The Eustace Diamonds (4 page)

When she was alone she stood before her glass looking at herself, and then she burst into tears. Never before had she been thus polluted. The embrace had disgusted her. It made her odious to herself.

(
Chapter 42
)

But whatever her feelings there is no way out. Trollope refuses to sentimentalize or to turn the episode into a tract against Victorian marriage conventions. For Lucinda too is ‘given entirely to evil things… Though from day to day and hour to hour she would openly declare her hatred of the things around her – yet she went on. Since she had entered upon life she had known nothing but falsehood and scheming wickedness; – and, though she rebelled against the consequences, she had not rebelled against the wickedness' (
Chapter 69
). And for her aunt it is the same. The
social
aspect of her marriage is all that matters. What occurs in the privacy of the bedroom is of no account. She does wonder with fear what she would do if ‘some terrible tragedy should take place between the bride and bridegroom'. But she puts away the thought by reminding herself that marriage has always been the same:

The horror which the bride expressed was, as Mrs Carbuncle well knew, no mock feeling, no pretence at antipathy. She tried to think of it, and to realize what might in truth be the girl's action and ultimate fate when she should find herself in the power of this man whom she so hated. But had not other girls done the same thing and lived through it all, and become fat, indifferent, and fond of the world? It is only the first step that signifies.

(
Chapter 69
)

The last sentence is one of the triumphs of Trollope's subdued style in this novel. Behind it is full recognition of the demands of social forms and of individual integrity, an understanding of the
importance of both, and horror at the torture such conflicting demands can inflict.

Stress on the quality of his characterization, however, must not suggest that Trollope was exclusively a psychological novelist or that the unity of his novels rests only in the interest created in the characters. This used to be the received opinion on Trollope and did his reputation much harm. For Trollope was deeply concerned by the way men behave in society, by the codes of conduct they erect and then defy, and in his novels he used every means to throw into relief those aspects of society. The plot, the characters, the diction, even physical objects are all counterpointed for a powerfully united effect.

Consider the diamonds themselves. As the story develops the diamonds and the abstracted notion of the diamonds move in importance from elements in plot engineering to something near symbol. In the first four chapters we are shown Lizzie inheriting her father's ‘wickedness' as self-adorning gifts:

[H]is daughter, when she was little more than a child, went about everywhere with jewels on her fingers, and red gems hanging round her neck, and yellow gems pendent from her ears, and white gems shining in her black hair.

(
Chapter 1
)

This leads to the embarrassing involvement with Harter and Benjamin when, after the Admiral's death, it is discovered that the jewels are not paid for. Lizzie, through her weakness and vanity (she will not give up the gems), is in pawn to the ‘Jew jeweller', which foreshadows her later ‘possession' by Emilius. The debt motivates her marriage to the vicious, dying Sir Florian. From this point spreads out the web of lies which corrode Lizzie's personality and taint all her human relationships. After Florian's death the diamonds become the centre and expression of her false, empty personality with its glamorous ‘poetic' exterior. They shed their dubious lustre over the social ‘monde', which admires Lizzie's ‘cleverness', and its predatory ‘demimonde' exemplified in the aptly named Mrs Carbuncle. And as an illustration of it all we are reminded again and again that Lizzie's favourite poem is Byron's
The Corsair
, a glorification of the pirate who steals not ‘property' but ‘booty'.

In Lizzie's materialistic universe the diamonds substitute for human relationships and responsibilities. She is ‘heartless' (‘I don't believe you've got a heart,' says Lucy in
Chapter 64
) for her emotions are engaged to the point of obsession elsewhere. This perversion of Lizzie's values is shown in two scenes whose similarity serves to differentiate the heroines and moves us to bring the necessary verdicts. At the end of the novel Lucy has ‘lost' Frank, when suddenly he comes to see her at the Fawn household. Her reaction is immediate: ‘Lucy was as white as marble, and felt such a sudden shock at her heart, that she could not speak' (
Chapter 77
). This echoes one of the only spontaneous ‘unacted' responses Lizzie ever makes, when she returns from the opera to find the jewels really stolen: ‘Lizzie's face was white as a sheet… With a horrid spasm across her heart, which seemed ready to kill her, so sharp was the pain, Lizzie recovered the use of her legs' (
Chapter 52
). Nowhere else is it suggested that she has a heart any more than she has maternal feelings for young Florian. ‘In his heart he knew' is a favourite formula which Trollope uses in this novel for moments when characters feel secret remorse or a consciousness of the wrong they are doing. It is never applied to Lizzie. At times this inadequacy is disastrous for her; it means that unlike characters with real moral base or insight she does not ‘know' intuitively about the genuineness of other people. She does not know that Emilius is not a gentleman –‘she actually did not know she was lying' (
Chapter 21
). But this heartlessness also gives her a quality of innocence. The ambivalence we feel towards Lizzie is not created by the inverted value words which society uses when it speaks of her (‘Wonderful stories were told of Lizzie's courage, energy, and resolution' (
Chapter 49
) but by this quality of child-like innocence. It brings out the ‘tenderness' in Major Mackintosh, or even in the ‘Corsair' Lord George, who when he took his last leave of her ‘took her hand in one of his; patted her on the head with the other, as though she had been a child, and then he left her' (
Chapter 75
).

That the diamonds pervert, or demonstrate the perversion of ideal human values into worldly ones, is emphasized on a purely verbal level. When Lizzie thinks of her ‘treasure' she thinks of the diamonds. Lucy's treasure, by contrast, is the proposal letter which
Frank has sent her. Both enjoy their treasure in secret: ‘Thereupon Lucy rose from her seat, and retired with her treasure into the bookroom' (
Chapter 15
). For Frank the ‘prize' is Lizzie, but the ‘treasure' is Lucy: ‘He had recognized the treasure, and had greatly desired to possess it' (
Chapter 18
). Trollope's description suggests that Lucy has ‘diamonds' much more valuable than Lizzie's, and that these are associated with human sympathies and not hard selfishness, when he remarks the ‘peculiar, watery brightness of her eyes — in the corners of which it would always seem that a diamond of a tear was lurking' (
Chapter 3
). But it is also more durable than Lizzie's this human diamond, for it is a ‘bright liquid diamond that never fell' (
Chapter 19
). Finally, in one of the great normative comments which Trollope allows himself in the last third of the book, this transfer is completed:

You may knock about a diamond, and not even scratch it; whereas paste in rough usage betrays itself. Lizzie, with all her self-assuring protestations, knew that she was paste, and knew that Lucy was real stone.

(
Chapter 65
)

The necklace is also, however, the Eustace diamonds. Whether or not it is an heirloom, it is an emblem of an aristocratic family and as such becomes the focus in this novel of Trollope's view on class structure, social change, the privileged aristocracy and the working middle class. It is here that Trollope relies heavily on Thackeray, whom he admired of all novelists. Gordon Ray has convincingly argued, in his biography of the other novelist, that what Thackeray did through his novels was to take the old aristocratic ideal of conduct and scale it down socially for a middle-class public, whilst retaining its essentially ‘noble' ethic. The result in his most Thackerayan work,
Philip
(1862), is the definition by fiction of a bourgeois chivalry. It is this ideal that we find in Trollope. The social philosophy is not bigoted or unthinkingly derivative. As expressed in
Ralph the Heir
it can accommodate change but maintains that too sudden a change results in a breakdown of the institutions and the ideology that support society:

The country gentleman of 200 years ago farmed the land he held. As years have rolled on, the strong have swallowed the weak — one strong man having swallowed up a dozen weak men. And so the squire has been made.
Then a strong squire becomes a baronet and a lord, till he lords it a little too much and a Manchester warehouse-man buys him out. The strength of the country probably lies in the fact that the change is ever being made, but is never made suddenly.

(
Chapter 49
)

But the vision of
The Eustace Diamonds
seems to belie the calm common-sense optimism of this exposition. In its world the aristocrats, the Eustaces, are doomed: ‘Consumption had swept a hecatomb of victims from the family' (
Chapter 1
). Sir Griffin Tewett has a vigour they lack but none of their grand quality, he is a ‘bear' and a ‘lout'. The senior aristocrat, the Duke of Omnium, is a ‘wornout old debauchee, with one foot in the grave' (
Chapter 61
). And beneath is a social hierarchy undermined by the weakness of its own members, by the shallowness of its values and the persistence of its invaders, the pinchbeck aristocrats, nouveaux-riches, shady European adventurers, Jewish financiers.

In spite of the prevailing comedy it is a sombre vision – but there can be no doubt that it represented Trollope's growing feeling about English society. In
An Autobiography
he describes his feeling in the 1870s that ‘a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable' (
Chapter 20
). The direct result of this feeling was, of course,
The Way We Live Now
, but
The Eustace Diamonds
partakes as well of this jaundiced outlook. There dishonesty is shown for what it is through Trollope's revelation of what a sham words as ‘value', ‘truth', ‘honesty' have now become. Value derives not from a set of principles by which to judge human behaviour but from the £10,000 the necklace is worth on the open market or the cash Lizzie represents to the fortune hunter. ‘Truth' no longer carries a bold clear meaning. Trollope remarks of lawyers in
Orley Farm
that not one of them ‘gave to the course of justice the credit that it would ascertain the truth, and not one of [them] wished that the truth should be ascertained'. And in
The Eustace Diamonds
the feeling lingers: ‘Evil-doing will be spoken of with bated breath and soft words even by policemen, when the evildoer comes in a carriage, and with a title' (
Chapter 74
). The law
itself sees nothing right. The clear distinction between theft and rightful ownership is muddled by legal quibbles over whether the diamonds are correctly ‘heirlooms' or ‘paraphernalia'. Even the plain word ‘lie' has little currency. The world sees Lizzie's lies as ‘cleverness'. She calls them ‘secrets' and not until late in the novel does she have to face the terrible word ‘perjury' and the unavoidable question – did she lie? Trollope himself variously calls her lies ‘shams', ‘fictions', ‘schemes' and ‘wiles' — but this is largely mimicry of her own inept moral terminology. To him they are simply lies. It is this honesty, this clarity of vision that places Trollope with the greatest social novelists of the nineteenth century, with Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot. What
The Times
said of
The Way We Live Now
is true of
The Eustace Diamonds
, published only three years earlier: ‘It should make us look into our own lives and habits of thought, and see how ugly and mean and sordid they appear, when Truth, the policeman, turns his dark lantern suddenly upon them, and finds such a pen as Mr Trollope's to write a report of what it sees.'

STEPHEN GILL
JOHN SUTHERLAND

Postscript:

Since 1969, when the preceding introduction was written, Trollope's critical standing and popularity have undergone momentous changes. Every one of his forty-seven novels and all his voluminous shorter fiction have been returned to print – a posthumous honour accorded to no other Victorian novelist than Dickens. The entire Barsetshire and Palliser series have been televised for audiences of millions in Britain and America. Trollope, it is fair to say, no longer needs advocacy from critics; the readers and viewers have spoken. The editors have not substantially rewritten this introduction, although it has been trimmed down and the defensive, proselytizing tone called for in the pre-Trollope-revival era (‘Trollope is as great as Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, etc.') has been moderated.

There remain, however often one reads or writes about it, some puzzling loose ends and enigmas in
The Eustace Diamonds.
It was written between 1869 and 1870: but in which year(s) is the action set? Fortunately, Trollope's famously methodical habits provide an answer. It was his practice (among his other working timetables) to keep an actual calendar from those he had handy in his study to make sure his narrative chronology ran straight. On at least five occasions in
The Eustace Diamonds
correlations of day of the week and month of the year (i.e. ‘Monday, June 5') confirm that Trollope was consistently referring to 1865 and 1866 calendars for the two years that the novel's main action covers.