More Barry

 Union-shop pro-
visions were the keystone of the entire edifice—so the right-to-work fight was
the centerpiece of the effort to do “Reutherism” in. That 1955 GM contract,
Clarence Manion railed in one of his first broadcasts, “moved Mr. Reuther
close up to the supreme dictatorship of American organized labor as a prelude
to a try for the presidency of the United States.” It was “offered at the point of
a strike threat to practically every big industry in the country by a labor monop-
oly that is exempt from the antitrust law and can, therefore, callously disregard
the public interest that every other person, corporation, and organization is
obliged to serve.” (Reuther, of course, saw it just the opposite: the entire goal
of the labor movement was to dignify the individual by removing him from the
vagaries of market competition. This was the public interest.)
Manion and Kohler could rage at Reuther. But he was a useful adversary;
years later conservatives should have lifted a glass in his honor. There would
have likely not been much of a conservative movement without him as catalyst.
The audience for sweaty appeals for isolationist anticommunism was shrinking
with every passing month. The fight against Reuther, on the other hand, was
one that everyone who owned a business-—and everyone who aspired to own-
ing a business—could understand. And the timing was propitious. In the South,
the struggle against the civil rights carpetbaggers was also turning moderates
into conservatives.

##

That aftemoon, he admitted, he was
going to denounce his President on the floor of the Senate.
It was a crucial moment in the fiscal history of the United States. Conven-
tional wisdom had always been that the symbol and substance of national eco-
nomic health was a balanced budget. But with the Great Depression, Keynesian
ideas began creeping into the thinking of the Democrats—that in times of stag-
nant private investment, government spending in excess of revenues could, by
sloshing the citizenry in surplus cash, serve to “pump-prime” the economy
back into life. For most Republicans such notions remained heresy. Now
Eisenhower, buoyed by his landslide victory in November to break with the old
Republican shibboleths and weighing the advice of his economic advisers that
a recession was around the corner, had just submitted a record budget in March
for FY 1958 of $71.8 billion. '
And on April 8 Barry Goldwater stood up in a nearly empty Senate cham-
ber and delivered himself of a tirade. “Until quite recently,” he began, “I was
personally satisfied that this administration was providing the responsible and
realistic leadership so vital to the maintenance of a strong domestic economy
which, in turn, is a vital factor in maintaining world peace.
“Now, however, I am not so sure. A $71.8 billion budget not only shocks
me, but it weakens my faith.”
He addressed “Mr. President” directly——to tell Eisenhower that he was a
betrayer of the people’s trust and a quisling in thrall to the Democrats’ “eco-
nomic inebriation.” The President had embraced “the siren song of socialism,”
“govemment by bribe,” “squanderbust govemment.” And Goldwater was only
Warming up. ’
The junior senator now found himself cast in the press as the key player in
the war rivening the GOP’s left and right wings. Time ran another profile:
below file photographs of dumpy Joe McCarthy, William Ezra Jenner, and
George Malone, whom Time labeled “The Neanderthals,” young Goldwater
was pictured in the cockpit of a fighter plane.

##

The Manionites’ conservatism was a conservatism of fear. They harped
endlessly on the “communistic income tax,” how the economy would be dec-
imated by inflation every time workers got a raise. (Taft Republicans, joked
The Nation, feared “only God and inflation.”) Their scapegoats were unnamed
subversives who were invisibly destroying the system from within: “I am at a
loss to understand the current public attitude deflating the inflation psychol-
ogy,” Fred Koch wrote in a self-published pamphlet. “Perhaps it is propa-
ganda, of which we have been fed much of late—-pink propaganda, in as much
as, in my opinion, Russia’s first objective is to destroy our economy through
inflation.” Politically the philosophy lost when it won: if you removed the fear
of subversion by catching subversives, you ended the fear that brought you to
power in the first place—although, of course, you could never catch all the
subversives, for the conspiracy was a bottomless murk, a hall of mirrors, a
tlflenace that grew greater the more it was flushed out. “The Communists have
lnfiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties for many years,” Koch
Wrote. “If, we could only see behind the political scenes, I am sure we would
be shocked.”
' Conscience of a Conservative didn’t blame invisible Communists for
Amenca’s problems. It blamed all-too-visible liberals. Its anticommunism was
not about raising nameless dreads but about fighting—hard and in the open.
,Amel‘i°a, said Conscience, was not losing the Cold War because of Alger Hiss,
fi“H"$ Rosenberg, or the striped-pants diplomats of the State Department. The
enemY was in the mirror. “A craven fear of death is entering the American con-
sciousness.” It “repudiates everything that is courageous and honorable and
dignified in the human being. We must—as the first step toward saving Amer~
ican freedom—affirm the contrary view and make it the comerstone of our for-
eign policy: that we would rather die than lose our freedom.”
The Cold War had whipsawed since I955 when President Eisenhower and
Premier Khrushchev met in Geneva for the first East-West summit conference.
The I956 GOP platform boasted: “The threat of global war‘ has receded. The
advance of Communism has been checked and, at key points, thrown back.”
Then came Hungary; then, on the eve of the elections, French and English
bombs pounded Egypt for nationalizing the Suez Canal, and Russia threatened
to intervene on Egypt’s behalf. There was a glimmer of hope when Russia
ceased nuclear testing in October of I958. Then, in November, Khrushchev
first threatened to take over Berlin. Now he had just been mollified by his I959
American visit. Was peace finally at hand?
Conscience of a Conservative answered that Soviet expansionism was
enabled by the fantasy of coexistence. Russia was “determined to win the con-
fiict, and we are not.” So the Kremlin used arms control agreements and testing
suspensions and the rest to seduce the American populace with romantic fan-
tasies of peace. “The Kremlin can create crisis after crisis, and force the U.S.,
because of our greater fear of war, to back down every time.” Then the Soviets
looked forward happily to the next phase of coexistence—legitimating their
crimes-by relabeling them “disagreements” amenable to “negotiation.”
“If an enemy power is bent on conquering you, he is at war with you: and
you——unless you contemplate surrender—are at war with him. Moreover——
unless you contemplate treason--your objective, like his, will be victory.”
The logical conclusion: “A tolerable peace . . . must follow victory over Com-
munism.”
Conscience of a Conservative drew to a close by ticking off the tenets of
American foreign policy, asking of each: “Does it help us defeat the enemy?”
Alliances were important—but since our alliances did not yet girdle the globe
and were defensive in outlook, we must be willing to act alone. Foreign aid
(unconstitutional unless it could be shown to promote the national interest)
should be limited to military and technical support. Diplomatic ties to the
Soviet Union should be reexamined: “I am quite certain that our entire
approach to the Cold War would change for the better the moment we
announced that the United States does not regard Mr. Khrushchev’s murderous
claque as the legitimate rulers of the Russian people or any other people.” The
United Nations, which reduced the struggle for world freedom to the lowest
common denominator agreement of eighty-odd nations, should be looked upon
longer in a position to threaten it.” Since the Soviets understood the nature of
circumspectly. As for arms talks: “No nation in its right mind will give up the
means of defending itself without first making sure that hostile powers are no
the conflict, they wouldn’t dismantle their nuclear weapons despite assurances
to the contrary; then, once we dismantled ours, “aggressive Communist forces
will be free to maneuver under the umbrella of nuclear terror.”
To prevent that, Conscience of a Conservative offered a quietly extraordi-
nary argument, in a few short paragraphs passing blithely over the simple,
awful paradox of the Cold War: in a world where weapons possessed the
power to destroy civilization, to attack an enemy with the most effective
weapon at your disposal would be to ensure your own destruction through
retaliation. This was the “balance of terror” experts believed kept the Cold War
 peace, but Conscience insisted it did no such thing: the Communists tested us
in Hungary, in the Suez, in West Berlin because they knew we wouldn’t stop
them. We feared any military altercation might escalate to the unthinkable.
‘The audacious solution: make nuclear war more thinkable—“perfect a variety
of small, clean nuclear weapons,” designed to be used locally, on the battle-
field. “Overt hostilities should always be avoided,” Conscience averred, “espe-
cially is this so when a shooting war may cause the death of many millions of
people, including our own. But we cannot, for that reason, make the avoid-
ance of a shooting war our chief objective. If we do that”—if War is rendered
unthinkable—“we are cormnitted to a course that has only one terminal point:
surrender.”
V To many young readers the argument had almost a Gandhian appeal-the
same appeal, on the left, held by valiant Southem blacks laying their bodies on
the line for the freedom to eat where they wished. Freedom was indivisible. It
Was worth dying for. Thus Conscience of a Conservative reached its stirring
‘dénouement, read, one imagines, by our pimply freshman with steadily mount-
ilflg glandularthrust:
The future, as I see it, will unfold along one of two paths. Either the
Communists will retain the offensive; will lay down one challenge
after another; will invite us in local crisis after local crisis to choose
between all-out war and limited retreat; and will force us, ultimately,
h $0 Surrender or accept war under the most disadvantageous circum-
‘ stances. Or we will summon the will and the means for taking the ini-
 tiative, and wage a war of attrition against them—and hope, thereby,
_ " YO bring about the international disintegration of the Communist
empire.

Barry

He was the company’ s master promoter, modest (he worked in
a tiny basement office) and generous (always handing out advances, advice,
and outright gifts to whatever supplicant should ask), who became famous by
introducing the “antsy-pants” fad to the nation—boxer shorts printed with the
critters scampering up the front and back.
Goldwater called himself a conservative, but Alsop marveled that
besides books, there wasn’t a thing that was old in this house, all angles and
odd shapes, a masterpiece of high desert modernism complete with a TV, bur-
glar alarm, and outside lights that Goldwater could work from controls on the
headboard of his bed. This was not a man who habitually looked backward.
“Out here in the West,” Goldwater told him, “we’re not harassed by the fear of
what might happen.” Goldwaters, he said, “have always taken risks.”
Some of it was even true. Reading profiles of Goldwater written in the eight or
so years of his uninterrupted honeymoon with the press as a young senator is a
bit like driving that stretch of desert interstate: the illusion of autonomy came
courtesy of dollars and leadership from Washington; the sweeping view that
seems to encompass the horizon hides everything beyond a narrow ribbon of
reality. Barry Goldwater once wrote that flying an airplane is “the ultimate
extension of individual freedom.” He neglected to note that a pilot not hemmed
in by the intricate regulatory apparatus of the skies may get only as far as the
plane he collides with in midair.
Of his family he would say, “We didn’t know the federal government.
Everything that was done, we did it ourselves.” But Big Mike’s rise came from
knowing the federal government intimately. The Arizona Territory he traveled
to in I860 to follow a gold strike developed as a virtual ward of the federal
government, used as a base for fighting the Indian Wars. (“Hostilities in Ari-
zona are kept up with a view of protecting inhabitants,” a general sardonically
observed, “most of whom are supported by the hostilities.”) The money to
build Big Mike’s first Goldwater’s store in I872 came largely from contracts
for provisioning Army camps and delivering mail. Pioneering days were long
Past, at any rate, by the time his grandchildren came along: Barry, born in
I909, and his sister and brother grew up with a nurse, chauffeur, and live-in
maid. He hardly needed to take over at the store after his father’ s death because
8 hired manager, not Baron Goldwater, ran it; Barry later admitted he left col-
lege because he didn’t like it. He never carried cash growing up; when he
Wanted to make a purchase in any store in Phoenix, he could charge it to his
father.
His generation’s coming marked the greatest confluence of all of federal
lafgesse to Arizona and Goldwater fortune: the Roosevelt Dam, begun in I905.
The population of nearby Phoenix, fattened by construction money, doubled in
five years. During World War I, thanks to the call for stepped-up production of
the state economy's Three C s —cotton, copper, and cattle—it boomed some
more. During the 1920s, three more reclamation projects gave federal handouts
to farmers and ranchers, and federal outlays for health and highways and voca-
tional education made up 15 percent of Arizona’s economy, and the population
of Phoenix nearly tripled.
 Then came the New Deal. The economic development of the South and the
west was one of Franklin Roosevelt s most cherished goals. Washington oper-
ated fifty different federal agencies in Arizona, in addition to the Hoover Dani
project. Federal funds totaling $342 million went to the state, and less than $16
million in taxes were remitted in return.
By then Barry Goldwater and a brother were in charge of the family enter-
prise. They did not profess gratitude for the federal government’s help. In
I934 they removed the blue eagle emblem of Roosevelt’s National Recovery
Administration from the windows of their stores to protest its price dictates.
Their response to the Depression was that private citizens should take care of
theirown, the way they did: Goldwater’s paid higher than the industry wage;
provided health, accident, life, and pension benefits; provided profit sharing, a
store psychiatrist, and a formal retirement plan. Later came a twenty-five-acre
farm for employee recreation, and a day camp for children. The family allowed
employees to examine the company’s books whenever they wished.
In June of I938, when the Works Progress Administration was putting
money to spend in department stores in the hands of sixteen thousand WPA
construction workers, Barry greeted the passage of the Fair Labor Standards
Act, raising the minimum wage from 25 to 40 cents and limiting working hours
to forty-four a week, with his first public political pronouncement, an open let-
ter to the President in the Phoenix Gazette. “My friend,” Goldwater began,
mocking Roosevelt’s fireside chat salutation, “you have, for over five years,
been telling me about your plans; how much they were going to do and how
much they were going to mean to me. Now I want to tum around and ask you
just what have they done that would be of any value to me as a businessman
and a citizen.” He complained of astronomical taxes and alphabet-soup agen-
cies; he argued that workmen had been able to win higher wages only because
Roosevelt’s economic policies forced factories to operate for fewer hours; he
charged that the President had “turned over to the racketeering practices of ill-
organized unions the future of the workingman. Witness the chaos they are cre-
ating in the Eastern cities. Witness the men thrown out of work, the riots, the
bloodshed, and the ill feeling between labor and capital, and then decide for
yourself if that plan worked.”
“I would like to know just where you are leading us,” he concluded. “I like
the old-fashioned way of being an American a lot better than the way we are
headed for now.” ~
The ideal politician, it has been written, is an ordinary representative of his
class with extraordinary abilities. Goldwater wrote as a member of an imagi-
nary republic of beneficent businessmen-citizens just like himself. It was not
for him to observe that the operating deficits brought on by the Goldwater’s
stores’ generous benefits package were covered out of interest generated from
his wife’s trust fund. (Indiana-born Peggy was an heiress of the Borg-Warner
fortune. Her family vacationed in Arizona, where they socialized with the most
prominent local family-the Goldwaters—as a matter of course.)

Vestal Fire

Archie Macadam was in the Nortons" big salon: this
afternoon, and the two old ladies, who loved nothing so
much as to give people what they wanted, loved to give
him all the brandy he could drink. This afternoon he had
arrived at the stage of well-oiled subtlety when the riddle
of the universe appears so perfectly simple to oneself that
one longs to explain the Theory of Relativity. In those
days the theory had not been invented, so Macadam was
trying to get up an argument with Austin Follett whether
the monkey goes round the pole or the pole goes round
the monkey. Follett, whose politeness Wlll have been
noticed, was looking as solemnly interested as if he were
listening to a profound exposition of Manicheism _that
might have been of service to his thesis on the origin of
Evil.
“ What you observe, Mr. Macadam, is very interesting.”
“ It is,” Macadam agreed gloomily. He was a tall clean-
shaven man of the explorer type, always very neatly dressed.
“ It is interesting, because .it’s unanswerable. What is
unanswerable must by the nature of things be more inter-
esting than what is answerable. Take God for instance.
You see what l’m driving at ? Of course you do. Well,
that’s exactly what I mean about this problem of the
monkey and the pole.”
During this last speech of Macadam’s Follett was aware
that somebody was digging him in the ribs to an accompani-
ment of suppressed chuckles. He did not dare to withdraw
his eyes from Macadam’s glassy stare, because he had reached
the point, which one often reaches in an argument with a
drunken man, of supposing that it would be extremely
imprudent to do so. However, the digs and chuckles became
so insistent that at last he had to turn round and risk
Macadam’s catching him a crack on the head with the
decanter. He then discovered that his neighbour was Mrs.
Ambrogio, to whom he had been introduced when he came in.
Mrs. Ambrogio was a handsome woman of about forty,
ample in the style of feminine beauty that was so much
admired when King Edward VII was Prince of Wales. She
was the type that used to look so queenly in silver and
plush photograph-frames on the occasional tables of houses
untainted by aestheticism. Indeed, there were people to
assure you that as a young woman she was a rival of the
Jersey Lily herself. There was an element of mystery
about her which Mrs. Ambrogio, had she wanted to, was
incapable of dispelling, because she was incapable of stringing
together a sufficiently intelligible long sentence. She had
certainly been married before, but whether she divorced
‘her husband or he divorced her, whether she had been a
widow when she married Pietro Ambrogio, a Neapolitan
lawyer practising in Sirene, or whether she had eloped from
England with him nobody on the island had ever discovered.
There were twenty legends in Sirene of her origin, which
varied from the unrepeatable to the faintly suggestive.
*
Miss Virginia fell in love with
a coachman. Stole all her money and ran away. Tell’
you lots of stories about the foreigners here, but never talk.
Peter’s sake. Mustn’t talk if you marry a lawyer. Used
to talk a lot before I married dear old Peter. Never talk
now. Bad for his business. Weren’t you chatting to Mrs.
Neave just now? Dear woman! Had an aflair . with
Duncan Maxwell last year. Only repeat what other people
tell me. Hate scandal. You walked down with , Nigel
Dawson. Such a dear boy! One of those. But what
does it matter P Why shouldn’t he be ? Don’t care what
anybody is. Love everybody.”
“ I had the good fortune to meet Mr. Maxwell in Bavaria
recently,” said Follett.
“ Isn’t he a dear? I like him so much. If you hear
that he steals people’s geraniums, don’t believe it. Don’t
believe anything you hear in Sirene.”
“ But why should people accuse a highly intellectual man
like Mr. Maxwell of stealing their geraniums ? ” Follett
asked in amazement.
“ People here accuse you of anything. I was accused of
keeping a disorderly house in Naples. 'Don’t care what they
say. Married the only honest lawyer in Italy, so don’t care
a damn what they say now.” e
“ But geraniums 2 ” F ollett persisted.
“ Building a house. Making a garden. Must get gera-
niums somewhere. Engaged three boys with spades and
large baskets. Worked all night. Next morning all the
geraniums in Sirene growing in Mr. Maxwell’s garden.
Other pe0ple’s gardens nothing but feetmarks, footmarks,
feetmarks. Don’t know which you say. No grammar.
No brains. Footmarks everywhere. Major Natt was so
angry. That’s Major Natt over there. Like him so much.
Mean as he can be. Such an old darling. Weighs out the
sugar for the kitchen himself every morning. Has hundreds
of naughty books. Wish I could read them. Can’t read.
Love reading, but can’t read. No brains. Lethis villa
this year-—Major Natt, I mean—and the tenants kept
chickens in the bathroom.”
“ Chickens?” Follett gasped. “ Why, I could under-
stand keeping ducks in a bathroom, but chickens . . .”
“ No water. Driest place in the house. Major Natt cut
OE the water from the bathroom before he went away.
Sells it to the contadini at ten centesimi a bottlei Goes to
Switzerland every Summer to save money. Say he milks
Swiss peasants’ cows himself tosave paying for his lunch.
Don’t believe a word of it. Don’t you believe it. Such
lies. Plenty of cherry brandy when you go there to tea.
Love him. There’s Peter!” She waved excitably, her
face crimsoning, to a neatly dressed little Italian who came
in from the garden at that moment. “Peter! Peter!
V ous venn, Peter ! ” She turned back to Follett. .“ Always
speak French to Peter. Peter can’t speak English and'I
can’t speak Italian. Servants understand me perfectly and
I understand them. Peter made love to my dear Assunta.
Turned her out atonce. Wouldn’t stand it. Caught him
kissing her and he said he was spongeing the statue of Venus.
Such lies. Hate lies! Most truthful woman in Sirene.

The Vagaries of Being Clare Booth Luce

in 1934, starlet Dorothy Hale and Clare Booth Luce accompanied Isamu Noguchi on a road trip through Connecticut in a car Noguchi had designed with Buckminster Fuller, the Dymaxion car (which rode on three wheels and held eleven passengers). The threesome stopped to see Thornton Wilderin in Hamden, Connecticut, before going on to Hartford to join Fuller for the out-of-town opening of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts.

By 1937, Hale was involved in a serious romance with Harry Hopkins, WPA administrator and Franklin D. Roosevelt's top adviser.^[3] Anticipating a "White House wedding" Hale moved into Hampshire House, a 27-story apartment building at 150 Central Park South, and began putting together atrousseau, but Hopkins abruptly broke off the affair. Luce said in later years that the White House was not happy about the Hopkins/Hale engagement rumors, and that may have been the cause of the break.^[4] The gossip columnists who had been reporting the engagement rumors played up the cruel jilting, causing Hale great embarrassment.^[3] Hopkins would eventually marry Lou Macy, a close Roosevelt associate.

In 1938, another benefactor and abandoned suitor, Bernard Baruch, advised Hale that, at 33, she was too old for a professional career and that she should look for a wealthy husband. Baruch even gave her $1,000 with the instructions, "... to buy a dress glamorous enough to capture a husband."

Hale became despondent over her stalled career, constant debt, and unhappy love life. At 5:15 am on October 21, 1938, Hale threw herself out of the window of her apartment. She was found still wearing her favorite Madame X femme-fatale black velvet dress with a corsage of small yellow roses, given to her by Noguchi.

Luce, an ardent admirer of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, almost immediately commissioned Kahlo to paint a "recuerdo" (remembrance) portrait of their deceased mutual friend, so that in Kahlo's words: "her life must not be forgotten".^[3] Luce understood a recuerdo to be an idealized memorial portrait and was doubtless expecting a conventional over-the-fireplace portrait for her $400. After being shown in March in Paris, the completed painting arrived in August 1939: Luce claims she was so shocked by the unwrapped painting that she "almost passed out."^[ What Kahlo created was a graphic, narrative "retablo", detailing every step of Hale's suicide. It depicts Hale standing on the balcony, falling to her death while also lying on the bloody pavement below.^[10] Luce was so offended that she seriously considered destroying it; but instead she had the sculptor Isamu Noguchi paint out the part of the legend that bore Luce's name.

Also read...

Alan Hollinghurst's "The Stranger's Child" from which I cannot pull a quote, though it gives every appearance of containing faultless prose. If Sebastian and Charles in Brideshead Revisited made it to first base, George and Cecil certainly proceed to second, but it is hardly more explicit. Sexuality is chimerical here too, attraction mercurial, the flamboyant Cecil making a seedy, pederastic grope of George's 16-year-old sister while at the family home boning George in sylvan ecstasies. Cecil eventually marries Daphne, and promptly dies in the great war while George settles down with a plodding mannish lady academic. The plot hiccups and advances every fifteen or twenty years or so. It was compulsively readable if ultimately disappointing.

Also "Wolf Hall", by Hilary Mantell which, again was compelling but a disappointment. From Wolf Hall:

"He cannot lock us all up"
"He has prisons enough"
"For bodies, yes. But what are bodies? He can take our goods but God will prosper us. He can close teh booksellers, but there will still be books. They can have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press.

and

on Anne:
She is selling herself by the inch. The gentlemen all say that you are advising her. She wants a present in cash for every advance above her knee. Not like you Mary. One push backward and, good girl, here's fourpence.
Anne has very long legs. By the time he comes to her secret part he will be bankrupt.

Vestal Fire and Compton Mackenzie

From an article in the Spectator:

On Capri in 1925 Scott Fitzgerald met his ‘old idol’ Compton Mackenzie and found him ‘cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane.

You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war wrecked him as it did Wells and many of that generation.’ Fitzgerald himself survives, on the strength of two and a half novels and perhaps a dozen short stories, but, except in Scotland, Mackenzie is, I surmise, more or less forgotten, and even in Scotland it’s only Whisky Galore and perhaps his Highland farces which keep his name alive. It will surprise many to learn that Fitzgerald once idolised him, but This Side of Paradise, his first novel, is very much son of Mackenzie’s Sinister Street.

The 1914-18 war, in which he worked as an intelligence officer in Greece, may indeed have left Mackenzie tired, but it hardly ‘wrecked him’. Indeed, within a couple of years of Fitzgerald’s dismissive judgment, he would publish Vestal Fire, the first of two Capri extra-vaganzas. The other is Extraordinary Women, scandalous at the time on account of its lesbian theme. Both books remain amusing and readable. If not as good as Norman Douglas’s South Wind, they survive better than Aldous Huxley’s comparable novels of conversation.Mackenzie was 13 years older than Fitzgerald, but outlived him by 32, writing to the end. Not bad going for someone ‘wrecked’ half a century earlier.

He made his reputation as an English Edwardian novelist; too much gush in his first books. Sinister Street was banned by libraries and highly praised by Henry James. This irritated Hugh Walpole, who saw himself as James’s pet young novelist and was jealous of Mackenzie. ‘Mackenzie, in spite of his cleverness, is no good,’ he wrote, indignantly. ‘Anyone who prefers Sinister Street to Sons and Lovers!’ Well, I do. Sinister Street — splendid title — has its longueurs, but ranks with Maugham’s Of Human Bondage as the best of the quasi-autobiographical English novels of the period. Ford Madox Ford thought it ‘possibly a work of real genius’.

The Greenacres and the Lookalofts and the finale

 Mrs. Greenacre, much as she reverenced Miss Thorne, and highly as she respected her husband's landlord, could not but look on this as an act of injustice done to her and hers. Hitherto the Lookalofts had never been recognized as being of a different class from the Greenacres. Their pretensions were all self-pretensions, their finery was all paid for by themselves and not granted to them by others. The local sovereigns of the vicinity, the district fountains of honour, had hitherto conferred on them the stamp of no rank. Hitherto their crinoline petticoats, late hours, and mincing gait had been a fair subject of Mrs. Greenacre's raillery, and this raillery had been a safety-valve for her envy. Now, however, and from henceforward, the case would be very different. Now the Lookalofts would boast that their aspirations had been sanctioned by the gentry of the country; now they would declare with some show of truth that their claims to peculiar consideration had been recognized. They had sat as equal guests in the presence of bishops and baronets; they had been curtseyed to by Miss Thorne on her own drawing-room carpet; they were about to sit down to table in company with a live countess! Bab Lookaloft, as she had always been called by the young Greenacres in the days of their juvenile equality, might possibly sit next to the Honourable George, and that wretched Gussy might be permitted to hand a custard to the Lady Margaretta De Courcy.
    The fruition of those honours, or such of them as fell to the lot of the envied family, was not such as should have caused much envy. The attention paid to the Lookalofts by the De Courcys was very limited, and the amount of entertainment which they received from the bishop's society was hardly in itself a recompense for the dull monotony of their day. But of what they endured Mrs. Greenacre took no account; she thought only of what she considered they must enjoy, and of the dreadfully exalted tone of living which would be manifested by the Rosebank family, as the consequence of their present distinction.
    "But did 'ee zee 'em there, dame, did 'ee zee 'em there with your own eyes?" asked poor Mrs. Greenacre, still hoping that there might be some ground for doubt.
    "And how could I do that, unless so be I was there myself?" asked Mrs. Guffern. "I didn't zet eyes on none of them this blessed morning, but I zee'd them as did. You know our John; well, he will be for keeping company with Betsey Rusk, madam's own maid, you know. And Betsey isn't none of your common kitchen wenches. So Betsey, she come out to our John, you know, and she's always vastly polite to me, is Betsey Rusk, I must say. So before she took so much as one turn with John she told me every ha'porth that was going on up in the house."
    "Did she now?" said Mrs. Greenacre.
    "Indeed she did," said Mrs. Guffern.
    "And she told you them people was up there in the drawing-room?"
    "She told me she zee'd 'em come in — that they was dressed finer by half nor any of the family, with all their neckses and buzoms stark naked as a born babby."
    "The minxes!" exclaimed Mrs. Greenacre, who felt herself more put about by this than any other mark of aristocratic distinction which her enemies had assumed.
    "Yes, indeed," continued Mrs. Guffern, "as naked as you please, while all the quality was dressed just as you and I be, Mrs. Greenacre."

and

  Bertie immediately gave his arm to Eleanor, walking between her and his sister. He had lived too long abroad to fall into the Englishman's habit of offering each an arm to two ladies at the same time — a habit, by the by, which foreigners regard as an approach to bigamy, or a sort of incipient Mormonism.

and finally....

  We must now take leave of Mr. Slope, and of the bishop also, and of Mrs. Proudie. These leave-takings in novels are as disagreeable as they are in real life; not so sad, indeed, for they want the reality of sadness; but quite as perplexing, and generally less satisfactory. What novelist, what Fielding, what Scott, what George Sand, or Sue, or Dumas, can impart an interest to the last chapter of his fictitious history? Promises of two children and superhuman happiness are of no avail, nor assurance of extreme respectability carried to an age far exceeding that usually allotted to mortals. The sorrows of our heroes and heroines, they are your delight, oh public! — their sorrows, or their sins, or their absurdities; not their virtues, good sense, and consequent rewards. When we begin to tint our final pages with _couleur de rose_, as in accordance with fixed rule we must do, we altogether extinguish our own powers of pleasing. When we become dull, we offend your intellect; and we must become dull or we should offend your taste. A late writer, wishing to sustain his interest to the last page, hung his hero at the end of the third volume. The consequence was that no one would read his novel. And who can apportion out and dovetail his incidents, dialogues, characters, and descriptive morsels so as to fit them all exactly into 930 pages, without either compressing them unnaturally, or extending them artificially at the end of his labour? Do I not myself know that I am at this moment in want of a dozen pages, and that I am sick with cudgelling my brains to find them? And then, when everything is done, the kindest-hearted critic of them all invariably twits us with the incompetency and lameness of our conclusion. We have either become idle and neglected it, or tedious and overlaboured it. It is insipid or unnatural, overstrained or imbecile. It means nothing, or attempts too much. The last scene of all, as all last scenes we fear must be,
     Is second childishness, and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
     I can only say that if some critic who thoroughly knows his work, and has laboured on it till experience has made him perfect, will write the last fifty pages of a novel in the way they should be written, I, for one, will in future do my best to copy the example. Guided by my own lights only, I confess that I despair of success.

Lady DeCourcey

There were two windows in the drawing-room wide open for the countess to pass through; but she saw that there was a woman on the sofa, at the third window, and that that woman had, as it were, a following attached to her. Her ladyship therefore determined to investigate the woman. The De Courcys were hereditarily short sighted, and had been so for thirty centuries at least. So Lady De Courcy, who, when she entered the family had adopted the family habits, did as her son had done before her, and taking her glass to investigate the Signora Neroni, pressed in among the gentlemen who surrounded the couch, and bowed slightly to those whom she chose to honour by her acquaintance.

In order to get to the window she had to pass close to the front of the couch, and as she did so she stared hard at the occupant. The occupant in return stared hard at the countess. The countess who since her countess-ship commenced had been accustomed to see all eyes, not royal, ducal, or marquesal, fall down before her own, paused as she went on, raised her eyebrows, and stared even harder than before. But she had now to do with one who cared little for countesses. It was, one may say, impossible for mortal man or woman to abash Madeline Neroni. She opened her large bright lustrous eyes wider and wider, till she seemed to be all eyes.

She gazed up into the lady's face, not as though she did it with an effort, but as if she delighted in doing it. She used no glass to assist her effrontery, and needed none. The faintest possible smile of derision played round her mouth, and her nostrils were slightly dilated, as if in sure anticipation of her triumph. And it was sure. The Countess De Courcy, in spite of her thirty centuries and De Courcy castle, and the fact that Lord De Courcy was grand master of the ponies to the Prince of Wales, had not a chance with her.

At first the little circlet of gold wavered in the countess's hand, then the hand shook, then the circlet fell, the countess's head tossed itself into the air, and the countess's feet shambled out to the lawn. She did not however go so fast but what she heard the signora's voice, asking--

***

'Who on earth is that woman, Mr Slope?'

'That is Lady De Courcy.'

'Oh, ah. I might have supposed so. Ha, ha, ha. Well, that's as good as a play.'

It was as good as a play to any there who had eyes to observe it, and wit to comment on what they observed.

But the Lady De Courcy soon found a congenial spirit on the lawn. There she encountered Mrs Proudie, and as Mrs Proudie was not only the wife of a bishop, but was also the cousin of an earl, Lady De Courcy considered her to be the fittest companion she was likely to meet in that assemblage. They were accordingly delighted to see each other. Mrs Proudie by no means despised a countess, and as this countess lived in the county and within a sort of extensive visiting distance of Barchester, she was glad to have this opportunity of ingratiating herself.

'My dear Lady De Courcy, I am so delighted,' said she, looking as little grim as it was in her nature to do so. 'I hardly expected to see you here. It is such a distance, and then you know, such a crowd.'

'And such roads, Mrs Proudie! I really wonder how the people ever get about. But I don't suppose they ever do.'

'Well, I really don't know; but I suppose not. The Thorne don't, I know,' said Mrs Proudie. 'Very nice person, Miss Thorne, isn't she?'

'Oh, delightful and so queer; I've known her these twenty years. A great pet of mine is dear Miss Thorne. She is so very strange, you know. She always makes me think of the Esquimaux and the Indians. Isn't her dress quite delightful?'

'Delightful,' said Mrs Proudie; 'I wonder now whether she paints. Did you ever see such colour?'

'Oh, of course,' said Lady De Courcy; 'that is, I have no doubt she does. But, Mrs Proudie, who is that woman on the sofa by the window? just step this way and you'll see her, there--' and the countess led her to a spot where she could plainly see the signora's well-remembered face and figure.

She did not however do so without being equally well seen by the signora. 'Look, look,' said that lady to Mr Slope, who was still standing near to her; 'see the high spiritualities and temporalities of the land in league together, and all against poor me. I'll wager my bracelet, Mr Slope against your next sermon, that they've taken up their position there on purpose to pull me to pieces. Well, I can't rush to the combat, but I know how to protect myself if the enemy come near me.'

But the enemy knew better. They could gain nothing be contact with the signora Neroni, and they could abuse her as they pleased at a distance from her on the lawn.

'She's that horrid Italian woman, Lady De Courcy; you must have heard of her.'

'What Italian woman?' said her ladyship, quite alive to the coming story; 'I don't think I've heard of any Italian woman coming into the country. She doesn't look Italian either.'

'Oh, you must have heard of her,' said Mrs Proudie. 'No, she's not absolutely Italian. She is Dr Stanhope's daughter--Dr Stanhope the prebendary; and she calls herself the Signora Neroni.'

'Oh--h--h--h!' exclaimed the countess.

'I was sure you had heard of her,' continued Mrs Proudie. 'I don't know anything about her husband. They do say that some man named Neroni is still alive. I believe she did marry such a man abroad, but I do not at all know who or what he was.'

'Ah--h--h--h!' said the countess, shaking her head with much intelligence, as every additional 'h' fell from her lips. 'I know all about it now. I have heard George mention her. George knows all about her. George heard about her in Rome.'

'She's an abominable woman at any rate,' said Mrs Proudie.

'Insufferable,' said the countess.

'She made her way into the palace once, before I knew anything about her; and I cannot tell you how dreadfully indecent her conduct was.'

'Was it?' said the delighted countess.

'Insufferable,' said the prelatess.

'But why does she lie on a sofa?' asked the Lady De Courcy.

'She has only one leg,' said Mrs Proudie.

'Only one leg!' said the Lady De Courcy, who felt to a certain degree dissatisfied that the signora was thus incapacitated. 'Was she born so?'

'Oh, no,' said Mrs Proudie,--and her ladyship felt somewhat recomforted by the assurance,--'she had two. But that Signor Neroni beat her, I believe, till she was obliged to have one amputated. At any rate she entirely lost the use of it.'

'Unfortunate creature!' said the countess, who herself knew something of matrimonial trials.

'Yes,' said Mrs Proudie; 'one would pity her, in spite of her past bad conduct, if she knew how to behave herself. But she does not. She is the most insolent creature I have ever put my eyes on.'

'Indeed she is,' said Lady De Courcy.

'And her conduct with men is abominable, that she is not fit to be admitted into any lady's drawing-room.'

'Dear me!' said the countess, becoming again excited, happy, and merciless.

'You saw that man standing near her,--the clergyman with the red hair?'

'Yes, yes.'

'She has absolutely ruined that man. The bishop, or I should rather take the blame on myself, for it was I,--I brought him down from London to Barchester. He is a tolerable preacher, an active young man, and I therefore introduced him to the bishop. That woman, Lady De Courcy, has got hold of him, and has so disgraced him, that I am forced to required that he shall leave the palace; and I doubt very much whether he won't lose his gown.'

'Why what an idiot the man must be!' said the countess.

'You don't know the intriguing villainy of that woman,' said Mrs Proudie, remembering her own torn flounces.

'But you say she has only got one leg!'

'She is as full of mischief as tho' she had ten. Look at her eyes, Lady De Courcy. Did you ever see such eyes in a decent woman's head?'

'Indeed I never did, Mrs Proudie.'

'And her effrontery, and her voice; I quite pity her poor father, who is really a good sort of man.'

'Dr Stanhope, isn't he?'

'Yes, Dr Stanhope. He is one of our prebendaries,--a good quiet sort of man himself. But I am surprised that he should let his daughter conduct herself as he does.'

'I suppose he can't help it,' said the countess.

'But a clergyman, you know, Lady De Courcy! He should at any rate prevent her from exhibiting in public, if he cannot induce her to behave at home. But he is to be pitied. I believe he has a desperate life of it with the lot of them. That apish-looking man there, with the long beard and the loose trousers,--he is the woman's brother. He is nearly as bad as she is. They are both of them infidels.'

'Infidels!' said Lady De Courcy, 'and their father a prebendary!'

'Yes, and likely to be the new dean too,' said Mrs Proudie.

'Oh, yes, poor dear Dr Trefoil!' said the countess, who had once in her life spoken to that gentleman; 'I was so distressed to hear it, Mrs Proudie. And so Dr Stanhope is to be the new dean! He comes of an excellent family, and I wish him success in spite of his daughter. Perhaps, Mrs Proudie, when he is dean, they'll be better able to see the error of their ways.'

To this Mrs Proudie said nothing. Her dislike of the Signora Neroni was too deep to admit of her even hoping that that lady should see the error of her ways. Mrs Proudie looked on the signora as one of the lost,--one of those beyond the reach of Christian charity, and was therefore able to enjoy the luxury of hating her, without the drawback of wishing her eventually well out of her sins.

"Wise people, when they are in the wrong, always put themselves right..."

Wise people, when they are in the wrong, always put themselves right by finding fault with the people against whom they have sinned. Lady De Courcy was a wise woman; and therefore, having treated Miss Thorne very badly by staying away till three o'clock, she assumed the offensive and attacked Mr Thorne's roads. Her daughter, not less wise, attacked Miss Thorne's early hours. The art of doing this is among the most precious of those usually cultivated by persons who know how to live. There is no withstanding it. Who can go systematically to work, and having done battle with the primary accusation and settled that, then bring forward a counter-charge and support that also? Life is not long enough for such labours. A man in the right relies easily on his rectitude, and therefore goes about unarmed. His very strength is his weakness; his very weakness is his strength. The one is never prepared for combat, the other is always ready. Therefore it is that in this world the man that is in the wrong almost invariably conquers the man that is in the right, and invariably despises him.

A man must be an idiot or else an angel, who, after the age of forty shall attempt to be just to his neighbours. Many like the Lady Margaretta have learnt their lesson at a much earlier age. But this of course depends on the school in which they have been taught.

Poor Miss Thorne was altogether overcome. She knew very well that she had been ill-treated, and yet she found herself making apologies to Lady De Courcy. To do her ladyship justice, she received them very graciously, and allowed herself with her train of daughters to be led towards the lawn.

Barchester Towers again

 Thus in this matter of the hospital poor Mr. Quiverful had his trials, and he had also his consolations. On the whole the consolations were the more vivid of the two. The stern draper heard of the coming promotion, and the wealth of his warehouse was at Mr. Quiverful's disposal. Coming events cast their shadows before, and the coming event of Mr. Quiverful's transference to Barchester produced a delicious shadow in the shape of a new outfit for Mrs. Quiverful and her three elder daughters. Such consolations come home to the heart of a man, and quite home to the heart of a woman. Whatever the husband might feel, the wife cared nothing for frowns of dean, archdeacon, or prebendary. To her the outsides and insides of her husband and fourteen children were everything. In her bosom every other ambition had been swallowed up in that maternal ambition of seeing them and him and herself duly clad and properly fed. It had come to that with her that life had now no other purpose. She recked nothing of the imaginary rights of others. She had no patience with her husband when he declared to her that he could not accept the hospital unless he knew that Mr. Harding had refused it. Her husband had no right to be quixotic at the expense of fourteen children. The narrow escape of throwing away his good fortune which her lord had had, almost paralysed her.
*
 Thus, while the outer world was accusing Mr. Quiverful of rapacity for promotion and of disregard to his honour, the inner world of his own household was falling foul of him, with equal vehemence, for his willingness to sacrifice their interests to a false feeling of sentimental pride. It is astonishing how much difference the point of view makes in the aspect of all that we look at!
    Such were the feelings of the different members of the family at Puddingdale on the occasion of Mr. Slope's second visit. Mrs. Quiverful, as soon as she saw his horse coming up the avenue from the vicarage gate, hastily packed up her huge basket of needlework and hurried herself and her daughter out of the room in which she was sitting with her husband. "It's Mr. Slope," she said. "He's come to settle with you about the hospital. I do hope we shall now be able to move at once." And she hastened to bid the maid of all work go to the door, so that the welcome great man might not be kept waiting.
    Mr. Slope thus found Mr. Quiverful alone. Mrs. Quiverful went off to her kitchen and back settlements with anxious beating heart, almost dreading that there might be some slip between the cup of her happiness and the lip of her fruition, but yet comforting herself with the reflexion that after what had taken place, any such slip could hardly be possible.

and

 "But why did you think about it, Bishop? How could you think of making such a creature as that Dean of Barchester? Dean of Barchester! I suppose he'll be looking for a bishopric some of these days — a man that hardly knows who his own father was; a man that I found without bread to his mouth or a coat to his back. Dean of Barchester, indeed! I'll dean him."
    Mrs. Proudie considered herself to be in politics a pure Whig; all her family belonged to the Whig party. Now, among all ranks of Englishmen and Englishwomen (Mrs. Proudie should, I think, be ranked among the former on the score of her great strength of mind), no one is so hostile to lowly born pretenders to high station as the pure Whig.
    The bishop thought it necessary to exculpate himself. "Why, my dear," said he, "it appeared to me that you and Mr. Slope did not get on quite so well as you used to do!"
    "Get on!" said Mrs. Proudie, moving her foot uneasily on the hearth-rug and compressing her lips in a manner that betokened much danger to the subject of their discourse.
    "I began to find that he was objectionable to you" — Mrs. Proudie's foot worked on the hearth-rug with great rapidity — "and that you would be more comfortable if he was out of the palace" — Mrs. Proudie smiled, as a hyena may probably smile before he begins his laugh — "and therefore I thought that if he got this place, and so ceased to be my chaplain, you might be pleased at such an arrangement."
    And then the hyena laughed out. Pleased at such an arrangement! Pleased at having her enemy converted into a dean with twelve hundred a year! Medea, when she describes the customs of her native country (I am quoting from Robson's edition), assures her astonished auditor that in her land captives, when taken, are eaten.
    "You pardon them?" says Medea.
    "We do indeed," says the mild Grecian.
    "We eat them!" says she of Colchis, with terrific energy.
    Mrs. Proudie was the Medea of Barchester; she had no idea of not eating Mr. Slope. Pardon him! Merely get rid of him! Make a dean of him! It was not so they did with their captives in her country, among people of her sort! Mr. Slope had no such mercy to expect; she would pick him to the very last bone.

On round dinner tables

 "It would do very well for a round table," suggested the ex-warden.
    Now there was something peculiarly unorthodox, in the archdeacon's estimation, in the idea of a round table. He had always been accustomed to a goodly board of decent length, comfortably elongating itself according to the number of the guests, nearly black with perpetual rubbing, and as bright as a mirror. Now round dinner-tables are generally of oak, or else of such new construction as not to have acquired the peculiar hue which was so pleasing to him. He connected them with what he called the nasty newfangled method of leaving a cloth on the table, as though to warn people that they were not to sit long. In his eyes there was something democratic and parvenu in a round table. He imagined that dissenters and calico-printers chiefly used them, and perhaps a few literary lions more conspicuous for their wit than their gentility. He was a little flurried at the idea of such an article being introduced into the diocese by a protégé of his own, and at the instigation of his father-in-law.
    "A round dinner-table," said he with some heat, "is the most abominable article of furniture that ever was invented. I hope that Arabin has more taste than to allow such a thing in his house."
    Poor Mr. Harding felt himself completely snubbed, and of course said nothing further; but Mr. Arabin, who had yielded submissively in the small matters of the cellar and kitchen grate, found himself obliged to oppose reforms which might be of a nature too expensive for his pocket.
    "But it seems to me, Archdeacon, that I can't very well lengthen the room without pulling down the wall, and if I pull down the wall, I must build it up again; then if I throw out a bow on this side, I must do the same on the other, and if I do it for the ground floor, I must carry it up to the floor above. That will be putting a new front to the house and will cost, I suppose, a couple of hundred pounds. The ecclesiastical commissioners will hardly assist me when they hear that my grievance consists in having a dining-room only sixteen feet long."
    The archdeacon proceeded to explain that nothing would be easier than adding six feet to the front of the dining-room without touching any other room in the house. Such irregularities of construction in small country-houses were, he said, rather graceful than otherwise, and he offered to pay for the whole thing out of his own pocket if it cost more than forty pounds. Mr. Arabin, however, was firm, and, although the archdeacon fussed and fumed about it, would not give way. Forty pounds, he said, was a matter of serious moment to him, and his friends, if under such circumstances they would be good-natured enough to come to him at all, must put up with the misery of a square room. He was willing to compromise matters by disclaiming any intention of having a round table.

An understanding with the reader and more Barchester

But let the gentle-hearted reader be under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr. Slope or Bertie Stanhope. And here perhaps it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes so far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage. Nay, more, and worse than this, is too frequently done. Have not often the profoundest efforts of genius been used to baffle the aspirations of the reader, to raise false hopes and false fears, and to give rise to expectations which are never to be realized? Are not promises all but made of delightful horrors, in lieu of which the writer produces nothing but most commonplace realities in his final chapter? And is there not a species of deceit in this to which the honesty of the present age should lend no countenance?
    And what can be the worth of that solicitude which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate? What the value of those literary charms which are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment? When we have once learnt what was that picture before which was hung Mrs. Ratcliffe's solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil. They are to us merely a receptacle for old bones, an inappropriate coffin, which we would wish to have decently buried out of our sight.
    And then how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader. "Oh, you needn't be alarmed for Augusta; of course she accepts Gustavus in the end." "How very ill-natured you are, Susan," says Kitty with tears in her eyes: "I don't care a bit about it now." Dear Kitty, if you will read my book, you may defy the ill-nature of your sister. There shall be no secret that she can tell you. Nay, take the third volume if you please — learn from the last pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there be any interest in it to lose.
    Our doctrine is that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified.
    I would not for the value of this chapter have it believed by a single reader that my Eleanor could bring herself to marry Mr. Slope, or that she should be sacrificed to a Bertie Stanhope. But among the good folk of Barchester many believed both the one and the other.
*
  "Are you a Whewellite or a Brewsterite, or a t'othermanite, Mrs. Bold?" said Charlotte, who knew a little about everything, and had read about a third of each of the books to which she alluded.
    "Oh!" said Eleanor; "I have not read any of the books, but I feel sure that there is one man in the moon at least, if not more."
    "You don't believe in the pulpy gelatinous matter?" said Bertie.
    "I heard about that," said Eleanor, "and I really think it's almost wicked to talk in such a manner. How can we argue about God's power in the other stars from the laws which he has given for our rule in this one?"
    "How indeed!" said Bertie. "Why shouldn't there be a race of salamanders in Venus? And even if there be nothing but fish in Jupiter, why shouldn't the fish there be as wide awake as the men and women here?"
    "That would be saying very little for them," said Charlotte. "I am for Dr. Whewell myself, for I do not think that men and women are worth being repeated in such countless worlds. There may be souls in other stars, but I doubt their having any bodies attached to them. But come, Mrs. Bold, let us put our bonnets on and walk round the close. If we are to discuss sidereal questions, we shall do so much better under the towers of the cathedral than stuck in this narrow window."
*
 From Winchester he went to Oxford, and was entered as a commoner at Balliol. Here his special career very soon commenced. He utterly eschewed the society of fast men, gave no wine-parties, kept no horses, rowed no boats, joined no rows, and was the pride of his college tutor. Such at least was his career till he had taken his little go, and then he commenced a course of action which, though not less creditable to himself as a man, was hardly so much to the taste of the tutor. He became a member of a vigorous debating society, and rendered himself remarkable there for humorous energy. Though always in earnest, yet his earnestness was always droll. To be true in his ideas, unanswerable in his syllogisms, and just in his aspirations was not enough for him. He had failed, failed in his own opinion as well as that of others when others came to know him, if he could not reduce the arguments of his opponents to an absurdity and conquer both by wit and reason. To say that his object was ever to raise a laugh would be most untrue. He hated such common and unnecessary evidence of satisfaction on the part of his hearers. A joke that required to be laughed at was, with him, not worth uttering. He could appreciate by a keener sense than that of his ears the success of his wit, and would see in the eyes of his auditors whether or no he was understood and appreciated.
    He had been a religious lad before he left school. That is, he had addicted himself to a party in religion, and having done so had received that benefit which most men do who become partisans in such a cause. We are much too apt to look at schism in our church as an unmitigated evil. Moderate schism, if there may be such a thing, at any rate calls attention to the subject, draws in supporters who would otherwise have been inattentive to the matter, and teaches men to think upon religion. How great an amount of good of this description has followed that movement in the Church of England which commenced with the publication of Froude's Remains!
    As a boy young Arabin took up the cudgels on the side of the Tractarians, and at Oxford he sat for a while at the feet of the great Newman. To this cause he lent all his faculties. For it he concocted verses, for it he made speeches, for it he scintillated the brightest sparks of his quiet wit. For it he ate and drank and dressed and had his being. In due process of time he took his degree and wrote himself B.A., but he did not do so with any remarkable amount of academical éclat. He had occupied himself too much with High Church matters and the polemics, politics, and outward demonstrations usually concurrent with High Churchmanship to devote himself with sufficient vigour to the acquisition of a double first. He was not a double first, nor even a first class man, but he revenged himself on the university by putting firsts and double firsts out of fashion for the year and laughing down a species of pedantry which, at the age of twenty-three, leaves no room in a man's mind for graver subjects than conic sections or Greek accents.
    Greek accents, however, and conic sections were esteemed necessaries at Balliol, and there was no admittance there for Mr. Arabin within the list of its fellows. Lazarus, however, the richest and most comfortable abode of Oxford dons, opened its bosom to the young champion of a church militant. Mr. Arabin was ordained, and became a fellow soon after taking his degree, and shortly after that was chosen professor of poetry.
    And now came the moment of his great danger. After many mental struggles, and an agony of doubt which may be well surmised, the great prophet of the Tractarians confessed himself a Roman Catholic. Mr. Newman left the Church of England and with him carried many a waverer. He did not carry off Mr. Arabin, but the escape which that gentleman had was a very narrow one. He left Oxford for awhile that he might meditate in complete peace on the step which appeared to him to be all but unavoidable, and shut himself up in a little village on the sea-shore of one of our remotest counties, that he might learn by communing with his own soul whether or no he could with a safe conscience remain within the pale of his mother church.
    Things would have gone badly with him there had he been left entirely to himself. Everything was against him: all his worldly interests required him to remain a Protestant, and he looked on his worldly interests as a legion of foes, to get the better of whom was a point of extremest honour. In his then state of ecstatic agony such a conquest would have cost him little; he could easily have thrown away all his livelihood; but it cost him much to get over the idea that by choosing the Church of England he should be open in his own mind to the charge that he had been led to such a choice by unworthy motives. Then his heart was against him: he loved with a strong and eager love the man who had hitherto been his guide, and yearned to follow his footsteps. His tastes were against him: the ceremonies and pomps of the Church of Rome, their august feasts and solemn fasts, invited his imagination and pleased his eye. His flesh was against him: how great an aid would it be to a poor, weak, wavering man to be constrained to high moral duties, self-denial, obedience, and chastity by laws which were certain in their enactments, and not to be broken without loud, palpable, unmistakable sin! Then his faith was against him: he required to believe so much; panted so eagerly to give signs of his belief; deemed it so insufficient to wash himself simply in the waters of Jordan; that some great deed, such as that of forsaking everything for a true Church, had for him allurements almost past withstanding.

Mr. Slope

 "Impudent scoundrel!" he continued after a while. "To dare to cross-examine me about the Sunday-schools in the diocese, and Sunday travelling too: I never in my life met his equal for sheer impudence. Why, he must have thought we were two candidates for ordination!"
    "I declare I thought Mrs. Proudie was the worst of the two," said Mr. Harding.
    "When a woman is impertinent, one must only put up with it, and keep out of her way in future, but I am not inclined to put up with Mr. Slope. 'Sabbath travelling!'" and the doctor attempted to imitate the peculiar drawl of the man he so much disliked: "'Sabbath travelling!' Those are the sort of men who will ruin the Church of England and make the profession of a clergyman disreputable. It is not the dissenters or the papists that we should fear, but the set of canting, low-bred hypocrites who are wriggling their way in among us; men who have no fixed principle, no standard ideas of religion or doctrine, but who take up some popular cry, as this fellow has done about 'Sabbath travelling.'"
*
Hitherto Barchester had escaped the taint of any extreme rigour of church doctrine. The clergymen of the city and neighbourhood, though very well inclined to promote High Church principles, privileges, and prerogatives, had never committed themselves to tendencies which are somewhat too loosely called Puseyite practices. They all preached in their black gowns, as their fathers had done before them; they wore ordinary black cloth waistcoats; they had no candles on their altars, either lighted or unlighted; they made no private genuflexions, and were contented to confine themselves to such ceremonial observances as had been in vogue for the last hundred years. The services were decently and demurely read in their parish churches, chanting was confined to the cathedral, and the science of intoning was unknown. One young man who had come direct from Oxford as a curate to Plumstead had, after the lapse of two or three Sundays, made a faint attempt, much to the bewilderment of the poorer part of the congregation. Dr. Grantly had not been present on the occasion, but Mrs. Grantly, who had her own opinion on the subject, immediately after the service expressed a hope that the young gentleman had not been taken ill, and offered to send him all kinds of condiments supposed to be good for a sore throat. After that there had been no more intoning at Plumstead Episcopi.
    But now the archdeacon began to meditate on some strong measures of absolute opposition. Dr. Proudie and his crew were of the lowest possible order of Church of England clergymen, and therefore it behoved him, Dr. Grantly, to be of the very highest. Dr. Proudie would abolish all forms and ceremonies, and therefore Dr. Grantly felt the sudden necessity of multiplying them. Dr. Proudie would consent to deprive the church of all collective authority and rule, and therefore Dr. Grantly would stand up for the full power of convocation and the renewal of all its ancient privileges.
    It was true that he could not himself intone the service, but he could procure the co-operation of any number of gentlemanlike curates well trained in the mystery of doing so. He would not willingly alter his own fashion of dress, but he could people Barchester with young clergymen dressed in the longest frocks and in the highest-breasted silk waistcoats. He certainly was not prepared to cross himself, or to advocate the real presence, but without going this length there were various observances, by adopting which he could plainly show his antipathy to such men as Dr. Proudie and Mr. Slope.
*
 Mr. Slope, in commencing his sermon, showed no slight tact in his ambiguous manner of hinting that, humble as he was himself, he stood there as the mouth-piece of the illustrious divine who sat opposite to him; and having premised so much, he gave forth a very accurate definition of the conduct which that prelate would rejoice to see in the clergymen now brought under his jurisdiction. It is only necessary to say that the peculiar points insisted upon were exactly those which were most distasteful to the clergy of the diocese, and most averse to their practice and opinions, and that all those peculiar habits and privileges which have always been dear to High Church priests, to that party which is now scandalously called the "high and dry church," were ridiculed, abused, and anathematized. Now, the clergymen of the diocese of Barchester are all of the high and dry church.
    Having thus, according to his own opinion, explained how a clergyman should show himself approved unto God, as a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, he went on to explain how the word of truth should be divided; and here he took a rather narrow view of the question and fetched his arguments from afar. His object was to express his abomination of all ceremonious modes of utterance, to cry down any religious feeling which might be excited, not by the sense, but by the sound of words, and in fact to insult cathedral practices. Had St. Paul spoken of rightly pronouncing, instead of rightly dividing the word of truth, this part of his sermon would have been more to the purpose, but the preacher's immediate object was to preach Mr. Slope's doctrine, and not St. Paul's, and he contrived to give the necessary twist to the text with some skill.
    He could not exactly say, preaching from a cathedral pulpit, that chanting should be abandoned in cathedral services. By such an assertion he would have overshot his mark and rendered himself absurd, to the delight of his hearers. He could, however, and did, allude with heavy denunciations to the practice of intoning in parish churches, although the practice was all but unknown in the diocese; and from thence he came round to the undue preponderance which, he asserted, music had over meaning in the beautiful service which they had just heard. He was aware, he said, that the practices of our ancestors could not be abandoned at a moment's notice; the feelings of the aged would be outraged, and the minds of respectable men would be shocked. There were many, he was aware, of not sufficient calibre of thought to perceive, of not sufficient education to know, that a mode of service which was effective when outward ceremonies were of more moment than inward feelings, had become all but barbarous at a time when inward conviction was everything, when each word of the minister's lips should fall intelligibly into the listener's heart. Formerly the religion of the multitude had been an affair of the imagination: now, in these latter days, it had become necessary that a Christian should have a reason for his faith — should not only believe, but digest — not only hear, but understand. The words of our morning service, how beautiful, how apposite, how intelligible they were, when read with simple and distinct decorum! But how much of the meaning of the words was lost when they were produced with all the meretricious charms of melody! &c. &c.
There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons. No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent and be tormented. No one but a preaching clergyman can revel in platitudes, truisms, and untruisms, and yet receive, as his undisputed privilege, the same respectful demeanour as though words of impassioned eloquence, or persuasive logic, fell from his lips. Let a professor of law or physics find his place in a lecture-room, and there pour forth jejune words and useless empty phrases, and he will pour them forth to empty benches. Let a barrister attempt to talk without talking well, and he will talk but seldom. A judge's charge need be listened to perforce by none but the jury, prisoner, and gaoler. A member of Parliament can be coughed down or counted out. Town-councillors can be tabooed. But no one can rid himself of the preaching clergyman. He is the bore of the age, the old man whom we Sindbads cannot shake off, the nightmare that disturbs our Sunday's rest, the incubus that overloads our religion and makes God's service distasteful. We are not forced into church! No: but we desire more than that. We desire not to be forced to stay away. We desire, nay, we are resolute, to enjoy the comfort of public worship, but we desire also that we may do so without an amount of tedium which ordinary human nature cannot endure with patience; that we may be able to leave the house of God without that anxious longing for escape which is the common consequence of common sermons.
    With what complacency will a young parson deduce false conclusions from misunderstood texts, and then threaten us with all the penalties of Hades if we neglect to comply with the injunctions he has given us! Yes, my too self-confident juvenile friend, I do believe in those mysteries which are so common in your mouth; I do believe in the unadulterated word which you hold there in your hand; but you must pardon me if, in some things, I doubt your interpretation. The Bible is good, the prayer-book is good, nay, you yourself would be acceptable, if you would read to me some portion of those time-honoured discourses which our great divines have elaborated in the full maturity of their powers. But you must excuse me, my insufficient young lecturer, if I yawn over your imperfect sentences, your repeated phrases, your false pathos, your drawlings and denouncings, your humming and hawing, your oh-ing and ah-ing, your black gloves and your white handkerchief. To me, it all means nothing; and hours are too precious to be so wasted — if one could only avoid it.

More Barchester

His lordship was at home, and the two visitors were shown through the accustomed hall into the well-known room, where the good old bishop used to sit. The furniture had been bought at a valuation, and every chair and table, every bookshelf against the wall, and every square in the carpet, was as well known to each of them as their own bedrooms. Nevertheless they at once felt that they were strangers there. The furniture was for the most part the same, yet the place had been metamorphosed. A new sofa had been introduced, and horrid chintz affair, most unprelatical and almost irreligious; such a sofa as never yet stood in the study of any decent high church clergyman of the Church of England. The old curtains had also given away. They had, to be sure, become dingy, and that which had been originally a rich and goodly ruby had degenerated into a reddish brown. Mr Harding, however, thought the old reddish brown much preferable to the gaudy buff-coloured trumpery moreen which Mrs Proudie had deemed good enough for her husband's own room in the provincial city of Barchester.

Our friends found Dr Proudie sitting on the old bishop's chair, looking very nice in his new apron; they found, too, Mr Slope standing on the hearthrug, persuasive and eager, just as the archdeacon used to stand; but on the sofa they also found Mrs Proudie, an innovation for which a precedent might be in vain be sought in all the annals of the Barchester bishopric!

_

The archdeacon made his fifth bow: he had made one at each mention of the horses; and promised that Mrs Grantly would do herself the honour of calling at the palace on an early day. Mrs Proudie declared that she would be delighted: she hadn't liked to ask, not being quite sure whether Mrs Grantly had horses; besides, the distance might have been &c, &c.

Dr Grantly again bowed, but said nothing. He could have bought every single individual possession of the whole family of the Proudies, and have restored them as a gift, without much feeling the loss; and had kept a separate pair of horses for the exclusive use of his wife since the day of their marriage; whereas Mrs Proudie had been hitherto jobbed about the streets of London at so much a month during the season; and at other times had managed to walk, or hire a smart fly from the livery stables.

My beloved Trollope, from Barchester Towers

In doctrine, he, like his patron, is tolerant of dissent, if so strict a mind can be called tolerant of anything. With Wesleyan-Methodists he has something in common, but his soul trembles in agony at the iniquities of the Puseyites. His aversion is carried to things outward as well as inward. His gall rises at a new church with a high pitched roof; a full-breasted black silk waistcoat is with him a symbol of Satan; and a profane jest-book would not, in his view, more foully desecrate the church seat of a Christian, than a book of prayer printed with red letters, and ornamented with a cross on the back. Most active clergymen have their hobby, and Sunday observances are his. Sunday, however, is a word which never pollutes his mouth--it is always 'the Sabbath'. The 'desecration of the Sabbath' as he delights to call it, is to him meat and drink:--he thrives upon that as policemen do on the general evil habits of the community. It is the loved subject of all his evening discourses, the source of all his eloquence, the secret of his power over the female heart. To him, the revelation of God appears in that one law given for Jewish observance. To him the mercies of our Saviour speak in vain, to him in vain has been preached that sermon that fell from the divine lips on the mountain--'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth'--'Blessed are the merciful, for the they shall obtain mercy'. To him the New Testament is comparatively of little moment, for from it can he draw no fresh authority for that dominion which he loves to exercise over at least a seventh part of man's allotted time here below.

Mr Slope is tall, and not ill made. His feet and hands are large, as has ever been the case, with all his family, but he has a broad chest and wide shoulders to carry off these excrescences, and on the whole his figure is good. His countenance, however, is not specially prepossessing. His hair is lank, and of a dull pale reddish hue. It is always formed into three straight lumpy masses, each brushed with admirable precision, and cemented with much grease; two of them adhere closely to the sides of his face, and the other lies at right angles above them. He wears no whiskers, and is always punctiliously shaven. His face is nearly of the same colour as his hair, though perhaps a little redder: it is not unlike beef,--beef, however, one would say, of a bad quality. His forehead is capacious and high, but square and heavy, and unpleasantly shining. His mouth is large, though his lips are thin and bloodless; and his big, prominent, pale brown eyes inspire anything but confidence. His nose, however, is his redeeming feature: it is pronounced straight and well-formed; though I myself should have liked it better if it did not possess a somewhat spongy, porous appearance, as though it had been cleverly formed out of a red coloured cork.

I never could endure to shake hands with Mr Slope. A cold, clammy perspiration always exudes from him, the small drops are ever to be seen standing on his brow, and his friendly grasp is unpleasant.

Such is Mr Slope--such is the man who has suddenly fallen into the midst of Barchester Close, and is destined there to assume the station which has heretofore been filled by the son of the late bishop. Think, oh, my meditative reader, what an associate we have here for those comfortable prebendaries, those gentlemanlike clerical doctors, those happy well-used, well-fed minor canons, who have grown into existence at Barchester under the kindly wings of Bishop Grantly!

But not as a mere associate for those does Mr Slope travel down to Barchester with the bishop and his wife. He intends to be, if not their master, at least the chief among them. He intends to lead, and to have followers; he intends to hold the purse strings of the diocese, and draw round him an obedient herd of his poor and hungry brethren.