The Way We Live Now (2 page)

Trollope, then, was working with contemporary material. But he was also a keen student of classical antiquity, and parallels with Roman history seem natural in this tale of imperial splendour and corruption. He was also alive to the mythic qualities that may inhere even in stories intended to convey what Henry James described as Trollope's ‘complete appreciation of the usual'.
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Certainly the usual is carefully presented, for example in the detailed London topography. The route of Felix's drunken ramblings on the morning of his proposed elopement, and Melmotte's walk on the morning of his election, could easily be followed today; like Melmotte we might well walk as far as he did and then take a cab to the City, as he did. The character and intentions of the walkers may be unusual, but their setting is markedly usual.

But Melmotte, a mythical figure, transforms the usual. An emblem as well as an agent of a more general social corruption and disorder, he may begin as one more sordid City confidence man of somewhat mysterious origins, but in the course of the narrative he acquires another dimension. One even begins to see in him, for all his vanity and ambition, qualities that make him, in a sense, nobler than many of the other characters; after his interview with Sir Felix in Chapter 23 we might judge him morally superior to the baronet. His entertainment for the Emperor of China is an absurd occasion, but the fact of his giving it establishes him as a prince among London merchants; the absurdity, and also the disappointment, are on the heroic, imperial scale, and it is not Melmotte who seems mean but some of his guests. For all his bullying, fawning, equivocating, he deserves his ‘Balzacian apogee', as Stephen Wall calls it.

Wall is right to suggest that in the brief period when Melmotte is on or near that point Trollope can show in a diagrammatic way ‘that collusion between money and rank which is such an indictment of the way we live now'
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moreover the ruined magnificence of the occasion confers on him a glamour that somehow belies the too simple judgement of Roger Carbury: ‘he is what he is because he has been a swindler greater than other swindlers' (p. 424). Vulgarthough he may be, he has complexity, and he is not afraid to be gigantic; he might have said with Nero,
Qualis artifex pereo
, what an artist perishes with me, but instead claims as a reward for his spectacular career, something like the.
immortality Horace thought to gain from his poems:
Non omnis moriar
, I shall not wholly die.

Robin Gilmour justly remarks that the catastrophe of Melmotte illustrates ‘a central paradox of Trollope's fiction – that of all Victorian novelists he has the most intimate knowledge of, and respect for, the norms that hold society together, and yet is drawn again and again to the creation of characters who flout and transgress these norms. The loneliness of the outsider deeply interests him, and he is often at his best when writing about it.'
¹⁰
Melmotte, the successful candidate in the Westminster by-election, had entered the House of Commons on the arm of the Prime Minister. (This is sometimes thought to be another of Trollope's sneers at Disraeli, and that reading cannot be entirely ruled out; but the context may suggest only the kind of courtesy the novelist, who loved the House, associated with parliamentary intercourse; and this measure of ambiguity – this leaving the reader to decide on the significance of an event – is more usual in Trollope than might be supposed, given his reputation for lack of subtlety.)

Melmotte is thus drawn into the fraternity of politicians; but for all the Prime Minister's courtesy and his own arrogant confidence he is a complete outsider. He has no notion of how to conduct himself in the House, making a premature maiden speech and doing it badly. By the time of his final appearance there he is ostracized, and when he rises to speak falls over, the physical fall prefigures the moral. He walks out alone.

Trollope's perhaps extravagant opinion was that ‘to sit in the British Parliament should be the highest object of ambition to every educated Englishman'
(Autobiography)
, and Melmotte, the outsider claiming to be an Englishman, had, as a manifest alien, impudently usurped this privilege, just as he had impudently though without difficulty made his way into the ranks of a corrupt or listless aristocracy – or into that part of it which lacked a firm commitment to the old English honour codes.

These were single mindedly endorsed by Roger Carbury, a squire who still lived off his land and knew what guests he might without impropriety offer a seat at his table. (Certain prejudices were the degenerate attendants of this decorum.) Melmotte's intrusion into Parliament, however politely managed, is, as Carbury could have predicted, a
disastrous violation. He can brazen out his parliamentary embarrassments for a while, but when finally his dishonour forces him out he goes of his own volition, with no destination but suicide, yet with a kind of dignity that is not quite a parody of Roman stoicism. The foreign body is expelled; but there is some sense that Melmotte is a scapegoat as well as an intruder, a great man as well as a sordid villain. When Mrs Hurtle sings his praises and holds such men to be above morality she, another outsider with a grudge, is overstating the case; but the telling of the tale goes a small part of the way towards endorsing her view.

And here one ought to reflect on Trollope's sometimes ambiguous attitudes to the alien, and in particular to his treatment of Americans and Jews. He knew the United States at first hand, and, almost of course, wrote a book about it
(North America
, 1862). During the Civil War he took the side of the North, against the current of English sentiment. He thought he saw the causes of the animosity that existed between the two countries; they arose from their resemblances. ‘Englishmen thought it their duty to Anglicize the world', he remarked in a speech made in 1864, while ‘the Americans were chips off the old block, and wished to Americanize the world'.
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A later novel,
The American Senator
(1876–7), chronicles the comic misadventures of the senator Elias Gotobed in an England he misunderstands and traduces. In
He Knew He Was Right
(1868–9) Trollope describes without much animus the family of the American ambassador in Florence, finding the father rather pompous, but marrying the daughter into English aristocracy; his – venom he reserves for the ‘Republican Browning', the feminist Wallachia Petrie. Yet one of his dearest friends, Kate Field, was not only an American but a feminist, and so should have been doubly an outsider.

America was not simple. In the
Autobiography
he treats the question summarily: ‘They among Englishmen who best love and most admire the United States,' he says, ‘have felt themselves tempted to use the strongest language in denouncing the sins of Americans.' They are admittedly generous, they love education and independence of mind; and they admire English manners. But politically they are at all levels corrupt; there is ‘glaring' dishonesty in high places. Trollope, a very energetic person, admired American energy while distrusting the forms it took. It is impossible to doubt that he saw in the United States a
warning of the way things would be if aggressive, uncontrolled, freebooting attitudes to money-making were to break down the restraints supposedly extant in England – the long-maintained habits of honourable dealing, the truthfulness of gentlemen, the solidity of squirearchy and the noblesse oblige of aristocracy. The price of these might be a certain arrogance and also some unexamined prejudice, but on the whole it was a price worth paying. Americans were not aristocrats, and only with difficulty could even the best of them be called gentlemen or ladies. Very clearly the financial operator Hamilton K. Fisker, for all his skill and energy – such a contrast with the effete members of the Beargarden – and Mrs Hurtle, for all her spirit – such a contrast with the tameness of English girls – could not be so called.

This explains the general treatment of Americans in
The Way We Live Now.
The grandiose operations of Melmotte (who may have an American father called Melmody, just as he may for all anybody knows be a Jew) are in part a consequence of the intrigues of Fisker, who reaches Melmotte through the financially impotent, conscience-troubled Paul Montague. In the games played by these men Montague is a mere English pawn. Fisker has a ruthlessness associated with the American West, a quality foreign to the well-born Englishman. Paul Montague, caught between the two worlds, is likewise the prey of Mrs Hurtle, also associated with the West, a woman who has lived under gun law, extracted a dubious divorce from a very American husband, and sexually enthralled the polite young Englishman.

Montague is not entirely feeble, especially if we compare him with Felix Carbury, who gets drunk and cannot even manage to get up in order to elope. Montague tries to stand up to Melmotte at the bogus meetings of the Board; and at some personal risk, with a good deal of dithering, and some stiffening talk from Roger Carbury, he stands by his decision to discard his importunate mistress. Yet even this success ultimately depends on her inherent generosity of spirit; perhaps she has been infected by English gentility to the extent that she can no longer use horsewhips and guns.

She returns to America in appropriate company – with Fisker, who has along the way won Marie Melmotte, a tough little outsider, a Jew and a bastard to boot, who, as finally becomes clear, would never have done as the wife of the English aristocrats who wanted her money. She has hung on to her father's ample reserve of money, and will hold her own in the harsher social and financial climate of the New World. Fisker, succeeding where Sir Felix Carbury and Lord Nidderdale failed, has got the girl and a large remnant of Melmotte's money; but corrupt
though England may now be, it has contrived almost by default to get rid of these outsiders.

Although Trollope falls short of what would now be thought a completely unprejudiced attitude to Jews, his treatment of the Jewish question, here and elsewhere, is more complex than that of many contemporaries. Admittedly he will refer with familiar irony to ‘the Hebrew gentleman' and allude to the supposed habits and physical characteristics of Jews, so that he can sometimes sound like a stupid clubman anti-Semite. Quite recently, in
The Eustace Diamonds
, he had produced a disagreeable stereotype in Joseph Emilius. But he can also surprise one with insight and sympathy. His
Nina Balatka
(1867, published anonymously) is set in Prague and concerns the marriage of a Catholic woman and a Jewish merchant; as Mullen observes, it reflects the historical fact that in 1867 civil restrictions on Jews were ended in the Austrian Empire.
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The mixed marriage is beset with problems, but Catholic and Jewish beliefts are alike respectfully treated.

Unlike
Nina Balatka, The Way We Live Now
has been called anti-Semitic. There were already strong Jewish interests in the City, and the fact did not please everybody. Melmotte's associate Cohenlupe is a crook; but the more interesting figure is Ezekiel Brehgert, whose manners may not be those of the English aristocrat but who is thoroughly honest – if not gentlemanly then manly, always one of Trollope's terms of approbation. Indeed Brehgert is made to serve as a measure of the snobbery and corruption of the Longestaffes.

One of Trollope's novelistic skills was the subtle use of letters to comment on character, and the terminal correspondence between Georgiana Longestaffe and Brehgert is a notable instance. Georgiana resists her family's crudely snobbish rejection of the Jewish suitor, moreover a man much older than she, and ‘in trade', mostly because she is desperate to marry, but partly because she senses that in this matter of the Jews ‘there was at present a general heaving-up of society… and a change in progress which would soon make it a matter of indifference whether anybody was Jew or Christian' (p.461). Georgiana is small-minded and her view of the matter is not disinterested; nor would Trollope, any more than most Jews and most Christians, have thought it a good thing
that all such distinction should be lost. He is not, as it were, behind Georgiana's musings; but one feels he has a less ambiguous sympathy with her suitor.

Brehgert, after his interview with Georgiana's father, sends her a good letter, the sort Trollope might indeed have called ‘manly' – he does call it ‘plain-spoken and truth-telling' – dealing with the father's objections, and especially pointing out that Longestaffe had closed his mind to the alteration in the social circumstances of English Jews. He adds, honourably, that his losses in the Melmotte collapse will for two or three years prevent his taking the second house he promised her in London, suggesting that they might manage quite comfortably for a while with the one at Fulham. Georgiana is not well pleased with this letter, least of all about the news of Brehgert's financial losses. In her reply she remarks that whereas she is willing to defy her family by marrying him she needs the promised town house: ‘Fulham is all very well now and then, but I don't think I should like to live at Fulham all the year through. You talk of three years, which would be dreadful.' She urges him to reverse his decision. His response is that her letter shows her unwilling to marry him ‘unless I can supply you with a house in the town as well as in the country', and, with great politeness, he declares their engagement to be at an end (p. 609).

All this is intelligently done, and it is what needs to be remembered when Trollope, in this novel, is called anti-Semitic. And indeed it is characteristic of his way of writing that the story often induces him to give depth and complexity to what could in principle have been presented in black and white. A notable instance is Roger Carbury, who certainly stands for old and increasingly neglected values, who is on the whole right about Melmotte and right about Mrs Hurtle, but whose rightness is shadowed by prejudice and intolerance. He might have been, much more simply, the kind of gentleman Pope admired, a Ralph Allen doing good by stealth in a society where ‘not to be corrupted was the shame'. But although he sometimes went close to producing such stereotypes, Trollope allows none such in
The Way We Live Now.