"Marriage"

All marriages are spirited but not as dynamic as the world in which we live. Thank God. It is necessary from time to time to retreat from the day’s news and to reflect on what has brought happiness, and to let humor and lightness have their play. In my case, what has brought happiness (and smiles) has been the family Caroline and I raised, and the families being raised by our three children. 

 

The photo was taken after our wedding ceremony and on the way to the reception.

 

...and, by the way, don’t forget that Daylight Savings starts tomorrow. Get to bed early!

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Marriage”

March 7, 2026

 

“A woman’s life is not perfect or whole till she has added herself to a husband.

Nor is a man’s life perfect or whole till he has added to himself a wife.”

                                                                                                                                Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

                                                                                                                                Miss MacKenzie, 1865

 

On April 11 Caroline and I will celebrate our 62^nd wedding anniversary. We have been married longer than either of our parents or grandparents. 

 

The concept of marriage dates back four or five thousand years, but for most of that time it was a contract for managing property. Marriage for love only gained traction in the late 18^th and early 19^th Centuries. Over time, attitudes changed. The courtships described by Jane Austen show partners standing in opposing lines. In 1828 Noah Webster wrote that marriage “was instituted by God himself.” In 1906 in The Devil’s Dictionary the satirist Ambrose Bierce defined the word marriage: “The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.” Our 1964 wedding vows were to last until death do us part. Marriage has always been considered the most stable environment in which to raise children. 

 

However, marriage is not a case of “one size fits all.” First, it is not for everyone, and second, not all marriages work. “Marriage,” the humorist Will Rogers once wrote, “is a habit. Divorce is a necessity.” It is impossible that two people can know all about one another after a few months or even after a couple of years. So luck plays a role. Nevertheless, when a marriage works angels sing.

 

Tens of thousands of books have been written, offering advice for a successful marriage – prioritizing your spouse, practicing forgiveness, maintaining a sense of humor, and committing to navigating both good and bad times together. While those words sound substantive, they sport an institutional tone; they could have been spit out by a ‘bot.’ When asked of lessons learned from our marriage, I demur. But love comes first.

 

“Vive La Différence,” sang Maurice Chevalier. And certainly Caroline and I are different. I am sensitive; she is empathetic. I am short-tempered, especially when interrupted while writing; Caroline is patient. However, like magnets we were attracted. P. G. Wodehouse had a sixty-one-year marriage to Ethyl Wayman. In 1932, eighteen years after he was married, he wrote Doctor Sally. The book includes humorous marital advice: “Chumps make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first and if it rings solid, don’t hesitate. All unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains.”

 

While I don’t think I am a chump – there, my sensitivity is showing! – Caroline and I have had a good marriage. Besides being lovers, we are good friends. There is no one with whom I would rather take a trip or share a meal. But the glue has been the children we produced, and the children they, with their chosen spouses, have produced. There is something magical in knowing that the genes we inherited from our forefathers and foremothers will live on in generations yet to come. While the future is unknowable, we pray that their lives will be happy ones. And all this because of a young woman my sister introduced me to at a small ski area in New Hampshire more than sixty-four years ago. Fortune has smiled upon us.

Burrowing into Books - "He Knew He Was Right," Anthony Trollope

                                                                    Sydney M. Williams

Burrowing into Books

“He Knew He Was Right,” Anthony Trollope

July 24, 2021

 

“Trevelyan had now become so accustomed to being told by everyone

that he was wrong, and was at the same time so convinced he was right…”

                                                                                                                                Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

                                                                                                                                He Knew He Was Right, 1869

 

Many of the longest books were written when people had fewer distractions. Today, readers approach a 900+ page novel tentatively, if at all. The last page seems so far from page one that we ask ourselves: Do I dare start? But a good story captures a reader, mesmerizing them into turning the pages. By story’s end, an affinity for the characters makes one reluctant to turn the last page.

 

Trollope is a writer of long stories. He is at his best when he writes of human interactions, especially about the love lives of upper-class men and women in Victorian England. Perhaps due to the influence of his mother, the novelist and social critic Frances Milton (Fanny) Trollope, Anthony Trollope’s women are more finely drawn than his men, and they are hewn into stronger characters than their male counterparts. In this, Emily Trevelyan, the heroine of the story, likes her own way: She is “so strong in her words, so eager, so passionate…She hardly ever yields to anything.” Of Emily’s sister Nora, Trollope writes: “…she had learned other things also, - to revere truth and love, and to be ambitious as regarded herself…” When she is to be married to Hugh Stanbury, she tells Lady Milborough: “I don’t mean to submit to him at all…I am going to marry for liberty.” A third young woman, Dorothy Stanbury, is described when young: She had “that extreme look of feminine dependence.” Two years later, as she is about to be married to Brooke Burgess, she has matured: “The flower that blows the quickest is never the sweetest. The fruit that ripens tardily has ever the finest flavor.”

 

Lady Milborough reflects on Victorian society: “Young ladies, according to her views on life, were fragile plants that wanted much nursing before they could be allowed to be planted out in the gardens of the world as married women.” In marriage, women were expected to be subservient to their husbands, to an extant uncomfortable to us in the 21^st Century. But human emotions do not change. What distinguishes exceptional literature from the ordinary is the author’s ability to write of universal truths, embedded in the emotions we all experience. In this story, Trollope tells of how stubbornness, born of jealousy, bores deeply into the human psyche. Louis Trevelyan and Emily Rowley are recently married, with a young son. Colonel Osborne, a bachelor friend of Emily’s father, calls on the young bride. He is narcissistic and insensitive, a man who “was clearly determined to make the most he could of what remained to him of the advantages of youth.” While Osborne’s visits were innocent, they upset her jealous husband and led to a marital rift that balloons out of control. While his wife never dishonored her wedding vows, Trevelyan expects repentance, something his wife is loath to give, as it would admit to a sin she had never committed. “Oh God, to what misery had a little folly brought two human beings, who had every blessing that the world could give within their reach!” While their love for one another is never in doubt, a vicious circle was created.

 

Reading Trollope is akin to studying a Chinese puzzle ball – those exquisite ivory carvings of balls within balls. In Trollope there are stories within stories, reflecting myriad connections in human relations. He Knew He Was Right is one of his best. Don’t let the book’s length deter you.

"Personal Responsibility in an Age of CRT"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Personal Responsibility in an Age of CRT[1]”

July 1, 2021

 

“In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never

ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.”

                                                                                                                 Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)

                                                                                                                 You Learn by Living, 1960

                                                                                                                                Preface

 

As we near our nation’s 245^th birthday, celebrants could do worse than consider the consequences of an increase in government dependency and a decline in personal responsibility.

 

Among truths that underly my beliefs are two relevant to this essay: One, life is not fair. We are born into different circumstances, with different attributes and abilities. A brother was born with Prader-Willi Syndrome, a condition that adversely affected his physical, emotional and mental development. While he and I were born of the same parents, his life, in the challenges he faced, was far more difficult than mine. And two, we are not equal (and never can be) in looks, physical prowess, emotional and social skills, or mental acuity. It is unlikely Michael Jordan could have developed the theory of relativity, and it is equally unimaginable that Albert Einstein could have played shooting guard for the Chicago Bulls.  The attempt to mandate equity, a dream of Progressives, is a Utopian nightmare. In his novel He Knew He was Right, Anthony Trollope put it like this: “Each created animal must live and get its food by the gifts which the Creator has given it…” No amount of government coercion will make life completely fair and make us equal. We must each work with who and what we are. In his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote: “Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know you trust him.”

 

Politicians love to compartmentalize the electorate. It is easier to serve up government offerings to a group than to argue the benefits of a particular political philosophy. Thus, we drift toward the comfort of government dependency and away from the more difficult adherence of personal responsibility. A Washington Post article from September 18, 2012, reported: “In 2011, about 49% of the population lived in a household where at least one member received a direct benefit from the federal government.” According to an op-ed in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal by John Cogan and Daniel Bell of the Hoover Institute, the American Families Plan, if it were adopted, would add another 21 million Americans to the roles of government assistance programs. Forget what it does to our debt; think of the effect on our national character.

 

Ironically, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is racist, in that it teaches that one race is inherently superior to another, and in its assumption that blacks are incapable of succeeding without government assistance. It promotes victimization rather than encouraging self-reliance. It ignores individual successes of modern black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Senator Tim Scott, Clarence Thomas, Candace Owens, Jason Riley, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and thousands more. As Martin Luther King taught us, people should be judged by who they are, not the color of their skin. Freedom depends on a responsible individual. Consider the autocracies that demand dependence and obedience and compare that to the Republic whose founding we celebrate Sunday. The Civil Rights activist and founder of the Woodson Institute, Robert Woodson in response to the 1619 Project, created an organization called 1776 Unites, which is designed to highlight “what is best in our national character and what our freedom makes possible even in the most difficult circumstances.” Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) and Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), both believed in personal responsibility. They were born into slavery, yet both became advisors to U.S. Presidents. In what other country would that have been possible? 

 

There is no question that a study of American history should include chapters on slavery and the women’s suffrage movement. But that can be accomplished by reading what has already been written. In 1853, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When President Lincoln met her at the White House nine years later, he is reputed to have said: “So this is the little woman that started this great war.” Keep in mind, Ms. Stowe, as a woman, was never able to vote. Yet she wrote a novel that spoke to the curse of slavery and helped bring about its abolition. Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn (1884) has been removed from many library shelves because some of its words are seen as threatening. Yet it provides modern readers a realistic look at the horrors of slavery, the dignity of the run-away slave Jim, and of the empathy of the uneducated Huck Finn. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Henry James’ The Bostonians (1886) did much the same for the cause of women.

 

It is a desire for power that causes politicians to place us within the confines of race, religion and gender. They ignore how far we have come in the past 250 years. Man has been around for 160,000 years, but civilization as we know it dates back only about 2,500 years. Progress has been steady, but uneven with two steps forward and one back. The founding of the United States, with all its obvious and known faults, was a giant leap forward in the liberation of men and women from the yoke of authoritarian governments. Slavery has been around as long as man, and it has existed on every continent and involved every race and creed. While it was largely abolished in the West in the 19^th Century, it still exists in parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Consider the plight today of China’s Uyghurs. They are real victims, under the Chinese Communist Party’s real oppressors. 

 

Sixty years ago, interracial marriage was illegal in much of the United States. Today, one in seven marriages are couples of mixed races. In 1960, only 3.1% of adult black Americans had graduated from four-year colleges. Today the number is 20 percent. (The comparable numbers for whites were about 18% in 1960 and 35% today.) While much good came from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they were accompanied by a decline in personal responsibility, which led to a diminution of the family, an increase in out-of-wedlock births and a glut in absent fathers. We see its effects in other aspects of our lives. Universities select students, not on merit but on race or gender identification. We are told it is the weapon, not the behavior of the individual, that is responsible for a plethora of black-on-black shootings in inner cities. 

 

As we prepare to celebrate the 4^th, we should consider the costs to a free people of a nation that abjures personal responsibility for the Eloi-like comfort of dependency. As long as it survives, the mission of the United States will never be complete. It will always be a work-in-progress – “An Experiment in Self-Government,” as Senator J. William Fulbright titled a 1955 article. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “The only title in our democracy superior to that of President is the title citizen.” It is a title that demands the rigors of personal responsibility.

"Ruth Bader Ginsburg - RIP"

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

www.swstotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

Ruth Bader Ginsburg – RIP

September 20, 2020

“She was the best of colleagues, as she is the best of friends. I wish her a hundred years.” 

Justice Antonin Scalia On the occasion of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 10^th Anniversary on the D.C. Court of Appeals 1990

In his novel, The Way we Live Now, Anthony Trollope wrote about his main protagonist, Augustus Melmotte: “But there had grown upon the man during the last few months an arrogance, a self-confidence inspired in him by the worship of other men, which clouded his intellect, and robbed him of much of that power of calculation which undoubtedly he naturally possessed.” Americans, especially those on the far left, have a tendency to elevate heroes to elysian heights, while consigning opponents to eternal damnation. 

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a brilliant jurist, a pioneer in women’s rights and a person who put politics aside when it came time to choosing friends, as could be seen in her long friendship with Antonin Scalia, opera being a common interest. She fought for equality, fairness and justice. As a lawyer, she argued six cases before the Supreme Court and won five of them, before being appointed to United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by President Carter in April 1980. She was worshipped by fans who called her “notorious” RBG. Two years ago, Betsy West and Julie Cohen produced a documentary on her life, “RBG.” At least six biographies have been written on her life. But we elevate people to iconic status at a risk. She, like all of us, was human.

 

Ms. Ginsburg was political. On July 10, 2016, in an interview with the New York Times, she said, “I can’t imagine what this place would be – I can’t imagine what this country would be – with Donald Trump as our President.” Shortly before she died, she dictated a letter to her granddaughter Clara Spera, in which she said: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.”

 

There is no question that the Supreme Court does not (and cannot) rise above politics. Judges are nominated by politicians and confirmed by politicians. Nevertheless, lifetime appointments should reduce political interference and angst. In fact, Supreme Court Justices have, at times, turned opposite to what had been expected, two examples being Felix Frankfurter and Earl Warren. Nevertheless, what is important if we want this Republic to persist for another two hundred and thirty-three years is adhering to the basic functions of the three branches of government: A legislature that creates laws; an executive that carries out laws, and a court that ensures laws passed comply with the Constitution. 

 

We will mourn Ruth Bader Ginsburg for a few days, with flags around the country at half-mast. Then politics will reenter the forum, with the President nominating a replacement. Democrats will invoke the memory of Merrick Garland, whose nomination by Barack Obama was blocked in 2016 by a Republican majority-held Senate. Had Democrats controlled the Senate four years ago, Mr. Garland would be Justice Garland today.

 

In this partisan world we inhabit, days of collegiality brought about by mourning for Justice Ginsburg will likely be short-lived. RBG’s death highlights the importance of this election – the difference between those who believe in a “living” Constitution that continuously updates reflecting cultural changes, and those who believe that decisions should be based on the written Constitution and precedent. Questions arise: Should the role of judges be to make or interpret the law? Should legislation be conducted from the bench? Seth Lipsky, in an editorial for the New York Sun, wrote of his admiration for Ms. Ginsburg, but he also recalled an exchange she had in Cairo eight years ago. The interviewer had mentioned that Egypt was writing a new constitution and wanted to know if Egypt should look to other constitutions. She replied: “I would not look at the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in 2012.” She preferred the more detailed bills of rights in the constitutions of Canada, South Africa and Europe. Mr. Lipsky added in his editorial: “Our Constitution rarely grants rights. It establishes negative rights, meaning prohibitions on government interfering with rights granted by God.” The distinction is important, in what it says about the role of government. A quote often mistakenly attributed to Thomas Jefferson has relevance: “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government to take away everything you have.”  

 

I had great respect for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as I do for the opinions of many of my friends on the Left but, just as I disagree with them, I disagreed with her judgments. Nevertheless, she left the world a better place. The real lesson to be learned from RBG is the relationship she had with her fellow Justice Antonin Scalia. They did not let political differences interfere with their personal friendship. Personal relations, even in disagreement, should be civil, collegial and respectful. As for whether President Trump should use this opportunity to nominate a replacement, why shouldn’t he? Surely, Democrats would. As Justice Ginsburg said in that same interview with the New York Times four years ago: “There is nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.” But I pray rhetoric does not become elevated, and that the enduring friendship of two Justices, who represented different views at the Supreme Court, is remembered, as it hovers over a Senate weighing a decision.

"Cross of Snow," Nicholas Basbanes

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Burrowing into Books

“Cross of Snow,” Nicholas Basbanes

August 1, 2020

 

“But to me, a dreamer of dreams.

To whom what is said and what seems

Are often one and the same, – “

                                                                                    “The Bells of San Blas,” March 12, 1882

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as Nicholas Basbanes writes in the introduction, has gone out of favor – “widely revered in one century, methodically excommunicated from the ranks of the worthy in the next.” A poet of gentility, tradition and respectability is incongruous when lyrics to popular songs and the language of late-night TV hosts would make blush a Vietnam War combat veteran or a Salomon Brothers trader. Yet, this is a man worth knowing – a brilliant linguist, a popular professor and the most renowned poet of his time. When first picking up the book, I wrote a note to myself: “I am embarking on an adventure to know a remarkable man, his life and times.” And that is what Mr. Basbanes has done in this very personal biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

 

The “Cross of Snow” in the title comes from a poem Longfellow wrote in 1879 as a tribute to his late wife Fanny who had died eighteen years earlier. The poem was inspired by the landscape artist Thomas Moran’s painting “Mountain of the Holy Cross,” a peak in the northern Sawatch Range of the Colorado Rockies

 

“There is a mountain in the distant West

That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines

Displays a cross of snow upon its side.

Such is the cross I wear upon my breast

These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes

And seasons, changeless since the day she died.”

 

Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine in 1807. After graduation from Bowdoin College in 1825 (in a class with Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne), he spent three years in Europe to better his knowledge of modern languages, which he would teach at Bowdoin. “Your tour is one for improvement rather than pleasure,” his brother Stephen wrote. He became fluent in German, Swedish, French, Italian and Spanish. When he died, his library contained over 11,000 books, in fifteen languages, all of which he could read. Returning to Bowdoin, he took up teaching duties. Six years later, he married Mary Potter. Four years later, he was offered the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard. He was again asked to travel to Europe to brush up on languages and to purchase books for the college. Mary went with him, only to die of complications from a miscarriage on November 29, 1835 in Rotterdam. She was twenty-three. Her last words: “Henry, don’t forget me.” He was deeply saddened. In his diary he wrote. “…at night I cry myself to sleep like a child.” He later admitted that bringing her was the biggest mistake he had made. He did not forget her. Four years later, he completed Footsteps of an Angel, which includes this stanza:

 

“And she sits and gazes at me

With those deep and tender eyes,

Like the stars, so still and saint-like,

Looking downward from the skies.”

 

Several months later, on that same trip, in July 1836, Longfellow met nineteen-year-old Fanny Appleton in Switzerland. She was traveling in Europe for a year with her father and siblings, her mother having died the previous year. Fanny was an observant and intelligent young woman. On a trip to Pompeii, she wrote in her journal: “The awe of the Past never came so strongly upon me as here, frail matter doomed to revisit the glimpses of the moon…Matter can be embalmed but the free soul was not cased in, by even the bondage of a million years.” Longfellow was smitten, but it took seven years of courtship before they married. In the interim, he wrote Hyperion, an unflattering semi-autobiographical piece – his second worst decision according to Mr. Basbanes. Hyperion speaks to Longfellow’s long pursuit of Fanny. She wrote to her friend Emmeline Austin about the story: “There are really some exquisite things in this book, tho it is desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches, like the author’s mind.” Nevertheless, teaching duties occupied him and he continued to write – in 1839 The Wreck of the Hesperus and The Village Blacksmith, and three years later Poems on Slavery, a mildly pro-abolitionist collection.

 

It was during their eighteen-year marriage Longfellow was most productive, especially after retiring from his teaching duties in 1854. During those years he published Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). He and Fanny hosted scores of America’s and England’s literati, as well as artists and musicians, at their home on Brattle Street in Cambridge, a house that had once been George Washington’s headquarters and is now called the Vassall-Cragie-Longfellow house. Among those entertained: Prince Edward (later Edward VII), Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Louis Agassiz, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Edwin Booth, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt and Jenny Lind. Fanny bore six children, five of whom survived into adulthood. Sadly, she died in a tragic accident at age forty-three on July 10, 1861.

 

Dante had been a favorite of Fanny’s; so, with her gone and with his eldest son in the Union Army, Longfellow translated Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. “In the months following Fanny’s death, Henry found comfort in Dante’s exploration of the heavenly spheres, with the idealized Beatrice at his side.” His effort, which took six years to complete, is still considered one of the best English translations. In 1868-69, he took a final trip to Europe, traveling with his three living daughters, his son Ernest and his wife, his brother Samuel and brother-in-law Tom Appleton. He dined with Charles Dickens and was received by Queen Victoria, who afterwards told Sir Theodore Martin, then working on a biography of her late husband, “I noticed an unusual interest among the attendants and servants…I am surprised and pleased to find that many of his poems are familiar to them.” His popularity in Britain was such, Basbanes writes, “that he was outselling Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson on their own turf.”

 

Longfellow is best remembered for sentimental poems like The Village Blacksmith, Paul Revere’s Ride and The Song of Hiawatha, whose lines we recall: “By the shores of Gitche Gumee/By the shining Big-Sea-Water.” It was poetry that people my age once memorized, but which does not fit today’s more cynical age. In this intimate biography, Nicholas Basbanes writes of his poetic achievements, his professorships at Bowdoin and Harvard and his translations. Longfellow condemned slavery, but not with the adamancy of some of his friends, perhaps because his father-in-law’s mills depended on southern cotton. However, people knew where he stood. One of his best friends was Senator Charles Sumner, a staunch abolitionist, once caned into unconsciousness on the Senate floor by South Carolina Democrat Preston Brooks in 1856.

 

 Longfellow continued to translate, write poetry and welcome guests at Craigie House, as he “…resumed his agreeable pace.” He did so until his death on March 24, 1882. His home on Brattle Street in Cambridge is now a museum. During his lifetime it was the most visited home in the United States, second only to Mount Vernon. In 1875, he attended his 50^th reunion at Bowdoin at which he read an ode written for the occasion, Morituri Salutamus, which includes these two lines:

 

“So many memories crowd upon my brain

So many ghosts are in the wooded plain,”

 

An evening in his company, Anthony Trollope reflected, was memorable: “…the stranger is apt to drop the poet in the gentleman, the distinguished man of letters to the uncommonly pleasant fellow whom he has encountered.” In her comments to Sir Theodore Martin, Queen Victoria added, “No other distinguished person has come here that has excited so peculiar an interest. Such poets wear a crown that is imperishable.” The writer William Winter (1836-1917), who regarded Longfellow as a mentor, is quoted: “…a perfect image of continence, wisdom, dignity, sweetness and grace.” Many years after his death, his son Ernest wrote of his father: “He was not a rushing river, boiling and tumbling over rocks, but the placid stream flowing through quiet meadows.”

 

This biography, by a sensitive and diligent author, is a delightful tribute to a poet whose soothing and bucolic voice deserves to be heard and to be read once more, especially in these turbulent times.

 

 

 

"The Duke's Children," by Anthony Trollope

Sydney M. Williams

Burrowing into Books

“The Duke’s Children,” Anthony Trollope

July 18, 2020

“He had already been driven to acknowledge that these children of his –

thoughtless, reckless, though they seemed to be – still had a will of

their own. In all which, how like they were to their mother.”

                                                                                                Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

                                                                                                The Duke’s Children, 1880

                                                                                                Chapter 61

The story begins with the Duchess of Omnium, Lady Glencora, having just died. She has left her husband the Duke, Plantagenet Palliser, a widow with three children: Lord Silverbridge, Lady Mary and Gerald. They are young people on the verge of adulthood – wealthy, aristocratic, impetuous and independent. We follow the gambling, horses and love affair of the oldest son, the romance of the daughter and the college pranks and sporting adventures of the youngest. Thrown into the mix is a hail of characters, scenes from fox hunting – a favorite sport of the author – and observations on politics and society

Anthony Trollope was prolific. In all, he wrote forty-seven novels. The Duke’s Children completes the sixth volume of the Palliser series. In this, Trollope provides a perspective on mid-late Nineteenth Century life among Britain’s upper classes. “He never wearied,” Henry James wrote in 1888, in a not-very-flattering essay on Anthony Trollope in Partial Portraits, “of the pre-established round of English customs…”

Plantagenet Palliser, now a Duke and former Prime Minister and “not yet fifty,” is one of the wealthiest men in England. He had inherited his title when his uncle, the former Duke of Omnium, died. Palliser has mixed feelings about Britain’s caste system. He is a traditionalist: “To the Duke’s thinking the maintenance of the aristocracy of the country was second only in importance to the maintenance of the Crown.” Tradition affected his attitude toward Silverbridge’s and Mary’s choices of marriage partners. But he is a man of contradictions: He tells the American Isabel Boncassen, Silverbridge’s intended: “There is no greater mistake than to suppose that inferiority of birth is a barrier to success in our country.” This he says while urging his son to seek a marriage partner from among Britain’s nobility.

Trollope describes the Duke as a parent: “A more loving father there was not in England, but nature had made him so undemonstrative that as yet they had hardly known his love.” Silverbridge, when we meet him, is a young man out of Oxford and into gambling “who imagined himself to be anything but extravagant, [so] wondered how the figures could mount up so rapidly.” After a flirtation with Lady Mabel Grex, Silverbridge meets Isabel, daughter of Ezekiel Boncassen a self-made American millionaire and scholar. He falls in love. Eighteen-year-old Lady Mary had fallen in love with Francis Oliphant Tregear while she was on vacation in Switzerland with her parents and while Tregear was traveling in the region. Frank was the son of a gentleman of no financial means. He had been a classmate of Silverbridge’s at Eton and Oxford. It was a romance known to Lady Glencora but not to her husband who, when he hears of it after his wife’s death, disapproves. Lady Mary, however, is a young woman of determination, with a clear understanding of her rights: “Being the child of rich parents she had the right to money. Being a woman, she had a right to a husband. Having been born free she had a right to choose one for herself. Having had a man’s love given to her she had a right to keep it.”

We read of the ups and downs of the two romances, of Silverbridge coming to terms with his turf buddies and Lady Mary’s handling of her father-imposed seclusion. Along the way, we pick up bits of Trollope’s wisdom: On life: “It is so much easier to think of the past than of the future – to remember what has been than to resolve what shall be.” On politics: “The statesman who falls is he who does much, and thus injures many. The statesman who stands the longest is he who does nothing and injures no one.” On diligence: “But for the feeling of self-contentment, which creates happiness – hard work, and hard work alone, can give it to you.” On finances: “Money is the reward of labour.” And on communication: “You have first to realize in your mind the thing to be said, and then the words in which you should say it…” Amen to that.

In the end, the Duke becomes reconciled to the inevitable. Silverbridge marries the beautiful Isabel, and Mary weds her beloved Frank. Left undetermined is the fate of Gerald, who having been tossed out of Cambridge for violating curfew, is now at Oxford.

Anthony Trollope wrote knowingly of his time and environment. The love affair between Silverbridge and Isabel was representative of a then popular trend – daughters of American millionaires marrying titled, but impoverished, Englishmen. Six years before this book was published American Jenny Jerome married Lord Randolph Churchill, the third son of the Marquess of Blandford. To read Trollope, and his vignettes on everything – from shooting in Scotland, horse racing at Doncaster, fox hunting near Trumpington Woods to parlors in Mayfair – is to better understand the social history of the time. Turning the last page is to say farewell to friends. 

                                                                                               

"National Identity"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“National Identity”

July 15, 2020

“The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.”

                                                                                                Vince Lombardi (1913-1970)

                                                                                                Coach, Green Bay Packers

As individuals, we are a combination of genetics and experience. Similarly, the United States is a product of its genetic makeup – its people, natives and immigrants – and its experiences, which includes everything that has happened over the past four centuries – the carving of towns and villages from the wilderness, the curse of slavery and its abolition, and especially the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Our experiences include the building of roads, railroads and the telegraph, the Civil War, the taming of the west, the industrialization of the economy and the rise of cities, schools and colleges, two world wars, the Cold War and its aftermath, and the internet. Our Country’s genetic makeup continues to expand as immigrants become citizens and new births add to our population. And, so do our experiences. Everything we do – the good and the bad – add to who we are.

We are a polyglot nation, not easily categorized. We are not, as The New York Times with its 1619 Project would have us be, a nation imbued with systemic racism, a country of victims and oppressors. On the other hand, we, as a nation, should be aware of the warts in our past. God, it has been said, cares little of what we have done. He cares about we do and will do.

Robert E. Lee has become symbolic of white oppression. As a defender of slavery and Commander of the Army of Virginia, he deserves reproach. But hatred for what he represented in that aspect of his life blinds us to the whole man. Like all of us, he was complex. His father “Light-Horse Harry” Lee was a Revolutionary War General and Governor of Virginia who landed in debtors’ prison around 1812. He abandoned his family and moved permanently to the West Indies. Lee was raised by his mother who died a month after he graduated second in his class from West Point, where he later served as Superintendent. When the Civil War broke out, he was torn between allegiance to the United States and loyalty to Virginia, his place of birth. (It was a time when people traveled less; so, one’s home state meant more than it does today.) In 1865, at Appomattox, General Lee surrendered his sword without animus to a younger General Grant, who had graduated in the bottom half of his class at West Point. In the aftermath of the War and at a time of bitter recriminations on the part of many Southerners toward the victorious North, Lee supported reconciliation with a reborn United States, later led by his former foe.

Today, Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia does not alone define who we are, but neither do New Hampshire’s White Mountains, Arizona’s Grand Canyon, New York City’s tall buildings, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, Florida’s Panhandle or Minnesota’s lakes. The United States is all these things and more. We are the newest immigrants and descendants of those who immigrated four hundred years ago; we descend from slaves and slave owners; we come from most every country in the world and represent every nation, race and religion. The United States is an idea, forged in the fertile minds of our Founding Fathers. For two hundred and thirty-three years, their words of hope and promise have drawn immigrants to these shores. Before that, we were a land to which people escaped, yearning to be free. We are the past, the present and the future. To deny the past, no matter how hurtful it may seem to some, is to pretend we are different than what we are.   

One problem with those who would like to “fundamentally transform” our country and its identity is not their policies (though I disagree with them), it is the adamancy of their advocacy – their silencing of dissenting opinions. It is a campaign that originated in college classrooms and that has now made its way onto the front pages of newspapers, in daily radio and TV news reports and into the boardrooms of our nation’s corporations, churches and eleemosynary institutions. It is an orthodoxy that has become pervasive, with overtones of Karl Marx and Nazi Germany and reminiscent of George Orwell’s “Newspeak.” Our identity should be that of a people freely expressing opinions without fear of retaliation. We should be a nation that treats all people equitably, that does not compartmentalize by race, sex or religion. We should be a nation where people succeed based on their skills, effort and “the content of their character.” We should honor symbols of liberty, like the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. And we should acknowledge the union of the American states, newly strengthened 155 years ago when Robert E. Lee accepted his loss and chose to stand, as one nation, with the people of the United States.

As a country composed of myriad races, religions and ethnicities, it has always been difficult to define our identity. Our genetic makeup is in flux. This has always been so. In his 1878 novel The Duke’s Children, Anthony Trollope has the American scholar and businessman Ezekiel Boncassen, a self-made son of a tailor, speak to two young English aristocrats about his country: “The influxions[1] are so rapid, that every ten years the nature of the people is changed.” Regardless of our outward appearances, what distinguishes and unites us are our freedoms. One can argue that freedom has not always been equitably applied, and that is true. But no one can deny that we were the first country to exalt the concept of individual liberty and have it embedded in a written Constitution.

Another problem with those who would transform the U.S. is that equality and liberty are incompatible. Demand for equality denies the aspirant liberty to succeed. And liberty to succeed means some will fail, so not all will be equal. Nevertheless, we are endowed with equal natural rights. Everyone is (or should be) equal before the law and the right to vote is shared equally, but we are not equal in aspiration, talent, or intellect. (Put me alongside Michael Jordan if you doubt my words.) Our guiding star is the promise in the Declaration of Independence of liberty. It did not come all at once, but, despite imperfections, we are a free people. We cannot let a rising tide of cancel culture and conformity undo what has taken so many years to construct. We cannot let the McCarthyism of those who claim speech constitutes violence forbid the utterance of opposing opinions. We cannot permit this assault on our liberties It is the right to speak without retribution that is essential to our national identity. We lose sight of that at our peril.

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[1] A word no longer in use but which means infusions of new blood, in this case from immigrants.

Burrowing into Books - "The Prime Minister," by Anthony Trollope

Sydney M. Williams

Burrowing into Books

“The Prime Minister,” Anthony Trollope

March 21, 2020

“After all, the making of new laws is too often but an unfortunate necessity laid on us by

 the impatience of the people. A lengthened period of quiet and, therefore, good government

 with a minimum of new laws would be the greatest benefit the country could receive.”

The Duke of St. Bungay advising his friend, the Prime Minister

                                                            The Prime Minister, 1876

                                                            Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

A nice thing about reading Trollope is the renewal of old acquaintances: characters who have a habit of re-appearing. For example, in The Prime Minister we meet again Frank Gresham who first appeared in Dr. Thorne, written eighteen years earlier and Lady Glencora who first appeared in 1864 in The Small House at Allington. Perhaps because of his mother, the novelist Frances Trollope, the son created women of independence, spirit and beauty. His observations on people and particularly clergy and politicians are as relevant today as when written 150 years ago. This is the penultimate novel in the six-volume Palliser series, which deals primarily with Parliament. The last in the series is The Duke’s Children, published in 1880, two years before his death at sixty-seven.

The story follows two lines, first that of Plantagenet Palliser and his wife Lady Glencora, or the Duke of Omnium as he had become toward the end of Phineas Redux, written three years earlier. Palliser is elected a coalition Prime Minister. We follow his trials and tribulations. In the second story line we meet Ferdinand Lopez, a man of unknown parentage and questionable repute, who marries Emily Wharton, the beautiful daughter of Abel Wharton. Against her father’s and her family’s wishes, she marries him. It is hinted that Lopez might be Jewish, and anti-Semitism was prevalent in England at the time. “But,” as Nicholas Shrimpton writes in the Introduction, “it was foreigners in general, rather than Jews in particular, that Englishman of Trollope’s generation were accustomed to regard as lesser breeds.” The story lines merge.

Included in the duchy Palliser inherited is Gatherum Castle, a monstrous country house where forty or fifty guests can be entertained for several days – a perfect place for the Duchess to exercise her political schemes, not all of which go well. But a dukedom, while appealing to his wife, carried responsibilities Palliser never wanted. As a Duke, he was no longer eligible for Parliament, where he had been happily ensconced as Chancellor of the Exchequer. But he was able to be Prime Minister. His friend, the older Duke of St. Bungay (quoted in the rubric), tells him of the characteristics necessary for a successful premiership: “One wants in a Prime Minister a good many things, but not very great things. He should be clever, but not be a genius; he should be conscientious, but by no means straitlaced; he should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin.”

Britain was at her most imperious in the 1870s. At its height (in the second half of the 19^th Century), it ruled 24% of the world’s land mass and comprised 23% of the world’s population. It controlled the Seven Seas. England’s Prime Minister was a powerful man. “To be Prime Minister in England,” the Duchess of Omnium tells her friend Mrs. Finn, “is as much as to be an Emperor in France, and much more than being President in America.” In the ensuing 150 years, while the British Empire was eviscerated, men have not changed, nor have the political forces that drive them. Omnium speaks, sounding a refrain familiar to us today: “The idea that political virtue is all on one side is both mischievous and absurd. We allow ourselves to talk in that way because indignation, scorn, and sometimes, I fear, vituperation are the fuels with which the necessary heat of debate is maintained.” A later observation from the Prime Minister has a ring of truth: “Political enemies are often the best friends in the world; and, I can assure you from my own experience that political friends are often the bitterest enemies.”

Plantagenet was a good man, perhaps overly sensitive, but a gentleman and a realist. When leaving the premiership, he tells his wife: “The play has been played, and the curtain has fallen, and the lights are being put out, and the poor weary actors may go home to bed.” He served his pledge, delivering three years of quiet, good government. As the story ends, the Duke will be followed as Prime Minister by Mr. Gresham, a character based on William Gladstone, a long-time leader of the Liberal Party.

What made the book so controversial at the time of its publication was the story of Ferdinand Lopez and Emily Wharton. In most of his novels, female characters choose the safer of two suitors. Not so in this one. Emily, failing to recognize his offensive and dishonest character and ignoring her father’s warnings, chooses Lopez over her long-time suitor and friend of her family, Arthur Fletcher. Trollope notes that Lopez was tall, good-looking and well spoken. He gave the illusion he was wealthy. He worked in the City, but what he did was a mystery. In fact, we discover, he speculated in commodities, especially guano. But he kept specifics from his fiancée and his future father-in-law. Trollope writes: “Ferdinand Lopez was not an honest man or a good man. He was a self-seeking, intriguing adventurer, who did not know honesty from dishonesty when he saw them together.”

The reader learns of the injustices of 19^th Century English marriages, when women became subservient to their husbands. A 21^st Century reader wonders – did Trollope, sensitive to women because of his mother’s success, deliberately create the despicable Lopez to highlight this iniquitous inequity?

Emily soon realizes the mistake she made, that her husband was more interested in her wealth than in her: “…she began to perceive that her father was to be regarded as a milch cow, and that she was to be the dairymaid.” But she feels honor-bound to suffer the consequences of her ill-considered decision. Divorce, at that time, was rare. In her own mind, she had made her bed; it was her obligation to lie in it. However, through tragedy, the story ends on an uplifted note.

Authors like Trollope expected their readers to be well-read. Throughout the novel are references to the Bible, to Greek and Roman mythology and classics, and to Shakespeare. The expectation was that the reader would be familiar with Matthew, Aesop, Plutarch and Lady Macbeth. Fortunately, explanatory notes, in the Oxford World’s Classics version I read, were easily accessible. While fewer novels were published in the 1870s than today, authors still competed for readers. English authors like Dickens, Eliot and Carroll were writing during the decade of the 1870s. So were Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev in Russia and Twain, Henry James and Alcott in the U.S. But there were, then, fewer distractions and alternatives; so educated people – literacy rates in England in the 1870s were 75% – spent more time reading. Now, Coronavirus has given us the opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with some of literatures greatest fictional characters. A good place to start is Trollope.