I’m re-reading ‘Barchester Towers’ by Anthony Trollope and checking back through my posts I see that I dropped a short note on it about 10 years ago. He finished it in 1856 and it follows ‘The Warden’ the first in the series about the clerical life around the cathedral city of Barchester. The spry playfulness that infuses this early novel has the spring of his genius in it. His addressing of the reader does not interpose the breaching of the pact of disbelief but is just an invitation to refresh our imagination or to begin again with a cleansed eye to look on the capers of Barchester clerics and their innocent lapses into worldliness.
Mr. Arabin was tempted by the Scarlet Woman of Rome having been led astray by the charismatic John Henry Newman. In the end he did not succumb to her gaudy blandishments but for a time he wobbled on the tightrope that spanned the Tiber. As a fellow of Lazarus a college of Oxford he would have lost his place as no longer subscribing to the 39 Articles and therefore a dubious influence on the young minds in his charge. A tight spot indeed. Here Trollope plays the part of the unreliable narrator moving between addressing the reader to make a plea and simultaneously leaving it quite open for us to doubt the proffered interpretation. Arabin is promoted as an unworldly, mystical, poetical sort of man of a high church type.
Though great things were expected of him by his tutor when an undergraduate somehow in his last years in Balliol that furnace of Scholarment he became something of a controversialist the downfall of many a promising student.
“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.”
As related by Trollope with a wink what bothered Arabin more than anything was the idea that he balked at Rome because he was afraid of losing his fellowship and all that it implied in status, emolument and learned society. However in a stroke of rationalization he turns this remaining within the Church Established by law into the harder, steeper path.
“He paused and stood silent for awhile, thinking of the time when he had so nearly sacrificed all he had, his powers of mind, his free agency, the fresh running waters of his mind's fountain, his very inner self, for an easy path in which no fighting would be needed;”
This inner recollection takes place during his first conversation with Mrs.Bold the beautiful widow with £1000 a year. We have also been told about Arabin’s wistful incipient longing for a more gracious, genteel, domestic, life. He is after all forty years old. We feel that Trollope may fix him up.
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