By which familiar couplet Pope of course meant nothing more than that the essentially feminine and, it may be, entirely blameless appetite for enjoyment, for the most part only a love of change, is no more eradicable from the sex than love of power.

This maiden scion of a decayed stock rebelled with the whole strength of her being, not so much against the poverty or the meanness as against the intolerably dull sameness of life in the jerry-built tenement, now hardly fifty years old. The mortgage on this, held by its constructor Flannelly, places at his mercy the doomed remnants of those who had once owned the estate. Something has been already said about the popular Irish murmurs at the waning splendours of the Viceregal Court. The continuance of many material abuses might have been acquiesced in almost without complaint if Dublin Castle had become once more the living and shining centre of a social system ablaze with hospitalities, and communicating a sense of importance, stir, and of quickly circulating capital, such as would have gratified even those excluded from its entertainments. The time nominally taken by Trollope for his story is the nineteenth century’s third decade. He himself, we have seen, did not reach Ireland till 1841, and drew only what he actually saw. Nor, since his arrival, had anything happened to betray him into anachronism.

In the fifties, not less than they had done in the forties, the poets, prophets, preachers, and teachers of The Nation still expatiated in glowing terms on the good time coming when, with the aid of republican France, Ireland should receive from the statesmen who were her sons the glories of a new birth, and Dublin should once again be as it was when it had its own parliament sitting in St. Stephen’s Green. Like expectations had been encouraged in Feemy by the literature she loved. With the help of the saints and of luck, her novelists had taught her that a lover, brave, handsome, gallant, and sufficiently well-to-do, who would think of nothing else but pouring silver, gold, and precious stones into his sweetheart’s lap, would yet appear to her at some appointed time not known. For such a prospect she had fitted herself with some accomplishments. She could play on an old spinet which had belonged to her mother, she had made herself a good dancer, and found herself lifted into another sphere when, with the help of the music and the movement, she forgot in her partner’s arms the cares, the meanness, and the gloom of the family hearthside.

When alone, however, she still fed her fancy with the cheap, ill-printed, trashy, and mischievous books that were to the Irish girlhood in her day what the penny novelette and the sixpenny shocker have, since her time, become to readers of her age, sex, and condition on both sides of St. George’s Channel. While Feemy’s town sisters might have been in raptures over the broadsheets wherein an earthly paradise was promised by writers who addressed with equal skill the romantic taste of the kitchen and the political passions of the mob, Feemy was giving her eyes, her heart and soul to The Mysterious Assassin, as her only refuge from Thady Macdermot’s everlasting talk about potatoes, oats, pigs, and from the dread, darkening the household like a cloud, that, impatient for principal as well as interest, Mr. Joe Flannelly of Carrick-on-Shannon might come down upon Ballycloran, to make himself master of the place and all within it.

Well would it have been for the Macdermots had their fair representative sought no further distraction from her dulness than the trivial and vulgar reading that, whatever its faults, was not calculated to do more lasting harm to the reader than was received by town labourers and rural peasants from the tawdry sedition mongers of Gavan Duffy’s literary staff. Writing in the earlier forties, Trollope economised his approval of most English measures for reforming Irish abuses. Even when not bad in themselves, those expedients might be corrupted by the human agents to which they were entrusted. The establishment of an Irish constabulary force dates from Liverpool’s administration and Wellington’s Lord-Lieutenancy in 1823. Changes in that body continued to be made till the consolidation of the various Acts connected with the subject had for its sequel Sir Robert Peel’s establishment in 1836 of the Irish Constabulary. Just a generation later, at Queen Victoria’s command, this body became known by its present name, the Royal Irish Constabulary. The duties of this imperial force, from the first, included certain civil services not imposed upon policemen of the United Kingdom. Such are the yearly collection of agricultural statistics, the management of the decennial census, the conduct by auction sales of goods taken under distress warrants, the inspection of weights and measures, the practical administration of the Food, Drugs, and Explosives Acts. The Irish Constabulary, too, are charged with the prevention of smuggling and of illicit distillation. The officers of this force are now chosen by Civil Service examinations. Vacancies for district inspectors are filled, one half by cadets, and one half by selected constables of exceptional merit.

To this body in its earlier days, as reconstituted by Peel, belonged the evil genius of Trollope’s first novel, Myles Ussher. Captain Ussher was his local title; for the revenue police were at that time organised as a military force. He had of course received his appointment without submission to any educational test. The natural son of a wealthy landed proprietor in Ulster, he owed his appointment entirely to family influence. He could read, write, knew something of figures, and had once learned, but had long since entirely forgotten, some Latin grammar.

There are touches in the description of this man showing that the novelist had profited by the Ethics, which, to quote Trollope’s words to the writer, “at least helped me here, though they had not done so in the Oxford scholarship examination for which I read them.” For Ussher’s valour was the spurious courage that comes of ignorance, and arises in equal parts from animal spirits and from not having yet experienced the evil effects of danger rather than from real capabilities of enduring its consequences. In other words, we are told, never having been hit in a duel, he would have no hesitation in fighting one; never having had a bad fall on horseback, he was a bold rider; never having had his head broken in a row, he would readily go into one. To pain, if it were not absolutely disabling, he was indifferent, because, not having yet suffered its acute form, he lacked the imagination to make him realise the possibility of sometimes experiencing it to such a degree. This kind of courage is shrewdly declared by Trollope to be that by far the most generally met with, as well as fully sufficient for the life Captain Ussher had to lead. The quality that chiefly gave Ussher some vogue with the better classes of his district, was his unfailing self-confidence and unconcealed belief in his ability, whether in war or love, to carry through any purpose he had taken up. His keen, calculating Irish brain had taught him the universal readiness to accept men at their own valuation of themselves. Acting on that principle, he had created for himself an impression, strong everywhere but especially among women, of being irresistible in whatever he might take up, and of having received from fate itself a guarantee against failure, whether in things of business or of the heart. Add to all this that, in a country where a little money goes a long way, Ussher contrived to be always supplied with ready cash.

What wonder therefore if in this favourite of destiny Feemy’s novel-nourished, romance-excited, and ill-regulated fancy saw the realisation of her fondest visions? Of course the mounted policeman, with the graceful seat on his horse, the uniform which became his handsome figure so well, became to her one of the knightly figures with whom the writers that she loved had peopled her imagination. And then his conversation, resembling Othello’s, about “most disastrous chances, moving accidents by flood and field, and hair-breadth escapes” in the regions where his duty lay, “of rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven.” Feemy probably had never read Shakespeare, or she might have learned wisdom from Desdemona. A sense of Æschylean fate, no more to be shunned than softened, runs through this tragedy, whose closing acts are not without the strength and pathos of Dickens in Oliver Twist, and at some points touch the Shakespearean level. Feemy’s father may not, indeed, have loved Ussher, or even “oft invited him.” But not on that account a less frequent or warmly received guest, he rode from his barracks, three miles distant, at Mohill, to Ballycloran to pass almost daily a whole morning or evening. Captain Ussher’s local unpopularity as a Protestant and a remorselessly vigilant official was nothing to his disadvantage in Feemy’s eyes. She saw in it only a proof of her lover’s devotion to his duty, and of his heroic determination of not flinching from any risk of life or limb in fulfilling the obligations he had taken upon himself.

The one member of the Ballycloran household who sees through the policeman’s designs upon the girl is Pat Brady, Thady Macdermot’s counsellor, rent-collector, and factotum. Even Thady, but for hampering considerations, would not lack the spirit to repel Ussher’s advances, and by doing so secure his sister’s safety. What, however, he mentally asks, can he do? The exciseman, on the strength of a mere vague suspicion, is not to be forbidden the house. That at best would only provoke his sister’s indignant disgust. Thady therefore remains inactive, and the only effect of the vague hints and irresponsible suggestions received from different quarters is to intensify a silent, sullen hatred of the man. That, henceforth, by a series of slow degrees—the description of which is Trollope’s earliest exhibition of high literary art—becomes his ruling passion. Not that, even yet, he has in his heart doomed Ussher to death for his intrusions upon the fallen family’s hospitality, and for the scandalous gossip that is raised against Feemy. Till the final stage comes within sight, Thady’s detestation is for the most part speechless, except when the accident of Ussher’s voice or presence rouses the young man to a passing fit of uncontrollable fury. About this time Ussher made a professional coup which, while more than ever concentrating upon himself the ill-will of the district at large, and in particular of Thady Macdermot, showed such adroitness and such contempt of personal danger combined as to deepen poor Feemy’s admiration of her hero. A wretch named Cogan, a Government spy, disclosed all the secrets of the trade in illicit potheen: the men who chiefly conducted it, and the places where the run spirits were to be found. The pauper peasants had been driven to this traffic because it offered the only chance of avoiding starvation.

Ussher’s official triumph in running the “potheen men” to earth leads directly up to the catastrophe. It secures the policeman’s promotion, but inflames to madness his detestation by Thady, who, little better than a peasant himself, sympathises with the peasantry that Ussher is hunting down. Feemy, on the other hand, idolising her lover’s intrepidity, ignores the local misery that is wrought by his daring devotion to duty. She thus unconsciously widens the gulf between her brother and herself. Trollope’s Post Office discipline, hardening his sensibilities, and constantly giving a fresh edge to his natural acumen, fitted him successfully to investigate in all its workings the contraband spirits trade and the spy system used for its detection. This fact gave more than an ordinary novelist’s value to what he had to say on the subject. Among the lower classes, two typical specimens of the human degradation it works are seen in Joe Reynolds and Pat Brady. Reynolds is a mere desperado, waging a truceless war with the world and with law. Brady has never been reduced to Reynolds’ straits for money and food; indeed the occupation alone of squeezing arrears from the Macdermot tenantry has always placed him a little above the dread of starvation. Will the young master of Ballycloran be induced, through Brady as the tool of Reynolds, to join the “boys” in exacting reprisals for the harshness meted out to them by the law?

The “boys” are bent on drawing Thady into their schemes of revenge, likely to prove murderous, upon two of his special abominations, not only Ussher but the builder, Flannelly’s man of business, Keegan, who aimed at himself possessing Ballycloran. With a sigh of relief, the reader finds Thady resist the “boys’” overtures, and, for the time, hopes he may yet be kept from the crowning crime which destiny had seemed to reserve for him. One of Ussher’s most recent captures goes by the name of Tim. This, on a much earlier page, has caused an ejected cottager to anticipate the policeman’s end with the words: “I’d sooner be in Tim’s shoes this night than in Captain Ussher’s, fine gentleman as he thinks hisself.” So far, however, Thady holds aloof from any projects of retribution, likely to involve bloodshed, against the men whose names had become bywords throughout the countryside. Nevertheless, we are still made to feel that, superhuman agencies, in the shape of foreordained circumstances, will draw Thady’s neck into the hangman’s noose.

What did Trollope, after careful inquiry, find the spy system, in its social and moral consequences, to be? At the outset he admits that paid informers frequently bring to justice criminals who would otherwise slip through the meshes of the legal net. On the other hand, the system involves not only the degradation of all concerned with it, but very often the grossest miscarriages of justice. Chief among the villainies of Irish espionage is the premium placed upon false informations by the prospect of blood-money. Next to that evil comes the deliberate manufacture of offences by those who have a money interest in fabricating baseless charges against the innocent and unwary. Trollope does not charge the Government with encouraging these informers, or even recognising them. All he says is that those charged with the execution of criminal laws do frequently secure their own advancement by the most iniquitous and demoralising methods.[7]

The resistance offered by Thady Macdermot to the schemes of ruffians who would stick at nothing fills many powerful pages in Trollope’s first story. The young master of Ballycloran is preoccupied with the issues of his sister’s fate, and maddened with the insinuations to which Ussher’s visits gave the point. Ussher himself will die a violent death, but as regards who is to deal the avenging blow the reader is kept in the sustained agony of a trying and artistically prolonged suspense. Some of those seized by Ussher for systematic evasion of the Excise duties protest their innocence while, bound together in twos and threes with cords, they are being huddled off to prison. To one of these Ussher exclaimed: “You mean to threaten me, you ruffian.” “I doesn’t threaten you”, was the answer, “but there is them as does; and it will be a black night’s work to you for what you are doing with the boys, for trying to make out the rint with the whisky, not for themselves but for them as is your friends.” Thus dramatically is set forth the Irish question, as it seemed to Trollope when he first knew the country. At the same time, the followers of his narrative, their interest in the characters now fairly roused, experience a sense of relief at discovering that they may think that Thady at least will be no party in doing the execrated policeman, or anyone else, to death.

The atmosphere at this point is so heavily charged with moral issues as to be depressing almost beyond tolerance. After the example set in such cases by Shakespeare, and indeed in a way Shakespeare might have approved, Trollope at once relieves the situation and at the same time, by the force of contrast, deepens its tragedy with humorous interludes more illustrative of Irish character than descriptions that should run to many pages. The peasants, whose inability to pay high rent for miserably bad land, and who, in Trollope’s words, have had recourse to illegal means for easing them of their difficulties, may have been driven to become “ribbon men,” but, even when separated from ruin by less than a step, throw themselves heart and soul into the noisy hilarities of a wake or a wedding. The description of Pat Brady’s marriage-feast, followed by the improvised cottage ball, might be the letterpress written up to some painting from the brush of an Irish Morland. Even the moody young master of Ballycloran, who is among the guests, in spite of his scowling glances and his inaudible imprecations on the policeman, has caught the contagious gaiety of the occasion. Ussher, also of the company, leads out Feemy as his partner. The prevailing merriment cannot indeed dispel the haunting thought that it may prove to be a dance of death. But the party itself ends, as it began, in whisky and in peace. Thady indeed, having taken more whisky than is his wont, exchanges hot words with Ussher afterwards. But the popular voice hints only, if at all, at what is to come in Brady’s whisper to Joe Reynolds: “It’s little Mr. Thady loves the Captain, and it’s little he ever will.”

This small melodramatic touch is followed by pen-and-ink pictures of society and sport, again driving the figure of a skeleton at the feast into the distant background. Carrick is to have some races, and afterwards a race ball. The night before, there is a dinner; one of the chief figures at this is a gentleman jockey, Bob Gayner, whose life is spent in riding steeplechases, and consequently in reducing his weight to the lowest possible figure. At this particular banquet he has not swallowed a mouthful. Our last sight of him is, when the diners disperse, standing against the fire-place sucking a lemon, with a large overcoat on, and a huge choker round his neck.

Quick, however, on the heels of all this festivity comes the warning that mischief more serious than ever is in the wind. The parish priest in The Macdermots, Father John, never proselytises, never intrigues, and only exacts from his flock alms enough to keep body and soul together. His device, however, to keep Feemy out of danger by moving her from Ballycloran to the care of Mrs. McKeon, together with her husband touched off in one of Trollope’s happiest character miniatures, has failed. The lover who, on one plea after another, had evaded Feemy’s repeated request of marriage, thinks now of nothing less than of making her his wife, but, being content to retain her as a possession, has no objection to punish Thady Macdermot for his unmannerly speech by carrying off his sister. How that design fails of execution, and how Feemy is not abducted, but Ussher, at the instant of lifting her into the carriage, is felled to the ground a corpse by Thady’s smashing bludgeon, forms a scene comparable, for blood-curdling force of description, with Nancy’s murder by Bill Sykes, and did indeed win from Charles Dickens his earliest admission that Trollope had strength as well as glibness. The long-drawn-out strain on her whole being of the events thus summarised has caused Feemy’s days to be numbered. She dies suddenly while waiting to give evidence at her brother’s trial. All that remains now is the execution of the death-sentence on Thady. The last words that he hears before the bolt is drawn are those of Father John’s prayer that God will receive him into His mercy.

The scenes of violence and desolation on which the curtain falls may almost be compared for impressiveness with any picture of the collective ruin wrought by Nemesis in Greek drama, or as the close of Hamlet itself. Yet the gloom which darkens the whole narrative derives at once, for the moment, relief from lighter interludes. Bob Gayner in The Macdermots prepares the way for Dot Blake in The Kellys and the O’Kellys. One chapter also in Trollope’s first novel so overflows with comedy passing into farce as appropriately to presage the rich and varied humour that is on the whole the dominant note of his second effort. Among the magistrates whom Thady Macdermot’s crime have called in solemn conclave together, are two, Jonas Brown of Brown Hall and Mr. Webb of Ardrum. In all respects but social or official status, these two form a complete contrast. The ungenial and unpopular Brown, one of Ussher’s most habitual hosts, has from the first angrily maintained the absence of any extenuating feature in the murder committed by Thady Macdermot. Webb, on the other hand, naturally amiable and beloved throughout his neighbourhood, almost goes so far as to deny Thady’s moral criminality. In the attempt to rescue something of his sister’s honour he merely committed justifiable homicide. His remarks on Thady’s opponents had been so severe as to be taken for personal insults by the Brown faction. The master of Brown Hall therefore demands from Webb a written assurance that his words were pointed at no member of the Brown family, but receives an answer regretting that he cannot comply with such a request. This, it must be remembered, was in the days before the duel had become obsolete.

Brown’s two sons, Fred and George, have from the first been spoiling for a fight. “The sod’s the only place now, father,” each exultingly exclaims, adding: “I like him the better for not recanting.” Fred takes a more serious view, remarks that Webb is a cursed good shot, suggests his father should make his will before he goes out. It would also be as well, in case of accidents, to have a doctor handy, for, as one of the sons thoughtfully remarks: “Though so vital a part as the head be not touched, the body is all over tender bits,” devoutly adding, in words that really have a touch of Dogberry or Shakespearean clown about them: “May heaven always keep lead out of my bowels; I’d sooner have it in my brains.” The father has fidgeted a good deal between these two fires of filial thoughtfulness and counsel, but so far has said nothing. At the last remark, his patience deserts him, and he exclaims: “D—— your brains! I don’t believe you’ve got any,” presently adding that the affair is one of which he has had some experience, while as yet neither of the young men has been out. The preliminaries of the duel may be comedy; the combat itself rises to farce. The Macdermots contains, as will have been seen, touches of more polished humour than this, though in most cases it is broad enough to suggest Anthony Trollope’s inheritance of the gift from his clever mother.

Such passages as that last dwelt upon in The Macdermots prepared, as had been suggested, the way for the transition to the next novel, The Kellys and the O’Kellys. That story, indeed, is not without some incidents only less sombre than those which diffuse their colour through the earlier book. It is characteristic of Trollope’s novels that the underplot is often of as much importance, and the source of as sustained an interest, as the main plot itself. In The Kellys and the O’Kellys, the secondary narrative not only keeps pace with the primary, but reflects the general character of its interest and displays a parallel for some of its occurrences. The period, a little later than the time chosen for The Macdermots, is that of O’Connell’s agitation, trial, and unimpaired ascendency. Among those brought to Dublin by the Liberator’s appearance before his judges are two men. One is the head of the O’Kelly, as of the Kelly clans, now Lord Ballindine; the other is a young man of about his own age, a widow trader’s son, Martin Kelly, whom the nobleman contemptuously acknowledges as a sort of fifteenth cousin. This group is completed by the evil genius of the story, Dot Blake. Both the peer and the peasant happen just now to be united by a similarity of object, more closely binding them for the moment than the tie of remote kinship. Fond of the turf, with one or two horses in training for the English “classical” races, Viscount Ballindine is bent on improving his finances by sharing his title with an heiress, Fanny Wyndham; her guardian, the Earl of Cashel, having other views for her, is actively concerned to prevent communications between his ward and her lover.

Now for Martin Kelly. Simeon Lynch, the Ballindine estate manager, under the present Viscount’s father, has feathered his nest so well as to have amassed a fortune that has raised his children far above the social level of their birth. His son, Barry Lynch, has even been at Eton with young Lord Ballindine; though in Barry’s case the “learning of the humanities have not softened manners or prevented them from being fierce.” His daughter Anastasia, known as Anty, divides the paternal property with her brother. She is therefore a very considerable catch. Nevertheless the plebeian Martin Kelly, with his Irish self-confidence, has set his heart on winning her. That project is resisted as strongly, by Anty’s brother, as Fanny Wyndham’s guardian objects to his ward’s union with Ballindine. Lord Cashel does what he considers his duty to the young lady in his charge shrewdly and, so far as her lover is concerned, harshly. Much whisky, and a money greediness that has swallowed up other passions, have gradually degraded Barry Lynch into a ruffianly sot, with no other thought than, by foul means if fair fail, to become master of his sister’s share in the property their father divided equally by will between them. The brother’s drunken ferocity proves the death-warrant to his schemes. Driven from home by Barry’s barbarity, Anty Lynch finds a humble refuge beneath the roof of Mrs. Kelly, Martin Kelly’s mother. To these extremities, the relations between Fanny Wyndham and Lord Ballindine naturally present no parallel. Even with them, however, the course of true love runs at least as roughly as is its proverbial wont.

The figures gathered round the leading personages in this twin drama illustrate the closeness with which Trollope studied every phase of Irish life. They are as racy of the soil as Charles Lever himself. Their truth and freshness indeed so much impressed Lever that they suggested to him the new variety of Irish character to be met with in his latest writings. The Irish squire who lives more by his wits than his land, Walter Blake, might indeed, had he wanted such inspiration, have supplied the germ of Dudley Sewell in Sir Brook Fossbrooke, and the other products of the post-Lorrequer period. An effeminate, slightly made man of about thirty, good-looking, gentlemanlike, with a cold, quiet, grey eye, and a thin lip, infallible on racing matters, riding boldly good horses, always drinking the very best claret that Dublin could procure, a finished gambler, who makes his six hundred a year, as to style of life, do the work of as many thousands. Here is a description entirely in the later Leverian style, and with the Leverian ring in the words of the well-bred, sporting adventurer, who plays his own game with such an entire absence of scruple, and with such polished serenity, that his friend Frank Ballindine has to thank some of Dot Blake’s remarks to Lord Cashel for the temporary rupture of his engagement with Fanny Wyndham. Lever’s first profession was medicine. How well Trollope understood its Irish representatives may be seen from his sketch of Doctor Colligan, who, attending Anty Lynch in the illness brought on by her brother’s brutality, resents, by knocking him down, a hint from Barry that he would make it worth the physician’s while to contrive the patient’s death. Of special interest, in view of what Trollope’s next novel was to be, is the Anglican clergyman on the Ballindine property, George Armstrong, whose life is a battle with tradesmen and tithe-payers, but who, though on one occasion Frank Ballindine has to supply him with a suit of clothes before despatching him on some errand to his lady-love, can always enjoy a good dinner when he gets one, and pilots his sorry hunter so cleverly as generally to be in at the death when out with hounds.

CHAPTER V

COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE AND ITS LITERARY FRUITS

AT the time of their first appearance the two Irish novels just described were commercial and literary failures. They preceded, however, even if they did not help to bring about, a turn for good in their author’s fortunes. It was indeed only after the full establishment of Trollope’s reputation that both The Macdermots and The Kellys and the O’Kellys were shown by the reflected light of success to abound in promise. The discovery might have been made earlier had not the books long remained practically unknown. However, Dickens’ friend and biographer, John Forster, then the most formidable critic and exacting editor on the London Press, thought sufficiently well of Trollope’s work to commission from him for The Examiner certain articles about the districts chiefly affected by the successive ravages of plague and famine in 1847. The broken fences, the deserted farms, and the monotonously endless stretches of misery and destitution in Trollope’s Post Office district, including Cork, Kerry, and Clare, were soon to be further disfigured by sights more terrible. Starvation did but prepare the way for the most hideous forms of new and ghastly disease.

Sufferers soon found their skins tight drawn, like a drum, to the face, and covered with small light hairs, as of those on a gooseberry. The poor wretches thus plague-stricken, having no longer roofs to shelter them, were huddled together in wigwams pitched under park walls, with no other food than that which the charity of the owners of these demesnes supplied. Conspicuous among the landlords who answered these appeals were Lord Dunkellin and Edmund O’Flaherty of Knockbane, near Galway. Out of all this misery, the political agitators, largely imported from the other side of the Atlantic, had begun in 1846 to make capital. This was their way of drawing Ireland into the subversive vortex which had already sucked in nearly the whole European continent. The appeal of the sedition mongers seemed to Trollope a failure, or at best but partially and superficially successful. As to the general condition in 1848, he told The Examiner that it was not a revolutionary year, at least for Ireland. They talked about rows. But these, he said, existed only in newspaper columns. From Portrush to Waterford, and from Connemara to Dublin, there would be found no trace of any widespread, popular plan for converting peasant occupiers into sovereign proprietors. No one realised more fully than the Connaught crofter the folly and futility of the talk about abolishing the difference between employers and employed. In England, wrote Trollope, there was too much intelligence to look for any general improvement on a sudden. In Ireland there was too little intelligence to look for any improvement at all.

The English Government, now under Sir Robert Peel, had taken the first step towards relieving Irish distress by freeing the ports for the admission of foreign grain in 1846. Trollope himself had seen the universal alleviation following the arrival of Indian corn for the starving people. Next, Lord John Russell, as Prime Minister in 1847, instituted relief-works to help the unemployed masses. These measures were attacked from two different quarters. Among the Irish peasantry some complained of not being fed absolutely for nothing. The landed classes were disposed to doubt the necessity of any State interference at all. But in his third Irish novel, Castle Richmond (1860), dealing with the famine period, Trollope himself testified to the alacrity shown by the territorial class in co-operating with the State. And Trollope was likely to be an impartial judge. His personal sympathies were not then with the Whigs. The English public man with whom he was chiefly in communication, the philanthropic Lord Shaftesbury, having served under Wellington and Peel, passed for a Conservative. The main points of his Examiner articles have been already given. The whole little series formed an answer to the charges against ministers brought by their censors, alike in Press and Parliament. The seven years he had passed on the other side of St. George’s Channel had indeed been turned to such good account as to make him an authority on Irish affairs in their then most prominent aspect.

Meanwhile, by the personal intercourse of society, or by instructive and inspiring correspondence with useful friends, Trollope had improved his acquaintance with men, manners, and things in a way that was afterwards to bear literary fruit. Between 1846 and 1850, his mother still lived at Florence, and though Anthony did not actually visit Florence till 1853, he and Mrs. Trollope, during those years, held regular and copious communication with each other through the post. In this way many pleasant glimpses are caught of diverse personalities famous, or at least interesting. There is F. W. Faber, first met at Mr. Sloane’s, the wealthy Anglo-Florentine, who gave the church of Santa Croce its new front. To Faber, Trollope was apparently first attracted by his having been the most brilliant Harrovian of his time. This acquaintanceship at once deeply interested Mrs. Trollope, and was to have a lasting effect upon her son. His first religious lessons may have been those in the Church catechism. He had then been taken in spiritual charge by Cunningham, the evangelical vicar of Harrow, caricatured, it was generally believed, in Mrs. Trollope’s Vicar of Wrexhill. To that divine he did his best in the way of listening as a duty, but the copious interspersion of casual conversation by him and other Low Church teachers with scriptural tags and devout ejaculations first made Trollope secretly think he was talking nonsense. In this way the youthful Anthony imbibed a sceptical disgust for the social ways and religious tenets of all that school. Filled with these prejudices, he came under a spiritual influence very different from any of which so far he had any experience.

His Winchester days had closed with missing New College. A little later he found himself hopelessly beaten for a small entrance scholarship on a minor foundation at Cambridge. To both Universities he made several short visits. At Oxford he heard the future Cardinal Newman preach from the pulpit of St. Mary’s. The effect of those sermons was deepened by many conversations with the preacher, and afterwards with the already mentioned F. W. Faber, whose personal charm was felt as strongly by Anthony as it had been by his mother, through whom indeed the son first knew that accomplished divine and poet, both in his Anglican and his Roman stage. Not indeed that Anthony Trollope was ever near to becoming a partisan of either side. Still at the outset his sympathies were, as afterwards, inclined towards the moderate, lettered, and generally accomplished members of the High Church party. As a boy, while with his parents abroad, he had seen and liked the home life of Roman Catholics. During the interval that separated his Irish stories from his third novel, he turned to good account the opportunities provided him by his mother for improving his knowledge of continental institutions, secular or religious, and the personal types they tended to produce. At each fresh point of his literary evolution Trollope’s industry in some degree took on the colour of the surroundings amid which it was exercised. The earlier of his Irish books grew out of his Post Office work in the “Isle of Saints.” Between 1848 and 1850, his cosmopolitan training had begun, and indeed advanced some way. Some years later his Tales of All Countries was to form a memorial of his experiences as a citizen of the world. Before these, came La Vendée. That novel, if written at all, would have been written probably in a very different manner but for the recent widening in his social, religious, and political horizons.

Trollope had been born amid the world-wide ferment of the ground swell following the great national convulsion in France with which the eighteenth century closed. Those commotions had seemed the more real and recent to his childhood from the constant conversational references to them as portending what England herself might expect. He had heard stories of the privations and hair-breadth escapes experienced by refugees from the reign of terror when struggling to place the Straits of Dover between themselves and their oppressors of the first French republic. In those parts of England from the first, at least by name familiar to him, he had seen the country houses where the royalist émigrés had found an asylum more than once during the years between the murder of the French king and the Vienna Congress. He had heard English prejudice describe French loyalty to the old régime as a mere pose, and Protestant prejudice refuse to see anything that was worthy the name of “true religion and undefiled” in the teachings of the Popish priesthood or in the daily life of their most loyal devotees. His more recent intercourse with men like Faber and Newman had, without leading him to a spiritual crisis, caused him to review and recast his religious conceptions. He had been taught as a boy to turn his back on all pre-Reformation doctrines and rites. His own experiences had now more than reconciled him to the working of the papal system in Ireland. On the whole he had found the Irish Roman Catholic priests kindly and far from bigoted men, honestly anxious to do their duty towards their flock, as well as towards the official representatives of that Protestant ascendency which in their heart they were bound to detest. Neither had Trollope, always open though his keen eyes were, known many authentic cases of priestly greed, intrigue, intolerance, or proselytism. The conventional charges, in fact, made by evangelicals against the hierarchy and officials of a foreign Church could from Trollope’s own experience be disproved. The mere fact of such accusations being brought deepened his distrust and dislike of Low Churchism and all its ways.

Possessed by such a spirit of reaction from the popular Calvinism which his mother had lashed in The Vicar of Wrexhill, he sat down, after The Kellys and the O’Kellys, to his third novel, La Vendée. By that time half a century had passed since the issues and methods of the French Revolutionaries, which destroyed Burke’s friendship with Fox, had left Whiggism in a state of intestine feud. An impulse such as had urged Coleridge and Southey into the Tory camp produced in Trollope a desire to write a story showing the French royalists in politics at their best, and the reasonableness of their religion as one by which to live and die. His public school associations had been genuine Wykehamist—that is to say, high Tory in Church and State. As a boy of fifteen he had heard of the “three days” which, on July 27, 1830, sent the last of the Bourbons, Charles X, from his French throne across the English Channel. At the age of thirty-three, while, as has been seen, going his Post Office rounds through Connaught, he had watched the progress of the second French Revolution of the nineteenth century. He might have been presented in his British asylum to the lately arrived “Mr. Smith,” who was none other than the Louis Philippe formerly, with the results already described, visited in his palace by Trollope’s mother. Hodie tibi, cras mihi, while La Vendée was in course of preparation for the press, English Tories and many who were not Tories had persuaded themselves that reform in politics, dissent in religion, and the progressive removal of ancient landmarks in Church or State would gradually bring this country under the same pernicious influences as those which had unsettled and devastated the greater part of the world beyond the Dover Straits. In La Vendée Trollope successfully fulfilled the twofold end of flattering conservative sentiment, religious or political, and of breaking comparatively fresh soil, as well as portraying new characters in a period that then seemed almost modern.

Readers of Disraeli’s novels will remember the advice urged by Rigby on Coningsby to “read Mr. Wordy’s history of the late war, in twenty volumes, proving clearly that Providence was on the side of the Tories.” No one knew better than Rigby’s reputed original, John Wilson Croker, or for that matter Disraeli himself, the compendious utility of Alison’s History of Europe. Elsewhere Trollope may easily have found the historic facts on which he based his third novel. From Alison he learned to deduce a moral in accord with the prevailing English sentiment. Like many of his countrymen who cared nothing for party, Trollope felt something of disgust at the Whig enthusiasm for Napoleon as the reconstructor of the European system, notwithstanding his rise to power by violating all those principles of civil and religious liberty which Whigs, by their historic traditions, were bound to hold sacrosanct. Without pretending to be a specialist in modern French history, Trollope knew enough of the country and the people to look for the real security of a gradual return to law and order, not in the exercise of coercive force by any individual however great, but in the national instincts and tendencies making for conservatism, political or religious, and, as he thought, underrated by recent English writers on the subject. This aspect of national character and life it became his business to bring out in La Vendée. His Irish stories had already maintained and illustrated the view that the Celt as he existed on the other side of St. George’s Channel could be as business-like, as thrifty, as sober in thought as the Saxon or the Lowland Scot himself. So La Vendée was to dispose of similar fallacies about the French rooted in the English mind. Genuine religion could exist in a Roman Catholic land, as well as genuine loyalty and uncalculating patriotism among a people conventionally considered fickle, frivolous, and, naturally incapable of the patient, self-repressive, and sustained effort by which Northern nations are content slowly to await and effect the reforms that Southern races precipitate and mar by revolutions.

Trollope occupies a middle place among the three novelists of the Victorian age who have acknowledged the literary fascination of the French revolutionary period in some one of its aspects, or in the events growing out of it. Carlyle, essentially a humourist before being an historian, first made the subject his own, and in some degree helped by his research and method his successors in their treatment of it. Five years after Carlyle, Bulwer-Lytton wrote Zanoni, the earliest English novel descriptive of Paris during the Terror. Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities came out some time later, in 1859. Trollope’s contribution, therefore, to the romance of the revolutionary series, chronologically might have owed something to Alison, who alone among those of an earlier date had touched the phases of the theme specially appealing to our novelist. In fiction the dates just given would exempt him from any suspicion of obligation to Bulwer or Dickens. His originality stamps itself on the opening chapter of La Vendée, and is consistently maintained throughout. Before the action of the novel begins, its royalist heroes can no longer doubt the resolution reached by the municipality of Paris that the king should fall. The Convention, in fact, was already founding the republic. The actual process, indeed, had advanced far enough to array the country gentlemen of La Vendée (1850) and their retainers in arms against the new régime. The entirely fresh descriptive feature of the opening chapters is the account of social Paris when the Jacobins were entrapping Louis XVI.

Here Trollope drew not on Alison, but the first-hand knowledge conveyed to him by his mother. Mrs. Trollope, in her turn, had been taken behind the political scenes of the period by the man whom the royalists in her son’s story agreed could alone save the throne. This was the same General Lafayette that Trollope’s parents had visited in his French country house and that always remained their chief friend abroad. During the early months of 1792, most of the haute noblesse had exchanged the French capital for London or for the English country houses, many of them, as has been already said, familiar to Trollope. They left, however, behind them enough of wit, beauty, and fashionable brilliance to prevent the capital from losing its character of the Western world’s polite metropolis. The city, in a phrase of a contemporary writer, H. S. Edwards, that took Trollope’s fancy, from having been the Lutetia of the ancients had become the lætitia of the moderns. Intellectual interest in the progress of the Revolution, up to the beginning of the king’s imprisonment, had the effect of obliterating class distinctions. It produced a certain solidarity between the professional classes which supplied the revolutionary leaders, and the more enlightened of the aristocracy that, long since admitting the necessity of drastic social ameliorations, had, as Trollope summarises it, approved the early demands of the tiers état, had applauded the tennis-court oath, had entered with enthusiasm into the fête of the Champ de Mars. These had credulously persuaded themselves that sin, avarice, and selfishness were about to be banished from the world by philosophy.

Bitter experience had already taught them their mistake. Philosophy placed no check upon human nature’s worst passions. The high-flown panegyrics on virtue in the abstract were practically consistent with the letting loose of the tiger and the ape in individuals. The feast of reason that followed the beheading of the king proved the introduction to the long-drawn-out orgy of fiends lasting till Robespierre’s death in 1794. What refuge could there be for the now undeceived dupes of their own fond expectations but in flight? Those who from the first had remained courtiers or royalists, and those whom a spurious philanthropy had caused to dally with wholesale homicide, hastened to put the English Channel between themselves and a capital and country from which had vanished all hope of personal safety or service to their fellow-men. Some gallant spirits had long lingered on near the place of the king’s confinement, refusing even now to despair of some happy chance that might favour his escape from his enemies, and enable his friends to conduct him permanently out of danger.

Such were the historical circumstances and actual conditions of the time without a knowledge of which Trollope’s third novel cannot be rightly understood. Its title came from the new republican name for the vintage districts of Anjou and Poitou, La Vendée (vendange). Those of its gentry who had rallied round the king were known in Paris as the Poitevins. The hope of which this little group supplied the leaders was scarcely so forlorn as it has been described since, during the seven years period covered by Trollope’s novel, the Vendean resistance to the Convention was carried on not only with unfailing courage but occasionally with substantial military success. In Paris, where the story opens, the Poitevins had attracted to their number some among the more moderate members of the Assembly, and particularly certain of those who had been officers of the royal bodyguard. They formed themselves into a club whose meetings were held in the Rue Vivienne. The last of these gatherings took place on August 12, 1792, and lasted just long enough to acquaint all present with the final and complete defeat of the moderates, who so far had clung to the conviction that in some unexplained manner the monarchy would be preserved from final overthrow. Against all gentler counsels, against, in Trollope’s words, the firmness of Roland, the eloquence of Vergniaud, the patriotism of Guadet, the brute force of Paris had prevailed.

Louis XVI, his worst enemies could not deny, had inherited none of his predecessor’s vices, and had shown himself the friend of popular rights. He had indeed actually himself convoked the Assembly that had no sooner come together than it resolved on his destruction. The Poitevins, however, had correctly estimated their resources in their respective neighbourhoods. With a good heart they now welcome and prepare for open war. When told that the sovereign’s defenders are outvoted in the Assembly and that resistance to the people is vain, they one and all protest against dignifying by that name the mob of blood-thirsty ruffians who for the time have the capital at their mercy. The real voice of the French people is for the monarch’s restoration to his rights. Under the Vendean gentry as leaders the masses will rise like one man against the demagogues who so foully misrepresent them. The real enemies of France and of the king are in each case the same men. To save the country from the usurpations of the Assembly falsely called national is also to deliver the lawful ruler from the dungeon to which, in the midst of this heroic oratory, comes the news of Louis having been consigned.

That for the present the mission of the patriots in Paris cannot proceed further is now admitted by all. Before, however, the patriots disperse, each to his own provincial neighbourhood, we have made acquaintance with the clearly and picturesquely characterised individuals of whom they consist. Its most prominent member, Lescure, is a type, historically true, of the educated and enlightened Frenchman, keenly alive to the abuses and evils of the aristocratic system that were at the root of popular degradation and distress. His mind had been nurtured, and his political education derived, from studying classical republicanism, as it existed in Athens and Rome. He was deeply read in Rousseau, Voltaire, and in the whole literature of the encyclopædists. An amiably philanthropic disposition had combined with tendencies of his intellectual culture to take for his watchwords Liberty, Fraternity, though not, it would seem, Equality. On perceiving the new movement to mean universal surrender to an ignorant and brutal mob, he drew back, to find himself gradually pressed into the presidency of the little Poitevin society. This personification of high-minded and cultivated philanthropy numbered amongst its followers the youthful heir to an ancient and wealthy territorial marquisate, Henri de Larochejaquelin.[8] His principles had been formed on those of his elder, Lescure, but his temperament, eager, impetuous, delighting in the rush and whirl of social gaiety, forms a contrast to his staid and judicious senior. In one respect he stands out as a product of the period. The new generation was often noticeable for the precocious manhood developed in the hothouse atmosphere of a convulsive epoch. Since reaching his seventeenth year, the young noble now mentioned, in consequence of his father’s ill-health, had taken upon himself the paternal estates’ management, and his sister Agatha’s guardianship.

Adolphe Denot is another who has a place in this little company. Born to a position of territorial ownership in Poitou, Denot represents in Trollope’s story the superficial votaries of political change, ready to take up with the newest mode in public affairs, without the trouble of inquiring into its significance or worth. Without Lescure’s historical knowledge and reflective habits, he belonged to the same section of French society as that in which Lescure had been reared. The earliest French protests against the tyranny of ages came from the French nobility themselves. Never in the theatre at Versailles had louder applause been excited than by the lines of Voltaire’s play, produced during the interval separating the first from the last quarter of the eighteenth century: “I am the son of Brutus, and bear graven on the heart the love of liberty and a horror of kings.” In the cheers that greeted these words, Trollope’s Denot might have followed the vogue by joining. J. J. Rousseau no doubt made himself personally responsible for the doctrine of the people’s sovereignty and its consequences. Before, however, its proclamation by him, Voltaire’s wit had secured the notion acceptance with rank, fashion, aristocracy, and even the Court circle. Recently, however, the enthusiasts for freedom in the royal playhouse had discovered everything which savoured of revolution to be insufferably vulgar. He had therefore gone over to Larochejaquelin’s lead, and enrolled himself under Lescure in the little Poitevin clique. Petted and caressed, as Trollope puts it, by the best and fairest in France, the revolution was still in its infancy when men discovered it to be a beast of prey, big with war, anarchy, and misrule.

The royalist organisation now described having been disbanded in the capital, the scene changes to those regions of southern France known as La Vendée. The country gentlemen of Anjou and Poitou were generally landlords of the smaller kind. They lived in comfort, but without any ambition for mere splendour. No pride in the antiquity of their race prevented their treating their tenants and household retainers less as dependents than equals. The instances of this now given exemplify Trollope’s favourite thesis that in a patrician dispensation characterised by thoughtfulness on the part of its controllers for those who live under it, there is more of the true democratic spirit than marks the most levelling variety of popular self-rule. The gentlemen of La Vendée have no sooner reappeared in their country homes than the counter-revolution, without any fostering agitation on their part, almost of its own accord sets in.

The Vendeans had heard from their rural seclusion of the king’s imprisonment, and of the insults offered by his republican jailors to the time-honoured ordinances of Church and State. There is no need for Lescure, Larochejaquelin, and the others to stimulate the local peasantry by fresh appeals against the emissaries of the detested republic. These only show themselves for the purpose of enrolling fresh conscripts, and forcibly apprehending a reluctant recruit. The spontaneous popular resistance ends in a pitched battle, with victory for the royalists. Operations are now on a larger scale. The struggle is no longer between small local garrisons on the one hand, and hastily levied, imperfectly disciplined royalist bodies on the other. Henceforth two armies, each tolerably marshalled and fairly equipped, meet each other in the field. Sieges are laid, attacks are delivered, sometimes repelled and sometimes succumbed to; all the combatants are engaged, towns are captured, private parks transform themselves into entrenched camps. Durbellière particularly, the country seat of the Larochejaquelins, becomes the theatre of a war conducted with sanguinary resolution on both sides, and with constantly varying fortunes. Among each host brave deeds in plenty are done. With the royalists the most picturesque, heroic, and victorious figure is that of Henri de Larochejaquelin, whose red sash and shoulder-band prove the same talisman of triumph as the snow-white plume of Henry of Navarre when he defeated the Duke of Mayenne at Ivry.

With the republicans too were to be found men equally capable or courageous, if less personally attractive. In the French romance that followed the Irish novels Trollope made no pretence of making his imagination the handmaid of history. Bulwer-Lytton, in The Last of the Barons, circumstantially constructed a bold and picturesque hypothesis as a plausibly conjectural explanation of the quarrel between Edward IV and Warwick. That was not at all in Trollope’s way. Equally little is his inclination, after the fashion of Sir Walter Scott, to play fast and loose with recorded facts, and to represent authenticated events in the light, and from the point of view, which happened to suit him. For the most part Trollope follows through every detail the accurate chronicle of the time. In one case, however, that he may account for the disappearance from his narrative of the character he calls Adolphe Denot, he departs from the historic record. According to Trollope, the Chouans, or Bretons who continued the Vendean War, followed a mysterious, if not an actually insane leader. The alleged mystery is mere invention. No personage of the period is more historical than Jean Cottereau, who from the first led the Bretons, and whose signal, the cry of the screech-owl (chat-huant), gave their name to the little Breton band. Nor can it be said that the historian’s version of events is, even for artistic purposes, improved on by the novelist’s discovery, in the Vendean leader, of Adolphe Denot, who, in an hour of what his friends charitably called mental aberration, had left the good cause of Church and King, had thrown in his lot with the revolutionaries. Since then he had remained out of sight.

At the point now under consideration, the novelist might indeed have done better, for himself as well as for his readers, had he exercised his fancy at least on the lines marked out by the historian. At the same time he deserves the praise of having caught the spirit of his period, as well as of having imbued his pages with a fair amount of genuine local colour. One word may be said about the pen-and-ink artist’s methods and the effect of his picture as a whole. The pervading tone, subdued if not, as in his first story, The Macdermots, sombre, at well-chosen points is relieved by the introduction of those lighter tints that Trollope’s quick eye for the humorous never failed in the right place to bring out. In the loyalist households, of the Vendean squires, the servants are treated less as inferiors than equals. Seeing in their employers their friends, and during war-time their comrades, they vie with each other in proving their devotion to the good cause. There thus sets in among them a generous rivalry as to who shall be nearest their lords in the hour of peril. Such a competition provides many happy openings for sketches of votaries of the sceptre and the crozier outdoing each other in the still-room and the servants’ hall.

There still remain Trollope’s estimates of the republican managers who, differing about much, agreed in calling the Vendeans mean curs, fit only for utter extermination. Six years earlier than the writing of La Vendée, Macaulay’s article on Barère had appeared in the spring number of The Edinburgh Review. The estimates of that particular revolutionary leader given by the historian and by the novelist generally agree with each other, but in every detail show the mutual independence of their writers. Macaulay’s account is an oratorical indictment, delivered in a more than usually impressive manner, and declaring that an amalgam of sensuality, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery, mendacity, and barbarity, such as in a novel would be condemned for caricature, was realised in Barère. Beside the essayist’s portrait of Bertrand Barère, place that in the novel which is our immediate concern, the one man, in a little party armed to the teeth, without sword, constantly playing with a little double-barrelled pistol, which he continually cocked and uncocked, and of which the fellow lay on the table before him. A tall, well-built, handsome man about thirty years of age, with straight black hair brushed upright from his forehead, his countenance gave the idea of eagerness and impetuosity rather than of cruelty or brutality. He was, however, essentially egotistical and insincere. A republican not from conviction but from prudential motives, he only deserted the throne when he saw that it was tottering.

For a time Barère supported the moderate party in the republic, and voted with the Girondists. He gradually joined the Jacobins, as he saw they were triumphing over their rivals. He was afterwards one of those who handed over the leaders of the Reign of Terror to the guillotine, and assisted in denouncing Robespierre and St. Just. He was one of the very few who managed to outlive the Revolution, and did so for nearly half a century. Nature had not formed him to be a monster gloating in blood. The republic had altered his disposition, and taught him, among those with whom he associated, to delight in the work which they required at his hands. Thus he became one of those who loudly called for more blood, while blood on every side was running in torrents. He too it was who demanded the murder of the queen, when Robespierre would have saved her. Before the Revolution he had been a wealthy aristocrat; he still wears the costume of his earlier period in the blue dress-coat, buttoned closely, notwithstanding the heat of the weather, round his body; the carefully tied cravat, disfigured by no wrinkle; the tightly fitting breeches that show the well-shaped leg. As a contrast to this sometime nobleman gibbeted by Macaulay, Trollope presents one to another notoriety of the period, known as the “King of the Faubourgs.” This was a large, rough, burly man, about forty years of age, of Flemish descent, by trade a brewer, by name Santerre, without fine feelings to be distressed at the horrid work set him to do, but filled with a coarse ambition, which made him a ready tool for the schemers who used his physical powers, courage, and wealth to their own ends.

The gallery given us by Trollope contains one more portrait, of fresher interest in itself, and not less life-like in its swift, sure strokes. Westerman in Carlyle’s description appears as an Alsatian. With Trollope he is a pure Prussian, a mercenary soldier who, banished from his native land, took service as a private in the army of the French republic, was soon promoted to be an officer, and after this promotion, foreseeing the future triumph of the extreme republicans, declared himself their adherent, and, joining Dumourier’s army, became that general’s aide-de-camp at the time of his attempt to sell the French legions to their Prussian and Austrian adversaries. Then Westerman left his master, and had since been the most prompt and ruthless military executioner of the Convention’s sternest behests. Westerman, as drawn by Trollope, is both soldier and politician. Two other military personages directing the campaign against the Vendeans, Bourbotte and Chouardin, take no interest in the affairs of State, and are merely rough, bold, brave fighters. Conspicuous among the Vendean leaders was Cathelineau. His spirited and fearless life’s work, crowned by a soldier’s brave death, excited the sympathetic admiration of the republic’s two military servants. That tribute to an enemy’s great qualities was enough to draw down upon them the anger of their superiors, especially of Barère. It was not, however, a time to visit such offences with a severe penalty. Both Bourbotte and Chouardin escaped without any formal reprimand.

To the sketch of Robespierre and the analysis of his character, Trollope, as might be expected, gives particular care. Here he supplements rather than follows those who before him had made this subject their own. “Seagreen incorruptible” was, says Carlyle, physically a coward, kept from flinching or turning tail only by his moral strength of purpose. Not so, is Trollope’s verdict. Courage indeed went conspicuously in hand with constancy of resolution, temperance in power, and love of country. If at the last he gave way, it was from the inward torment caused him too late by the discovery that his whole career had been a blunder, and that none of the objects which he had first set before himself were fulfilled. Poor mutilated worm, exclaims the novelist of La Vendée, what was there of pusillanimity in the remorse of conscience prostrating his whole physical frame, when he compared the aims which animated him at his beginnings with the results he saw all about him at his close? From Carlyle, Trollope knew of Mirabeau’s prophecy on hearing Robespierre’s maiden speech: “This man will do somewhat; he believes every word he says.” So staunch and sympathetic a Tory as Alison echoes as well as amplifies that view. And with him Trollope, who like many other writers about this period had learnt the usefulness of Alison, agrees.

To the English novelist, not less than to the English historian, Robespierre’s career stands out not as the offspring of any individual character, but as representing the delusions of the age. Chief among those errors ranked a belief in the natural innocence of man. With this fallacy had united itself another—the lawfulness of doing evil that good might come. Once exterminate by wholesale bloodshed all who embodied the debasing influences of a corrupt aristocracy, the masses would rise to the full height of their native greatness. Thus a triumphant democracy, enthroned upon mountains of patrician corpses, would wield its beneficent sceptre over a purified and reanimated society. Here as elsewhere agreeing with, perhaps indebted to, Alison, Trollope also speaks of Robespierre as omnipotent in Convention and in the Committee, but as having, too, his master, the will of the populace of Paris. In union with and in dependence on that, he could alone act, command, and be obeyed. Alison puts the same idea rather differently when he says: “Equally with Napoleon during his career of foreign conquest, Robespierre always marched with the opinions of five millions of men.”

Apart from the failure of moral fortitude and nerve which weakened and clouded his end, what particular feature in Robespierre’s temperament and life gave colour to the charge of cowardice that Carlyle at least considers so irrefutable? The answer is suggested by Trollope in what forms the most original passage in this portion of his story. One fond and tender dream Robespierre could never banish. Once let France, happy, free, illustrious, and intellectual, own how much she owed to the most disinterested patriot among her sons, Robespierre would retire to his small paternal estate in Artois; evincing the grandeur of his soul by the rejection of all worldly rewards, receiving nothing from his country but adoration. While in Trollope’s pages he is represented as preoccupied with visions like these, his garret is entered by a young woman, decently but very plainly dressed. This was Eleanor Duplay, who, when Robespierre allowed himself to dream of a future home, was destined to be the wife of his bosom and the mother of his children. Eleanor Duplay possessed no mark of superiority to others of her age (about five-and-twenty) and station. The eldest of four sisters, she specially helped her mother in caring for the house, of which Robespierre had become an inmate. With no political aptitude or taste of her own, she had caught, as she believed, political inspiration from his words, finding in his pseudo-philosophical dogmas, at once repulsive and ridiculous to modern ears, great truths begotten of reason and capable of regenerating her fellow-creatures.

Eleanor Duplay has a special object in approaching Robespierre at this moment, which brings her into the central current of the story. She had, in fact, undertaken to plead with her father’s lodger the Vendean cause. Both the girl herself, and the public opinion whose echoes she caught, were shocked by the wholesale massacre of women and children now going on in the doomed district after which Trollope called his story. What work, she had asked herself, when rallying her courage to the task, so fitting for the wife-elect of a ruler of the people as to implore the stern magistrate to temper justice with mercy? Her lover’s reception of the first hint at her prayer is not promising. The Vendeans, he says, must be not only conquered but crushed. The religion of Christ, he goes on, declares that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children to the third and fourth generation. Hence the babes must share the fate of their parents. As for the mothers, it is, says Robespierre, a false sentiment which teaches us to spare the iniquities of women because of their sex. This interview leads up to one of the most dramatic situations of the novel, and is so managed as during its progress to bring out in effective relief the feature of Robespierre’s character, which other expositors of it have noticed, but which none illustrated so fully as Trollope. Eleanor Duplay’s petition had not been completed when her lover’s suspicion—his predominating trait—expresses itself in an outburst of dark and terrible anger. In vain she assures him that no one has set her on to talk to him of this. In ordinary men suspicion sometimes clouds love; in Robespierre, as he is here described, it strangled the possibility of love at its birth.