The Eustace Diamonds

Like many readers, I love Victorian novels in part for their sprawling capaciousness. Needing to fill out each monthly number drove Victorian novelists to layer plot twists and characters in a way that contemporary novelists have no real pressure to do. (In fact, I recently figured out why Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children (2006) left me unsatisfied: it was Victorian in ambition but nearly 300 pages short of Victorian in length, and that absence was evident in the way that crucial facets of central characters felt sketched rather then fully imagined, let alone fully drawn.) Anthony Trollope was not much for plotting--Dickens, whom he criticized for his melodrama, could have plotted circles around him. But he was such a professional (committing himself to writing 250 words every hour he was at his desk) and such a perceptive observer of human nature that the heft of his novels usually goes unnoticed, filled as they are with detailed explications of interesting characters. The Trollope novels I've read feel less like treks through a plot, from a start to an obvious finish, than they do visits with some interesting people and their society, to be begun at any point and to be ended at the first convenient marriage; that they come up to the length of a typical three-decker Victorian novel seems incidental.

In The Eustace Diamonds (1873), however, Trollope fails to hide the padding. The perils of serial publication make themselves known, as the plot is repeatedly summarized and conversations, if not exactly repeated, are at least echoed. Midway through the book, Trollope, who rode to hounds a couple of times each week, lets his love of hunting love get the better of him in an extended scene of a hunt, one that has none of the drama of the hunt in Phineas Finn (1869). In addition, at that point in the novel he introduces several new characters who, while individually at least somewhat interesting, as a group slow the novel and draw attention away from its central characters.

Despite that, The Eustace Diamonds is worth the occasional slog, offering many typical Trollopian pleasures. His authorial statements about human nature, though never so aphoristic or philosophical as George Eliot's, are as usual confident and convincing. Here, for example, he shows us Lizzie Eustace, the perpetual dissembler at the center of the book's events, exploding with frustration:

"And is there to be no punishment?" she asked, with that strong indignation at injustice which the unjust always feel when they are injured.

Then there's his usual facility with the minutiae of character, as in this gently ironic description of a marriage proposal offered by the remarkably unremarkable Lord Fawn:

He was now standing upright before her, with the fingers of his right hand touching his left breast, and there was something almost of dignity in his gesture and demeanor.

That "almost" is nearly worthy of Waugh, who also came to mind (along with Ivy Compton-Burnett) when I read this batch of conversation between a young governess, about to be married, and the crotchety old lady whose companion she's to be until the wedding:

"Dear me;--sent you up in the carriage, has he? Why shouldn't you have come by the railway?"

"Lady Fawn thought the carriage best. She is so very kind."

"It's what I call twaddle, you know. I hope you ain't afraid of going in a cab."

"Not in the least, Lady Linlithgow."

"You can't have the carriage to go about here. Indeed, I never have a pair of horses till after Christmas. I hope you know that I'm as poor as Job."

"I didn't know."

"I am, then. You'll get nothing beyond wholesome food with me. And I"m not sure it is wholesome always. The butchers are scoundrels, and the bakers are worse. What used you to do at Lady Fawn's?"

"I still did lessons with the two youngest girls."

"You won't have any lessons to do here, unless you do 'em with me. You had a salary there?"

"Oh, yes."

"Fifty pounds a year, I supose."

"I had eighty."

"Had you, indeed; eighty pounds;--and a coach to ride in!"

"I had a great deal more than that, Lady Linlithgow."

"How do you mean?"

"I had downright love and affection. They were just so many dear friends. I don't suppose any governess was ever so treated before. It was just like being at home. The more I laughed, the better everyone liked it."

"You won't find anything to laugh at here; at least, I don't. If you want to laugh, you can laugh upstairs, or down in the parlor."

Most of the drama of the novel is precipitated by characters feeling forced by circumstance to make impossible choices: marry for love or marry for money; break an engagement one knows to be wrong, or marry, and keep the approval of society while losing one's conscience. One of the book's relatively minor characters, the young Lucinda Roanoke, throws those dilemmas into stark, even shocking relief, crystallizing the themes of the novel in her horror at the concept of her impending marriage. She speaks frankly, cruelly, and with a strain of deep, angry fatalism, refusing to pretend that the marriage is anything but forced. She hates her fiance--hates the very idea of marriage--and her disgust after their first embrace is unexpectedly blunt:

When she was alone she stood before her glass looking at herself, and then she burst into tears. Never before had she been thus polluted. The embrace had disgusted her. It made her odious to herself.

Yet she marches onward towards the fateful day, unable to see a way out.

George Eliot, in The Mill on the Floss (1860), refused to allow a compromise with society once she'd put her heroine into a situation where there could be no right choice; instead, she brought on an apocalyptic flood. Thomas Hardy, too, who was just launching his career at the time of The Eustace Diamonds, would time and again reach for the tragic and violent in that sort of situation. In the story of Lucinda Roanoke there are hints that Trollope may yet surprise us with a turn in that direction. The night before the wedding, Lucinda's grasping, overbearing aunt has a moment of worry as she sees her to her bedroom:

An indistinct, incompleted idea of some possible tragedy had flitted across the mind of the poor woman, causing her to shake and tremble, forbidding her, weary as she was, to lie down.

Could Miss Roanoke's story possibly end with a suicide? Trollope, it turns out, is not willing to go that far. Though he does not back down from his portrayal of the cruelty of her position--the marriage is called off, but Miss Roanoke remains in some sense permanently damaged--he allows it to fade into the background, as his primary characters meanwhile do find themselves able to make some accommodation, however flawed, to the demands of society.

But even as Lucinda's aunt waited outside her door, we knew that Trollope would not choose the tragic. It is not his form. He will criticize, satirize, lay out our failings for us to see--but if we are obstinate he will not force us to acknowledge those failings by foreclosing the possibility of individual happiness. I can imagine Trollope recoiling from the relentless gloom of Jude the Obscure, for he always remains conscious that his role is at least as much that of entertainer as of commentator. A novel, he wrote in his posthumously published Autobiography,

should give a picture of common life enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos.

If that creed led him to turn away from the darkness and fatalism that would fuel a writer such as Hardy--and would be part of the reason his critical standing fell after his death and remained low for decades--it still left him a broad palette on which to present to us characters and situations that, more than a century later, still teem with life and insight.

"They were long, large eyes--but very dangerous."

After a few months of actively staying away, I've succumbed once again to the seductions of Anthony Trollope, continuing with the next novel in the Palliser sequence, The Eustace Diamonds (1873). I'm not that far into it--in fact, after thirty-six pages, I'm only just now getting past Trollope's introduction of the dramatis personae. At the end of the fourth chapter, which was the end of the first serial installment of the book (in the July 1871 issue of the Fortnightly Review), Trollope himself laments the dilated nature of his introductions:

Dramatists, when they write their plays, have a delightful privilege of prefixing a list of their personages;--and the dramatists of old used to tell us who was in love with whom, and what were the blood relationships of all the persons. In such a narrative as this, any proceeding of that kind would be unusual--and therefore the poor narrator has been driven to expend his four first chapters in the mere task of introducing his characters. He regrets the length of these introductions, and will now begin at once the action of his story.

I could imagine coming to the end of that first installment in the Fortnightly Review and being frustrated that you got so little action and drama for your shilling. We, however, have the advantage of holding the whole book in front of us, so we can instead revel in Trollope's extended descriptions, which are enjoyable for their careful, balanced prose and their unapologetic declarativeness. Trollope is not one for vagueness or beating around the bush--he leaves little to inference. Instead, he tells you, straight-out, what his characters are like; that established, the interest comes in figuring out how these fully imagined--and fully laid out--characters will affect each other, how they will deal with new or unexpected situations.

It's the antithesis of the show-don't-tell ethos of contemporary writing instruction, and it's easy to imagine it being a turgid mess in the hands of a lesser writer. But Trollope's prose is unfailingly engaging, even charming, and when used to convey his nuanced understanding of how society constrains, alters, and forms character, it makes for compelling reading. Here, for example, is how he opens the novel:

It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies--who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two--that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself. We will tell the story of Lizzie Greystock from the beginning, but we will not dwell over it at great length, as we might do if we loved her.

Lizzie is certainly not lovable, being frequently compared, even by Trollope himself, to the ruthless gold-digger Becky Sharp in Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Trollope's early description of her delivers some wonderfully Victorian physiognomical analysis of her deeply flawed character:

Her chin was perfect in its round, not over long--as is the case with so many such faces in which such length utterly spoils the symmetry of the countenance. But it lacked a dimple, and therefore lacked feminine tenderness.

Who knew a dimple was the minimum requirement for feminine tenderness? Writers of personal ads may have to come up with a new acronym. But the absence of a dimple isn't the only clue to Lizzie's character:

How few there are among women, few perhaps also among men, who know that the sweetest, softest, tenderest, truest eyes which a woman can carry in her head are green in colour! Lizzie's eyes were not tender--neither were they true.

Though this photo doesn't give any clue, I do hope that Mrs. Trollope had green eyes--or, failing that, that she was better at sussing out the differences between Trollope's narrative voice and his actual self than I am.

{Digression: now that I've dug up that photo of Rose Trollope, I can't resist sharing a photo of Anthony as well, in case you've never seen him in his full, bearded glory.



End digression.}

Lizzie of course isn't the only character on whom Trollope lavishes his descriptive powers. His presentation of her aunt, Lady Linlithgow, serves as a nice reminder of one of the pleasant differences between history and literature. If history at its best often brings us up short by reminding us of just how different the world and its people were in the past, one of literature's most striking powers is to do the opposite, revealing unexpected continuities and personality types and traits that have remained surprisingly resilient, even common, over time. The category of person to which Trollope assigns Lady Linlithgow will, I think, be familiar to everyone:

Lady Linlithgow, too, though very strong, was old. She was slow, or perhaps it might more properly be said, she was stately in her movements. She was one of those old women who are undoubtedly old women--who in the remembrance of younger people seem always to have been old women--but on whom old age appears to have no debilitating effects. If the hand of Lady Linlithgow ever trembled, it trembled from anger; if her foot ever faltered, it faltered for effect.

Trollope, however, always has more words at his disposal, and he likes to use those words to complicate the character he is presenting:

In her way Lady Linlithgow was a very powerful human being. She knew nothing of fear, nothing of charity, nothing of mercy, and nothing of the softness of love. She had no imagination. She was worldly, covetous, and not unfrequently cruel. But she meant to be true and honest, though she often failed in her meaning;--and she had an idea of her duty in life. She was not self-indulgent. She was as hard as an oak post--but then she was also as trustworthy. No human being liked her;--but she had the good word of a great many human beings.

That's a fairly typical description for Trollope. He is forever turning his characters around and around to point out facets that we might not otherwise have seen. For me, that alone goes a long way toward justifying his tell-don't-show approach, however much he may pretend to regret it.

But enough writing--there's nearly 700 more pages to read and a lovely Sunday stretching before me!