The Eustace Diamonds (3 page)

‘My father's property was all Irish, you know.'

‘Was it indeed?'

‘And he was an Irish peer, till Lord Melbourne gave him an English peerage.'

‘An Irish peer, was he?'…

‘He was then made Lord Fawn of Richmond, in the peerage of the United Kingdom. Fawn Court, you know, belonged to my mother's father before my mother's marriage. The property in Ireland is still mine, but there's no place on it.'

‘Indeed!'

‘There was a house, but my father allowed it to tumble down. It's in Tipperary; — not at all a desirable country to live in.'

‘Oh dear no! Don't they murder the people?'

‘It's about five thousand a year, and out of that my mother has half for her life.'

‘What an excellent family arrangement,' said Lizzie. There was so long a pause made between each statement that she was forced to make some reply.

(
Chapter 8
)

The description of Lord Fawn in his perplexity about money and marriage is another splendid example of Trollope's eye for the detail that suggests the true stature of the human figure:

‘A peasant may marry whom he pleases,' said Lord Fawn, pressing his hand to his brow, and dropping one flap of his coat, as he thought of his own high and perilous destiny, standing with his back to the fireplace, while a huge pile of letters lay there before him waiting to be signed.

(
Chapter 11
)

The equation which the order of description delicately suggests between ‘high and perilous destiny' and ‘huge pile of letters' deflates the human rubber stamp who is dramatizing himself into a
noblesse oblige
dilemma.

But the more compelling comedy of the novel, though emerging from a like deft arrangement of detail, is darker in tone. There are, of course, moments when Trollope insists on what the reader must know, and these can be very fine. Could condemnation be more poised and gentlemanly than in the remark on Lizzie's prospective husband: ‘There were two facts concerning him which might, or might not, be taken as objections. He was vicious, and – he was dying' (
Chapter 1
)? But finer still are the moments when a comic episode draws the reader to judgement by inference from unemphatic descriptive detail. When, for instance, Lizzie goes to bed in the Carlisle hotel, ‘some short prayer she said, with her knees close to the iron box' (which normally contains the diamonds). A few hours later comes the thief:

The man then with perfectly noiseless step entered the room, knelt again — just where poor Lizzie had knelt as she said her prayers — so that he might more easily raise the iron box without a struggle, and left the room with it in his arms.

(
Chapter 44
)

Both Lizzie and the thief steal the diamonds in their different ways, both kneel before the box. The parallelism reveals them both as worshippers of Mammon. More blistering is the assault directed against Mrs Carbuncle in the chapter entitled ‘Tribute'. She is described looting London for her niece's wedding gifts:

To one or two elderly gentlemen upon whom Mrs Carbuncle had smiled, she ventured to suggest in plain words that a cheque was the most convenient cadeau. ‘What do you say to a couple of sovereigns?' one sarcastic old gentleman replied, upon whom probably Mrs Carbuncle had not smiled enough. She laughed and congratulated her sarcastic friend on his joke; — but the two sovereigns were left on the table and went to swell the spoil.

(
Chapter 65
)

In the French euphemism ‘cadeau' and the English one ‘smiled' the implication is something less than oblique that Mrs Carbuncle is conducting her business as a whore. And at two guineas the price hardly raises her above the lowest street-walker. But the ‘tribute' is for the sacrament of marriage.

The maturity of Trollope in
The Eustace Diamonds
is felt also in the characters he created. That his ‘people' should be living, socially
acceptable human beings was important to him. None the less they must be, as real people sadly are, fallible. Frank Greystock when journeying to Scotland should know his duty; to reject Lizzie and be true to Lucy. No gentleman could doubt this. But, says Trollope (pointing surely at the continuing saga of Tennyson's
Idylls of the King
(1859)), we are not all Arthurs, ‘a man honest in all his dealings, equal to all trials', nor Scott heroes and heroines, but real fallible men and women. The misfortune is that art is not always allowed to show this. It is a truth we can attest from personal experience, for ‘Our own friends around us are not always merry and wise, nor alas! always honest and true. They are often cross and foolish, and sometimes treacherous and false. They are so, and we are angry. Then we forgive them, not without a consciousness of imperfection on our own part. And we know — or at least believe — that though they may be sometimes treacherous and false, there is a balance of good.'

It is this theory, so vehemently set out in
Chapter 35
of
The Eustace Diamonds
, that determines the nature of Trollope's characterization, or at least its emphases. There is no black and white condemnation, for the novel offers sympathetic observation of what people really are and this must make such simple judgement impossible. Of course, Trollope suggests, many people will feel that in telling the stories of Lizzie and Frank Trollope is raking the sewers. They will ask ‘Why should one tell the story of creatures so base? One does not willingly grovel in gutters, or breathe fetid atmospheres, or live upon garbage.' The answer to such readers is simply that they are divorcing fiction from life and asking for the fabulous, not the real. For real men are not ‘villains' or ‘heroes' and these old categories should be scrapped. ‘We cannot have heroes to dine with us. There are none. And were these heroes to be had, we should not like them. But neither are our friends villains — whose every aspiration is for evil, and whose every moment is a struggle for some achievement worthy of the devil.'

Although never a central figure again, Lizzie returns, older and wiser, in later novels. Her marriage annulled (false to the end Emilius is a bigamist), she is once again with ‘her prettiness and her percentages' a target for adventurers. One such, Lopez, throws over
his proposal that they should elope the poetic glamour to which she was once so susceptible:

‘Lizzie Eustace, will you go with me, to that land of the sun,

Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,

Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime?

Will you dare to escape with me from the cold conventionalities, from the miserable thraldom of this country bound in swaddling clothes? Lizzie Eustace, if you will say the word I will take you to that land of glorious happiness.'

But Lizzie Eustace had £4000 a year and a balance at her banker's. ‘Mr Lopez,' she said.

‘What answer have you to make me?'

‘Mr Lopez, I think you must be a fool.'

(
The Prime Minister
, Chapter 54
)

Lizzie has come a long way from her adolescent fantasies about a Byronic ‘Corsair' lover. She responds here as anyone in her degraded milieu would do to an unprofitable offer. No longer naive she is no longer innocent and Trollope merely adds her to the cast of the dreary degenerates who fill in the background of his later novels.

Trollope was fascinated by another group of characters — those caught in the dilemma where their principles of conduct are inadequate to their situation, where incompatible demands have to be met, or where a plan of conduct has to be made minute by minute in lieu of fixed principles. The feature common to all these situations is that the character is alone – and Trollope was deeply interested in the lonely man. Belonging to a firmly structured society himself, believing in rooted ideals of conduct, Trollope always had an eye for people either outside this society or crushed by its demands. As one thinks of the novels the memorable characters all seem to have been lonely – mentally sick like Trevelyan in
He Knew He Was Right
or Kennedy in
Phineas Firnn;
socially compromised like Alice in
Can You Forgive Her?
or Crawley in
The Last Chronicle of Barset;
rejected lovers like Johnny Eames in the Barsetshire novels or Roger Carbury in
The Way We Live Now;
or socially unacceptable like Melmotte in the same novel. And in
The Eustace Diamonds
the fact that they are lonely dominates the lives of two such different women as Lizzie Eustace and Lucy Morris. Loved by everyone, cared for by kind friends, Lucy is
alone because this is the only way she can assert her independence and integrity in a society which wants to stifle her with compromising kindness. Does Lord Fawn insult Mr Greystock, then Lucy must accept it, because Lord Fawn is the head of the family on whose kindness she relies. The result is a lie, but no one would think less of Lucy were she to apologize to Lord Fawn, compound the lie and sink back into comfortable living. When Frank Greystock compromises her the harsh but realistic Lady Linlithgow is always ready to spell out the position of a girl who is known to be betrothed but who is not actually claimed and supported by her lover. For Lizzie, on the other hand, loneliness is the hidden essence of her life. Because she seeks to simulate relationships without trust or honesty, she passes, like Becky Sharp in
Vanity Fair
(1848), from triumph, as in her marriage to Sir Florian Eustace, to humiliation, as each relationship crumbles. She is left with only one refuge, Mr Emilius, a match for her in duplicity and unscrupulous cool nerve. It is one of Trollope's finest moments when these two finally barter for each other. Lizzie knows that Emilius has followed her to Scotland to claim her when her fortunes (and her value) are at their lowest. He knows all about her and has only renewed his suit after news of the final verdict which acquits her legally but discredits her personally has come through. Now in language which smacks of Byron's
Don Juan
(1819—24) and of the Bible (Lizzie thinks one appropriate but not the other) Emilius makes his ‘offer' and in so doing reveals them both for what they are.

‘ A poor woman's no should be nothing to you, Mr Emilius.'

‘It is everything to me – death, destruction, annihilation – unless I can overcome it. Darling of my heart, queen of my soul, empress presiding over the very spirit of my being, say — shall I overcome it now?'

She had never been made love to after this fashion before. She knew, or half knew, that the man was a scheming hypocrite, craving her money, and following her in the hour of her troubles, because he might then have the best chance of success. She had no belief whatever in his love. And yet she liked it, and approved his proceedings. She liked lies, thinking them more beautiful than truth. To lie readily and cleverly, recklessly and yet successfully, was, according to the lessons which she had learned, a necessity in woman, and an added grace in man.

(
Chapter 79
)

What is interesting in this analysis is that Trollope is so careful to avoid downright condemnation and dismissal. Lizzie knows that Emilius is a scheming hypocrite, or rather
she half knows.
All her life she has lived by lies and now she can no longer trust even her response to other people. Reality and her interpretation of it have merged. Henry James intended derogation when he said, in his obituary of his fellow novelist, ‘Mr Trollope is a good observer, but he is literally nothing else,' but he indicated in fact Trollope's greatest source of literary strength. He is a good observer, not in the sense that he is superficial but in the sense that he observes in detail the activities of human conduct and records them with scrupulous fidelity (it was a commonplace in obituaries of Trollope that his novels would principally attract the social historian of subsequent generations rather than the general reader). The result is not cold reproduction, however, but portraits which involve us in sympathetic judgement and awareness of individual lives. The depiction of Lizzie is built on admirably intelligent and wise comment, such as when she is angling for Lord Fawn and Trollope remarks:

There existed in her bosom a sort of craving after confidential friendship – but with it there existed something that was altogether incompatible with confidence… She knew what were the aspirations – what the ambition – of an honest woman; and she knew, too, how rich were the probable rewards of such honesty. True love, true friendship, true benevolence, true tenderness, were beautiful to her – qualities on which she could descant almost with eloquence; and therefore she was always shamming love and friendship and benevolence and tenderness. She could tell you, with words most appropriate to the subject, how horrible were all shams, and in saying so would be not altogether insincere; yet she knew that she herself was ever shamming, and she satisfied herself with shams.

(
Chapter 14
)

Again in the delineation of Lucinda Roanoke, potentially the most interesting character in the novel, Trollope reveals his compassion and understanding of the tensions set up by the pull of individual temperament against the demands of society. In the story of Lucinda Trollope more openly than usual describes a state of sexual torment. A young girl must marry, of course. Mrs Carbuncle presses her niece into the arms of boorish Sir Griffin, and Lucinda complies:

On a sudden she made up her mind, and absolutely did kiss him. She would sooner have leaped at the blackest, darkest, dirtiest river in the county. ‘There,' she said, ‘that will do,' gently extricating herself from his arms. ‘Some girls are different, I know; but you must take me as I am Sir Griffin; – that is if you do take me.'

(
Chapter 42
)

But this embrace, which usually signifies acceptance and future marriage and implies sexual compatibility, as it does with Lucy and Frank in
Chapter 77
, is a sham: