Can You Forgive Her? (3 page)

But she had now recovered her presence of mind, and understood what was going on. She was no longer in a dream, but words and things bore to her again their proper meaning.
‘I will not have it, Mr Fitzgerald,’ she answered, speaking almost passionately…

When palliser appears – as Burgo successfully pleads for one more meeting – Glencora displays that temperament which convincingly shows us the
grande dame
of the later novels in the making:

Lady Glencora, when she saw her husband, immediately recovered her courage. She would not cower before him, or show herself
ashamed of what she had done. For the matter of that, if he pressed her on the subject, she could bring herself to tell him that she loved Burgo Fitzgerald much more easily than she could whisper such a word to Burgo himself. Mr Bott’s eyes were odious to her as they watched her; but her husband’s glance she could meet without quailing before it. ‘Here is Mr Palliser,’ said she, speaking again in
her ordinary clear-toned voice, Burgo immediately rose from his seat with a start, and turned quickly towards the door; but Lady Glencora kept her chair. [
Chapter 50
]

The poised dignity of Glencora’s ”Here is Mr Palliser’ is answered by her husband’s chivalry in leaving her with Burgo while he goes to fetch her scarf. Nothing in the novel shows more convincingly how well matched they are than
this ability they both show to rise to the demands of the occasion.

It is a striking indication of the flexibility of manner which Trollope’s secure understanding of these characters permits, that when Palliser begins to lecture Glencora on the morning after (
chapter 58
) the dialogue begins as a comic tiff. But it wonderfully develops into a statement by both characters of their deepest feelings
– feelings which they almost seem to discover for the first time as they voice them. Certainly Palliser can have had no intention of declaring his love for Glencora in the way that her desperation surprises him into, and his decision to give up the chance of
the political office which means so much to him in order to take his wife abroad is taken with a beautifully convincing lack of premeditation.
The butler’s knock at the end of the chapter allows an excellently judged return to normality. The whole passage is worth dose attention as an example of Trollope’s art at its truest and most self-effacing. Not only is it intensely dramatized – it is the characters’ utterances rather than the author’s comments that tell us the most important truths – but the registration of gesture is extremely
attentive. When Glencora goes up to Palliser and takes him by the coat, he, being much taller, looks down at her and ‘very gradually,
as though he were afraid of what he was doing,
he put his arm round her waist’; she shakes her head, ‘touching his breast with her hair as she did so’. These physical tentativenesses are not only, in their context, deeply touching: they mark the real beginning of
the Palliser marriage, whose superficial instability but essential durability is studied further in the later Palliser novels. There are few more moving experiences in Victorian fiction than to recall this scene when reading the opening chapter of
The Duke’s Children,
which records Palliser’s sense of loss at his wife’s death:

It was as though a man should suddenly be called upon to live without
hands or arms. He was helpless, and knew himself to be helpless… there had been no other human being to whom he could open himself… He had so habituated himself to devote his mind and his heart to the service of his country, that he had almost risen above or sunk below humanity. But she, who had been essentially human, had been a link between him and the world.

When the Duke, as he has now become,
finds that his daughter has been encouraged by Glencora to love a man he regards as unsuitable because she could not bear to see the girl’s feelings frustrated as her own had once been, he becomes ‘almost beside himself with rage and grief.

Trollope himself came to doubt whether the Palliser novels would ever be looked at in such a way as to allow cross-references of this kind to make their full
point:

Who will read
Can You Forgive Her?,
Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux,
and The Prime Minister consecutively, in order that he may understand
the characters of the Duke of Omnium, of Plantagenet Palliser, and Lady Glencora? Who will even know that they should be so read? [
Autobiography
,
chapter 10
]

And it is true that the full humanity of these novels only emerges when they are considered together,
for only then do the effects of time on character become fully apparent The study of such effects had been in Trollope’s mind from the beginning.

In conducting these characters from one story to another I realized the necessity, not only of consistency, – which, had it been maintained by a hard exactitude, would have been untrue to nature, – but also of those changes which time always produces.
There are, perhaps, but few of us who, after the lapse of ten years, will be found to have changed our chief characteristics… But our manner of showing or of hiding those characteristics will be changed, – as also our power of adding to or diminishing their intensity. It was my study that these people, as they grew in years, should encounter the changes which come upon us all. [
Autobiography
,
chapter 10
]

This balance between superficial alteration and underlying continuity could only have been achieved by a novelist who lived as intimately and as intensely with his characters as Trollope did.

His relationship with Plantagenet Palliser was particularly close, and his later treatment of the man, especially in
The Prime Minister
and
The Duke’s Children,
movingly deepens the lines of the portrait
drawn in
Can You Forgive Her?
Palliser was, for Trollope, partly the study of an ideal, but Trollope was too worldly not to concede that conduct which may be ideal in theory is often awkward in practice. Palliser’s nobility may be unexpected because his appearance is insignificant and his manner aristocratically aloof, but it is abundantly apparent in the generosity with which he sacrifices political
office for Glencora’s sake, in the selflessness with which he assumes the blame for the fact that she does not love him and in the decency which he shows towards Burgo. His goodness is essentially unspectacular and free from self-regard. Against this must be put the fact that Palliser has very little sense of what other people are like and how they might feel, and – as the extract from
The Duke’s
Children
already quoted
makes clear-he becomes deeply dependent on Glencora because he finds relationships (other than professional ones) difficult. His unlikely and even quaint friendship with Lady Rosina de Courcy in
The Prime Minister
– based upon their joint devotion to cork-soled boots – Palliser finds interesting because it is not demanding. (Glencora tells Alice that her husband is very
particular about his shoes as early as
chapter 22
of
Can You Forgive Her?)
He tends to shrink from other people because he is so easily upset by them; his tetchy reserve is the reverse of his wife’s robust indiscretion. An absorbing feature of their marriage, as Trollope develops it, is that they constantly irritate each other because their temperaments are so opposed, but they become ever more
necessary to each other for the same reason.

Palliser’s honesty, like his nobility, is of an extreme rather than an everyday kind, and therefore the less visible. Glencora’s uncle-in-law, the old Duke of Omnium, describ’s it well in
chapter 28
of
The Prime Minister:

This husband of yours is a very peculiar man… His honesty is not like the honesty of other men. It is more downright; – more absolutely
honest; less capable of bearing even the shadow which the stain of another’s dishonesty might throw upon it… He is very practical in some things, but the question is, whether he is not too scrupulous to be practical in all things.

It is his excessive scruple which makes his later career as Prime Minister in some ways an agonizing period for him, but it is also – as Trollope’s introductory description
of him in
Can You Forgive Her?
makes clear – the foundation of his public character:

He was very careful in his language, labouring night and day to learn to express himself with accuracy, with no needless repetition of words, perspicuously with regard to the special object he might have in view. He had taught himself to believe that oratory, as oratory, was a sin against that honesty in politics
by which he strove to guide himself. [
Chapter 24
]

Because of these qualities Palliser has moments of great moral authority. In the important breakfast scene already discussed (
chapter 58
), Glencora decisively loses the initiative when Palliser forces her to acknowledge the difference between saying that Mr

Bott ‘watches’ her, and alleging that he ‘spies’ on her, with the implication in the latter
case that he does so by her husband’s commission. It is Palliser’s refusal to suspect her that makes Glencora disgusted with her own deceit But it must be added that Palliser’s scrupulousness sometimes makes him look absurd. Although he incorporates some of the qualities Trollope admired most, Palliser is not idealized in the sense that he is under the novelist’s special protection. His discourtesies
to Alice are petty, his boredom when confined to his wife’s company for any length of time is undisguisable, and his anxieties about Glencora’s health when she is in an interesting condition are old-womanish; indeed his remarks to Grey to the effect that, while of course every man feels the importance of a coming child, no one can quite appreciate what the prospect of an heir must mean to
a Palliser, is aristocratic in a way that would be objectionable if it were not so tolerantly presented as comic (
chapter 73
).

In public life, as we see particularly in
The Prime Minister
, Palliser’s qualities both qualify him and make him unsuitable for the highest office. Part of Trollope’s aim was to take him as representative of

those politicians in possessing whom England has perhaps more
reason to be proud than of any other of her resources, and who, as a body, give her that exquisite combination of conservatism and progress which is her present strength and her best security for the future. [
Chapter
24
]

Historically Palliser typifies the political temper of a period that a modern historian has called ‘the age of equipoise’ (see the book of that title by W. L. Burn). Personally
his political position is close to Trollope’s own. The conservatism Trollope refers to partly expresses itself as a devotion to the British constitution. When Grey, at the very end of the novel, observes that to Palliser ‘the British House of Commons is everything’, he replies, ‘with unwonted enthusiasm; – ”everything, everything. That and the Constitution are everything’’, The progressive side
of his creed which is stated so forcefully in
chapter 68
of
The Prime Minister,
where he asserts that ‘Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain if, begins to
be apparent in this novel in his attempts to persuade John Grey that it is not enough for men to be content to live for themselves only (
chapter 77
).

Palliser is also the product of Trollope’s long-held ambition to get into Parliament
himself, an ambition which four years after
Can You Forgive Her?
unwisely led him to contest the notoriously corrupt constituency of Beverley in Yorkshire (his unhappy experiences there were used in his novel
Ralph the Heir
, 1870-81). He stood as an ‘advanced conservative Liberal’. Trollope’s intense but ultimately frustrated desire to sit in the House of Commons is expressed in an unusually exposed
way at the beginning of
chapter 45
, where he describes its gate as

the only gate before which I have ever stood filled with envy, – sorrowing to think that my steps might never pass under it… as my slow steps have led up that more than royal staircase, to those passages and halls which require the hallowing breath of centuries to give them the glory in British eyes which they shall one day possess,
I have told myself, in anger and in grief, that to the and not to have won that right of way, though but for a session, – not to have passed by the narrow entrance through those lamps, – is to the and not to have done that which it most becomes an Englishman to have achieved.

But although the sentiments in this passage are clearly those of Trollope himself, the character in the novel to whom
they are relevant is George Vavasor. The fact illustrates the innate generosity of Trollope’s mind. George is, after all, the villain of the piece, but Trollope credits bun with feeling ‘all the pride (in being an M.P.) of which I have been speaking’. It makes one realize afresh how inadequate terms such as ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ are for the realism of Trollope’s fiction. Vavasor is a violent man, certainly:
not only does he throw Alice’s ring in the fire, break his sister’s arm, and take a pot shot at his rival, but he is apt to entertain homicidal fantasies. He is also sexually unscrupulous – his original engagement with Alice was broken off because of his low Lusts’, and his former mistress eventually makes a forlorn appearance in
chapter 71
. He cynically allows the turn of a coin to decide whether
to send or to destroy his letter to Alice renewing his proposal. At the same time, one has only to compare him with
real creatures of melodrama like Dickens’s Carter or Rigaud, to see that he belongs to the actual world, not to the theatre. Trollope’s characterization takes into account what a man might have been as well as what he does in fact become. His observation that ‘nature, I think, had
so fashioned George Vavasor, that he might have been a good, and perhaps a great man’ (
chapter 45
) seems at first perversely indulgent, but it does justice to those unfulfilled powers in him which attract Alice and Kate. It is a paradox of Trollope’s fiction that in novels so apparently restricted by convention the characters should appear to be so free to choose for themselves the life they lead.