The Last Chronicle of Barset Read Online Free PDF Page B

chalice of the moral law, and the human consumption of its contents, or, in other words, between the law and the living of it. Writing about Trollope in
The Ethics of Reading
, J. Hillis Miller argues that one of the reasons that Trollope was driven to keep writing novels was that he needed to find a solid ground of moral law, but that this kept slipping away from him:
    The secret motivation for this [obsessive writing of novels], it may be, was an attempt to write a novel which would assuage his need for a written ascertained moral law. He too, like his characters, sought secure possession of the grounds of moral decision through an indubitable entry into the law as such. Instead of that, his novels, as he progresses from one to another, enter more and more deeply into an understanding of what it means to define the human condition as separation from secure grounds of moral choice. 15
    It is also the case that the more secure and fixed the ‘stern laws of the world’ are held to be, the greater the tendency in the human condition to create space around those laws for slippage, accommodation and bending. Trollope’s characters, whom he and his contemporary readers spoke of as real, are so believable partly because they accommodate themselves to the world in ways that are not revolutionary, but which subtly, almost imperceptibly, shift the ground of the law to a place which is more comfortable. Like Archdeacon Grantly, Trollope likes those around him to be ‘comfortable’ if at all possible. If it does not damage the integrity of his story, the comforts are usually doled out at the end of the novel. A minor incident at the close of
The Last Chronicle of Barset
is paradigmatic of the many greatand small ways in which this novel writes across its own grain, shifting the ground of authority. Several men are called ‘cross-grained’ or perverse in the novel, and Reverend Crawley is the most cross-grained of all. In chapter 79 , when all around him are finally trying to make him comfortable and to reintroduce him to society, he refuses to go to stay with the Arabins because of the poor state of his coat and his wife’s gown:
    â€˜At such a time such reasons should stand for nothing,’ said the dean.
    â€˜And why not now as they always do, and always must till the power of tailors shall have waned, and the daughters of Eve shall toil and spin no more? Like to like is true, and should be held to be true, of all societies and of all compacts for co-operation and mutual living.’
    Josiah Crawley’s words have a ring of authority – almost a proverbial soundness to them – and the authority rests partly on the echoing of a biblical passage. However, Crawley’s words unravel the authority of the passage he echoes from Matthew 6:28–9: ‘And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ Reverend Crawley’s worldly law of ‘like to like is true’ runs against the grain of biblical authority, and he does give thought to his raiment. Nevertheless, Trollope works at the close of the novel to accommodate this worldly law, and Mr Crawley gets his new coat and is able to stand ‘like to like’ with Archdeacon Grantly who proclaims: ‘We stand… on the only perfect level on which such men can meet each other. We are both gentlemen’ (ch. 83 ).
    Biblical law is unravelled by wordly law, which is then manipulated by Trollope; the grounds of authority and law are slippery in the making of ‘compacts for co-operation and mutual living’ in the human condition. Not all compacts are fulfilled at the close of
The Last Chronicle
. Lily Dale, for example, is not showered with the ‘natural’ comforts of married life and a wedding trousseau. In some ways it is Mr Crawley