By Anthony Trollope
It shouldn’t be difficult to find modern parallels to the story the great Victorian Anthony Trollope tells in The Warden, the first of Trollope’s four Barsetshire Chronicles.
Mr. Harding is a good man, the warden to an alms house which provides a peaceful home to twelve old men. The young and zealous John Bold is also a good man, but he believes he sees in Harding’s comfortable existence an injustice which must be exposed. The law, the church, and the self-righteous national press all have their say in the scandal that ensues.
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Many thanks to Todd and Paula for finding (and sending the link for) this video of The Warden made by the BBC:
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Anthony Trollope published his first novel at the age of 40 and died when he was 67. In those 27 years he wrote 47 novels. His work ethic was spectacular.
Henry James admired Trollope and wrote an extensive appreciation of both the author and his work. In that appreciation, James singled out The Warden, writing:
The Warden is a delightful tale, and a signal instance of Trollope’s habit of offering us the spectacle of a character. A motive more delicate, more slender, as well as more charming, could scarcely be conceived. It is simply the history of an old man’s conscience.
The good and gentle Mr. Harding, precentor of Barchester Cathedral, also holds the post of warden of Hiram’s Hospital, an ancient charity where twelve old paupers are maintained in comfort. The office is in the gift of the bishop, and its emoluments are as handsome as the duties of the place are small. Mr. Harding has for years drawn his salary in quiet gratitude; but his moral repose is broken by hearing it at last begun to be said that the wardenship is a sinecure, that the salary is a scandal, and that a large part, at least, of his easy income ought to go to the pensioners of the hospital. He is sadly troubled and perplexed, and when the great London newspapers take up the affair he is overwhelmed with confusion and shame. He thinks the newspapers are right he perceives that the warden is an overpaid and rather a useless functionary. The only thing he can do is to resign the place. He has no means of his own he is only a quiet, modest, innocent old man, with a taste, a passion, for old church-music and the violoncello. But he determines to resign, and he does resign in spite of the sharp opposition of his friends. He does what he thinks right, and goes to live in lodgings over a shop in the Barchester High Street. That is all the story, and it has exceeding beauty. The question of Mr. Harding’s resignation becomes a drama, and we anxiously wait for the catastrophe. Trollope never did anything happier than the picture of this sweet and serious little old gentleman, who on most of the occasions of life has shown a lamblike softness and compliance, but in this particular matter opposes a silent, impenetrable obstinacy to the arguments of the friends who insist on his keeping his sinecure fixing his mild, detached gaze on the distance, and making imaginary passes with his fiddlebow while they demonstrate his pusillanimity.
The subject of The Warden, exactly viewed, is the opposition of the two natures of Archdeacon Grantley and Mr. Harding, and there is nothing finer in all Trollope than the vividness with which this opposition is presented. The archdeacon is as happy a portrait as the precentor an image of the full-fed, worldly churchman, taking his stand squarely upon his rich temporalities, and regarding the church frankly as a fat social pasturage. It required the greatest tact and temperance to make the picture of Archdeacon Grantley stop just where it does. The type, impartially considered, is detestable, but the individual may be full of amenity. Trollope allows his archdeacon all the virtues he was likely to possess, but he makes his spiritual grossness wonderfully natural.
No charge of exaggeration is possible, for we are made to feel that he is conscientious as well as arrogant, and expansive as well as hard. He is one of those figures that spring into being all at once, solidifying in the author’s grasp. These two capital portraits are what we carry away from The Warden, which some persons profess to regard as our writer’s masterpiece. We remember, while it was still something of a novelty, to have heard a judicious critic say that it had much of the charm of The Vicar of Wakefield. Anthony Trollope would not have accepted the compliment, and would not have wished this little tale to pass before several of its successors. He would have said, very justly, that it gives too small a measure of his knowledge of life. It has, however, a certain classic roundness, though, as we said a moment since, there is a blemish on its fair face. The chapter on Dr. Pessimist Anticant and Mr. Sentiment would be a mistake almost inconceivable if Trollope had not in other places taken pains to show us that for certain forms of satire (the more violent, doubtless), he had absolutely no gift. Dr. Anticant is a parody of Carlyle, and Mr. Sentiment is an exposure of Dickens: and both these little jeux d’esprit are as infelicitous as they are misplaced. It was no less luckless an inspiration to convert Archdeacon Grantley’s three sons, denominated respectively Charles James, Henry and Samuel, into little effigies of three distinguished English bishops of that period, whose well – known peculiarities are reproduced in the description of these unnatural urchins. The whole passage, as we meet it, is a sudden disillusionment; we are transported from the mellow atmosphere of an assimilated Barchester to the air of ponderous allegory.
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George Saintsbury, the great Victorian writer, literary historian, scholar and critic, was not nearly as enthusiastic about Trollope as James. In his 1898 work, Corrected Impressions: Essays on Victorian Writers, he wrote:
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
by George Saintsbury
The vicissitudes of Mr. Anthony Trollope’s reputation are less striking and perhaps less instructive than those of George Eliot’s, for there can be very little doubt that Miss Evans had genius, and I never met more than one competent critic (a personal friend, by the way, of the author of The Warden) who thought that Mr. Trollope had. But he had immense fertility, and if not immense, very great talent; and his career is in consequence something of a warning. Unless I mistake very greatly, no novelist towards the end of the sixties was in greater demand at the circulating libraries, and by the editors and publishers of magazines which published serial novels, than Mr. Trollope; and certainly no one ever set himself to satisfy that demand with greater energy or in a more business-like spirit. He probably did himself no good with the public or the critics by the quaint frankness of his avowals in his Autobiography as to the strictly professional fashion—so many hours per day, and so many words per hour—in which he did his “chores.” And certainly there was a time when the public altogether failed to respond to his endeavours to please them. His last half-dozen, if not his last dozen novels, were I believe indifferent pecuniary successes; and I remember very well the difficulties under which I found myself when I had to criticise more than one of them. For it is, I think, a law of the Medes and Persians, “Never speak evil of man or woman who has given you pleasure,” and I admit that in the days of the Chronicles of Barset, Mr. Trollope gave me a very great deal of pleasure. But it is also a law of honest criticism never to say what you do not think, though it is by no means necessary to say all that you do think, and it was not easy to reconcile these two laws in the late seventies and early eighties with regard to Mr. Anthony Trollope.
He seems indeed to me to be the most remarkable example we have yet seen of a kind of writer who I suppose is destined to multiply as long as the fancy for novel-reading lasts. Only a few months ago it fell to my lot to read through the work of a famous amuseur of this kind in the generation before Mr. Trollope’s, a man as famous as himself in his own day, and of gifts certainly more varied and perhaps not less considerable. And the resemblance between Theodore Hook and Anthony Trollope struck me, I own, forcibly and rather terribly. Hook is of course at a much greater disadvantage with a reader of the present day—at least with a reader of my standing—than is Trollope. Much of him is positively obsolete, while in Trollope’s case the mere outward framework, the ways and language of society, the institutions, customs, and atmosphere of daily life, have not had time to alter very strikingly, if at all. Trollope too, did not attempt the purely comic vein, as did Hook; and the purely comic vein, unless it be absolutely transcendent, and of the first class, is that which dries soonest.
But still they are of the same general kind, and their motto, the motto of their kind, is Mene, Tekel. I do not even think that any one is ever again likely to attain even so high a rank in it as Mr. Trollope’s. Most have got the seed, and the flower has become common accordingly. I do not know that I myself ever took Mr. Trollope for one of the immortals; but really between 1860 and 1870 it might have been excusable so to take him. In Barchester Towers, especially, there are characters and scenes which go uncommonly near the characters and scenes that do not die. Years later the figure of Mr. Crawley and the scene of the final vanquishing of Mrs. Proudie simulate, if they do not possess, immortal quality. And in the enormous range of the other books earlier and later it would not be difficult to single out a number—a very considerable number—of passages not greatly inferior to these. From almost the beginning until quite the end, Mr. Trollope—whether by diligent contemplation of models, by dexterous study from the life, or by the mere persistent craftsman’s practice which turns out pots till it turns them out flawlessly—showed the faculty of constructing a thoroughly readable story. You might not be extraordinarily enamoured of it; you might not care to read it again; you could certainly feel no enthusiastic reverence for or gratitude to its author. But it was eminently satisfactory; it was exactly what it held itself out to be; it was just what men and women had sent to Mudie’s to get. Perhaps there is never likely to be very much, and still less likely to be too much, of such work about the world.
And yet even such work is doomed to pass,—with everything that is of the day and the craftsman, not of eternity and art. It was not because Mr. Trollope had, as I believe he had in private life, a good deal of the genial Philistine about him, that his work lacks the certain vital signs. We have record of too many artists, up to the very greatest, who took no romantic or sacerdotal view of their art, and who met the demand of the moment as regularly and peaceably as might be. You will no more avoid failure by systematic unbusiness-likeness, than you will secure success by strict attention to business. The fault of the Trollopian novel is in the quality of the Trollopian art. It is shrewd, competent, not insufficiently supported by observation, not deficient in more than respectable expressive power, careful, industrious, active enough. But it never has the last exalting touch of genius, it is every-day, commonplace, and even not infrequently vulgar. These are the three things that great art never is; though it may busy itself with far humbler persons and objects than Mr. Trollope does, may confine itself even more strictly than he does to purely ordinary occurrences, may shun the exceptional, the bizarre, the outré, as rigidly as Miss Austen herself. Indeed, there is a very short road to vulgarity by affecting these last three things; and I think since Mr. Trollope’s time it has been pretty frequently trodden by those who are hastening to the same goal of comparative oblivion which, I fear, he has already reached.
From Chapter XVIII, “Three Mid-Century Novelists (concluded)” in Corrected Impressions: Essays on Victorian Writers by George Saintsbury, published 1898 by Dodd, Mead and Company, New York.