A political conspiracy of women

Phineas is damaged politically by the scandal-mongering of the journalist Slide and by his own thin-skinned quarreling with the junior leader Bonteen. Thus falling out of position for an office in the new Government, he is informed by Mrs. Goesler that she is conspiring with Lady Glencora, and with other political spouses, to improve his chances.

Throughout his career, Phineas has gained advancement by the attentions of women who worked in his interest. Phineas stiffly and pridefully objects to this latest campaign on his behalf, to which Mrs. Goesler responds "If you have enemies behind your back, you must have friends behind your back also."

Laura Kennedy's aged and worried father, Lord Brentford, on the need to come to terms with his daughter's mad husband: "Mad people never do die. That's a well known fact. They've nothing to trouble them, and they live forever."

Brentford on the change in political culture that has enabled the rise of such as Bonteen: "There used to be a kind of honor in these things, but that's all old fashioned now. Ministers used to think of their political friends; but in these days they only regard their political enemies. If you can make a Minister afraid of you, then it becomes worth his while to buy you up. Most of the young men rise now by making themselves thoroughly disagreeable."

Finn privately disparages and underestimates Glencora, but she uses her considerable domestic political skills to attempt to advance his case -- largely in order to spite Bonteen, who she loathes but also in support of her friend Mrs. Goesler and in revenge upon those who have brought scandal upon her friend Laura Kennedy. Glencora helps to defeat Bonteen by giving him a social opportunity to make an ass of himself.

The Duke of St. Bungay is unknowingly enlisted in the anti-Bonteen cause. He, too, is drawn to the fading hereditary nature of Parliamentary politics: "Bonteens must creep into the holy places. The faces he loved to see, -- born chiefly of other faces he had loved when young, -- could not cluster around the sacred table without others who were much less welcome to him. . . . There must be Bonteens; -- but when any Bonteen came up, who loomed before his eyes as specially disagreeable, it seemed to be his duty to close the door."

Glencora's campaign succeeds in spiking Bonteen's ambitions but, as her manipulations become public in the form of rumors, not in elevating Finn -- the incoming Prime Minister, Gresham, being determined that "no woman's fingers should have anything to do with his pie."

Phineas despairs, believing the women's conspiracy on his behalf will be forever held against him, but Marie Goesler is not entirely sympathetic, judging "the thing lost is too small, too mean to justify unhappiness."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

A paragon of nobility and idleness dies

The idle suitor Gerald Maule's father is introduced -- a man equally lazy and, what's more, has an ideology of laziness. An aesthete with little income, Mr. Maule Senior is also vain and determined to hold onto what is left of his youth. "No one kenw better than Mr. Maule that the continuing bloom of lasting summer which he affected requires great accuracy in living. Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age."

Now 55, Maule, in his boyhood, "he had been one of those show boys of which two or three are generally to be found at our great schools . . . Winning prizes, spouting speeches on Speech Days, playing in Elevens, and looking always handsome."

At his club, Maule apostrophizes the dying Duke of Omnium, who hour area as a paragon of aristocratic idleness, as opposed to the younger generation of working nobles, whom he detests: "they all go in for something now . . . They are politicians or gamblers, or, by heaven tradesmen. The Earl of Tydvil and Lord Merthyr are in partnership together working their own mines, -- by the Lord, with a regular deed of partnership, just like two cheesemongers." Omnium, however, is a paragon of nobility: "perhaps no man who had lived during the same period, or any portion of the period, had done less, or had devoted himself more entirely to to the consumption of good things without the slightest idea of producing anything in return!"

Parliament as a matter of families and heredity in the view of the Whighish Barrington Earl: "I do believe in the patriotism of certain families. I believe that the Mildmays, FitzHowards, and Pallisers have for some centuries brought up their children to regard the well-being of their country as their highest personal interest. . . . Of course there have been failures. But the school in which good
training is practiced will, as a rule, turn out the best scholars."

The yellow-journalist Quintus Slide of "The People's Banner" has
switched sides to the Conservatives, his duty to "speak of men as
heaven-born patriots whom he had designated a month or two before as
bloated aristocrats and leeches fattened on the blood of the people."

The staunch and honest radical Bunce mockingly says to Slide "I
suppose an editor's about the same as a Cabinet Minister, you've got to keep your place -- that's about it."

Trollope indicates Bunce's limitations: "Mr. Bunce was an outspoken, eager, and honest politician, -- with very little accurate knowledge
of the political conditions by which he was surrounded, but with a strong belief in the merits of his own class. He was a sober, hardworking man, and he hated all men who were not sober and
hardworking. He was quite clear in his mind that all nobility should
be put down, and that all property in land should be taken away from men who were enabled by such property to live in idleness. What
should be done with the land so taken away was a question which he
had not yet learned to answer." [Earlier, the good Mrs. Bunce had
confided to Phineas that she would rather her husband use his money
on drink rather than waste it on union dues].

Slide proposes to expose the marital rift between Robert Kennedy and Laura in "The People's Banner." Phineas objects that Kennedy is
clearly mad, to which Slide replies sanctimoniously "There is nothing easier in the world than calling a man mad. It's what we do to dogs when we want to hang them."

To Phineas' further objection that such a private affair is not of
public interest, Slide counters snidely that "private quarrels between gentlemen and ladies have been public affairs for a long time past" and that "the morals of our aristocracy would be at a low ebb indeed if the public press didn't act as their guardians . . . It's my belief that there isn't a peer among 'em all as would live with his wife constant, if it were not for the Press. . . . We go in for morals and purity of life, and we mean to do our duty by the public without fear or favor."

Phineas confronts the increasingly deranged Kennedy, who is staying at a dilapadated Scottish-owned hotel. Kennedy fires a shot at Phineas, who he believes to be his estranged wife's lover and the cause of all his agonies.

Omnium on his deathbed: "He was wan and worn and pale, -- a man evidently dying, the oil of whose lamp was all burned out. . . . He had never done any good, but he had always carried himself like a duke, and like a duke he carried himself to the end."

Omnium dies with the beloved of his years dotage, Mrs. Max Goesler, at his bedside. Mrs. Goesler reassures him that he lived life as a noble should, but Trollope opines that "her nature was much nobler than his: and she knew that no man should live as idly as the Duke had lived."

Omnium's successor as Duke, Plantagenet Palliser, has no interest in rank -- his passions are political and economic and his elevation of the House of Lords appalls him as it will make him ineligible to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer when the Liberals return to power in the lower house.

Mr. Maule Senior sees Omnium's death as an opportunity to court the wealthy Mrs. Goesler. Lamenting Omnium's recent death and the political ambitions of his successor, the effete ner-do-well says to the Duke's companion of his fading years "I dare say that Mr. Palliser, as Mr. Palliser, has been a useful man. But so is a coal heaver a useful man. The grace and beauty of life will be clean gone when we all become useful men."

Of the Duke's great achievement in life, Maule says by way of epitaph that "a great fortune had been entrusted to him, and he knew it was his duty to spend it. He did spend it, and all the world looked up to him."

Of Maule, the canny Marie Goesler assesses him to Phineas as "a battered old beau about London, selfish and civil, pleasant and penniless, and I should think utterly without a principle."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

"Cutting-up the Whitehall Cake": "Phineas Redux" begins

"Phineas Redux" begins with its hero called back from his Irish retreat by the Liberal Party and seemlessly renewing the relationships from two years earlier described in "Phineas Finn." His Irish retreat is seen as perhaps just a parenthesis in his social and political career in London -- a parenthesis that includes the death in childbirth of his wife.

Until Finn's , there had been no contact with his former associates, which Trollope treats as part of the normal order of things: "Distance in time and place, but especially in time, will diminish friendship. It is a rule of nature that it should be so and the friendships which a man most fosters are those which he can beat enjoy. If your friend leave you, and seek a residence in Patagonia, make a niche for him in your memory, and keep him there as warm as you may. Perchance, he may return from Patagonia and the old joys repeated. But never think that those joys can be maintained by the assistance of ocean postage, let it be at never so cheap a rate."

Finn has been recruited to run for parliament from an industrial district called Tankerville for which neither he nor Trollope see much appeal: "Tankerville was a dirty, prosperous, ungainly town, which seemed to exude coal-dust or coal-mud at every pore. It was so well recognized as being dirty that people did not expect to meet each other with clean hands and faces. Linen was never white at Tankerville, and even ladies who sat in drawing rooms were accustomed to the feel and taste of soot in all their dantiest recesses. . . . At Tankerville, coal was much loved and was not thought to be dirty."

The reader is duly reassured that it would not be part of Phineas' duty to actually reside in the be-grimed district he proposes to represent.

Finn had been recruited by the Liberals as part of their plan to regain the Parliamentary majority. They are irritated that the Conservatives, in their brief time in power, have so effectively taken advantage of the spoils system: "For to them, Liberals, this cutting up of the Whitehall cake by the Conservatives was spoilation when the priviledge of cutting was found to have so much exceeded what had been expected. . . . Was it to be borne that an unprincipled so-called Conservative Prime Minister should go on slicing the cake after such a fashion as so lately adopted?"

Trollope introduces the determinedly idle Gerald Maule, a guest at the home Phineas's old friends Oswald and Violet Chilterns, where he indifferently foxhunts and courts Adelaide Palliser.

Maule is wary of Oswald's foxhunting zeal, opining that he goes about it "as if his soul depended on it." Adelaide counters that Oswald is "very energetic," to which Maule responds: "a bull in a china shop is not a useful animal, nor is he ornamental, but there can be no doubt of his energy. . . . The man who stands still is the man who keeps his ground."

Adelaide is foolishly courted by a member of the gentry -- Trollope signals the mockery to be accorded such a venture by dubbing him Spooner of Spoon Hall and identifying his mother as one of the Platters of Platter House. Spooner believes he should be taken seriously by the distant, and near-peniless Adelside, as he is both more wealthy and a better foxhunter than the lackadaisical Maule.

Adelaide is appalled and insulted by Spooner's lack of recognition of the class divide between them. He says, fumbling: "You seem to think I'm something, -- something altogether beneath you." regarding which Trollope comments: "And so in truth she did. Miss Palliser had never analyzed her own feelings and emotions about the Spooners whom she met in society; but she probably conceived that there were people in thhe world who, from certain accidents, were accustomed to sit at dinner with her, but who were no more fitted for her intimacy than were the servants who waited upon her. Such people were to her little more than the tables and chairs with which she was brought into contact."

At the Chilterns, Phineas becomes reacquainted with the fascinating and masterly Mrs. Goesler, whose European wealth allow her to maneuver through and around the English class system. She continues to be devoted to care of the now-addled Duke of Omnium, with whom she began a flirtation after Phineas rejected her.

The parliamentary session, and the electoral battle between Liberals and Conservatives, turns on religion -- on the state establishment of the Church of England. But there is no true ideological battle as the real maneuvering is over power and spoils.

Lady Laura's spurned husband Robert Kennedy is truly animated by fierce religion and has converted his estate into a kind of hermit's retreat -- unlit fireplaces, empty candlesticks, scant food -- while he homicidally fumes over his wife's desertion. He wants her back not as a matter of happiness but to join him in godfearing misery: "Happy? What right had she to expect to be happy here? Are we not told that we are to look for happiness there, and to hope for none below? . . . I do not want her to make her to make me happy. I do not want to be made happy. I wanted her to do her duty."

Laura Kennedy in her German exile lamenting the briefness of Phineas, visit: "But when the lamp for a while burns with special brightness, there always comes afterwards a corresponding dullness."

Trollope's sense of love and passion (in Phineas' retrospection of his failed suit for Laura): "He knew now, or thought he knew, -- that the continued indulgence of a hopeless passion was a folly opposed to the very instincts of man and woman, -- a weakness showing want of fiber and muscle in the character."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry