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Trollope's Case for Moral ImperativeAuthor(s): Roger L. SlakeySource: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Dec., 1973), pp. 305-320Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933002 .

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Trollope's Case for Moral Imperative ROGER L. SLAKEY

M O ORAL IMPERATIVE in the fiction of Anthony Trollope? Nonsense. What about Mr. Scarborough's Family? That surely is a case for moral relativism. Recent criticism, in fact, has advanced this very thesis so far that one of the best of his critics, Ruth apRoberts, is making him out an advocate of situation ethics. He insists, she says, upon a flexible morality and encourages us to "look at the specific individual instances with a tender casuistry, in the spirit of what is now sometimes called 'situation ethics.' ' "1 Robert M. Polhemus differs from her only insofar as he finds moral relativism limited to the late novels.2 While apRoberts and Polhemus are not the first to recognize Trollope's sympathy for all, even for the small-minded and the evil,8 they are the first to argue that this tolerance, this sympathy, this regard for situation so characteristic of Trollope amount to moral relativism. By way of defending the

I "Trollope Empiricus," VN, No. 34 (1968), pp. 4, 6. In a later essay apRoberts asserts that Trollope's concern in the novels "is always moral, and he is always recom- mending, by means of his cases, a more flexible morality. His stance is that of what we now call Situation Ethics." See "Trollope's Casuistry," Novel, 3 (1969), 25. She repeats this assertion in The Moral Trollope (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1971), p. 52. As her book appeared after I had written this paper and as it makes essentially the same argument as the articles, I have not converted references to the book.

2 In the last novels, Polhemus says, Trollope begins to "accept moral relativism ... and returns to a quiet crusade for tolerance in personal relationships." See The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968), p. 215.

3 As early as 1858, a reviewer of Doctor Thorne had commented that because Trol- lope reveals the De Courcys' heartless and worldly ways so good-naturedly, we sym- pathize with them, "we do not disown the family, and that makes the secret of Mr. Trollope's excellence." See Donald Smalley, Trollope: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 71. The review appeared in the Athenaeum, 5 June 1858, p. 719.

[305]



306 Nineteenth-Century Fiction

argument, apRoberts says that in Orley Farm Lady Mason is "a forger we cannot bring ourselves to condemn," that in The Amer- ican Senator the ironic perspectives upon Senator Gotobed evidence "a large, relativistic view."4

Tolerance and sympathy, however, and regard for situation and ironic perspective do not necessarily evidence fundamental relativism. And since apRoberts assumes they do, her argument is not conclusive. Trollope is certainly tolerant of his strays, sinners, and dogmatic ascetics, and he not only sympathizes with them but soli- cits his readers' tolerance and sympathy as well. Yet if tolerance, sympathy, and regard for situation be moral relativism, Thomas Aquinas and Jesus Christ would be relativists, for in moral questions Aquinas manifested both sympathy and tolerance and insisted upon considering situation, and Jesus not only refused to condemn the woman caught in adultery but gave his life for sinners.

The point at issue here does not pivot on a quibble. It turns upon fundamental distinctions in the discussion of morality, such as that between the agent of an action and the act itself, and that between the gravity of an act and the agent's understanding of that gravity. Trollope uses distinctions like these in his novels. The question is whether, in doing so, he makes a case for situation ethics or for a sympathetic understanding of morally complex imperatives.

According to Joseph Fletcher, situation ethics "aims at a contextual appropriateness-not the 'good' or the 'right' but the fitting."5 Love alone determines what is fitting in a given situation or "in non-Christian situation ethics some other highest good .. . such as self-realization in the ethics of Aristotle."6 Now Trollope believed that the love of neighbor is the highest value of life:

That doctrine which tells us that we should do unto others as we would they should do unto us [is] the very pith and marrow and inside meaning of Christ's teaching, by adapting which we have become human, by

4 See "Trollope's Casuistry," p. 22 (The Moral Trollope, p. 45) for the one remark, and, for the other, "Trollope's One World," SAQ, 68 (1969), 476 (The Moral Trollope, p. 188).

5 Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), pp. 27-28. 6 Ibid., pp. 26, 31. The term "self-realization" is an unfortunate oversimplification,

because its meaning is too general. The Imitation of Christ is as concerned with self- realization as the Nichomachaean Ethics, and neither work attributes to the concept the same meaning that writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attribute to it.



Trollope's Moral Imperative 307

neglecting which we revert to paganism.... How different has been the world before that law was given to us and sincel Even the existence of that law, though it be not obeyed, has softened the hearts of men.7

From Trollope's viewpoint, Christ's commandment of neighborly love is the watershed of history, and those who accept it know that the way to heaven "must be found in good deeds here on earth; and . . . the good deeds required.. . [are] kindness to others."8 Trollope nowhere intimates that Christ taught two equally important com- mandments, the love of God and the love of neighbor; he thinks only of that second commandment. Clearly he considers this men's greatest good since it is by obeying this that they become human. The question, then, is whether such a love prompts men to settle for "contextual appropriateness," to accept as fitting what is not in traditional morality also good and right.

Consider Orley Farm and Doctor Wortle's School. In both novels, principal characters assume they have done what is fitting, although, in the former, Lady Mason has forged a codicil to her husband's will, thereby robbing her husband's son by a previous marriage, and, in the latter, Peacocke lives with the wife of another man. According to traditional morality, Lady Mason has committed theft, Peacocke, adultery. Trollope handles both situations in such a way that, while creating a sense of the moral and human complexities involved and evoking the utmost sympathy for the characters, he seems always to maintain that the act committed by each is wrong.

Lady Mason, for instance, has robbed her stepson only out of love for her son, not out of consideration for herself. Had she not forged the codicil, the boy would have been left with nothing. She herself is good and kind and unselfish. She wins almost everyone's affection, including the reader's, and administers the estate during her son's minority in the best interests of the tenants and for the good of the property itself. The stepson, on the other hand, is wealthy enough without the property, and is such an irascible, grasping, miserly, spiteful fellow that had he possessed it he would have bled the tenants and the estate for his own profit. When he learns of the forgery, he seeks not only to claim the property but, in a spirit of

7 Anthony Trollope, The Life of Cicero, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Bros., 1881), II, 324-25.

8 Ibid., II, 330.




vengeance, to crush Lady Mason into the dust. Given his personality and hers, given his behavior and hers, the estate is safer in Lady Mason's hands than in his. And, after all, her husband should have provided for his son by her.

Nonetheless, Trollope insists that 'the stepson, despicable as he is, is entitled to the farm, and that Lady Mason, good and lovable as she is, is not. In simple terms, she is guilty, and no concatenation of events can alter that fact. There is no explaining otherwise the moment when she confesses her crime to Sir Peregrine Orme, and Trollope comments, undoubtedly with an eye to the confessional melodrama in Dickens:

She did not faint, nor gasp as though she were choking, nor become hysteric in her agony; but she lay there, huddled up in the corner of the sofa, with her face hidden, and all those feminine graces forgotten which had long stood her in truth so royally. The inner, true, living woman was there at last,-that and nothing else.9

Our attention is directed here to Lady Mason's release from the shackles of artifice and dishonesty. Having made her confession, she is on the way to becoming whole.

One might object, to be sure, that because Lady Mason is cheating her stepson, her act is not fitting. The point in situation ethics, however, is that if Lady Mason thinks her act fitting, as she does for many years, no one has the right to protest. The nub of the issue is not whether we condemn Lady Mason but whether, sympathizing with her, as we should, we still recognize that she is wrong to have forged the codicil.

Doctor Wortle's School does not admit even this objection, for the affair, a private and personal one, affects none but the two concerned. As in Orley Farm, so here, the situation seems to favor those whom traditional morality would hold sinners. While living in St. Louis, Mr. Peacocke married an American whose husband was re- ported dead. When it turns out the man is alive, Peacocke returns with the woman to England, where the two continue living quietly together as man and wife until the husband's brother comes on the

9 Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), II, 35; italics mine.




scene to blackmail them. Why should the Peacockes be thought wrong? The woman's husband by law is dissolute, brutal, and in- different to her. Peacocke is kind and good and loves her deeply and tenderly; and she loves him. He believes, too, that he is right to keep her and that if he deserts her he will condemn her to miserable lone- liness.

Yet nothing in the narrator's manner or tone suggests he is ironic when he says: "Every day passed together as man and wife must be a falsehood and a sin"; or: "That [Mr. Peacocke] had lived a life of sin,-that he and she had continued in one great falsehood, is manifest enough." Why does he tell the story? He intends, he says, to show "how the Doctor bore [the news when the sin became known] .. . and how also Mr. and Mrs. Peacocke bore it." '1 That is, we who stand apart from the narrative have no doubt where right and wrong lie; those enmeshed in the situation have. We are therefore asked to watch them sympathetically and patiently as they strug- gle 'toward the good and the right. We are asked not to assume that in this situation the Peacockes may have acted well but, distinguish- ing between an act and the agent of that act, to observe how certain men and women behave in a given situation.

Trollope sympathizes with the Peacockes, yes, but approves their living together outside wedlock? I find no evidence of his approval, or of his saying, as a true situationist would, if you are prompted by love, or by another value you consider highest, I will not judge you, for your values, though different from mine, are as good as mine if you are persuaded of them and attempt to act upon them. On the contrary, Trollope seems convinced in the novels that there are such things as right behavior, hierarchy of values, and binding relationships.

What, then, of Mr. Scarborough's Family? Granted the above argument is valid for the other novels of Trollope, this one is surely an exception. The contradictions in critical comment upon it imply as much. On the one hand, Geoffrey Tillotson has called it Trol- lope's "late masterpiece," Gerald Brace has said it is "not only 'Trollopian' in every favorable sense of the word but . . . close to

10 Anthony Trollope, Dr. Wortle's School (1881; London: Oxford Univ. Press, World's Classics, 1928), pp. 31, 32.




being the best novel he ever wrote," and Gordon Ray has labeled it "a cheerful book."'- On the other hand, A. 0. J. Cockshut has called it "only brilliant melodrama," shot through with moral confusion,12 and he and the Stebbinses consider its tone anything but cheerful. The Stebbinses say that in this novel, Trollope, "titanlike . . . questions the moral order and writhes with pain and contempt at his own answers." 13 In essential agreement with them, Cockshut argues that the only solution for the dilemma posed by the moral confusion must come from reconciling religion and political economy, something Trollope cannot do. The narrative itself, Cockshut adds, proposes a species of moral relativism repugnant to Trollope: "Each of the main characters has a different standard of honesty, each is justified from one point of view and each is vulnerable.... The point of the book is not that Mr. Scarborough's grotesque morality is justified, but that it is no more vulnerable than that of the others." 14 Polhemus seems to convert into a frank and cheerful relativism this reluctant quasi-relativism that Cockshut finds, for he says that Scarborough, despite his lies and swindling, "acts out of benevolent moltives ... gets good results," and is a man of in- tegrity.15 In short, Mr. Scarborough's Family is called masterpiece and melodrama, cheerful and gloomy, morally confused and morally relativistic. If nothing else, the conflict of opinion implies that right and value are hardly discernible.

Yet they are clearly discernible. The book, a masterpiece and certainly Trollopian, is neither cheerful nor gloomy. Whether

11 "Trollope's Style," in Mid-Victorian Studies, by Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson (London: Univ. of London, Athlone Press, 1965), p. 57; Brace, "The World of Anthony Trollope," Texas Quarterly, 4, No. 3 (1961), 187; Ray, "Trollope at Full Length," Huntington Library Quarterly, 31 (1968), 323. Like Geoffrey Tillotson and Gerald Brace, James Pope Hennessey considers the novel "one of the greatest and most or- ganized" of Trollope's long novels. See Anthony Trollope (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), p. 380.

12 Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (London: Collins, 1955), p. 237. 13 Lucy Poate and Richard Poate Stebbins, The Trollopes: The Chronicle of a

Writing Family (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1945), p. 328. 14Cockshut, pp. 114, 234-35. 15 Polhemus, pp. 240, 241. See also Ruth apRoberts' remark in "Cousin Henry:

Trollope's Note from Antiquity," NCF, 21 (1969), 96, and the context of that remark. In The Moral Trollope, p. 157, she further comments: "There is a virtuoso quality in the way Trollope manipulates [the Scarborough case], insisting on its complexity and difficulty, insisting on moral relativism.... the oddness of this barely believable case demands a situation ethic."




Scarborough's motives are benevolent in his eyes, they are not simply to appear so to the reader. His results are pitiable, not good. And the moral confusion, or relativism, whatever we choose to call it, vanishes once we recognize the relationship between the minor and the principal actions.

As Jerome Thale has pointed out, Trollope habitually employs his subplots to define the conflict in his major plots.16 To read his novels properly is to read all the plots of a given novel, not just one. That is so obvious it ought not to be said, yet it must be said if for no other reason than to protest the tendency in Trollope criticism during the past twenty years to fasten upon one action, often not even a major action, and to interpret in the light of it not only the novel in which it appears but Trollope's attitudes toward life and values as well.

In Mr. Scarborough's Family there are three actions. The major plot, Scarborough's effort to circumvent the entail to his property, involves a serious moral question. One of the subplots, Uncle Pros- per shuttlecocking his heir, Harry Annesley, travesties the Scar- borough affair, and, with its rich comedy, undoubtedly helps to account for the cheerfulness Gordon Ray has found in the book. The other subplot, the amusing love tale of Florence Mountjoy and Harry Annesley, develops a thematic perspective essential to an understanding of Mr. Scarborough and his family.

In the major plot, Scarborough, determined to select his own heir despite the entail on his property, marries in Rummelsburg and, after the birth of his first son, Mountjoy, has a second marriage ceremony in Nice. He then returns to his family property at Tret- ton, where his wife dies after a second childbirth, leaving him two sons, two marriage certificates, and a plan for besting the entail. His plan seems foolproof. If Mountjoy grows up trustworthy he will inherit,the property; if he grows up dissolute, Augustus will inherit it, the second certificate declaring Mountjoy illegitimate and Au- gustus the heir. Scarborough does not imagine the possibility that both sons might disappoint his expectations.

They do, however. When Mountjoy, a reckless gambler, borrows heavily against the property, Scarborough produces the second cer-

16 "The Problem of Structure in Trollope," NCF, 15 (1960), 147-57.




tificate and claims Augustus, a promising barrister, as his heir. When in his turn Augustus, having abandoned the law, contemns his father and finally tells him he should die and get out of the way, Scarborough produces the first certificate, reinstates Mountjoy, and dies, leaving Augustus neither a profession nor an inheritance; and he dies knowing that the property will find its way to the gambling tables of Monaco.

This is the major action in a nutshell. Running through it, there seems to be a question whether Scarborough should be exonerated from the burden of his rascality or, if not, whether he is any more a rascal in his way than those about him are in theirs. For, unlike them, he acts, or seems to act, in accord with his principles. Be- lieving virtue and vice merely "good-nature" and "ill-nature," he does as he wishes with evident good nature. He scorns honesty and, to obtain his end, slanders his wife's memory, perpetrates gross de- ception, and manipulates the law. Although he uses his sons as tools, however, and beguiles men, if not into approving or condon- ing his wrong, at least into excusing or minimizing it, he acts genial- ly and for the sake of what he considers the greatest good, the preser- vation of the estate-in Fletcher's words, his summum bonum. The narrator himself claims that "in every phase of his life [Scarborough] had been actuated by love for others. And indeed he had never been selfish, thinking always of others rather than of himself."'7

If Scarborough acts out of love and with shrewd consistency according to his principles, is he worse in his way than others are in theirs? Is he perhaps to be absolved of guilt? Cockshut answers em- phatically that Scarborough is no worse, and Polhemus seems to absolve him.

Yet Scarborough is worse than others. Forgetting for the moment whether he is consistent with his principles, I think it unlikely that Trollope is saying the rascal who revels in rascality is no worse than the man who, though seeking to be honest, sometimes acts dis- honestly. It is true that Grey, Scarborough's family lawyer, believes him "the greatest rascal that I ever knew" yet is reluctant to sever relations with him, that he finds himself unable to "regard him as

17 Anthony Trollope, Mr. Scarborough's Family (1883; London: Oxford Univ. Press, World's Classics, 1946), p. 567. Citations in the text are to this edition.




an honest man regards a rascal" (373). It is true also that he assists Scarborough in cheating the moneylenders and in manipulating the law. What he does, however, he does only after having satisfied himself, precipitately as things turn out, that Scarborough is speak- ing the truth when he reveals the marriage certificate from Nice and claims Mountjoy is illegitimate. Grey does n/ot intend to cheat. When he learns the truth of the affair and sees how -the law can be manipulated by the unscrupulous, he resigns his legal practice in disgust and dismay. His inconsistency between principle and practice is for the most part unintentional, and, where it is not, is something that perplexes and annoys him. There is, too, a moral difference between the dissipation of Mountjoy and the calculating avarice and indifference of Augustus. Although Trollope does not explore thematically the distinctions between reckless and calcu- lated evil, as Dostoevsky does in The Brothers Karamazov, he makes those distinctions. Mountjoy is clearly a better man than Augustus, and Grey than Scarborough.

Of course people seem to approve Scarborough. Merton, his medical attendant, says that while "thoroughly dishonest," Scar- borough is "a most excellent man," a modern Robin Hood, with a "capacity for love, and an unselfishness, which almost atones for his dishonesty"; and: "If you can imagine for yourself a state of things in which neither truth nor morality shall be thought essential, then old Mr. Scarborough would be your hero" (514).18 Barry, an astute lawyer, would exonerate him: "He has been so clever that he ought to be forgiven all his rascality" (53).

Nonetheless, whatever people think the compensations of Scar- borough's chicanery, they acknowledge the chicanery itself (201), and Merton's proposition is both conditional and hypothetical. If there is a Barry there is also a Grey, and a number of others like him. The lives of those surrounding Scarborough and talking about him, therefore, do not encourage us to assume that, alas, there is no difference between one man's behavior and another's. They evidence rather a degree of moral uncertainty somewhat in the way

18 Taking this passage as the key to the novel, Cockshut says, pp. 234-35, that Scarborough is such an agreeable and clever fellow he is indeed our hero. But in the novel itself, Merton has just said that "all the world must condemn" Scarborough (567).




they do in The Ring and the Book. As such, they testify to a need for moral precision. What kind of moral precision? Certainly not, as Grey believed, the precision of law.

Trollope's novels, and Mr. Scarborough's Family in particular, make clear what he considered that precision to be. One of its elements is honesty, for Trollope, the sine qua non of society. Un- like Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, whose characters, even when deliberately dishonest, maintain relations with others, Trol- lope thought that the dishonest man isolates himself from others and that if he persists in dishonesty he becomes less and less capable either of associating with others in any form or of judging his own actions.19 This is the case with all forms of dishonesty in his novels, the dishonesty of malice or speculation, like that of George Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her? or of Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime Minister, the dishonesty of stubbornness and prejudice, like that of Robert Kennedy in Phineas Redux, the dishonesty of trying to sub- mit to another's wishes while ignoring one's own, dishonesty like that of Mary Masters in The American Senator. The very word "honesty" in fact recurs so frequently in Trollope's writing that it must to some extent have asserted the very essence of life for him. It meant to him not only the absence of pretense20 and the unpre- judiced receptivity to others,21 but the forthright declaration, revelation as it were, of the very substance of anything. This is its meaning in such remarks as ",the snow had not fallen in hearty, honest flakes"22 in such reflections as Hugh Stanbury's in He Knew He Was Right, that it is "more manly" to tell Nora his love "honestly, than go on groping about with half-expressed words." 23 It is the

19 In Trollope's novels note, for example, Countess Josephine in Lady Anna, Ma- dame Staubach in Linda Tressel, and Mrs. Bolton in John Caldigate.

20 Trollope once said in a lecture that "a man should not live with an easy con- science if, in his calling, he pretends to anything, either to knowledge, or to sanctity, or to property which he does not possess." See "The Civil Service as a Profession," in Trollope, Four Lectures, ed. M. L. Parrish (London: Constable, 1938), p. 7.

21 Concluding North America, Trollope says that he has "endeavored to judge without prejudice, and to hear with honest ears, and to see with honest eyes." See North America, ed. Donald Smalley and Bradford A. Booth (New York: Knopf, 1951), p. 509. In the first chapter of this remarkable but neglected book, Trollope speaks of difficulties one meets in attempting to view a foreign country fairly. His discussion should be a persuasive argument against the claim he is a relativist, for he clearly regards circumstance in order to perceive the truth.

22 Ibid., p. 410. 23 Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right (1869; London: Oxford Univ. Press,

World's Classics, 1948), p. 313.




meaning, too, of Trollope's insisting that a writer not only speak the truth but convey "with the least possible amount of trouble" to the reader and "most accurately all that the writer wishes to convey on any subject."24 A thing, a person, a statement is honest when its expression declares what it is and what it is supposed to be.

The peculiar thing about this declaration is that in good men and women it is compulsive. Those who perceive a truth, however dim- ly, and do not speak it out when they should, encounter a pressure from within and must do battle with themselves. They can no more hide with impunity from their dispositions and perceptions than they can successfully obscure, conceal, or obliterate facts.

As a corollary to this impulse in men, there is in affairs themselves an impulse toward manifestation. In Trollope's fiction, unlike that of Dickens or Balzac, information cannot long remain hidden, for, though a man may tinker with it for awhile, as Scarborough does, still, in the words of Bozzle, ,the private detective of He Knew He Was Right, "facts is open ... if you knows where to look for them" ;25

and most of Trollope's characters do. That is, facts are available to the patient. In the course of time, moreover, they have a way of announcing themselves despite human ingenuity. For this reason, in Mr. Scarborough's Family, Barry, a practical and hard-nosed lawyer, is right to insist that even had Scarborough said nothing of his marriage in Rummelsburg it would eventually have come to light because "these things do come out" (562).26 Given this impulse toward expression both in men and in the nature of things, Scar- borough's effort to manipulate the law obviously attacks not only the law itself but the vital principle in men that makes society pos-

24 Thackeray (New York: Harper and Bros., 1879), p. 193. 25 He Knew He Was Right, p. 592. 26 This view runs throughout Trollope's fiction. For instance, in Lady Anna (1874;

London: Oxford Univ. Press, World's Classics, 1936), p. 473, when the Countess Jo- sephine shoots and injures Daniel Thwaite, he says nothing to anyone. And yet the world knows of the shooting, although "nobody knew it 'officially.'" In An Old Man's Love (1884; London: Oxford Univ. Press, World's Classics, 1936), p. 102, "news had got abroad, and tidings were told that Mr. Baggett was about to arrive in the neighbor- hood," yet the source of this news is unknown, and Mrs. Baggett has kept mum. Trol- lope himself confesses in The Duke's Children (1880; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1938), I, 84, that he cannot handle epic beginnings because "I have always found that the details would insist on being told at last and that by rushing 'in medias res' I was simply presenting the cart before the horse." The words "always" and "insist" describe a pressure in facts toward manifestation. And, indeed, Trollope says in Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1873), p. 525, that "time [would] reveal most things."




sible. It attacks the substance of things and would make of society a mere structure, devoid of the vital, human forces that only honesty reveals.

The novel hints at such structuralism through numerous allu- sions to manner, costume, showmanship, and pretense.27 Scarbor- ough himself, for all his vaunted independence, is noticeably concerned with appearance. While claiming indifference to the world's opinion (196), he likes to exaggerate his suffering (63, 72), he wants men "to think me good" (75), he seeks "to arrange everything so that it would be seen that he has set all laws at defiance" (366; italics mine), and, as Augustus notes, he is at pains to show the world he is a bold fellow in his suffering and is ready to face death "without a pang or a regret" (67-68). He speaks, too, so repeatedly and osten- tatiously of his courage in defying the law that one hears almost un- awares Gertrude's "methinks the lady doth protest too much."

Now since Scarborough nowhere apprehends the contradiction, nor owns to himself that he is boasting, we are led to recognize that he is a man of surface, pitiably ignorant of himself. His ignorance is the more pitiable because, with all his talent, he lacks even an elementary understanding of human relationships. He is intro- duced as one "luxurious and self-indulgent.... affectionate to his children, and anxious above all things for their welfare, or rather happiness" (1-2; italics mine). While the distinction between welfare and happiness is not evident, it is obvious that a man, at once affectionate, luxurious, and self-indulgent is likely to confuse them. Indeed, Scarborough seems not to know what either means. A moment later he appears insensitive to his son's feelings and, implicitly, to all feelings of personal relationship: "It did not occur to him, that, in making such a revelation as to his son's mother, he would inflict any great grief on his son's heart. To be illegitimate would be, he thought, nothing unless illegitimacy carried with it loss of property" (6). Moreover, though he is said to have acted out of selfless love, he has played favorites among his children, spoiling the

27 Mr. Anderson, for instance, claims to be "fond of anything that requires a costume" (130). Prosper, about to propose to Miss Thoroughbung, reflects that "so much must depend upon manner" (254). Scarborough's sister justifies her calling a London consultant by telling Augustus, "It will show ... that we have had the best advice," an excuse that prompts him scornfully to remark: "Yes it will show; that is exactly what people care about" (63).




elder "by every means in his power" (191), and has "poured out [his] money with open hands for both" (508). He has allowed them complete freedom and has expected nothing, not even kindness, in return (509). He has not educated.them to family loyalty and love, nor does he feel loyalty toward them. He disowns Mountjoy for offering the estate as security, and he sets out to destroy Augustus. That is to say, the Scarboroughs are a family in name and by virtue of the estate. They have neither respect nor consideration for one another and no interest in one another. What they lack is made evident by the contrast between their family and that of the An- nesleys. If, therefore, as the narrator says, Scarborough acts out of love, that love is grotesque.

And what does it accomplish? Not the good results Polhemus has claimed. It undermines the family honor, as Florence remarks (88), and, as Scarborough realizes in the final hours of his life, despoils the estate he had given a lifeltime to develop. Materially, he sees, he has accomplished exactly nothing (565-66). Humanly, he has accomplished less, for both sons have learned to hate each other and to mistrust him, and he has come to hate Augustus. Surely his death- bed plea that Mountjoy stop gambling and concern himself with Augustus (566-67) rings pathetically, if ironically, over the travesty of family life, for he has loved them principally as the means of safeguarding his property, and, while protesting his love, has sacri- ficed them to his aim without remorse. He has confused notions indeed of welfare and happiness.

Scarborough undermines love and family because he destroys the foundation upon which they rest, confidence in others and reliance upon them. As Mr. Annesley says of the absurd Prosper, "it is dreadful to have to trust to a man who cannot tell wrong from right" (239); and Grey in one way, Augustus in another, learn to their peril how dreadful that trust can be. Here, in fact, the irony of Mr. Scar- borough's Family has its fullest play. Scarborough trusts no one. In planning to secure his estate, he trusts nei(ther his wife nor himself to educate the boys, nor the boys to learn. Ironically, he trusts the very thing he hates, the law. He counts on it to honor whatever certificates he produces and, in honoring to the letter its regulations for inheritance, to disown his elder son if a piece of paper declares him illegitimate.




The crux of this novel, then, is the problem of trust. It permeates implicitly the major action, underlies the shenanigans of Uncle Prosper and his will, and defines every facet of the love affair of Florence Mountjoy and Harry Annesley. For these two lovers have had to build their relationship upon trust through the long separ- ation imposed upon them by Florence's mother. Under pressure from family and associates, and subject to rumors that Harry is a scoundrel, Florence has had to rely upon her knowledge of him and her belief in his essential honesty. And both have had to bide their time patiently in the face of threatened adversity, confident in each other and in the future.

In the closing lines of the novel the importance of trust is made explicit when, on a trip in the Alps, Harry teasingly cautions Flor- ence lest her pony stumble and pitch her over a precipice. She re- plies that it is

almost as unlikely to stumble as you are. One has to risk dangers in the world, but one makes the risk as little as possible. I know they won't give me a pony that will tumble down. And I know I've told you to look to see that they don't. You chose the pony but I had to choose you. I don't know very much about ponies but I do know something about a lover;- and I know that I have got one that will suit me. (629)

Whatever her lecture may augur for the happiness of their marriage, it is thematically significant, summarizing as iit does an implied statement of the novel: men must trust one another in order with security to assume a number of relationships, run the necessary risks in life, and go forward creatively in time.

In Trollope's fictional world a man can look only to other men. Grey has believed in the law, assuming that when facts are made certain they "are immovable" (518), and he learns to his sorrow that the unscrupulous may concoct their own facts and for a time pass them off as though they are certain, that law is reliable only while men choose to live by it. Harry Annesley learns in more detail. He discovers that law is ineffectual without the good will of honest men: "The law will allow him," he says of Prosper's intention to disown him, "but the injustice would be monstrous" (215). He discovers that in human affairs legalism can perpetrate injustice because one man may bring against another accusations that are "though in essence . . . false, in words . .. true" (223). And he discovers that some




problems are not resolved by an appeal to justice: "I am not speak- ing of justice," he says, protesting Augustus' cold-blooded accusations against his father, "but of feeling" (64).

Given the tangle of human relationships through time, the pledges men make, and the courses they follow on the basis of those pledges, honesty, love, and trust are more the foundation and the buttresses of society than, as Aeschylus says in the Oresteia, the law. Scarborough's failure and the discoveries of Grey and Annesley do not mean in this novel that religion and political economy are ir- reconcilable, as Cockshut has said they are; they mean rather what Furnival has pointed out in Orley Farm: "Let us make what laws we will, they cannot take precedence of human nature,"28 a view de- veloped with remarkable variety throughout Trollope's work.

Mr. Scarborough's Family, then, like the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess, though more gently, works ironically with the needs of a healthy society and of moral men. Epithets like "good- natured" and "kind-hearted," used with apparent indiscrimination and prodigality, create an ironic ambience that invites Trollope's readers to listen skeptically to such protestations as the narrator's paean, "in every phase of his life [Scarborough was] actuated by love for others. . . . [and] had never been selfish" (567)-and to listen skeptically with good reason; for a moment later the narrator adds, "the three persons who were assembled around [Scarborough's] death-bed, did respect him, and had been made to love him by what he had done" (567). One of the three is Mountjoy.

I do not mean that Scarborough's geniality is of no account. Cock- shut is right in saying he is likable. He is also pitiable, a victim of his own assumptions about life. At the same time he is culpable. The pervasive irony in the novel functions ultimately to accuse us of gross moral insensitivity if we accept the protests of love at face value and fail to perceive the essential cause of Scarborough's wrong. The man, not the boast, reveals what he is.

There is no evidence, therefore, that in Mr. Scarborough's Family Trollope appears morally confused or morally relativistic. On the contrary, there is a profound appreciation for the moral complexity in human affairs, a keen awareness that, as Donne has said, he who would reach the truth "about must and about must go." Perhaps

28 Orley Farm, II, 254.




from Trollope's viewpoint the failure to realize this and to preserve equanimity and trust, as Florence does, is evidence of "the way we live now." Be that as it may, he evidently believed that in life there was truth to be gotten, and good, and right.



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