THE PRIME MINISTER Read Free Page A

honest men are to desert their country in order that the dishonest may have everything their own way’ (p. 480) . We meet a parallel to this argument of expediency in
The Warden
when Archdeacon Grantly tells the saintly Septimus Harding thatthe older clergyman has a duty to go on drawing a comfortable income from the Church rather than leave it to be enjoyed bysomebody less upright In Trollope’s fictional universe, moral scruple is often difficult to reconcile with the exigencies of life in the world.
    Such issues in the moral conduct of public life, rather than political principles themselves, are what Trollope delights in, for,as Enoch Powell among others has complained, 9 politics as doctrine are not Trollope’s subject Nevertheless, the particular compound of materials in the Palliser novels has proved very successful. Trollope has been the favoured reading of a substantial number of politicians, including at least two Prime Ministers in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1878 the politician and historianA.W. Kinglake acknowledged his enthusiasm in a letter to the author; ‘I am always mindful of the un-numbered hours of pleasure that I owe to your delightful books. And, apart from the pleasure, it is so good for one… to see the play of healthful English life as you with your genius present it.’ 10 Few readers of a century or more later would think the matter was so uncomplicated. After all, someof Trollope’s novels which are now most respected, such as
He Knew He Was Right
and
The Way We Live Now
, can scarcely be said to convey that ‘play of healthful English life’ that Kinglake picked out for special comment. Marital breakdown, kidnapping, insanity, ruthless speculation and cheating are more likely to have stuck in the modern reader’s memory. Of course it is probably true that a readerlike Kinglake would have regarded these particular books as unpleasant aberrations in the Trollopian canon, but later generations have found them typical of Trollope’s works, in most of which disturbing undercurrents are now detected.
The Prime Minister
is an interesting case. The novel seems clearly to celebrate what according to Victorian myth was the most quintessentially ‘English’ of socialgroups, the squirearchy, whose virtues finally overcome the corrupt values of speculative capitalism. In the non-political plot, genteel Englishness is triumphant, an alien adventurer is expelled, and our English heroine rescued, while the political story-line tells us that although the practicalities of political life demand frequent moral compromiseand social discomfort, a man of the highestrank can be found who for a brief interlude will bring to the office of Prime Minister an idealism which is rare amid the hurly-burly of government At first sight the evidence of
The Prime Minister
seems to be that there are great strengths in the English way of doing things, and great resilience in English political and social institutions.
    A brief look at the institution of marriage in
ThePrime Minister
, however, should alert us to some unsettling features in the Trollopian universe. As so often in Victorian fiction, marriage is presented as the ideal career for a woman, and the culmination of her early struggles – so long, that is, as the spouse is responsible, English and of the landed or professional classes. Contracting an exogamous marriage nearly proves fatal for Emily Wharton,who in an emergency can only put herself under the protection of her father, a well-to-do lawyer. Unsurprisingly, the law provides little protection for a wife against her husband, but even in its own terms, the operation of the institution sounds corrupt The legal system is always an important presence in Trollope’s novels, and in this case it is the source of the wealth which Ferdinand Lopezwishes to acquire through his wife for speculative purposes. (In this,
The Prime Minister
dramatizes one aspect of the struggle between capitalism and