A House of Air. Hermione Lee

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

Mrs Oliphant’s Carlingford² is described for us in much less detail than, say George Eliot’s Milby in Scenes of Clerical Life. To draw an accurate map of it would be difficult. The railway station, with unhelpful porters, is to the south. The High Street is for shopping, George Street (with the Blue Boar Inn) is the business district. To the east of the town, Wharfside, down by the canal, is a slum, ignored by the respectable. Grange Lane and Grove Street are for the gentry, though Grove Street has ‘a shabby side’ and backs onto narrow lanes. St Roque’s, the chapel of ease for the Parish Church, is to the north. In the last of the Chronicles, however, Phoebe Junior, the sun is said to set behind St Roque’s. Plainly Mrs Oliphant is less interested in topography than in people. But in giving the atmosphere of a small community, almost resentful of arrivals and departures (although these are its main source of interest), complacent, hierarchical, inward-looking, and conscious of one direction, the canal-side, in which it dare not look—here she cannot put a foot wrong. Within these tight limits human beings must discover what a real life is, and contrive, somehow, to have it. I should like to say something here about her observation of human nature, but mustn’t, because she herself thought the idea an impertinence. All she ever did, she said, was to listen attentively.

      Her first approach to Carlingford (though by no means its only one) is through its churchgoing. This was a natural choice for the mid-nineteenth century. Only a few years later Dickens, close to death, fixed on a cathedral city and its clergy for his last novel. For present-day readers, Carlingford means a direct plunge into the rich diversity of Victorian Christianity. At one end of the spectrum there are ‘viewy’ High Churchmen, inheritors of the Oxford Movement, eager to reunite England with its Catholic past and to show truth by means of ritual. Ritual, confession, vestments, candles, are all an offence to everyday worshippers—un-English, or worse. To the Low Church, shading into the Evangelicals, plainness and simplicity are also a way of showing holiness. Church building is still in its hard Gothic heyday. (St Roque’s, where the perpetual curate is ‘viewy,’ is by Gilbert Scott.) The Dissenters have only one red brick building, Salem Chapel, in Grove Street. It is attended mainly by ‘grocers and buttermen.’ Beyond lie the poor. Here both the Ritualists and the Evangelicals see their duty. They visit, and bring blankets and coal. But what church, if any, the bargees and brickworkers attend, we are not told.

      On a lower level a thriving competition is in progress between the Parish Church, St Roque’s, and Salem. How many pews are filled, how many paid-for ‘sittings’ are taken up, will the Sunday sermon lose or gain supporters? But, unlike Trollope, Mrs Oliphant does not treat organized religion as a variant of the political structure, occupied in manoeuvres for position. The preoccupations of Carlingford are unspiritual and often ludicrous, but the church, no matter how far it falls short, is there to link them with an unseen world. In this way, although her human comedy is so much narrower than Trollope’s, it has a dimension that can hardly be found in Barchester.

      III. The Rector

      The Rector most characteristically begins with a new arrival at Carlingford. Mrs Oliphant opens her story in a tone of shrewd irony, presenting Carlingford as its ‘good society’ sees itself—that is, the ‘real town,’ not the tradespeople or, of course, Wharfside. This real town stays secluded in Grange Lane, behind high walls ‘jealous of intrusion, yet thrusting tall plumes of lilac and stray branches of apple-blossom, like friendly salutations to the world without.’ These households, the mainstay of the Parish Church, are half-agreeably disturbed by the thought of a new incumbent. He may be a Ritualist, like young Mr Wentworth of St Roque’s. He may be Low Church, like the late Rector, who absurdly exceeded his duties and actually went down to preach to the ‘bargemen’ of the canal district. To look at it from another point of view, there are unmarried young ladies in Carlingford, and it is known that the new Rector, also, is unmarried.

      This, like A Christmas Carol and Silas Marner, is the novel as parable. The houses of Grange Lane, as we first see them in the May sunshine, are an earthly paradise. To open the Wodehouse’s garden door—‘what a slight, paltry barrier—one plank and no more’—is to be elected, to find it shut is to be cast out. As the story opens the young curate, Frank Wentworth, is already, though not securely, admitted to the garden, the falling apple blossoms making light of his ‘black Anglican coat.’ He is too poor to propose marriage to Lucy, the pretty younger daughter. When the door closes behind him he walks stiffly away along the dry and dusty road. Out goes the frustrated young man from the display of fertile greenery, in comes the shy, celibate newcomer. ‘A tall, embarrassed figure, following the portly one of Mr Wodehouse, stepped suddenly from the noisy gravel to the quiet grass, and stood gravely awkward behind the father of the house’ in contrast to the blazing narcissi and the fruit trees. Morley Proctor has been ‘living out of nature.’ For the last fifteen years he has been immured in the college of All Souls, preparing an edition of Sophocles. ‘He was neither High nor Low, enlightened nor narrow-minded. He was a Fellow of All Souls’—about which Mrs Oliphant probably knew very little except for the irony of the name for an establishment which cared for so few of them. Proctor is honourable enough, upright and sincere, but in company he is ‘a reserved and inappropriate man.’ His heart is an ‘unused faculty.’ He is out of place, as he knows at once, in the vigorously flowering garden.

      But Morley Proctor, too, has come from a Paradise to which he looks back regretfully, a haven of scholarship and ‘snug little dinner-parties undisturbed by the presence of women.’ This is in spite of the fact that his mother has come from Devonshire to look after him, a dauntless little mother who treats him with the mixture of love and impatience at which Mrs Oliphant (in fiction as in life) excelled. Old Mrs Proctor, young in heart, regards her son as a child, but as one who should be settled down with a wife. One of the Wodehouse daughters would do—the kindly, plain, elder one whose reserve seems an echo of Morley’s own timidity, or perhaps the dazzling Lucy.

      Having placed this situation, Mrs Oliphant asks us to see it in a different light. It turns out that the new Rector has left All Souls, somewhat against his conscience, precisely in order to give his mother a good home. When he ‘turned his back on his beloved cloisters’ he knew very well what the sacrifice was, but he was determined to make it.

      I have said that Mrs Oliphant is not writing of the religious life simply as a social mechanism, or for the sake of the psychological tension that it produces. Proctor’s flight from the possibility of marriage (not without an unexpected twinge of sexuality, since Lucy is so pretty) is domestic comedy of a delicious kind, since Lucy does not want him in the least. But the crisis of the story, when it comes, is spiritual. As a sharp interruption to the dull services that he conducts and the dinner parties that he awkwardly attends, the Rector is called to the bedside of a dying woman. He is asked to prepare her soul for its last journey. His reaction to the agony is dismay, and a very English embarrassment. Without his prayer book he is at a loss for a prayer. He has to leave even that duty to young Wentworth, who providentially comes in time to the sickroom. The Rector ‘would have known what to say to her if her distress had been over a disputed translation.’ The heart of the story is his trial and condemnation, and he has to conduct the trial himself. Carlingford doesn’t reject him—quite the contrary. But he perceives that Wentworth, ‘not half or a quarter part as learned as he,’ was ‘a world farther on in the profession which they shared.’ Among those who are being born, suffering and perishing he has no useful place. His training has not prepared him for such things. And yet, can they be learned by training? ‘The Rector’s heart said No.’

      Mrs Oliphant, in fact, is asking: what is a man doing, and what must he be, when he undertakes to be an intermediary between man and God? She returns to the question later, in Salem Chapel. The answer, in her view, has nothing to do with formal theology, or she would not have proposed it. Nor is it a matter of duty. Morley Proctor was right, in his anxiety, to consult his heart.

      IV. СКАЧАТЬ