointment is dead to them. Yet to his surprise these men and women who for two or three years have been to him like the people of a half-forgotten dream, take him up again. They are all keen politicians absorbed in the personnel of politics and for ever busy in casting the drama that they love, and Phineas is a very fair actor. In a few months he feels that he has never been away. The charming girl who refused him is now a married woman of great social importance, and is ready to help him on, and two other women whom, to put it roughly, he himself in the old days refused, fall once more under the spell of his Hibernian personality. Fortune smiles on him; the ball is at his feet. Then all of a sudden he is suspected of murder and tried for his life. The melo- dramatic incident is perhaps, so far as the plot is concerned, an artistic mistake, but it serves to show Phineas who are his friends; it throws him finally into the arms of the rich woman who has been in love with him for years ; and it serves also to make the reader really fond of Phineas, who breaks down under the ordeal.
The favours of fortune in regard to Phineas were in danger of irritating the reader. His looks, his manners, his successes, were beginning to pall. Trollope strikes him down that he may show the heart of his hero. With a skill and delicacy of which he is not always capable, the novelist makes us see that after all Phineas was a humble man. He pleased the friends, who seem too much like patrons, because it was his nature to be pleasant. He was by nature grateful, kind-hearted, easily amused. His capacity for hero-worship served to cultivate his conscience, for his hero was always a better man than himself. The women who fell in love with him did not touch his heart, though in the long last be marries one of them. Towards all his admirers he is full of gratitude and respect. Phineas has the heart of a child. He is not a strong man, but he is a guileless one. Trollope shows an odd piece of insight into modern human nature (is such an expression a contradiction in terms P) when he proves to his reader that he can make him like and respect a man who lacks that particular form of strength—calmness in adversity—which is conventionally necessary in a hero.
How far Trollope's politicians are portraits it is not easy to say. Mr. Frederic Harrison, who writes a charming little introduction to this new edition of an old book, will not allow that they are portraits at all. Mr. Daubeny is, of course, intended to suggest Disraeli. The political volte-face which he makes at a critical juncture in the nation's affairs will seem familiar to all those who have lately read L. Moilpeuy's
second volume. " That speech of Mr. Daubeny'a will never be forgotten," we read, " by anyone who heard it. Its studied bitterness had perhaps never been equalled, and yet not a word was uttered for the saying of which be could be accused of goiug beyond the limits of Parliamentary antagonism,"although " no words in the language could have attributed meaner motives." The old Prime Minister listened apparently unmoved. "Mr. Mildmay sat and heard him without once raising his hat from his brow or speaking a word to his neighbour." So sat Peel. Mr. Gresham may have been Mr. Gladstone—at the time the book was written this was supposed. Mr. Frederic Harrison, however, does not think so now, and did not think so then, and Mr. Greshana's portrait is rather a failure in any case. He makes a confused impression on the mind of the reader. Monk is, of course, intended for John Bright, though a much less grand figure. Trollope draws him as a perfectly independent, honest, and very vigorous thinker—a little given to didacticism—utterly free of am- bition, political or social ; but he imputes to him a curious impersonal coldness which sometimes makes us wonder why Phineas was so devoted to him. When Phineas is accused of murder, Mr. Monk preserves an open mind on the subject. The shock to the hero-worshipper is great. Independence is a quality whose sources are various, and some of them are inhuman. Detachment is strangely unlovable, or such would appear to be Trollope's conclusion.
It is the portraits of smaller fry which will most delight us, beginning at the very bottom with Mr. Bunce, the politically minded clerk whose wife let lodgings. He was a
Radical. He disliked the rich, the aristocracy, all members of Parliament, and the police. The first three of these hatreds were founded upon theory. With.the police he had come into
unpleasant conflict during a street row. "I pay rates for the police to look after rogues," said he, "not to haul folks about and lock 'em up." The editor of that horrible rag, the People's Banner, is also most entertaining. He could write excellent English, had not a scruple in the world, and dropped his h's.
Some day be hoped to "stand" for somewhere. "I look upon the 'Ouse as my oyster," he would say in moments of intimacy, flourishing the pen with which the oyster was to be opened. At the other end of the scale come Barrington Erle, the Duke of Omnium, and his heir " Planty Pal."
The duke would have been a wise old man had the sense of his own social importance not eaten like a disease into his mind and sent him early into his dotage. Importance did in his case what money is said to do in so many—it slowly unhinged him. He belongs to the past. His successor cared nothing at all for his strawberry leaves. He cared for politics ; "industry, rectitude of purpose, and a certain clearness of intellect " were his only distinctions. Barrington Erie is perhaps one of the best portraits in the book. He personifies a type which is enormously. useful in all spheres of life. Upon one occasion, as a very young man who has but just got his seat, Phineas indulges in a little natural and commend- able rodomontade. He would not, he assures his friend, change his politics for any man—any patron, any leader.
" Barrington Erie turned away in disgust. Such language was to him simply disgusting. It fell upon his ears as false maudlin sentiment falls on the ears of the ordinary honest man of the world. Barrington Erie was a man ordinarily honest. Ho would not have been untrue to his mother's brother, William Mildmay, the great Whig Minister of the day, for any earthly consideration. He was ready to work with wages or without wages. He was really zealous in the cause, not asking very much for himself. He had some undefined belief that it was much better for the country that Mr. Mildmay should be in power than that Lord de Terrier should be there. He was convinced that Liberal politics were good for Englishmen, and that Liberal politics and the Mildmay party were one and the same thing. It would bo unfair to Barrington Erie to deny to him some praise for patriotism. But he bated the very name of independence in Parliament, and when he was told of any man, that that man intended to look to measures and not to men, he regarded that man as being both unstable as water and dishonest as the wind."
Mr. Frederic Harrison tells us in his introduction that times have changed, and that the Phineas series must in great part be read as history. "The old Whig coteries are gone : the influence of county magnates and society leaders is dim, the aristocratic tone of politics and of manners has retired to the backwoods." Is this so ? We wish that a new Trollope might arise to recount the pilgrimage of a new Phineas Finn through a new Vanity Fair and a new House of Commons. The new story, we think, would be very like the old one.
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