"Spontaneous Order" and the Politics of Anthony Trollope

"Spontaneous Order" and the Politics of Anthony TrollopeAuthor(s): Robert HughesSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Jun., 1986), pp. 32-48Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045053 .

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"Spontaneous Order" and the Politics of Anthony Trollope ROBERT HUGHES

RE A D E R S in search of politics in Anthony ) Trollope's Palliser novels often come

away justifiably exasperated. After all, Trollope himself tells us that the politicians of this, his major achievement in fiction, were vehicles "for the expression of my political and social convictions," and that "as I have not been able to speak from the benches of the House of Commons, or to thunder from platforms . . . they have served me as safety-valves by which to deliver my soul."' Surely safety valves ought to release something in the form of partisan or pro- grammatic ideas. They ought to give us some sampling, in the mode of Benjamin Disraeli or Charles Kingsley, of a major Victorian's thought on the historic developments of nineteenth-century politics. At the very least, one would think, a writer with major pre- tensions to political views ought to have something to say about industrialization, urbanization, poverty, and imperialism.

Instead, only three of the six Palliser novels deal substantially with Parliamentary politics, and these novels are largely concerned with family problems, courtship, property, and private legal strug- gles, the sort of content the great body of his work possesses. Even the Parliamentary politics in these books is completely nonpolemical and surprisingly nonpartisan. Michael Sadleir best summed up the

? 1986 by The Regents of the University of California

'An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page, World's Classics (1950; rpt. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 1980), p. 180.

32



TROLLOPE'S POLITICS 33

attitude of many readers, and nearly all critics, toward politics in Trollope: "Politics per se ... were very near his heart. But he was too intuitively a novelist to permit a personal preoccupation to dominate his story-telling."2

Some critics, to be sure, have noted interesting correspon- dences between Trollope's fictional heroes and historical figures of the day, and a few, notably A.O.J. Cockshut and especially John Halperin, have shown how the activities of Trollope's politicians display certain political attitudes.3 But politics in this form hardly does justice to Trollope's claims, for Trollope, defeated in a Parlia- mentary election himself, saw some of his most significant fiction as a product of his political ambitions. In this day of politician- turned-novelist it is hard to imagine that of novelist-turned- politician: our elevation of the artist's calling is absolute. But Trollope gave the novelist's vocation no such status and regarded his election defeat as the greatest disappointment of his life. Though Trollope was seriously political to a degree unmatched by any other major nineteenth-century British novelist, his political ideas are distressingly hard to define.

This apparent lack of political ideas is a consequence of his attitude toward ideas and theory in general. As Ruth apRoberts argues in The Moral Trollope, his fiction expresses a singular and uncomfortable idea: that principles and theories have a limited role in life at best. Since man's nature is only partly rational, proper moral ends are determined more by the possible than by the ideal.4 Trollope's political thinking, then, grounded as it is in this uncon- ventional assumption about the marginal significance of theory in human affairs, is thus of an unexpected sort and is conveyed in models of social interaction that are informed by this assumption. Thus implicit in all of Trollope's work is a very subtle conception of the state and society that is present only more explicitly in the Palliser novels. When Trollope's fiction is read in this light, he

2Sadleir, introd., Can You Forgive Her? (1948; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. v.

3Cockshut, Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (London: Collins, 1955); and Halperin, Trollope and Politics: A Study of the Pallisers and Others (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977).

4The Moral Trollope (Athens: Ohio State Univ. Press; London: Chatto and Windus [titled Trollope: Artist and Moralist], 1971).



34 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

becomes preeminently a political novelist who created a unique sort of political fiction.

A good way to see how politics is presented in his work is to look at one of those typical digressions that are presumed by some to be, at best, a self-indulgent break in the thematic unity of his fiction and, at worst, a mechanical padding out of a chapter to reach his incredible daily quota of pages. The passage occurs in the first of the Palliser novels, Can You Forgive Her?, and compares two characters, a Mr. Grindley and a Mr. Maxwell, who are of no importance whatsoever to any of the three plot lines of the novel.

There was a hunting club, Trollope tells us, in which Maxwell reigned supreme and all recognized his leadership while Grindley held no status at all. Grindley, he says, was more intelligent than Maxwell, his birth just as good, and, unlike Maxwell, who was considered the "king" of the club, Grindley reached his position in life by his own efforts.

Grindley knew that he had a better intellect than Maxwell; and yet he allowed Maxwell to snub him, and he toadied Maxwell in return. It was not on the score of riding that Maxwell claimed and held his superiority, for Grindley did not want pluck, and every one knew that Maxwell had lived freely and that his nerves were not what they had been. I think it had come from the outward look of the men, from the form of each, from the gait and visage which in one was good and in the other insignificant. The nature of such dominion of man over man is very singular, but this is certain, that when once obtained in manhood it may be easily held.5

This paragraph is a good representative in miniature of politics in Trollope's~world, for here politics is the study of the "dominion of man over man," whether it be the dominion of man over woman (or vice versa) in marriage, of parents over that tiny polity, the family, of social idol over outcast, of successful politician over un- successful one.

The club here is a model of social interaction that takes its shape from a basic assumption about people: that they can be highly

5Can You Forgive Her?, ed. Andrew Swarbrick, World's Classics Centenary Edition of Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), I, 169; subsequent references to this novel appear paren- thetically in the text.




irrational and that consequently the basis of hierarchy and power in any group is frequently irrational. The implication is that neither Grindley nor Maxwell understands the basis of their relationship or how it came to be. The nature of ordering in the club is not intentional or planned on any conscious level; rather it is automatic and instinctive. But despite the injustice of the hierarchy of this little state, there is a curious absence of ridicule or criticism on Trollope's part. He does not condemn the irrationality and injustice of the arrangement. His attitude is cold and analytical and, if anything, amused, for the hunting club is represented in this novel and elsewhere in his novels as a source of the greatest satisfaction to all.

Understood properly, this little digression sheds light on many other examples of human ordering in the Palliser novels, from courtship games to political and social power generally. For example, much of the plot of the series stems from Plantagenet Pal- liser's amazed reaction to the unreasonableness of political power and social ascendancy. When the Duke of St. Bungay tells him that he must strive to bear himself through life in a way that would befit his recently deceased uncle, the Duke of Omnium, Palliser is painfully aware that his uncle was an old reprobate and grasps the full grostesquerie of the notion that such a man was valuable to the welfare of his country.6 Trollope, in a passage in Phineas Finn that closely parallels that on the hunting club above, contrasts Palliser's father, the old Duke of Omnium, with the Duke of St. Bungay, probably the one statesman of the series who most consistently represents Trollope's own views:

I hardly know why it should have been so, but the Duke of Om- nium was certainly a greater man in public estimation than ... the Duke of St. Bungay. The Duke of St. Bungay was a useful man, and had been so all his life.... But the Duke of Omnium had never yet done a day's work on behalf of his country.... The one was a moral, good man, a good husband, a good father, and a good friend. The other,-did not bear quite so high a reputation. But men and women thought but little of the Duke of St. Bungay, while the other duke was regarded with an almost reverential awe.

6Phineas Redux, ed. John C. Whale, World's Classics Centenary Edition of Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), II, 157.




I think the secret lay in the simple fact that the Duke of Omnium had not been common in the eyes of the people. He had contrived to envelope himself in something of the ancient mystery of wealth and rank.7

Again, the irrationally based social ascendancy of an unworthy man is contrasted with the lesser success of a worthy one. A great source of the dynamic of the plot lines in the series stems from Plantagenet Palliser's, and others', confrontation with this fact. Here society itself is a model of social order with characteristics similar to a club. In this way various models of interaction-the family, the law, the clerical profession, the club, and Parliament itself-elaborate Trol- lope's ideas about the nature of human ordering.

Trollope's insistence on this irrational nature of human association stems from a fundamental insistence on the irrational nature of personality. Sometimes, as Christopher Herbert argues, this irrationality takes the form of an unaccountable, tragic inability to act in ways other than an unchangeable personality dictates; thus characters like Louis Trevelyan in He Knew He Was Right and Sir Peregrine Orme in Orley Farm are locked in their own personalities regardless of what the more reasonable side of their natures tells them to do.8 Sometimes human irrationality manifests itself in a somewhat different way, as a wide disjunction between a character's stated beliefs and his real, irrational motives. People cling to certain ideas or principles or abstract values, but these frequently have little to do with the way they behave.

A good example of this can be found in the novelJohn Caldigate. This novel revolves around the story of John Caldigate's marriage to Hester Bolton and his subsequent trial for bigamy as the result of a previous alliance with a woman in Australia. Hester Bolton's mother, Mrs. Bolton of Puritan Grange, objects violently to the

7Phineas Finn, ed. Jacques Berthoud, World's Classics Centenary Edition of Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), II, 81-82. This passage, evidently echoing the King's advice to Prince Hal in I Henry IV (III.ii.39-87), is a good example of the Shakespearean resonances scattered throughout Trollope's work. Here Trollope, like the King, maintains that society responds in unconscious ways to those with an instinctive grasp of the requirements for social position.

8"Trollope and the Fixity of the Self," PMLA, 93 (1978), 228-39.




marriage even before she knows of the trial for bigamy simply because, as she thinks, she wants to keep her daughter free from all taint of worldliness. Trollope's portrait of her is a masterful study of intense religious fanaticism and the violence it engenders. The rest of the Bolton family had to put pressure on the father, Mr. Bolton, simply to permit his daughter's marriage. But with the suspicion of bigamy, all the Boltons conspire to bring Hester back to Puritan Grange. While John Caldigate awaits trial, Hester, who does not want to leave her husband, is tricked into visiting her home and is there held prisoner by her parents. Mr. Bolton is throughout highly ambivalent about this line of conduct but yields to his wife's fanatical will.

Mrs. Bolton "was a woman of strong convictions and bitter prejudices; but her heart was soft enough."9 As Trollope continually reminds the reader, she truly loves her daughter. But she sees her dilemma as one of conflict between religious principle and human love. In any such conflict, she feels, love must yield to the law of God: "'If I let her go, I shall kill her soul,' said the determined woman. 'Is not her soul more than her body?"' (p. 343). Her rationale for her action is a harsh Christian theory that demands a suppression of her natural good will.

But her rationale has little to do with her real motivations. In a highly charged scene in which both husband and daughter try to convince Mrs. Bolton that she is wrong, Trollope explains the true nature of her conflict: "'I will not let you go,' said the mother, rising from her seat. 'I too can suffer. I too can endure. I will not be conquered by my own child.' There spoke the human being. That was the utterance natural to the woman" (p. 346). This passage is richly illustrative of Trollope's assumptions about human nature. Mrs. Bolton is entirely unaware of the radical discrepancy between her self-understanding and her real motives. She stands as an extreme example of a Trollopian character to whom theory is all important but to whom theory is not at all helpful in actually understanding her actions. In this passage religious principle is a highly misleading and vicious excuse for feelings that she con-

9John Caldigate (London and New York: Geoffrey Cumberlege/Oxford Univ. Press, 1946); further citations in the text are to this edition.




sciously refuses to examine. There are feelings that are "human," "natural to the woman," and there are ideas that are often irrelevant to the real situation.

This terminology is echoed much later in the book. After Hes- ter has been recognized as the legal wife of Caldigate, Mrs. Bolton rudely rejects an attempt by her stepson to persuade her to accept Caldigate as her son-in-law. A little later, when she is alone, Trollope tells us that her "religious bias" was not uppermost in her mind: "There was no taint of hypocrisy in her character; but yet, with the force of human disappointment heavy upon her, her heart was now hot with human anger and mutinous with human resolves" (p. 581).

Her motivation for clinging so closely to her idea of Caldigate's wickedness is in fact more complex than Trollope explicitly states. She is much younger than her husband, who has sons by a previous marriage. Hester becomes, as a result, someone privately her own, someone to be protected from encroachments by the family of her husband's first wife. Because of Mrs. Bolton's unhappy marriage, Hester looms disproportionately large as a factor in her life. Far more strong-willed than her husband, she resents the fact that "with all her labour, with all her care, and with all her strength, she had not succeeded in becoming the master of that weak old man" (p. 582). Behind her apparent hatred of John Caldigate, then, is a struggle for power and independence in her family and a vague resentment toward her husband. By hinting at the complicated nature of her unconscious feelings, Trollope underscores the human element behind her religious fanaticism. The theories and principles that are so important to an individual's self-understanding are often quite unrelated to more visceral sources of action.

Trollope presents Mrs. Bolton's problem here as an individual's struggle for power within a social group, an aspect of the curious "dominion of man over man." As such, the family is the most frequently employed model of social interaction in his novels. Of course, families in his work are not all as troubled as the Boltons. The Staveleys of Orley Farm, for example, are an ideal portrayal of the family as a harmonious little society. But more often than not, Trollope underscores the irrational nature of family ties and the unconscious drives of its members. And the wide disparity between Mrs. Bolton's conscious beliefs and her unconscious motives shows the doubtful relationship between ideas and human action.




But lest we dismiss Mrs. Bolton as an extreme example of irrationality, Trollope presents us with another example in the same novel, that of Judge Bramber, the judge who tries Caldigate's case. Unlike Mrs. Bolton, Judge Bramber is eminently responsible and healthy, governing his professional life in strict adherence to abstract rules of justice. He is absolutely fair in making judicial de- cisions and extremely successful at distinguishing between what is relevant and what is irrelevant to the case before him. Unlike Mrs. Bolton, the judge has an honest capacity for suppressing personal feeling for the sake of a higher ideal. He is Trollope's example of a character who has successfully internalized an abstract idea of justice and has learned to relegate private bias to a dim corner of his thinking. Absolutely apolitical and resented by others less con- scientious in the profession, "he was put upon the bench, simply because he was supposed to possess ajudicial mind. Here he amply justified that opinion,-but not without the sneer and ill-words of many" (p. 520).

But there is an interesting chapter in which Trollope carefully reproduces the judge's intricate thought processes in reconsidering John Caldigate's case. Caldigate has already been convicted of bigamy and sent to prison. New evidence is placed before the Sec- retary of State by Caldigate's attorney, Sir John Joram, showing that the witnesses for the prosecution had perjured themselves. The Secretary, unwilling to make a controversial decision, evades the task by asking Judge Bramber for a reconsideration and gives him Sir John Joram's letter "demanding" the release of Caldigate. This word greatly offends the judge who thinks that a good lawyer should never sink to showing enthusiasm:

Sir John Joram, whom he had known almost as a boy, had "de- manded" the release of his client. The word stuck in Judge Bram- ber's throat. The word had been injudicious. The more he thought of the word the more he thought that the verdict had been a true verdict, in spite of the fraud. A very honest man was Judge Bram- ber;-but human. (p. 526)

Here the word "human" carries a far different weight than it does when applied to Mrs. Bolton. In her case it refers to a pathological inability or unwillingness to be honest with herself and carries with it an intensity and seriousness commensurate with her role in the




novel. Applied to Judge Bramber, the word indicates a minor flaw treated with a light ironic touch.

But despite the vast difference between the two characters, there is a similar emphasis in the way "human" is used. In both instances the word indicates the great difficulty people have in living up to theoretical principles, however conceived, for to be human is to confront one's own irrationality. Judge Bramber's flaw, though small, is problematic. He becomes the only figure involved in the case who has any doubts about the hero's innocence. When his indecision threatens to mean Caldigate's further imprisonment, the Secretary is forced to pardon Caldigate without a positive ac- quittal. The judge in fact never makes up his mind. The reason for the judge's indecisiveness can be seen when it is put in the context of the legal system as a model of social interaction. In this system all the participants, judge, plaintiff, defendant, attorneys, have certain prescribed roles. Judge Bramber, in refusing to reverse his earlier decision, is protecting his role as a participant and strug- gling to maintain his position of dominion in his little realm against Sir John Joram, "whom he had known almost as a boy," and the Secretary of State. He, like Mrs. Bolton, is involved in a struggle for power and position in the world he inhabits.

Trollope consistently undercuts the role of principles and theory, and even thinking, in human affairs. One of the most striking things about the Barsetshire novels, for instance, is the way Trol- lope's clergymen seem uninterested not only in theological issues but seem to trouble themselves very little about their role as ex- emplars of Christian ethics. The two notable exceptions, Mr. Har- ding and Mr. Crawley, are notable partly because they are exceptions. And what is true of the church as a profession is also true in law and politics: few lawyers and politicians in Trollope's work bother themselves with theory; they unthinkingly play out prede- termined roles dictated by the models of social interaction that are their professions.

Trollope can even go so far as to play down the role of thinking itself. Time and again, as Ruth apRoberts points out, Trollope uses the phrase "We think that we think"; she also adds that "this is inclined to occur when one of his characters has a set piece of "thinking" to do, a decision to make, and it is the crisis that reveals the "thinking" to be not quite so rational a process as we generally




understand it to be."'0 This undercutting of the role of thinking in life points toward a definition of man that emphasizes the nonrational.

If thought cannot be trusted, then we must put our trust in something more reliable. For Trollope this may be the judgment of friends, the general sense of morals and manners in the com- munity, traditional practice, or simply the necessary compulsion of the roles people play in life. Each model of social interaction com- pels players to behave in certain ways or be eliminated from the game, for each model has rules of its own, whether it be the adversary system in law or the game of party versus party in politics. Moreover, one model can illuminate the others. Thus Plantagenet Palliser's struggle to remain Prime Minister parallels his struggle to control his wife and family; Phineas Finn's confrontation with the legal system parallels his confrontation with party politics. These interlocking images of human association combine to create a portrait of society in Trollope's fiction.

This idea of society as a complex network of multivariate groupings, most of which ultimately owe their existence to unconscious impulses and rules, is what Friedrich A. Hayek calls "spontaneous order." Hayek maintains that an important school of social theory dating from the eighteenth century, in the persons of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, gave rise to a conception of human association quite different from the rationalist tradition that dates from Thomas Hobbes and Jean- Jacques Rousseau. While these latter two posited a social contract theory of the formation of society which emphasized conscious human invention, design, and reason as the test of the just society, the former emphasized irrational and unconscious forces sponta- neously working to produce the various orders of society which have become institutionalized through a gradual process of evo- lution. This conception of society thus stresses the nonrational basis of life-including government, the family, the law, language-and the consequent danger of abstract thinking as applied to the un- knowable complexities of society." According to this idea, legisla-

'"The Moral Trollope, p. 100. "F A. Hayek, Rules and Order, Vol. I of Law, Legislation and Liberty, 3 vols.

(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973-79), pp. 35-54.




tors and theorists and social planners and reformers generally make a mistake in trying to apply abstract principles to what is essentially the "spontaneous order" of society. The only true test of justice in a cognitively limited world becomes experience and history and tradition. This fundamentally skeptical position is summed up well by Edmund Burke:

Metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line.... The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complex- ity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature, or to the quality of his affairs.'2

The picture of society in Trollope's novels falls well within this Burkean frame. Trollope, like Burke, looks to experience and practice for the test of truth and not to individual judgment, which even at its best in the person of people like Judge Bramber is subject to the vagaries of personality. And Trollope provides us with many lessons in his fiction of the danger of abstract thought when applied to a model of social interaction with its own spontaneous dynamism.

A good example of such a model is the legal system, for it is basic to Trollope's portrayal of society. On law rests the fundamental contractual connections between members of society, and as such it is basic to an understanding of his social philosophy. Trollope's attitude toward the law is a good index of his attitude toward politics and English life in general. This is why the attorney Mr. Grey of Mr. Scarborough's Family and Phineas Finn of Phineas Redux explicitly connect their disillusionment with the law to a disillusionment with their country. 13

The best way to see how Trollope uses the law as a test of England as a nation is to examine his portrayal of his favorite lawyer, Mr. Chaffanbrass. Mr. Chaffanbrass is a good example of Trollope's boundless fascination with the law because he is the only lawyer who appears in three novels stretching from the beginning of Trollope's career to near its end: The Three Clerks in 1858, Orley

'2Reflections on the French Revolution and OtherEssays, Everyman's Library (Lon- don: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1925), p. 59.

"3Mr. Scarborough's Family, World's Classics (London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946), p. 531; Phineas Redux, II, 220.




Farm in 1862, and Phineas Redux in 1874. In each appearance of Chaffanbrass, Trollope is careful to level at him some of his more virulent criticism. Chaffanbrass is the Old Bailey's most reprehen- sibly successful practitioner, noted for being able to save anyone from execution no matter how obviously guilty, and for browbeat- ing any witness no matter how honest into the appearance of craven dissimulation. He always "gave to his customer, with all the power at his command, that assistance which he had professed to sell. But we may give the same praise to the hired bravo who goes through with truth and courage the task which he has undertaken."'14 Chaf- fanbrass refuses to see any purpose beyond his role in the adversary system and, as such, he is an excellent embodiment of the English legal system functioning at its most basic, impersonal level.

Mr. Chaffanbrass is an outgrowth of an attack Trollope made on the unfairness of British law in The New Zealander, a nonfictional work of social criticism written two years before The Three Clerks but not published until 1972. Here the hypothetical Mr. Allwinde represents the law at its worst. Like Chaffanbrass he is honest enough to do his best for his "client murderers," but also, like Chaffanbrass, he is "vile"; for by humiliating honest witnesses and saving scoundrels, he manages to "obscure the truth, to turn guilt into innocence, innocence into guilt, to perplex and punish the good man doing his duty, and save the bad man who has neglected his duty." Trollope concludes that "if the necessary defence of a criminal require vile means, let it be given over to vile men. But it may safely be denied that anything vile is necessary."' 5

When Mr. Allwinde becomes incarnated as Mr. Chaffanbrass, however, his nature as a representative of British law becomes more complex. As N. John Hall notes, Chaffanbrass, unlike Allwinde, usually employs his unscrupulous talents in ways that the reader applauds, despite Trollope's condemnations.'6 Thus Chaffanbrass, while being an outrageous emblem of the adversary courtroom system, has an uncomfortable way of succeeding where idealists fail and achievingjust results that could be achieved by no one else.

'4Orley Farm, World's Classics (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1935), II, 359; further page references in the text are to this edition.

'5The New Zealander, ed. N. John Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 63.

'6N. John Hall, introd., The New Zealander, p. xxxiii.




His assiduous discharge of a professional role and refusal to look beyond it can seem like heroism in Phineas Redux, for example, when Phineas Finn is saved from execution for a murder he did not commit. For Chaffanbrass what is paramount in a trial is not the discovery of the fact of criminal guilt but rather the careful following of the rules: "What we should all wish to get at," explains Chaffanbrass, "is the truth of the evidence about the murder. The man is to be hung not because he committed the murder ... but because he has been proved to have committed the murder" (II, 178). The law must be grounded, according to him, on a frank admission of the limitations of human knowledge. Trust the system, says Chaffanbrass and, ultimately, so says Trollope; do not trust individual, unreliable human judgment.

This attitude toward the law is well evidenced in Orley Farm. In this novel Trollope incorporates all his criticism of the law in the person of a young lawyer, Felix Graham, who, along with Chaf- fanbrass and three others, works on the defense of Lady Mason, the central character of the novel, accused of having forged a will twenty years earlier. In this book, as in the others, Trollope explicitly attacks the law as an ungentlemanly undertaking: "I cannot understand how any gentleman can be willing to use his intellect for the propagation of untruth, and to be paid for so using it" (II, 165).

But when this position is personified in Felix Graham, it begins to take on a more ethically obscure aspect. Like Trollope, Graham is indignant about the legal profession's indifference to truth. Un- like Chaffanbrass, to whom "it was a matter of course that Lady Mason should be guilty," Felix Graham feels that "the absolute truth in this affair was a matter of great moment" (II, 282). As the trial progresses and he becomes convinced of Lady Mason's guilt, his scruples actually begin to endanger her defense (II, 289). By striv- ing to be honest and clinging to the truth, Graham is caught in a morally difficult situation. Chaffanbrass later tells him: "You are too great for this kind of work I take it.... If a man undertakes a duty, he should do it.... especially if he takes money for it, Mr. Graham" (II, 363).

Felix Graham's genuinely superior sense of rectitude places him in the paradoxical position of nearly betraying his client; Chaf-




fanbrass' morally limited view aims lower but achieves its ends. And the final irony is that despite the fact that Chaffanbrass is uncon- cerned with questions of justice, his methods end in a more just and merciful solution to Lady Mason's case than Felix Graham's pristine attitude would have produced. Chaffanbrass can submit himself to the rules of the adversary system of justice and make it work; Felix Graham, by holding himself above the necessarily de- fective system, simply fails to make it serve any higher purpose. The two lawyers reveal a central paradox about spontaneous order in society, repeated again and again in Trollope's novels: the un- thinking, unreflective, instinctive person keeps the mechanism of society running smoothly; the thinking, self-conscious person often obstructs it.

This central lesson about law is not cynical or pessimistic, however, for Trollope is no grim moralizer. On the contrary, despite his explicit denunciations of Chaffanbrass, Trollope's portrayals of him and his courtroom histrionics betray a sheer exuberant fascination that every reader shares: "Mr. Chaffanbrass, even when asking the simplest questions, in the simplest words, even when abstaining from that sarcasm of tone under which witnesses were wont to feel that they were being flayed alive, could so look at a man as to create an antagonism which no witness could conceal" (Phineas Redux, II, 198). The final truth about Mr. Chaffanbrass is that he is an all-star player in a wonderful kind of spectator sport. In this way Trollope, far from condemning the irrational nature of spontaneous order, can actually celebrate it.

Parliamentary politics-Trollope's greatest image of social interaction and the one dearest to his heart"-displays characteristics very similar to the legal system. Parliament, like the law, is a game with rules that compel players to suppress individuality enough to cooperate in useful ways. This is why Augustus Staveley's advice to Felix Graham-"A man, as I take it, must through life allow himself to be governed by the united wisdom of others around him" (Orley Farm, II, 352)-is echoed strongly in the statesman Joshua Monk's advice to the young, idealistic Phineas Finn: "There must be

"1In Can You Forgive Her?, II, 43-44, Trollope makes a touching digression about his own frustrated desire to sit in Parliament.




compromises, and you should trust to others who have studied the matter more thoroughly than you, to say how far the compromise should go at the present moment" (Phineas Finn, II, 78).

In addition, abstract ideas produce the same invasive, chaotic effects in both law and government, for both have their basis in spontaneous order and irrationality. The game itself is to be trusted, not individual perceptions of truth. Players who expect more of the game than it can deliver may be heroic or noble but are basically disruptive. Trollope's frequent spokesman, the Duke of St. Bungay, utters an extreme statement of this fact in evaluating Plantagenet Palliser:

I admire his character and his genius, but I think him the most dangerous man in England as a statesman.... He has no instinct in politics, but reaches his conclusions by philosophical deduction. Now, in politics, I would a deal sooner trust to instinct than to calculation. (Can You Forgive Her?, II, 194)

This is not to say that Trollope is uncritical of the political process and fails to see its fundamental injustices, for the winners of the Parliamentary game, like those in a club or a court case, or even the game of romance and courtship, are not necessarily the best or the brightest or the most worthy. Both Phineas Finn and Plantagenet Palliser learn painfully the lesson that idealism can be destructive and that such unromantic virtues as compromise, loyalty to a party leader, and the ability to make friends are more important than more classic ones. For Trollope even patriotism is questionable because it "sometimes sinks almost to pedantry. AJoveborn intellect is hardly wanted, and clashes with the inferiorities. Industry is exacting. Honesty is unpractical. Truth is easily offended. Dignity will not bend."'8

Trollope's understanding of Parliamentary politics has at its core a fundamental paradox: politicians cannot achieve justice by constantly pursuing it. Justice is achieved only indirectly when politicians respond to the natural dynamism of the party system. In this system the paramount question becomes not "Is it right?" but

'8The Prime Minister, ed. Jennifer Uglow, World's Classics Centenary Edition of Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), II, 315.




rather "Will it work?" According to Shirley Robin Letwin, Trollope's politicians never create policy by approaching an issue with pre- conceived ideas. Instead they create "their destination in the course of arriving":

They are not troubled by a conflict between principle and expe- diency because there are . .. no heaven-sent principles forbidding the adoption of what is expedient here and now.... They are undoubtedly serious about winning, but in the manner of players in a game. They are not bent on achieving victory by any strata- gems at hand; they are out to win by conducting themselves in accordance with certain rules.'9

This is why the outcome of Parliamentary contests is never a matter of life and death and why Plantagenet Palliser's failure as Prime Minister, so classically tragic in its outlines-a man of noble birth rises to power but loses it through his flaw, self-consciousness-is not finally tragic. The game of power in Parliament, though fun in the manner of a gladiator contest, is ultimately reassuring because it has its own self-regulating, nonrational, spontaneous order.20 Thus, while there is excitement generated by the defeat of Palliser's coalition government in The Prime Minister and some doubt about what might replace it, the doubt is quickly dispelled: "After a few days the old men had rattled into their old places,-or, generally, old men into new places," and a new government was in- evitably formed (II, 363).

This nonrational basis of both Parliament and the legal system runs counter to a common view of Trollope as a great Victorian rationalist, one who, in Coral Lansbury's words, "created a rational world, the ideal universe of law in which cause and consequence exist in a state of logical accord."'" Such a view of Trollope under- estimates the prominence of the irrational in his fiction. Building on a frank recognition of the limits of human thought and the consequent unreliability of abstraction as applied to experience, Trollope can actually celebrate the nonrational nature of sponta-

'9The Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), p. 199.

20See, for example, Phineas Redux, I, 290-302. 2'The Reasonable Man: Trollope'sLegal Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,

1981), p. 224.




neous order. Thus we sense the fun and joy in his portrayal of smoothly running models of social organization: the happiness of a harmonious family, the enjoyment produced by a hunting club, the spectacle of the courtroom or Parliament. When his attitude toward these models of interaction becomes clear, they can be seen as more than disparate and randomly described aspects of nineteenth-century life; rather they become images of surprising political suggestiveness.

This political character of his fiction helps explain something that new readers of Trollope always find amazing: the sheer ton- nage of the typical Trollope novel. Trollope himself was immensely proud of the number of pages he produced, and one suspects that though he does not tally them in his Autobiography, he probably carried a figure constantly in his mind of the number of words he had produced in his lifetime.22 The extraordinary length of his books is due, of course, to the convention of the serialized novel so popular in the nineteenth century. But that only partly explains the phenomenon, for Trollope took the convention one giant step further in his greatest achievement, the Palliser series, which can be seen as one long, very loosely constructed Trollope novel with recurrent characters and themes and plots within plots that reflect and amplify each other. Perhaps a more significant explanation lies in the political ambitions he had for his fiction. Trollope's novels present a great variety of images of man in society over a long period of time that add up to a total picture of a nation. The idea of a nation that emerges is what Edmund Burke described as "an idea of continuity.... made by the peculiar circumstances, occa- sions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time."23

Truman College, Chicago

22An Autobiography, pp. 118-19, 362-64. 23The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Bohn's British Classics,

8 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1954-57), VI, 146-47.



Documents

"Spontaneous Order" and the Politics of Anthony Trollope