The Political Novel
ONE of the peculiar literary developments of the present age is the political novel, — a form of fiction of which scattered specimens have existed for nearly a century, but which only of late has seemed to take on a specific form, setting it off from other branches of fiction. In a political novel the chief interest, instead of being concentrated on domestic and social intrigue, or on adventure by field or flood, or even, like some of Dumas’s romances, on the haute politique of kings and courts, turns on the shifting movements of party politics in England or the United States, not without other examples drawn from the politics of France. It certainly appears strange that so little was done in this style till comparatively late years, because the variety of individual character, the combination of thrilling incidents, the achievement or failure of studied design, are all furnished in abundance by the politics of a parliamentary country. Yet the political novel can hardly be said to be on a firm basis; the most successful specimens of it in the United States can hardly be called satisfactory, and the author has yet to come who will give us a political novel to compare with Emma or Guy Mannering, David Copperfield or The Newcome, Ravenshoe or Adam Bede.
The earliest novel of any particular force which dipped into politics was Miss Edgeworth’s Patronage. That story, written some years after her greatest successes, never attained the renown of Castle Rackrent or The Absentee. The plot hinges on the fortunes of two families, the Falconers and the Percies, in each of which it is necessary for the parents to help on their sons and daughters in life; but while the Percies intend that their children shall attain success as far as possible by their own merits, accepting favors sparingly and never without rendering an equivalent, the Falconers push themselves by “patronage.” This they accept by whomever dispensed, but in preference from a certain Lord Oldborougli, who is represented as high in the ministry, surrounded by faithless colleagues and in imminent danger of ruin, from which his self-seeking clients the Falconers make a foolish and abortive attempt to rescue him, while the real clue to safety and triumph is supplied by the disinterested Percies. There is much wit and humor in the dialogue, and some vividness in the character sketches; but the black is very black and the white is very white; the Falconers are all shameless but baffled intriguers, selling themselves for messes of the poorest pottage, while the Percies walk through misfortune to glory by a succession of incidents which it would be flattery to call improbable. There is not much politics in the book, and it is all cabinet politics, with no reference to any public deliberative body. Patronage is amusing in many ways, but is much inferior to most of Miss Edgeworth’s earlier fictions.
Next came, bouncing into the arena of fiction, as who should say, “Room for the Campeador,” Samuel Warren’s Ten Thousand a Year. Originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine, it was subjected to serious revision when issued in a volume. Such an extraordinary combination of genius weakened by conceit, knowledge of men spoiled by prejudice, keen satire and false pathos, a few real personages mixing with the most wooden puppets, has rarely been seen. Warren was primarily a barrister, and the basis of the story is the work of a crafty attorney, Oily Gammon, by far the best character in the book, to recover an estate of “ten thousand a year” for Tittlebat Titmouse, the lost heir, a cockney counter-jumper of supereminent vulgarity. This success further leads the hero to a seat in Parliament, and to his recognition as the next heir to a peerage, though of course the whole castle is ultimately upset, and everything falls to Warren’s darling Charles Aubrey, who was Thackeray’s pet aversion as a highborn snob.
The best chapter in the book is probably the contested election at Yatton, which ends in sending Titmouse to Parliament. The humors and passions of the polling, the bribing by the agents and coquetting of the electors, are drawn with great spirit and minuteness of detail, and suggest the acquaintance with such a contest that only a managing lawyer would supply. Yet the contemporary picture in Pickwick of the Eatanswill election, though avowedly a caricature sketch, probably leaves the more correct, as well as the more amusing impression of the two. Dickens as a reporter knew how to tell a story for the public, neither vague nor tedious. Warren’s judicial satire is definite enough, but very ponderous.
Having got his hero elected, he describes him in Parliament; and here is seen what political prejudice can do when it runs riot. Warren was a Tory; he doubtless believed that the Reform Act of 1832 had ruined England; accordingly every Tory is a high-bred gentleman and a disinterested patriot, while every Whig is either a blackguard radical or an unscrupulous office-seeker. He shows his belief by a profusion of invented names, meant to symbolize character. Of these, two specimens will be enough. Brougham, afterwards Lord Brougham and Vaux, is first Mr. Quicksilver — not a bad hit — and then Lord Blossom and Box, while Daniel O’Connell is Swindle O’Gibbet.
Warren was followed in a few years by Mrs. Gore’s Cecil, in which are some slight political touches, and then by Disraeli’s Coningsby and Sibyl, which may be called political novels, in that they were written to exhibit the fantastic doctrines of the party calling itself “Young England; ” but they do not contain much reference to actual party contests in Parliament, in the Cabinet, or on the hustings.
Bulwer in The Caxtons touched on the subject by making one of his characters a member of the Cabinet, to whom his hero acts as secretary; but he extended the idea largely in My Novel, which that same hero is supposed to write, in which political rivalry, ending in a contested election, has no little influence on the plot. The election is well drawn, more true to life in some ways than Warren’s satire, or Dickens’s caricature.
Henry Kingsley’s pathetic tale of Austin Elliot — not so carefully or thoroughly worked out as Ravenshoe, but still an exquisite piece of writing — deals largely with the distress of 1846 and following years, and the crisis of the plot is laid in the House of Commons during the debate on the Corn Laws. It is a great pity he did not work out this suggestion; for no man could have written a political novel more thrilling or more witty.
No novel of any distinguished merit dealing with politics appeared in England till Anthony Trollope took up the subject in Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux, and continued it in the Prime Minister. The character indicated by this name originally appeared in Can you forgive her? and the subject was worked out still further in The Way we live now, and The Duke’s Children. It should seem that Trollope, having exploited the clergy with brilliant force in The Warden and its successors, was the first author to apprehend clearly what might be made in fiction of the fortunes of a group of politicians, their leaders, underlings, and antagonists, seeking to hold or to seize the reins of power in England. He puts forward two heroes, one, Plantagenet Palliser, born in the purple, heir presumptive to a dukedom, and hardly needing to do more than reach out his hand for the great offices of state, and Phineas Finn, a young Irishman of good abilities, a high sense of honor, and an indefinable charm, which promote him rapidly to a succession of posts which he can fill with credit and renounce with dignity. Each has his romance, Palliser’s coming after marriage, as he learns to give his whole heart to his wayward, unaccountable, but altogether fascinating wife; and Finn in more than one hope to win a high-born Englishwoman. But here Trollope is frightened. He will shower all manner of good things on his young Irish adventurer, who is not undeserving of them; but he will not let him into the peerage and gentry of England. In his namesake novel, Phineas Finn marries a loving little Irish maiden who does not live long; and after his return to the political scene is won by a wealthy Austrian widow, who helps to deliver him from a charge of murder.
To draw out these characters, and a variety of others, men and women, who aid or impede their political progress, Trollope sets before us in order a series of debates in Parliament, Cabinet meetings, drawing-room conferences, and all manner of intrigues and confidences founded on imaginary, but perfectly possible and probable fluctuations of party policy and personal ambition. His various statesmen and stateswomen, prominent or subordinate, are excellently sketched and filled, affording abundant illustration of Trollope’s power to make the commonplace interesting. This is particularly the case with his Prime Minister, Plantagenet Palliser become the Duke of Omnium, a statesman who has risen as high as an Englishman can rise, because all parties respect his industry and his honesty, and who breaks down because his nature is too sensitive not to feel the attacks of mean and impudent enemies, and his intellect not strong enough to crush them. He is least successful in delineating Palliser’s predecessors in the highest office, — strong party leaders. The shadows of Disraeli and Gladstone were too much for him. He could not help trying to transfer them to his pages, and in different novels he exploited them under various names; but the results, neither photographic nor invented, are disappointing.
Some of Justin McCarthy’s novels, written in collaboration, deal with political movements, as do Lord Beacons - field’s Lothair and Endymion. But the most striking efforts in this direction in England have been Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Marcella and Sir George Tressady. That a highly gifted Englishwoman should handle parliamentary transactions with knowledge and skill is not strange. Such matters are subjects of ordinary conversation when cultivated men and women meet in the British isles; and a lady need not be a “suffragette ” to understand thoroughly what is meant by having the House counted out on a motion of Opposition, or an under secretary’s losing his seat on standing for reëlection. The entire course of these novels — or rather of this novel, for the second is a continuation of the first — displays this intimacy. The particular phase of English politics dealt with is the great social question of classes and the distribution of wealth, farm-laborer against landlord, home-worker against sweater, factory-hand against mill-owner. The heroine, Marcella, a young woman remarkable for beauty, for enthusiasm, and for a power of swaying her acquaintances, has early imbibed socialistic sympathies. A change in family circumstances brings her in contact with the condition of the country laborer, and also with a Tory member of Parliament, heir to a title and a great estate, to whom rather hastily she is betrothed. The engagement is broken off chiefly through the influence of another politician, who claims to represent the laborers. Marcella becomes a nurse, witnesses the distress in East London, and is ultimately reclaimed by her lover, with her interest in social problems not weakened, but regulated and informed. Politics, though constantly seen in the background, comes to the front for a small part only of the book; but it is brought forward as easily and simply as foreign travel or domestic illness might be. There is special skill shown in the way the labor question is represented as actually discussed in Parliament, and affecting the position of parties, though nothing like the points imagined had ever formed part of real debates or intrigues when Marcella was published. In Sir George Tressady, the heroine’s influence, now recognized as a power in politics, is exercised to bring the hero, a careless pessimist, to a sense of greater things, while the moulding of Marcella’s own character under the successes and failures sure to result from sharing in the complications of politics is handled with great subtlety. Politics forms a larger part of this second book, though there is much romance, very well done. The characters are alive, and the serious tone is enlivened by plenty of humor peeping out at intervals. The book is made to end with a realistic and apparently needless tragedy. There is a tendency to soliloquism, a literary vice of the age, the personages pondering their fate alone, and in the third person. Trollope’s language has often been criticised for its slouchy tone; Mrs. Ward’s is generally pure and elegant; though one fails to see the advantage of “by now ” over the recognized “by this, " which was good enough for Macaulay.
When we pass from England to our own country, we shall find several attempts at making politics the groundwork of a novel. But one may say of most of them that they fail to grasp the subject. One writer goes to Washington. She is impressed with the magnitude of the government machine and the splendor of its home. She goes to a President’s reception and a debate in the Senate, and forthwith gives us a sort of photograph of them, studded with various marionettes called characters, and bearing no more relation to the schemes, passions, jealousies, successes, and failures of real politics, than do the actual photographs of the White House and the Capitol and their groups in the foreground, which she probably puts in her book.
Or, a writer is struck by the caucus intrigues and working of the Boss System in Lincolnsport or Shermania. He collects a good many anecdotes and sweeps them into a sort of newspaper short story. There is very fair description, no slight penetration of character, and plenty of righteous indignation. But these never of themselves will make a political novel, without a literary control unknown to their compilers.
At length, about a generation ago, appeared the very remarkable story called Democracy. For a long time it was anonymous; but whoever wrote it, the claim on its title-page to be an American novel was exactly true. Never, before or since, has there appeared such a truly national work of fiction, neither local, as breathing the air of a single section of our country, nor provincial, as having a squint towards Europe. The writer wastes no time in descriptions of Washington, any more than Thackeray does of London; but assuming that Americans know their own capital, he goes straight to its heart, with a firm hand on the knife from first to last.
The fashionable widow, who after exhausting all the attractions, frivolous or serious, of New York society, comes to see what interest the national government can have for her, and the imperious partisan senator, to whom political advancement is life, are set against each other with consummate skill, and with a strict sense of proportion that never allows description to retard the story. Diplomats from various nations, Americans in and out of Congress from various states, all true to life, are combined in a very likely but serious plot. How the heroine feels almost too late the fascination of political manœuvring to be almost fatal, attracting her with the deadly charm of a handsome serpent, and how she is saved from its magic at the last moment, is capitally told. The list of these characters is but short after all, reminding one of a like limitation in Balzac and in Hawthorne; but such is Washington life. where the same associates are always recurring.
There is one obvious criticism on Democracy: it is all a satire. Unless the author sadly belies himself, the existing development of American government gives him no pleasure, but is a sort, of organized hypocrisy. The following sentence, not spoken by any of the characters, but as part of the narrative, shows the pure animus. Speaking of early spring the author says: —
“This is the moment when the two whited sepulchres at either end of the Avenue reek with the thick atmospheres of bargain and sale. The Old is going; the New is coming. Wealth, office, power are at auction. Who bids highest ? Who hates with most venom ? Who intrigues with most skill ? Who has done the dirtiest, the meanest, the darkest, and the most political work ? He shall have his reward.”
Terrible, whatever the truth of the picture, that an American offers it to his countrymen, in a frame of keen wit and deep pathos.
Democracy was followed, after a long interval, by The Honorable Peter Stirling, the work of the ill-starred Paul Leicester Ford. This book at once became popular, and a new edition has lately been called for. It is rather a fictitious biography than a novel, tracing the hero’s career, not quite like Tom Jones’s, from his cradle, but from his college days to the age of forty. Peter Stirling is a Harvard graduate, who has attained a peculiar popularity among his classmates, but cares for no woman but his mother. He contrives however to fall deep in love, and being rejected goes to New York as an unknown candidate for legal practice, and becomes known to the politicians of the sixth ward through their children, whom he has made his playmates, and whom he protects by a bold attack from the poison of “swill-milk ” dealers. This leads to his becoming a power among the Democrats of New York, city and state. Then after many years the forgotten romance of his life is revived by the daughter of his early love. Both parents are equally his friends; and he steps forward to save the wife from misery by taking upon himself the guilt of an intrigue which belongs to the husband. As soon as this love-affair comes to the front, politics falls back, to be indirectly recalled by Peter’s behavior as colonel of a city regiment in a strike riot where dynamite is used; in the end he is chosen governor, having previously refused all political office — except “ boss.”
The book is long; yet it holds one from first to last. This result comes in spite of certain dissertations on the philosophy of practical politics, delivered by Peter Stirling, which are not particularly entertaining or instructive. The love-making distinctly injures what is the chief interest up to its appearance; and however ingenious, is not novel. Indeed the detail of how a young lady, really goodhearted, yet not above coquetry, plays a big fish which she has hooked but is somewhat afraid to land, might be cut down, or even cut out, with very little detriment. The tale of how Stirling, in the teeth of race, of culture, and of natural sentiment, contrives gradually to win first the affection, then the confidence, and finally the unquestioning allegiance of his accidental constituency, while contending with other leaders of the party at both its ends, shows great imaginative and constructive force, and the interest it wakes is at times thrilling, but lacking in the power of conviction. Peter goes through twenty years of contention with every kind of New York politician, exposed to influences which are at least of questionable probity, and emerges without any weakening of his own; fighting fire with fire, yet with his garments unsinged, — not unsmoked, however, for though a total abstinent to please his mother, he is an unstinted and uncontrolled devotee of tobacco. There is a still worse defect if the book asserts itself as an American political novel: the author has no interest in any politics but those of New York. New England exists only as a feeder, and Washington as a fly-wheel for New York; and the rest of the Union does not exist at all.
The like criticism is true of Mr. Winston Churchill’s Coniston. Here the interest is confined to a state which, if not absolutely and solely New Hampshire, its author formed out of portions of that and other states, assuredly without the required constitutional assent. Here it is the career of a country boss, apparently without romance in his nature, that is entirely modified by a love, in this case purely paternal, for the daughter of the woman he had longed to marry. A book so fresh in every one’s mind needs no detailed analysis. The politics of a New England village and state capital are very different from those of Manhattan and Albany; but Mr. Churchill has made them fully as interesting, and, it must be maintained, far more probable. The indignant charges of inaccuracy he has encountered go far to prove, as in the kindred case of Mr. Cable’s Grandissimes, that he is not inaccurate; no one would be bitterly angry at a portrait that was not a pretty good likeness. It must remain a puzzle, however, by what means Jethro Bass, after acquiring his hold over his neighbors’ votes by means of mortgages on their estates, contrived to get similar holders all over the state to give him their votes from mere financial brotherhood. In one respect both Mr. Ford and Mr. Churchill will ill stand comparison with the author of Democracy, whose English is faultless. Mr. Ford should have known that a “hallway" is a rare adjunct to the houses of cultivated people; that a Welsh “rarebit" is an amiable fiction; and that to speak of keeping up a struggle “that long " is anything but good talk. Mr. Churchill is happily still alive to learn that " subserviated ” is a ludicrously false creation of his own; that “impractical, which he did not invent, is an illegitimate cross between “impracticable” and “unpractical;” and that it is possible to write a good long novel without once using the word “silhouetted.”
Of the host of attempts at political novels and short stories to which the last twenty years have given birth, not very much need be said, except that they share in the defects of their betters. They are in general too local; they follow with no little vividness and penetration the course of political ambition and intrigue in some section of the Union: but they are interesting and even intelligible only in a qualified sense to those who live outside that pale. Such, for instance, is the case with Mr. Charles Warren’s witty and thoughtful political stories founded on his experience as secretary to Governor Russell. They have such a strong smack of the Bay State that it is to be feared many Americans would make nothing of them. Yet if our political novelist goes to Washington, where the national political interest centres, in which every American from Houlton to Brownsville has a share, he runs into that strange isolation of the Capital City, scarcely knowing the real life of the states, and scarcely known of them.
And there is another element, generally conspicuous in all our political fictions, which injures their complete effectiveness as novels. They are always dealing not with the immediate questions of political life, but with the ethical problem, how far an American politician can keep his moral dignity and selfrespect. It is always the fight between “Politician” and “ Reformer,”— both with a Capital and quotation marks. A good instance of both these failings is afforded by The Gentleman from Indiana, where a young man fights his way up to political supremacy in that well-known state, against enemies open and secret, operating by moral intrigue and physical violence, solely by the resistless force of his exalted purposes. Now it is sadly true that this problem, how far a practical politician can be an honest man, does cast a dark shadow over our politics, city, state, and national; yet if Mr. Sleary’s dictum is true, — “ People mutht be amuthed, Thquire; they can’t alwayth be working nor yet thtudving,” — the eternal harping on this ethical string will be fatal to the production of a really satisfactory political novel. Let it be supposed that an author is writing a novel founded on the events of some war, our own wars or any other; and should be eternally exhibiting his generals and captains and troopers holding conferences with themselves and one another on the justice of war in general, and of this particular contest into which they have thrown themselves. It might be the very question for a historian or a statesman, but it would not help to make a good novel.
The fundamental difficulties that political novelists have to encounter is whence to draw their situations and chief characters. Are they to invent political intrigues and crises, raising questions that never have arisen in our history ? or are they to reproduce some contest that once occurred? Mr. Ford and Mr. Churchill do the latter. The swill-milk scandal actually convulsed New York; the encounter of militia with strikers, and the merger of railroads are memories rather than creations. A novelist who undertook to invent a wholly new controversy in national politics as the basis for his plot would need amazing ingenuity. Trollope was so hard put to it that he brought forward the Disestablishment of the Church of England to unseat one of his Prime Ministers, and left another without any national policy at all, the perplexed head of an ill-assorted and short-lived coalition. Yet Mrs. Ward has done this very thing brilliantly; and there are in the United States many important questions that never have been fairly brought out, and might afford excellent material for possible and even prophetic complications.
Still harder is the problem of the novelist’s political heroes and villains. Are they to be portraits from the past, imaginations of the future, or composite photographs of the present ? One thing is certain: the public will have it that they are the first, however the author may deny it. They know who Jethro Bass was, and can give you name and place. When I first read Democracy, I was resolved to see Senator Stephen A. Douglas in the fictitious Senator Radcliffe. Douglas may have given the author some hints; but to identify the men was absurd. Many of these persistent identifications remind one of a country Democrat’s reading of the inscriptions under a remarkable group of statues exhibited in New York in 1854. In the ill-fated “Crystal Palace " of that year were shown Thorwaldsen’s Christ and the Apostles. The Saviour faced one on entering, and the twelve were ranged in a semicircle, six on either hand, and underneath, the names, Andrew, Thomas, James, and the rest. The countryman walked up and began reading: “Andrew — Jackson; Thomas— Jefferson; James — Madison; Bartholomew— Bartholomew— Oh. that’s one of those Western Presidents. ”
There is no space to go beyond our own language in the study of the political novel. It may be said, however, that Son Excellence Eugène Rougon is perhaps the feeblest of Zola’s memorable series, and that Numa Roumestan is a work of great power. This line of fiction has nearly won its assured place, but has by no means reached perfection. So far as our own country goes, political novelists must cultivate a wider national sympathy and a sterner economy of detail, with a determination, while never renouncing that moral sensitiveness which the subject demands, to employ it in due proportion to the claims of creative art.
Matthew Porter, a political novel by Gamaliel Bradford, Jr., the author of The Private Tutor, did not appear till the above article was in type, and it was too late to add a suitable notice.