Trollope’s ambivalence about lawyers’ ethics
That takes us, finally, back to Trollope’s lawyers. Are any of them models to emulate? Shaffer thinks that Trollope was scandalized by trial lawyers’ disregard for the truth, so perhaps that means the answer is no.[606] I do not think this reading gets at the full Trollopean complexity, however.
To be sure, Trollope voices his outrage more than once, most powerfully when he describes Mr. Chaffanbrass:
He was always true to the man whose money he had taken, and gave to his customer, with all the power at his command, that assistance which he had professed to sell. But we may give the same praise to the hired bravo who goes through with truth and courage the task which he has undertaken. I knew an assassin in Ireland who professed that during twelve years of practice in Tipperary he had never failed when he had once engaged himself. For truth and honesty to their customers - which are great virtues - I would bracket that man and Mr. Chaffanbrass together (OF II.277-78).
This is one of the few places where Trollope speaks about the lawyers in his own voice. He does it again when he describes “five lawyers... not one of whom gave to the course of justice credit that it would ascertain the truth, and not one of whom wished that the truth should be ascertained” (OF II.128). Trollope continues,
Surely had they been honest-minded in their profession they would all have so wished; - have so wished, or else have abstained from all professional intercourse in the matter. I cannot understand how any gentleman can be willing to use his intellect for the propagation of untruth, and to be paid for so using it (OF II.128).[607]
A bit of conventional lawyer-bashing. But Trollope turns out to be of two minds. In Orley Farm, the foil to the truth-despising lawyers is the young barrister Felix Graham, who thinks that law should be about truth, and to whom Chaffanbrass represents “all that was most disgraceful in the profession” (OF II.57).
The American legal ethicist Henry Drinker, in his introduction to the 1950 edition of Orley Farm, described Felix as “Trollope’s early idea of the perfect barrister.”[608] If Trollope really meant to condemn conventional lawyers’ ethics, Drinker might be right. But that is not how Trollope wrote Orley Farm.Trollope introduces Felix Graham as “the English Von Bauhr” (OF I.137). Von Bauhr is a German legal scholar, a stupifyingly tedious proceduralist who criticizes the British legal system in a three-hour speech at a conference on law reform. Trollope does not tell us much about Von Bauhr’s views, but we learn a great deal about Felix Graham’s, and if Felix Graham is the English Von Bauhr, Von Bauhr’s views amount to a rejection of adversarial ethics: “Let every lawyer go into court with a mind resolved to make conspicuous to the light of day that which seems to him to be the truth” (OF I.141).
What does Trollope think of this theory? If he despises lawyers who defeat the truth as much as the earlier passages I’ve quoted suggest, he ought to love Von Bauhr’s and Graham’s theory. But that is not how he writes Orley Farm. In an amusing scene, he shows us Von Bauhr in his hotel room after his speech, napping and dreaming. Von Bauhr dreams of “an elysium of justice and mercy,” an elysium as orderly “as a beer-garden at Munich,” an elysium in which a grand pedestal stands, on which “was a bust with an inscription: ‘To Von Bauhr, who reformed the laws of nations’” (OF I.136). Trollope comments, “It was a grand thought; and though there was in it much of human conceit, there was in it also much of human philanthropy” (OF I.136).
Trollope is gentle, but he leaves little doubt that Von Bauhr is ridiculous. All his reforms, summarized in the dry, unintelligible pamphlet with which he anesthetizes the law-reform congress, are the product of pure theory untouched by human life and untempered by human judgment. In Orley Farm, we must realize, Germany represents a kind of theory-besotted Cloud Cuckooland, the antipodes of sound British judgment.
Lucius Mason studied at a German university, and came back a conceited, scholarly fool. He lectures to his mother about how he will improve the yield of Orley Farm by fertilizing it scientifically, with expensive, high-quality, imported guano (OF I.19). When Lady Mason expresses concern that he will ruin his fields and waste his capital, he loftily dismisses the importance of capital, “speaking on this matter quite ex cathedra, as no doubt he was entitled to do by his extensive reading at a German university” (OF I.19). Germany is where they fill your head with expensive, high-quality, imported guano. That, I think, expresses Trollope’s judgment about the theories of Von Bauhr and those of Felix Graham.That leaves Trollope in a standoff. On the one hand, he clearly despises the “unique, novel, and unsound adversary ethic” by which lawyers grant themselves moral immunity for whatever they do to defeat the truth.[609] But Trollope shows no more mercy for the German inquisitorial alternative, which he compares to torture.[610] And he has no sympathy for Graham’s legal ethics of truthfulness, because it comes from a theory that has nothing to do with the world in which real people actually live. When Graham argues according to his theory in Lady Mason’s trial, Trollope portrays him as a feckless failure (OF II.223-24). Trollope’s dilemma is one that many of us share. He dislikes the way lawyers defeat truth, and he rejects their rationalizations, but he grudgingly admits that the job they do is an important one and that the way they do it may sometimes be what the job requires.
And what of Mr. Furnival, the central legal interest of the story? Trollope paints him as a lawyer with great powers of discernment in practical matters, and no powers of discernment in his own life - no powers to see how infatuated he has become with Lady Mason, or how badly he is botching his own marriage, or what a calculating, dishonest girl his daughter has grown up to be, or how callous he is to his clerk.
Like Chaffanbrass, Furnival is not a pretty sight to behold. If there is any lesson in the figure of Furnival, it is how deeply specialized and disconnected from the rest of life professional excellence can be, even excellence in a field like law that requires careful judgment of other people.Shaffer thinks worse of Furnival than that, however. Shaffer thinks that Furnival fails even as a lawyer by dodging the truth and trying to make things work out well for Lady Mason. The heart of his criticism is this: “Furnival, as we say, got Lady Mason off; but he could not find a way to help Lady Mason to peace in her guilt or to reconciliation with her family and her commu- nity.”[611] And again, “Thomas Furnival, barrister, saved Lady Mason from the pain and the promise of being reconciled to her neighbors.”64
I find the criticism puzzling, however. Mrs. Orme could not find a way to help Lady Mason to peace in her guilt or to reconciliation with her family and her community either. If Furnival pressed Lady Mason as Mrs. Orme pressed her, her defense would have collapsed and the result would have been prison. How would that reconcile her to her neighbors, who shun her even after her acquittal? In the story as it actually unfolds, it is Mrs. Orme’s actions, not Mr. Furnival’s, that banish Lady Mason from her community and estrange her son from her. Furnival at least had a plan for restoring Lady Mason to her community. Admittedly, it was a plan to restore her on untruthful terms, but they were terms that she had found acceptable for twenty years.
Shaffer is right to this extent: at the end of the novel, only Lady Mason’s truthfulness wins forgiveness from Sir Peregrine. Truthfulness reconciles Lady Mason to him - but the cost is that they will never see each other again. And there is little doubt that if Lady Mason had told the truth at the beginning of the novel, Sir Peregrine and Mrs. Orme would never have admitted her to their company in the first place. Truthfulness exacts a terrible toll, and I have argued that Trollope never tells us whether he thinks the price was worth paying. Perhaps he did not want to scandalize his Christian readers with the thought that Rebekah may have been right.