Anthony Trollope's "The Two Generals"

Written 1863 (29 October - 8 November)
Published 1863 (December), Good Words Published in a book 1867 (August), Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories , Strahan

As in the case of "The Widow's Mite", we read this story twice on Trollope-l, first in 1997 and again in 2000, both times we read it as a Christmas story. This time I place the conversation from 1997 first as it erupted into a controversy over Trollope's attitudes towards slavery and then over whether the American civil war was at core a fight over slavery. Beneath all of it was a subtextual quarrel about white American racial discrimination and prejudice towards black Americans today. Several people on the list were offended because other people on the list had not been offended by the story. On the second occasion I included a copy of Longfellow's famous "Christmas Bells" which includes 4 stanzas usually omitted, stanzas which connect the poem to the US Civil War and suggest how people at the time could have read "The Two Generals" as a Christmas story.

As I write this (in 2004), I realize I and all those who argued more or less from my point of view were wrong and John Hopfner right. Trollope's lack of indignation, his treatment of slavery and slaves as sheer counters, an important and minor issue in the story is unacceptable and (ultimately) supportive of slavery and thus the south. John also implied that the inference Trollope would not have minded the reader takig from the story was pro-South and that slavery is just fine (thus Ada sees Tom as the finer spirit). He was right.

Since reading "Two Generals" in 1997 I have read Trollope's North America twice and come to the conclusion that while Trollope intellectually and even emotionally saw the horrors of slavery, he so identified with white people and property-owners that he dismissed it as he dismisses the horrors of convict slavery in Australia, the lives of the working and agricultural classes in England and the powerlessness and miseries of women. In the case of women, he identifies strongly with men and is determined they shall stay powerful over women. In the case of subject peoples, he identifies with the powerful. His reasoning falls back finally on God: God has cleansed the land of Ireland by this terrible famine; God is cleansing the land of North America. Were he though among those cleansed he would have written differently.

His attitude towards the civil war is fundamentally anti-war. In North America he argues the war's central issue is slavery, but argues the North had to go to war not to eradicate slavery but in order to assert the power of a nation-state over its subject peoples. He prophecies the North will win due to its greater economic strength and numbers, but that the culture of the North and South and West are all so different, the US will split into two (or perhaps even three) separate nations. He says slavery will die because as an economic system it is self-destructive, does not create wealth for all and does not lead to a prosperous nation (as a group). He mourns for the whites who will end up in poverty. He has no space for mourning for the destroyed lives of the African people. Indeed he seems to look forward to their extermination. His Pro-Americanism is a function of his respect for the private property system and strong individualism he finds in the US as well as his identification with the English-rooted culture of the elite at the time.

What one can hold against him is his erasure of the miseries of the slaves. In "The Two Generals" we are told how the slaves loved General Tom (the master best); in North America, we are asked to believe how well treated slaves are across Kentucky. Never does he once tell of the truth of how one person will treat another who is their slave. He invents fatuous fictions of them as he does in some scenes about the Irish in Castle Richmond. I recommend as basic reading about slavery in the US, particularly as it affected women, Frances Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838-`839.

From: "Robert Wright"
To: "TrollopeReadingList"
Subject: Short Stories - "The Two Generals": Introduction
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 1997

I placed this story in the schedule out of sequence also because it could be said to be a Christmas story. It really isn't much associated with the holiday season, but romantic meetings take place on Christmas Eve and the book starts with Christmas.

I found the story pleasing. The backdrop of the American Civil War still raging at the time of writing was a good one, and the characters real and believable. There is little depth to the tale though. Who shot the bullet? It is not clear.

One of my Christmas presents this year was a book describing Notting Hill and Holland Park in the early Victorian era. There is a picture of our house in it, dated 1856, completely unaltered. Well, in appearance only, because the house is described as being in multi-occupation, with the smell of foul offensive privvies and pigs living in the rooms. In the life of my house, 1856 is not that long ago, and the Civil War era in 1861 is so close in time, but so different in every way (or is it?)

Robert J Wright
http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~wright
email wright@dircon.co.uk

From: hansenb@frb.gov
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998
Subject: Short Stories: "The Two Generals" To: trollope-l@teleport.com

This story is really a kind of war correspondence, isn't it? It's an earlier literary version of what Alistair Cooke did to make his name nearly a century later in the U.S.

What struck me so strongly was the feeling of the older son, who 'Was prepared to declare that the wealth of the South was derived from its agriculture, and that its agriculture could only be supported by its slaves.' Here, in one easily understood sentence, Trollope presents a point of view to his readers back in England. And what springs to my mind is that 135 years later, although the slaves have been freed, there are still economies in the less developed world where the slave labor of a whole class is similarly necessary for the economic success of the higher classes. I am of course talking of the 'sweat shop' conditions in the apparel and shoe industries in SE Asia and elsewhere.

Bart
hansenb@frb.gov

Then I responded to a question:

From: "Amit K. Basu"
Subject: Sutherland's Trollope: The Early Short Stories: "The Two Generals"

Amit K Basu asks:

Was the passage from "The Two Generals" written before or after Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address?

It seems not. According to Sutherland, "The Two Generals" was written around the first week of November 1863; it was printed in Good Words December 1863, and then again in Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories in 1867. Sutherland quotes Trollope's North America: "Kentucky is one of those border states which has found it almost impossible to secede, and almost equally impossible to remain in the union." He says "Julian Thompson suggests that 'The germ of the story may have been Trollope's meeting at Washington [in 1862] with Senator John Crittenden [whose] two sons fought on opposite sides in the American Civil War.' Finally Sutherland reminds us that Trollope could have remembered Thackeray's The Virginians (1859) "which has to brothers fighting on oposite sides in the American revolutionary war."

I thought the story was interesting for its portrayal of the fight over slavery as a fight over property and wealth. The brother who inherits the Kentucky farm wants to keep his slaves, for without them his avenue to wealth is non-existent; he therefore is gung-ho for states' rights and argues "Kentucky" as his country. The younger brother who does not inherit his father's estate, but goes to West Point and makes the Federal army his career argues the US is his country, and seems to regard slavery as a moot point or unimportant, not the central issue. It's clear that disinterest is a myth; so too the "rationalizations" that the characters turn into moral truths.

I wondered how many Americans at the time (or now) could have unravelled the arguments in this fashion; the powerful close and open on slavery also makes it clear that slavery is the issue, and from the narrator's point of view, one which will be etched in people in flesh & blood. The climax is the story comes when the southern brother loses his leg; he had threatened to kill his northern brother and could have him, but turns away and is himself shot by another northerner.

Ellen Moody

From: hopfnerj@cc.tacom.army.mil
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998
Subject: Short Stories: A Jaundiced View of "The Two Generals"
To: trollope-l@teleport.com

Unless I'm forgetting something, the posts that have appeared lately on "The Two Generals" have seemed favorably disposed toward the story. Well, here's a dissenting view: I didn't especially care for it, I think because Trollope appeared to set me up to root for the wrong character. So the end just felt disappointing.

The story starts with some background exposition. We learn that Reckenthorpe, pere, is a well-to-do Kentucky farmer and statesman, now elderly, who owns slaves--though he had voted to abolish slavery in his home state. We also learn that, back in his palmier days, he'd been a duelist.

Well, this is "clank" #1 for me: if a farmer is personally against slavery, what prevented him from freeing his own slaves on the spot, wonder I? This makes his conviction seem none too powerful. But, okay: the man's a slave-owner and a former duelist. Maybe Trollope wants us to envision a southern gentleman.

Reckenthorpe, pere, has two fils: Tom, the eldest, is a slave-owner, and Trollope describes him as a "southern gentleman." Tom also favors succession, to ensure the continuation of slaveholding.

Frank, the younger son, is a West Point grad, and favors retention of the union. He therefore seems to oppose slavery.

Tom and Frank have a spirited discussion, in which Tom says that if ever he meets Frank in battle, he'll shoot him down in preference to any other, on the basis that Frank will be a "renegade" (renegade to his state, one presumes).

This is clank #2, even though Trollope tries a couple of times later in the narrative to say that Tom is just a hot-head and didn't really mean what he said. The opening bit of business puts me firmly in Frank's camp--both on the basis that Frank is the brother who opposes slavery, and on the basis that Frank isn't the one favoring the break-up of the nation.

Now we've got Ada Foster--pretty, nubile, wealthy, and conveniently an orphan, who has been living with the Reckenthorpes for two years. The elder Reckenthorpes hope Ada will marry one of their sons, and in due course she in fact decides she's in love with....Tom. This though Trollope assures us that Ada, who grew up in Maine, is passionately Northern in her sentiments, hates slavery, and is keen for abolition.

Clank #3: I'm not buying Trollope's explanation that ol' Ada, as an impressionable young woman, just can't help but soften at a touch of romance, though be she ever so impervious to argument. Indeed, what I'm expecting to see as the story unfolds is that Ada, repulsed by Tom's pro-slavery stance as the war drags on and becomes ever more bloody, will decide that she can't marry him. This is the argument Frank advances, and it strikes this reader as reasonable.

But then, wouldn't you know, nothing of the sort happens. Tom and Frank finally confront one another on the field of battle. Tom doesn't shoot Frank, even though he's got the drop on him. Frank doesn't shoot Tom either, though a bullet from an unknown source fells Tom, who winds up losing his leg.

The brothers start to reforge their brotherly bond afterward, and Frank decides not to play the heavy and not send the incapacitated Tom back home. Tom and Ada get married. End of story.

Clank. I don't get it. It seems to this reader that Tom is in the wrong, and that in truth Ada, if she loves the Union and abhors slavery, shouldn't be marrying a slave-owner who has been fighting for the cause she affects to despise. He's a romantical fellow, and not a jerk in every way, to be sure. Still, he's a jerk in ways that ought to matter very much to Ada, but do not. So what argument are we to suppose that Trollope meant to advance, by way of this story? That Ada really was a hypocrite, and that she and Tom really were better suited to one another than she and Frank would have been? That being a slave-owner is really no more than a peccadillo--like being fond of garlic and boiled cabbage, perhaps? Or that if you're wounded in combat, all is forgiven? Granted, Tom is shown to have a number of good attributes. But in a story of this length, his negative ones come more forcibly to the fore than do his positive ones, at least for me.

The notion of two brothers in a border state, each favoring a different side in the way between the states, has its compelling side, but I don't see that Trollope was writing in a way consistent with what appear to have been his own sentiments (that slavery is wrong, I mean, and that the south was doomed to lose the war).

Grumpily,
--John Hopfner

Re: Short Story: A Jaundiced View of "The Two Generals"

John Hopfner has offered a reasoned lucid exposition of some of the discomfort he felt when reading the above story by Trollope.

He was first of all bothered that Trollope did not favor the abolitionist brother. I would say that not only did Trollope not favor "Tom," he hardly bothered to differentiate the military from the slave-owning Gentleman farmer, Frank, except as to their politics which he suggests is not the result of some disinterested idealism, but their education, careers, economic interests. Every time I read this story I have the same hard time keeping them apart and have to rely on labels on a couple of the pages so I can remember which one is named Tom and which one Frank. I agree Ada's choice is not really explained except to say that she too does not follow any reasoned moral decision in her choice of partner for life.

And herein is my inference: Trollope does not believe people really act out of idealistic beliefs. The portrait of the old man is a portrait of someone who had succeeded because he knows how the political world works, and that is a matter of personalities over time, and respect gained through some primitive kinds of personality traits, not through ideals. John does not mind when I am personal so I will instance my own "partnership" with someone long ago who was a deep reactionary, a Falangist.

Another larger perspective on Trollope's story must come from his being an Englishman. He is not involved in the "sin" of slavery. He calls it a terrible crime, but he sees it from the outside. Today I read the first 9 or 10 chapters of Huckleberry Finn for a class I am going to begin teaching in a couple of weeks. The in-the-bone, running through one's blood like some poison kind of feeling towards slavery is just not in Trollope. He is an outsider. I find it remarkable that an Englishman of the 1860's can say categorically the raison d'etre of this war was slavery when for decades after the war was over respectable historians denied this over and over again. But maybe Trollope is willing to admit this--that thousands of people died terrible deaths, torturous because of the bloody ferocity of a battlefield with the weapons they had without any medicine to counter the effect of these--because he did not own slaves, and did not live among people who did, did not himself get to know slaves or ex-slaves.

What is the moral of this story? It is to depict a horrific war, to bring home to us the terrible cost of civil war. Trollope focuses in on precisely that state and a family in it where brothers ended up on opposing sides. The most effective sentences in the piece bring us back to the blood-stained corpse ridden fields. These are not Flanders, nor Ipres, but they get pretty close. The American civil war may be said to have been the first modern war and Trollope is registering a civilized man's response to this horror. This is what human beings can do to one another. It's not that Tom is in the wrong, it's that something is wrong with this culture, this nation, and it is in an upheaval to throw the canker, the blight, the poison out. Tom doesn't count. He's just a cipher.

But being Trollope, our author shows us that in intimate encounters people's humanity will win out. As abstractions, we are willing to rain bombs on one another; but one man from one side meets another from the other in a ditch, face-to-face, and one does not feel the immediate need to kill the other out of a desperate fear for his life, and they will recognize their identity with one another. He also needed a story so he went back to the old romance motif of a Balan story--the unexpected meeting of brothers in battle. He combines this with his own hopefulness, and we get the one brother forgiving the other (what matter what is their names) and the girl loving the man without his leg, staying with him although life will now be very hard.

I don't know that I have removed the "clanks" for John, but I have tried to explain why I think Trollope wrote this story and why he did so in the way he did.

And it's a Christmas piece, so the events happen Christmas time and he injects Christian charity and the bleak landscape of winter over the whole.

For me the story mostly worked. I found the characterization of both brothers too thin, but I thought the point was two figures caught in a vast terrible conflagration. It doesn't matter so very much what the issues are to Trollope (so yes he seems not to care about slavery), though Trollope does justice to them.

Ellen Moody

Duffy and Bart had had an exchange to which Mike Powe replied:

Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998
From: Colonel Panic
Sender: michael@localhost.localdomain
Reply: looie@teleport.com
Subject: Short Story: "The Two Generals"
Sender: owner-trollope-l@teleport.com
On Wed, 7 Jan 1998, Duffy Pratt quoted Bart Hansen:

"The American Colonists were not running a society based on slavery, as was the South."

Duffy then wrote:

"Actually, slavery was legal in the colonies, but not in England (for the very little it was worth.) The North did not go to war to end slavery. That was belated and done primarily for political reasons. It has since has been used as a justification for the war and a way for Northerners to consider themselves morally superior to Southerners."

Part of the problem for mid-19th C Americans was that there was no regional consensus on slavery. "Pro-South" agitation during the Civil War was a serious problem in the northern states. In the 1850s, full-scale wars erupted on the frontier between the two sides of the slavery question. This is where John Brown first made his mark -- attacking and killing pro-slavery Southerners who had moved into the Kansas Territory.

In 1859, Oregon was made a state -- even though as a practical matter, it was a thousand miles from the rest of the country. It came in as a "free" state, part of the Missouri Compromise, if I remember right -- but anyway, the purpose of bringing this outpost into statehood was to balance free vs slave states. But, at the same time, in a development typical of that period, free blacks were by Oregon state law forbidden to move there.

The "slavery question" certainly had a significant impact on the choices made by both sides that eventually led to war. The impetus to war was fueled in a major part by the tensions between pro-slavery forces and the anti-slavery sentiments flamed up by the abolitionists. These tensions had their roots in the still-strong regionalism of the day; but the questions about slaves and slavery were real.

Slavery was woven into the fabric of the society in ways that could not be appreciated. The New England states became wealthy trading in rum -- rum made from molasses that came from slave plantations in the Indies. New Englanders were also foremost among the traders in slaves; New England shippers made fortunes shipping plantation cotton to England; while New England textile manufacturers likewise became rich weaving plantation cotton. About half of the attendees at the Constitutional Convention were slaveowners.

No one was innocent.

mp

Then I wrote:

To Trollope-L

January 7, 1998

R: Short Story: "The Two Generals"

In response to Duffy, Bart has brought up an important aspect of this story: it was written to be a Christmas story. Thus Bart:

"Your last sentence about Northerners considering themselves morally superior to Southerners gets us back to the point, though, that Trollope did not take a strong enough stand in this story. But, for a 'Christmas' story, or as unbiased war reporting, that may be an unrealistic expectation."

John Hopfner's original objecton was precisely the same as that referred to here: "Trollope did not take a strong enough stand in this story." But remember it's a Christmas story and how Trollope struggled over these. As he says:

"While I was writing The Way We Live Now, I was called upon by the proprietors of the Graphic for a Christmas story. I feel, with regard to literature, somewhat as I suppose an upholsterer and undertaker feels when he is called upon to supply a funeral."

One of the things that happens in many of Trollope's Christmas stories is he struggles with what is to him an unpalatable request. He is "required" to "instill" others with some abiding "religious feeling," and he names "charity." Why did he do it? It was expected of him as an important figure on the scene; he felt he ought to. So he would sit down and write out of what I believe is an essentially disillusioned and realistic outlook some story of real life. I think he even unconsciously fought himself because several of his Christmas stories have very unChristmasy matter: Catherine Carmichael is a woman sold to a man in Australia; it is hinted he beats her and forces sex on her; "The Telegraph Girl" is about a girl who works very hard for very little money and how another girl exploits her badly; and here is a story of how only by thousands of people slaughtering one another could one group force the other group to give up their slaves--who provided for their owners the patina or reality (depending on how many slaves and land one had and where it was) of an aristocratic way of life.

So what we have here is material that does not lend itself to Christmas. What does Trollope do? He has a bleak wintry landscape--this reminds me of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where the poet makes a similarly ambiguous use of the Christmas landscape. He has the one brother not shoot the other, and for his "sacrifice" lose his leg. He has the girl who was brought up in their home and bound to marry one of them marry the one-legged man and assures us she loved him all the more deeply. Bah humbug, said John Hopfner. So too says Trollope: "I feel the humbug implied by the nature of the order."

None of the above is to say Trollope felt about slavery the way I hope all of us now, some people then, and I assume all black Americans have always felt about it.

But we should not forget the generic limitations and demands that make for a peculiar story.

Ellen Moody

From: BCKol
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998
To: trollope-l@teleport.com
Subject: Short Story: "The Two Generals"

John Mize writes:

"I personally found Trollope's seemingly mild dislike of slavery a little hard to take, because I am disgusted with the modern day defenders of the Confederacy active in the South today. I hear all the time that slavery wasn't as bad as the abolitionists claimed, and that if the North had left the South alone, the South would have abolished slavery soon enough."

I've heard this kind of thing, too. It was actually taught in the schools, even in the North, as recently as the 60s and 70s. Another thing one hears is that the system of slavery was actually an economic burden on the South. There is no historical evidence for this. The economy of the South was booming in the years leading up the war, because of the cheap labor supplied by slaves.

The justification used for slavery in the U. S. was that African people were inferior. They were considered to be less than human. I think that this justification arose because the people who settled in the U. S. considered themselves Christians, and they knew that slavery was wrong. In order to justify a system that became economically crucial, they had to rationalize that the people they enslaved were subhuman, and actually better off as slaves. This attitude persists to this day, particularly in the southern part of the U. S. There is a chapter on this in Gone with the Wind, in which the narrator steps forward and discusses, in great detail, why African people are inferior and were better off as slaves. It is shocking to come across this chapter in a book written in the early part of the 20th century, and to know that people still cling to this belief even in the 1990s.

Brooke Kolosna

From: BCKol
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998
To: trollope-l@teleport.com
Subject: Short Stories: "The Two Generals"

Duffy writes:

"The North did not go to war to end slavery. That was belated and done primarily for political reasons. It has since has been used as a justification for the war and a way for Northerners to consider themselves morally superior to Southerners."

You have this turned around, I'm afraid. The South went to war to protect the system of slavery, which had become essential to their economy.

A lot of non-slave-holding small farmers in the south got dragged into this, against their inclination and to their ruin. After all this time, I don't think that there is a question of moral superiority. Did the northern politicians and policy-makers oppose slavery out of a sense of morality? For the most part, absolutely not. There were abolitionists on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. The attitude that African slaves were inferior to other humans was also pervasive on both sides. One hundred and fifty years later, we can look back and say, gosh, that was a really horrible system (which quite a number of people, including slave-holders, were observing at the time).

Brooke

From: hansenb@frb.gov
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998
Subject: Short Story: "The Two Generals" To: trollope-l@teleport.com

Duffy, I thought I carefully worded my post, with the phrase, 'a society based on slavery.' I did not say anything about legality or whether there were slaves in Northern states. You say, 'The North did not go to war to end slavery.' No, but didn't they go to war to keep the Union, which had been broken by the South over slavery? I ask that sincerely as a question.

Your last sentence about Northerners considering themselves morally superior to Southerners gets us back to the point, though, that Trollope did not take a strong enough stand in this story. But, for a 'Christmas' story, or as unbiased war reporting, that may be an unrealistic expectation.

Regards, Bart
hansenb@frb.gov

From Duffy Pratt:

On the story, I think it is worthwhile to compare slavery to the rights of Irish tenant farmers. As much as other people want to make these things black and white, I think it's really degrees of gray. Also, Trollope excels at having good people defend bad institutions, and bad people be on the side of the good. (I'm thinking of many of his aristocrats and conservative politicians on the one hand, and his annoying feminists and tailors on the other.)

Yes. But why was keeping the Union so important? Seward wanted to spread the Union to the entire continent, including Canada, Mexico, the Carribean. Empire was a driving idea at the time. The U.S. idea of empire was manifest destiny, and secession was a severe threat to that ideal. So did the North go to war because it wanted to guarantee the rights of people that were almost universally regarded as inferior? Remember, Lincoln wanted to ship all the blacks out of the country, if feasible. Or was it for some other less noble reason, like those that drive most wars?

Regards
Duffy

In December 2000 we had our second discussion. This time no one was upset by Trollope's attitude towards slavery in the story nor by there not being anyone who was offended -- though Judy Geater talked sensitively and intelligently about the slavery issue. I put down this much milder discussion to the age of the list, the real consensus for courtesy that had developed over the next two years (after a couple of bad fights) and the reality that it seems that most of the active participants on Trollope-l nowadays are British rather than American and they just don't get as excited about the US Civil war or racial discimination in the US today. It doesn't affect them now. The issue is still a burning one in the US because of racial discrimination, racial prejudice, and the real differences in culture between the Northeast/Northmidwest and Southern United States. I suggest states like Washington and Oregon (the second cited by Mike Powe) are in culture aligned with the Northeast when it comes to racial prejudice; so too California.

I began it with a revision and expansion of my original posting in December 1997:

Re: "The Two Generals": A Story about the US Civil War

According to Sutherland, "The Two Generals" was written around the first week of November 1863; it was printed in Good Words December 1863, and then again in Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories in 1867. Sutherland quotes Trollope's North America: "Kentucky is one of those border states which has found it almost impossible to secede, and almost equally impossible to remain in the union." He says "Julian Thompson suggests that 'The germ of the story may have been Trollope's meeting at Washington [in 1862] with Senator John Crittenden [whose] two sons fought on opposite sides in the American Civil War.' Finally Sutherland reminds us that Trollope could have remembered Thackeray's The Virginians (1859) "which has to brothers fighting on oposite sides in the American revolutionary war."

The story portrays the fight over slavery as a fight over property and wealth. Frank, the brother who inherits the Kentucky farm wants to keep his slaves, for without them his avenue to wealth is non-existent; he therefore is gung-ho for states' rights and argues "Kentucky" as his country. Tom, he younger brother who does not inherit his father's estate, but goes to West Point and makes the Federal army his career argues the US is his country, and seems to regard slavery as a moot point or unimportant, not the central issue. It's clear that disinterest is a myth; so too the "rationalizations" that the characters turn into moral truths.

Since Trollope was himself against slavery at least intellectually from a general humane standpoint and economically, it's interesting that he does not favor the abolitionist brother; indeed he hardly bothers to differentiate between the two. It's hard to keep them apart as personalities. We know Frank is a slave-owning gentleman former and Tom a solider. That's it. We know they had different educations, careers, and therefore economic interests. We see Ada prefers Frank, but her choice is not really explained.

Here's my inference: Trollope does not believe people really act out of idealistic beliefs. The portrait of the old man is a portrait of someone who had succeeded because he knows how the political world works, and that is a matter of personalities over time, and respect gained through some primitive kinds of personality traits, not through ideals.

Another larger perspective on Trollope's story must come from his being an Englishman. He is not involved in the "sin" of slavery. He calls it a terrible crime, but he sees it from the outside. The in-the-bone poison, some disease running through one's blood and guilt over it is just not in Trollope . He's an outsider. It is remarkable that he took an anti-slavery posture. That was not popular in England whose manufacturers lost money and whose government was monarchical. It's astonishting that an Englishman of the 1860's can say categorically the raison d'etre of this war was slavery when for decades after the war was over respectable US historians denied this over and over again. But maybe Trollope is willing to admit this -- that thousands of people died terrible deaths, torturous because of the bloody ferocity of a battlefield with the weapons they had without any medicine to counter the effect of these -- because he did not own slaves, and did not live among people who did, did not himself get to know slaves or ex-slaves.

What is the purpose and moral of this story? It is to depict a horrific war, to bring home to us the terrible cost of civil war. Trollope focuses in on precisely that state and a family in it where brothers ended up on opposing sides. The most effective sentences in the piece bring us back to the blood-stained corpse ridden fields. These are not Flanders, nor Ipres, but they get pretty close. The American civil war may be said to have been the first modern war and Trollope is registering a civilized man's response to this horror. This is what human beings can do to one another. It's not that Tom is in the wrong, it's that something is wrong with this culture, this nation, and it is in an upheaval to throw the canker, the blight, the poison out. Tom doesn't count. He's just a cipher.

But being Trollope, our author shows us that in intimate encounters people's humanity will win out. As abstractions, we are willing to rain bombs on one another; but one man from one side meets another from the other in a ditch, face-to-face, and one does not feel the immediate need to kill the other out of a desperate fear for his life, and they will recognize their identity with one another. He also needed a story so he went back to the old romance motif (found in Arthurian legends for example) of a Balan story -- the unexpected meeting of brothers in battle. He combines this with his own hopefulness, and we get the one brother forgiving the other (what matter what is their names) and the girl loving the man without his leg, staying with him although life will now be very hard.

And it's a Christmas piece, so the events happen Christmas time and he injects Christian charity and the bleak landscape of winter over the whole.

For me the story mostly worked. I found the characterization of both brothers too thin, but I thought the point was two figures caught in a vast terrible conflagration. The concluding lines of the story are very powerful:

"And they were married in May, though the din of war was going on around them on every side. And from that time to this the din of war is still going on, and they are in the thick of it. The carnage of their battles, and the hatreds of their civil contests, are terrible to us when we think of them; but may it not be that the beneficent power of Heaven, wheich they acknowledge as we do, is thus cleansing their land from that stain of slavery, to abolish which no human power seemed to be sufficient"

Re: "The Two Generals" as a Christmas Story

Paradoxically this is a typical Christmas story for Trollope: most of them don't present us with the furniture of Christmas. Rather they simply occur in the winter or figure forth some emotional charity or generosity traditionally associated with the seasonal holiday. "The Telegraph Girl" and "Catherine Carmichael are Christmas stories: the ethics of the first are appropriate; the season of the second.

Trollope disliked the false sentimentality of Christmas -- especially as it had come to be commercialised in his life. His roots hark back to the early 19th century: his mother was born in 1779, and Christmas for him remained attached to the church; it meant going there, having a good dinner, perhaps a few games, perhaps sometimes festive, and walking in the landscape. "Not If I Know It" captures how Trollope liked to spend Christmas ideally, the feeling he thought people who were lucky might feel. In his Autobiography he writes:

"While I was writing The Way We Live Now, I was called upon by the proprietors of the Graphic for a Christmas story. I feel, with regard to literature, somewhat as I suppose an upholsterer and undertaker feels when he is called upon to supply a funeral."

One of the things that happens in many of Trollope's Christmas stories is he struggles with what is to him an unpalatable request. He is required to instill others with some abiding religious feeling, and he names "charity." Why did he do it? It was expected of him as an important figure on the scene; he felt he ought to. He made money that way. So he would sit down and write out of what I believe is an essentially disillusioned and realistic outlook some story of real life. I think he even unconsciously fought himself because several of his Christmas stories are about hard difficulties: civil war, a strike, in "Catherine Carmichael" a woman is sold to a man in Australia who beats her and forces sex on her; "The Telegraph Girl" is about a girl who works very hard for very little money and how another girl exploits her badly; "Not If I Know It" is about a family squabbling over borrowing money. He did write one marvelous Christmas story about Christmas: "Christmas at Thompson Hall" and it's about how hard it was to get to the dinner, a comic kind of trauma the night before.

Trollope's Christmas stories recall the Christmas material of some medieval poems, e.g., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where the poet makes a similarly ambiguous use of the Christmas landscape. In "The Two General" one brother does not shoot the other, and for his "sacrifice" loses his leg. The lady of the story marries this one-legged man and assures us she loves him all the more deeply. There is the cyclical feel. After all Christmas is the Winter Solstice. Trollope was by temperament a strong sceptic. I cannot imagine him ever writing a ghost story.

Ellen Moody

To which Angela Richardson replied:

Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2001
Reply: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] "The Two Generals"

I enjoyed reading this short story by Trollope on the civil war and agree with Ellen that it is hardly a Christmas story, though shaped to fit his assignment. In response to the thought that as an Englishman Trollope was outside of the slavery issue, I agree, he writes in that way, but he was wrong to feel so.

Wealth was made out of slavery here too. The great ports of Bristol and Liverpool depended upon the slave trade. I was at the Tate yesterday and remembered that it was founded by wealth from the sugar trade, a trade made possible by slaves.

Angela

Then Judy Geater:

Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001
Reply: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] "The Two Generals"

Hello all

Angela wrote

"I enjoyed reading this short story by Trollope on the civil war and agree with Ellen that it is hardly a Christmas story, though shaped to fit his assignment. In response to the thought that as an Englishman Trollope was outside of the slavery issue, I agree, he writes in that way, but he was wrong to feel so. Wealth was made out of slavery here too. The great ports of Bristol and Liverpool depended upon the slave trade. I was at the Tate yesterday and remembered that it was founded by wealth from the sugar trade, a trade made possible by slaves."

Good point! In the powerful closing paragraph, Trollope speaks of America needing to be cleansed from the "stain of slavery" - but, looking back, we can see that at this period Britain was indeed "stained" by the same trade, as you say, and also by exploitation of people in other parts of the British Empire.

I didn't find the story very Christmassy either, but it is interesting to see that Trollope took quite a strong religious tone in this tale, which, like "The Widow's Mite", he wrote for the publication Good Words. John Sutherland says in his introduction to Early Short Stories:

"Trollope would seem to have caught perfectly the tone of religious earnestness which 'Good Words' required to make its fictional offerings palatable. (He would never have ended a short story for 'Cornhill' or the 'London Review' with an invocation to the Almighty.)"

Ellen mentioned that the two brothers were partly based on the Crittenden family - here's a little more information on this from the "Penguin Companion to Trollope" by Richard Mullen and James Munson:

"The story is set in Kentucky, which Trollope visited in 1862, and is based on Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky who tried to effect a compromise to avoid war. His two sons each rose to the rank of Major General, George in the Confederate and Thomas in the Union Army. Trollope met Senator Crittenden in Washington, but thought his compromise, while 'honourable', was 'moonshine'. "

He says the actual details of the battles have nothing to do with the Crittendens, and adds: "Tom, who gains glory in the Confederate Army, seems to be patterned on Jeb Stuart and his daring cavalry raids."

When I first read the story, I found myself wondering if the heroine, Ada, would be torn between her feelings for the two brothers, but, in fact, although Trollope sets up a love triangle with them both wanting to marry her, she never has any doubts and stays true to the same brother, Tom, throughout.

Thinking about this, I realised that I was also expecting Mary in Is He Popenjoy? to be torn between feelings for George and Jack - but in fact she is never seriously tempted to be unfaithful to her husband. It seems as if Trollope's heroes can fall in love more than once - Phineas Finn moves smoothly from one flirtation to the next - but usually his heroines can love only once, in the novels and short stories I've read so far, anyway!

I can't think of many central women characters who are seriously torn between two lovers - though I suppose at the start of the Palliser novels there's Glencora's love for Burgo Fitzgerald, which threatens her proposed marriage to Plantagenet Palliser. Any other suggestions, anyone?

Bye for now
Judy Geater

The reader needs to know the list had just finished reading Is He Popenjoy? at this time.

RE: 'The Two Generals': Love, Race Discrimination, Regional Conflicts, & Economic Exploitation

It is true the best known of the female and male characters involved in love triangles in Trollope present the sympathetic characters as unable to love a second person. This goes for both males and females: a Lily cannot switch to Johnny, so Johnny cannot forget Lily. When the individual is coerced into giving up an intense love and married off to someone else (usually for aggrandizing the family), he or she is usually presented as diminished and dissatisfied for life, discontented. Lady Glen is an obvious candidate, but I would also place Lady George Germaine, now Marchioness of Brotherton there too.

There is a strong paradigm going on in Is He Popenjoy?, one which goes back to the first novels. I recently read Madame de LaFayette's La Princesse de Clèves and there we find a heroine coerced into marrying for aggrandizement a man for whom she feels very little and knows less. Over the course of the novel she comes to accept and even respect him, but she cannot love. In Is He Popenjoy? the closing scenes between Lord George and his wife show sexual satisfaction (as we find Lady Glen and Plantagenet eventually knew), but there are the continual twinges of incompatibility, of slight and not-so-slight needling on Mary's part and dense turning away on George's. It's not that Mary is cold, but that she has been deterred, thwarted in the interests of gaining title and money. The plot paradigm of the single love is useful for figuring forth what individuals give up to become part of a conformist society, to find safety in it.

However, Trollope also presents women and men who get over it. He is a realist and sceptic. These types include: the Irish heroine in Castle Richmond who switches from an intense enthrallment from a ne-er-do-well to genuine love for the prudent Anglo- Protestant hero; it's beautifully and effectively done. (This novel deserves to be better known; there was a suggestion to read it with The Kellys and O'Kellys before embarking on a Palliser marathon.) There is Clara Amedroz in The Belton Estate who hesitates between an intense enthrallment (sexual) for a man with whom she is intellectually and morally incompatible and her attraction to Will Belton. The second man wins her. There is, famously, Alice Vavasour, who did love George, and all novel long hesitates between him and the worthy John Grey. Phineas Finn is notoriously fickle. An intense situation emerges in The Vicar of Bullhampton when one of the heroines genuinely hesitates between two heroes, and almost takes the one she thought, or half-thought she wanted at first -- and the half-thought was genuine. Lady Anna is deeply drawn to the young Lord Lovel and we are given to understand would have learned to love him deeply (in the manner of Marianne Dashwood for Brandon) had she married him instead of her tailor. Paul Montague did love Mrs Hurtle and switches to the pallid Henrietta. The Prime Minister gives us Emily Wharton first loving Lopez (she did) and then turning to Arthur Fletcher. Then there are the good man: Lord Silverbridge in The Duke's Children did think or really love Mabel Grex; he moves to the younger Isabel; so too Frank moves from Mabel to Mary Palliser. He too once loved Mabel and in a way has depths of apprehension and sophistication in common with her he will never have with Mary who is our innocent chaste heroine.

And so it goes.

I leave out all the unsympathetic characters who switch back and forth -- Trollope denies them the capacity for intense love, but they do get engaged, married, separate and then find another: Lizzie Eustace, many males in the novels (Sir George Hotspur).

It's a myth that Trollope presents intense loyalty as a given. What he presents are the permutations of emotions driven by the pressure of social needs and coercion, of time and change, of temptation for material aggrandizement, and of weakness in the face of sexual allurement.

The fact that in 'The Two Generals' Ada never shifts is part of the one-dimensional nature of the characters in this story. It is written as a parable. Trollope is not interested in the characters as individuals but as standing for forces and attitudes which led to the horrors of the civil war.

In response to Angela and Judy on the complicity and real guilt of Britons over slavery, you are both quite right. The conditions of slaves in Bristol and Liverpool were revolting and well known. The first time we read this story on Trollope-l a couple of Americans protested Trollope's apparently neutral or unemotional brand of abolitionism.

I hope these people won't mind if I reprint a couple of these dissenting posts as they made good points:

At this point I reprinted John Hopfner's, Duffy Pratt's, Bart Hansen's, Brooke Kolosna's and Mike Powe's postings on "The Two Generals" from three years before. I then went on to comment myself:

Duffy Pratt also argued that the war was not primarily fought to keep the slaves, but for political reasons. It was about who would have power within the oligarchy (which have we have recently seen in still in power in local states behind the screens of 'democracy', 'popular elections', and supposedly principled supreme court justices. I apologise because I can't find his posting which was interesting.

'The Two Generals' goes to the heart of some real economic problems that are with us today still. Shall one class of people be allowed to exploit the labour of another who are relatively powerless against them?

We should also remember that there has been a suggestion we should read at least one of the travel books before the Pallisers. As a group we might just most enjoy Trollope's North America written as a journey through the US at the time of the civil war and it's never far from Trollope's thoughts.

Ellen Moody

Judy again talked about sticking to one love all your life and gave very good examples of novels which show how difficult it can be for someone to switch sexual and emotional allegiance (a posting I unfortunately cannot find), to which I replied:

Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2001
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] The Ur-Story in Trollope & 'The Two Generals'

In response to Judy Geater,

Oh feelings can change enormously and can become opposite from what they originally were. Think of how people behave during divorces. In the case of Alice Vavasour, she was erotically entangled with her 'wild' man: she began to see how dangerous he was when engaged to him, and was finally put off by his having an affair with another woman. There are also ominous hints about how she responded to his advances once they were engaged. She is drawn to him again precisely because he is still 'wild', but now the 'wildness' presents itself to her in its worldly guise as ambition, challenge.

Trollope does not often show us characters changing over the long haul of a life; when his characters reappear they tend to be somewhat older but his notions of decorum and how to build a character consistently keep them 'in character', consistent. Indeed that is part of why we delight in them. We like the idea that people stay the same. He also is precluded from showing us divorce. His span of attention to sexual interaction and courtship is most often confined to a few short years before marriage, and then he defends the institution afterwards by immediately presenting the woman as 'satisfied'. Within a few sentences Alice Vavasour vanishes into Mrs Grey. It is a shame that he is so confined, but these are the givens of the 19th century bourgeois novel in England and the US.

Yet he does reasonably often show us characters torn between two people and vacillating. The final decision is often driven by coercion from outside forces, and the triangle becomes most interesting when we are made to see what has been lost in the decision as well as what has been gained. Victoria Glendinning is very good on these triangles in Trollope, and she connects them to Trollope's own resignation in his marriage which is consciously depicted (albeit comically) in his very late books in the depiction of Mr and Mrs Neverbend and Mr Whittlestaff, Mrs Baggett and Mary Lawrie. Glendinning prefers to try to tease out the connections between Trollope as a young man deciding to and then marrying and books like The Claverings (Harry Clavering vacillating between Florence Burden -- a burden -- and Lady Julia); it's safer. She calls this perpetually repeating triangle the ur-story. I would only differ from her in the insistence she has on something concrete, or concrete analogies in Trollope's life; it's rather that he is exploring the intangible within him (and us) metaphorically and relating it to the choices society pushes us into.

I read 'The Two Generals' as a parable; that was my response to John Hopfner at the time. Trollope doesn't mean us to take these characters as three-dimensional and rounded. Rather they stand for the entangled internecine forces of civil war. Trollope is intent on how a civil war twists and drives people; how they chose sides based on their economic interests and social roles; and how these are criss-crossed by subjective emotions rooted in childhood and Eros (Trollope often sees love as irrational).

Cheers to all,
Ellen Moody

Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [trollope-l] 'The Two Generals'

Hello all

Ellen, thanks so much for posting part of a former discussion on "The Two Generals".

I found it fascinating and especially enjoyed John Hopfner's "grumpy" post - I thought everybody made very good points and all these comments have really made me think more about the story. I have to say that I don't really feel it is as successful as "The Widow's Mite" - but it is still interesting. I take the points made by a couple of people that in real life Ada would naturally gravitate more towards Frank, who shares her deepest beliefs and opposition to slavery, rather than towards Tom.

But there is a feeling that once she has made her choice, she has made it - and this rings true in a way, to me anyway.

I have been pondering further over your detailed discussion of love triangles in Trollope. Clearly, from some of the characters you talk about, I was wrong to think that his "good" women are never really torn between two rivals. It seems as if some characters, like Lily, stick in the mind more and tempt me to generalise, but, as you suggest, there are others who make compromises and settle for a second-best love.

I had thought of Alice Vavasour but had the feeling when reading Can You Forgive Her? that she is never really tempted by George - more by the idea of her own nobility in giving up John Gray. However, since she did love George in the past, her feelings are probably more complicated. Somehow I found it hard to believe in her past love for George because of the way she is so physically repulsed by him in the book's present. I wonder if feelings ever change to quite that extent.

Trollope's North America sounds an interesting suggestion to me. I've just been reading Dickens's "American Notes" on another list, and am hoping to read Fanny Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans in the next few weeks, so it would be interesting to see how Anthony Trollope's views compare with those of his mother!

Bye for now
Judy Geater

Re: 'Christmas Bells' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This poem by Longfellow is often printed with the last four stanzas left off; that, only the first three are printed as if they are the whole of it. The last four stanzas, though, are where the strength of the poem resides. The poem as a whole also explains why Trollope's 'Two Generals' is a Christmas story, or why it would have been perceived as one by 19th century readers. This poem and 'The Two Generals' show a sombre appreciation of the meaning of Christmas. It was written in 1864.

'Christmas Bells' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

Till, ringing, singing, on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the soun
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
'There is no peace on earth', I said;
'For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep;
'God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!

Cheers from Ellen


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