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" 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 From: hansenb@frb.gov 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 Then I responded to a question:
From: "Amit K. Basu" 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.
From: hopfnerj@cc.tacom.army.mil 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).
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 Duffy then wrote:
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:
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:
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 John Mize writes:
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 Duffy writes:
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 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 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 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:
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:
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 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 Hello all
Angela wrote
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:
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:
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 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 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, Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001 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 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
And thought how, as the day had come, Till, ringing, singing, on its way, Then from each black, accursed mouth It was as if an earthquake rent And in despair I bowed my head; Then pealed the bells more loud and deep; Cheers from Ellen
To: "TrollopeReadingList"
Subject: Short Stories - "The Two Generals": Introduction
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 1997
http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~wright
email wright@dircon.co.uk
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998
Subject: Short Stories: "The Two Generals"
To: trollope-l@teleport.com
hansenb@frb.gov
Subject: Sutherland's Trollope: The Early Short Stories: "The Two Generals"
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998
Subject: Short Stories: A Jaundiced View of "The Two Generals"
To: trollope-l@teleport.com
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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998
To: trollope-l@teleport.com
Subject: Short Story: "The Two Generals"
"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."
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998
To: trollope-l@teleport.com
Subject: Short Stories: "The Two Generals"
"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."
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998
Subject: Short Story: "The Two Generals"
To: trollope-l@teleport.com
hansenb@frb.gov
Duffy
"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"
"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."
Reply: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] "The Two Generals"
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."
"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.)"
"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'. "
Judy Geater
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] The Ur-Story in Trollope & 'The Two Generals'
Ellen Moody
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [trollope-l] 'The Two Generals'
Judy Geater
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!
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the soun
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
'There is no peace on earth', I said;
'For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
'God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!
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