The Eustace Diamonds (2 page)

Settles in Montagu Square, London

Lady Anna
(–1874),
Phineas Redux
(–1874);
Australia and New Zealand
and
Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bush Life

1874
The first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris

Hardy,
Far From the Madding Crowd

The Way We Live Now
(–1875)

1875
Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone

Travels to Australia, via Brindisi, Suez and Ceylon

Begins writing
An Autobiography
on his return.
The Prime Minister
(–1876)

1876
Mark Twain,
Tom Sawyer

Finishes writing
An Autobiography. The American Senator
(–1877)

1877
Henry James,
The American

Visits South Africa

Is He Popenjoy?
(–1878)

1878
Hardy,
The Return of the Native

Sails to Iceland

John Caldigate
(–1879),
The Lady of Launay, An Eye for an Eye
(–1879) and
South Africa

1879
George Meredith,
The Egoist

Cousin Henry, The Duke's Children
(–1880) and
Thackeray

1880
Greenwich Mean Time made the legal standard in Britain. First Anglo-Boer War (–1881)

Benjamin Disraeli,
Endymion

Settles in South Harting, W. Sussex

Dr Wortle's School
and
The Life of Cicero

1881
In Ireland, Parnell is arrested for conspiracy and the Land League is outlawed

Robert Louis Stevenson,
Treasure Island
(–1882)

Ayala's Angel, The Fixed Period
(–1882) and
Marion Fay
(–1882)

1882
Phoenix Park murders in Dublin

Visits Ireland twice to research a new Irish novel, and returns to spend the winter in London. Dies on 6 December

Kept in the Dark, Mr Scarborough's Family
(–1883) and
The Landleaguers
(–1883, unfinished)

1883
An Autobiography
is published under the supervision of Trollope's son Henry

1884
An Old Man's Love

1923
The Noble Jilt

1927
London Tradesmen
(reprinted from the
Pall Mall Gazette
, 1880)

1972
The New Zealander

‘The Eustace Diamonds may fearlessly compare with any of Mr Trollope's earliest and best known novels. '

T
HIS
one sentence from a
Times
review was seized on by Chapman & Hall, Trollope's publishers, as an eye-catching advertisement tag for their new novel. But it was probably injudicious to remind the public in 1873 just how long it had known Trollope's novels. For there were many such reminders. In the same year a discerning reader might have bought
Under the Greenwood Tree
, the work of a promising new novelist,
Middlemarch
, the masterpiece of the century's great intellectual novelist, or the second volume of Forster's
Life of Dickens
, a reminder that the artistic generation to which Trollope properly belonged was passing into history. Though still publishing regularly and still commanding a large readership, Trollope must have seemed antediluvian to many, a survival from a more leisured and possibly a less serious age of novelists.

He may have thought so himself. Certainly in
The Eustace Diamonds
Trollope made an effort to tailor his novel to changing public taste. In his autobiography he suggests that the central suspense plot of
The Eustace Diamonds
was only casually constructed and that Wilkie Collins, the author of
The Woman in White
(1860) and
The Moonstone
(1868), would have shaped it much more skilfully (
Chapter 19
). But the presence of this master of crime mystery is strong in
The Eustace Diamonds.
The plot of
The Moonstone
is built around the theft of a fabulous gem plundered at the storming of Seringapatam. It has a curse on it for its owner and a band of Indians has been sent to England to recover it and restore it to its original religious function. The jewel comes by inheritance into the possession of a young English girl and is stolen at a house party. An inscrutable detective from Scotland Yard, Sergeant Cuff, helps clear up the mystery. Trollope obviously borrows from this source very selectively, and
transmutes where he borrows. On Sergeant Cuff he comically bestows a double promotion in Major Mackintosh, but he neglects completely the surface authenticity of Collins's narrative which is made up of letters, journal and diary excerpts and reports, stubbornly retaining instead his habitual relaxed colloquium with the reader. It is in plot and structure, however, that the similarities between the two novels are most pronounced – both deal with the theft of a valuable jewel from a beautiful girl, the detection after difficulty of the thief and the ultimate loss of the diamonds, and both, despite Trollope's disingenuous denial of it in
Chapter 52
, hold the reader's attention by the artful concealment of consequence known as suspense.

Collins's influence on a temperamentally digressive novelist, always prone to multiply sub-plots and to end a novel with a peal of wedding bells, was wholly good, and the ‘un-Trollopian' quality of
The Eustace Diamonds
, its complicated, taut and fast-moving action, helped make it the commercial success he needed. ‘At any rate, the book was a success, and did much to repair the injury which had come to my reputation in the novel market by the works of the last few years,' was his complacent comment in
An Autobiography
(
Chapter 19
). But although readers could be seduced by an infusion of the Sensation Novel, critics were not. The book was largely unnoticed in the opinion-forming journals. The
Athenaeum
, in one of the few reviews which the novel received, was studiously unexcited and fell back on the usual praise and, more important, the usual complaints:

Mr Trollope has at some length justified the neutral-tinted view of humanity which he adopts, and formally declines the task of describing heroes and heroines… Whether every man's experience, even in this workday world, does not contradict Mr Trollope's sombre view of his fellow creatures, is another question… In a literary point of view, we think the present volumes will not diminish his reputation. His instrument is always the kaleidoscope, but this particular presentation of the old materials is effective enough… Lizzie Eustace may be, perhaps, reckoned an addition to an old familiar troupe… Mr Trollope has advisedly limited our expectations, and within his limits we can find scope for entertainment.

Such a criticism is to be expected by any author who has accustomed his readers to a particular style and tone. Responses atrophy. What is new in a work is overshadowed by what reminds the reader of past successes. Most important, the reader no longer believes that the author can develop and so comes to regard each new production as ‘typical' of an already known style. At this point with a word like ‘Dickensian' or ‘Tennysonia' we sneer rather than describe. But such a reaction to Trollope is unjust and has inhibited readers who shudder at the adjective ‘Trollopian' from encountering novels as varied and as powerful as any of the century. For late in his long writing career Trollope was producing novels which, while never as popular as the Barsetshire series, are certainly greater. While it is silly to attempt to set a precise date, it is probably fair to see the aptly named
Last Chronicle of Barset
as the beginning of an advance on three fronts. There develops a deepening interest in uncomfortable, non-normative people such as Crawley, the prickly perpetual curate of Hogglestock, ‘an unhappy, moody, disappointed man, upon whom the troubles of the world always seemed to come with a double weight', or Trevelyan, the anguished hero of
He Knew He Was Right.
The novels become richer as Trollope attempts to portray people with whom he has little sympathy but whose plight, as they are crushed by the tension between social forms and their own instincts, he understands. There is a greater command of structure that can encompass a comparatively narrow psychological study such as
He Knew He Was Right
and a massive panorama of the corrupt contemporary social world such as
The Way We Live Now
without distortion of scope. Finally, inspiring all these changes, there is a much more strident tone, a deeper moral concern born of Trollope's sense that an era of stability was passing. The ‘age of equipoise' between the abolition of the Corn Laws and the second Reform Bill was over. The temper of the new age urged Trollope to reconsider the social and moral base on which his earlier novels rested. What, asks the
Last Chronicle
, is truth? The Rev. Crawley might feel that he knows his innocence, but if the facts are against him, the facts by which his fellows must judge, what is the truth? Is it after all the case that ‘truth will out'? Phineas Finn, the hero of the earlier novel of that name, returns in
Phineas Redux
to a world in which British Justice can
come near to condemning an innocent man. British Justice is, of course, vindicated, but Phineas has seen too much and wants to retire from public life.
The Way We Live Now
exposes the hollowness of a society in which human relationships have the form of honour and sincerity without the substance. In line with this radical analysis,
The Eustace Diamonds
examines ‘truth' in many contexts and dilemmas and at many levels of seriousness. The plot turns on Lizzie Eustace's lies and self-deceit, but in its details it brings into the open other deceits, from the murky, in the way Mrs Carbuncle rustles up wedding presents for Lucinda, to the comically perplexing, when Frank Greystock discovers that he is guilty of ‘'orse nobbling' (
Chapter 38
). Much of the earlier Trollope inevitably remains. Much that is most important in the novel, for instance, is articulated, as before, in a set of idiomatic value terms to which the reader must attune his ear. These contain in themselves allusions to the social structure at a level beyond explanation. The verb ‘do' for example in this question of Mrs Greystock's, ‘But, dear Frank, would it do for you to make her your wife?' (
Chapter 4
) or the adjective ‘queer' in ‘People will think it dashed queer'. The question ‘Had she been unmaidenly?' (
Chapter 7
), the term ‘manly', the concept of the ‘gentleman', or the duty implicit in ‘Frank, you'll be true to me?' (
Chapter 26
), all resound to positives which the modern reader often finds it difficult to perceive. But there is much, too, that is new and represents enlargements of territory and technique. There is a new willingness to contemplate the distasteful, to acknowledge the power of the outsider or ‘cad', a new vision which simply takes in more of the world. Amongst these later novels
The Eustace Diamonds
has a high place, an excellent example of Trollope's mature art.

The novelist's sureness is felt in the skill with which he constructs his novel and makes his relationship with the reader. As a conscious artist Trollope has been given less than his due. But there is much that is graceful and much that is subtle. The ending of the novel, which places the events of the story in the framework of the wider Trollope world, was finely described by Beerbohm as having ‘a sort of formal grace and irony — something rather Mozartian or
Watteauesque – quite un-Trollopian'. The notorious moments when the author intrudes to address the reader are handled with much greater dexterity. At one moment, for instance, Trollope claims to be telling his readers the truth of the matter in his characteristically bluff manner:

In the meantime, the Eustace diamonds were locked up in a small safe fixed into the wall at the back of a small cellar beneath the establishment of Messrs Harter and Benjamin, in Minto Lane, in the City… The chronicler states this at once, as he scorns to keep from his reader any secret that is known to himself.

(
Chapter 52
)

But this is a trick in which the novelist is working behind the mask of an unsubtle, veracious-clubman Trollope. What the reader really wants to know is what will happen to Lizzie, and this knowledge is withheld. In a novel which bewilders him with its play on truth and untruth, the reader finds that he can trust neither to objective ‘truth' (not even Mr Dove, the highest authority on legal definition, is initially sure whether the diamonds are heirlooms or paraphernalia) nor to the ‘truth' of the narrator's commentary. Again, what could be more deceptively skilful than the way in which Trollope concludes the story of Lucy Morris?

As the personages of a chronicle such as this should all be made to operate backwards and forwards on each other from the beginning to the end, it would have been desirable that the chronicler should have been able to report that the ceremony was celebrated by Mr Emilius. But as the wedding did not take place till the end of the summer, and as Mr Emilius at that time never remained in town, after the season was over, this was impossible. It was the Dean of Bobsborough, assisted by one of the minor canons, who performed the service.

(
Chapter 77
)

This is certainly one of the ‘suicidal' intrusions that so upset Henry James. But its effect is to assert that the story is not make-believe, neatly patterned to form a novel, that if there is intrusion there is no meddling.

Trollope's style is richer, too, in these later novels. It has been attacked as pedestrian and over-subdued. What James said in his review of
Can You Forgive Her?
in 1865 has been frequently echoed: ‘To Mr Trollope all the possible incidents of society seem to be of
equal importance and of equal interest. He has the same treatment, the same tone, for them all. ' The truth, probably, however, is rather that, accustomed to the virtuosity of Dickens, Thackeray, James himself, we have missed the quieter artistry of Trollope's style. But it is there. At its lightest it reveals his splendid sense of the absurd, as in the following dialogue where Lizzie, desperately anxious to capture Lord Fawn, listens to this stumbling explanation of the financial position: