A House of Air. Hermione Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ the view of Carlingford and takes us to a different part of it. The Doctor, however, like the Rector, has to face a painful ordeal of reality. This is all the more telling because in his hard-working medical practice he might be thought to be facing it already. But Mrs Oliphant shows him as another, although very different example of the unused heart.

      Edward Rider is a surgeon, still, at that date, professionally inferior to a doctor. He is no hero, and Mrs Oliphant defines carefully what are ‘the limits of his nature, and beyond them he could not pass.’ He is shown as wretchedly in need of a woman, but unwilling to marry because he can’t face the expense and responsibility. His surgery is in the dreaded brickworkers’ district, partly because he is not a snob, but largely because he has to make a living. He would work in Grange Lane if he could, but that is the domain of old Dr Marjoribanks, who attends the ‘good society.’ To this ‘poor young fellow,’ as Mrs Oliphant calls him, strong-minded, short-tempered, comes a terrible visitation. His drunken failure of an elder brother, Fred, has come back in disgrace from Australia and installed himself in the upstairs room. ‘A large, indolent, shabby figure,’ he is incapable of gratitude but is always ready with a pleasant word for the neighbours, who prefer him, in consequence, to the doctor. Fred’s foul billows of tobacco smoke define him and hang over the first part of the book, just as the surgery lamp shines defiantly at the beginning and the end.

      Mrs Oliphant was well acquainted with sickbeds and travel and the support of idle relations. The story seems almost to tell itself. It moves fast, as though keeping pace with the doctor’s rounds in his horse and drag, the quickest-moving thing on the streets of Carlingford. One encounter follows another, each outbidding the last. Fred is followed from Australia by his feebly plaintive wife and a pack of children. All have arrived in charge of his forceful young sister-in-law, Nettie. She is a tiny, ‘brilliant brown creature,’ a mighty atom, afraid of nothing ‘except that someone would speak before her and the situation be taken out of her hands.’ Having a little money left, she undertakes to support the whole lot of them, and whisks them away to new lodgings. The title The Doctor’s Family can now be seen in all its irony. First Rider, who has been too cautious to marry, is threatened with a whole family of wild children:

      Nettie comes to his rescue, but this is no relief to the doctor, who falls violently in love with her. Fred’s squalid death in the canal may look like a solution, but isn’t. It means, or Nettie convinces herself that it does, that she has no right to marry and desert her weak-spirited sister. All the action seems checked, until the arrival of another Australian visitor, ‘the Bushman,’ who ‘fills up the whole little parlour with his beard and his presence,’ gives it quite a new direction. From the secluded top room where Dr Rider once hid away his brother, the whole drama has come into the open. There it has to be played out to the amazement of watching Carlingford, from the bargemen who drag in Fred’s bloated body to mild, elderly Miss Wodehouse, with whose gentle observations the book comes to rest. Dr Rider and Dr Marjoribanks, Frank Wentworth and the Wodehouses, will return in the later Chronicles, all of them less than perfect human beings. Mrs Oliphant is not much concerned with faultless characters. An exception, in The Doctor’s Family, is the honest Bushman, but even he, Miss Wodehouse points out, has made a woeful mistake. And by avoiding the Victorian baroque, the luxurious contrast between the entirely good and pure and the downright wicked that even George Eliot sometimes allowed herself, Mrs Oliphant creates a moral atmosphere of her own—warm, rueful, based on hard experience, tolerant just where we may not expect it. One might call it the Mrs Oliphant effect. In part it is the ‘uncomprehended, unexplainable impulse to take the side of the opposition’ that she recognized in herself and in Jane Carlyle. It is the form that her wit takes, a sympathetic relish for contradictions.

      We are quite ready, for example, to accept Nettie as the saving angel of The Doctor’s Family, but when the drunken Fred says ‘Nettie’s a wonderful creature, to be sure, but it’s a blessed relief to get rid of her for a little,’ it’s impossible, just for the moment, not to see his point of view. Later on, when Nettie’s responsibilities unexpectedly disappear, she feels, not gratitude or ‘delight in her new freedom,’ but a bitter sense of injury. She has never had to see herself as unimportant before. Again, Freddie, the youngest child, adores her and refuses to leave her. But this passion, says Mrs Oliphant, is simply ‘a primitive unconcern for anyone but himself.’ Anybody who has looked after young children must reluctantly admit the truth of this. ‘When I am a man, I shan’t want you,’ says Freddie. In The Rector, young Mr Wentworth, even in his deep concern for the dying woman, cannot help feeling annoyed that the Rector was there before him. Mrs Oliphant hardly implies that men, women, and children should not be like this, only that this is the way they are. The often not-quite-resolved endings of her novels produce the same bittersweet effect. In Hester (1883) the strong heroine, who has shown herself perfectly capable of an independent career, is left without hope of the work she meant to do, but with two men, neither of them up to her mark, who want to marry her. ‘What can a young woman desire more,’ writes Mrs Oliphant dryly, ‘than to have such a possibility of choice?’ To take a very different example in one of her short stories, ‘The Open Door’ (1882), the ghost of a young man knocks at the door of a house in Edinburgh, ceaselessly trying to make amends to the family who lived there a century ago. A minister persuades the spirit to leave its haunting, but whether it is at peace as a result there is no way of telling.

      As to the conclusion of The Doctor’s Family, Mrs Oliphant herself was not satisfied with it. ‘Sometimes,’ she wrote to Miss Blackwood in 1862, ‘one’s fancies will not do what is required of them.’ I think she underrated herself here. Surely she was right, in any case, to leave her readers to reflect on whether the end of the story is a defeat for Nettie. This, in turn, raises the question of the balance of power between men and women, and the world’s justice towards them. ‘If it were not wicked to say so,’ Nettie remarks, ‘one would think almost that Providence forgot sometimes, and put the wrong spirit into a body that did not belong to it.’ Nettie has had no education. One might call her self-invented. She speaks for her creator here. Still more so, when she has rejected Dr Edward and let him drive off, full of love and rage, into the darkness, while she goes into the house. ‘As usual, it was the woman who had to face the light and observation, and to veil her trouble.’ This is all the more effective because of its restraint. Mrs Oliphant is not asking even for change, only for acknowledgement.

      The letter to Miss Blackwood makes it clear that her imagination was not always under the control of her will, and shows the natural spontaneous quality of all she wrote, as indeed of all she did. The mid-Victorian novel, Walter Allen once pointed out, ‘was an unselfconscious, even primitive form,’ and it suited her admirably. When she had good material—and in the Carlingford Chronicles she had—she was a most beguiling novelist. She saw her novels, she said, more as if she was reading them than if she was writing them. ‘I was guided by the human story in all its chapters.’

      V. Salem Chapel

      ‘When I die I know what people will say of me,’ Mrs Oliphant wrote. ‘They will give me credit for courage, which I almost think is not courage, but insensibility.’ In the winter of 1861 she was living in a small house in Ealing. She was deep in debt and had three young children to support, one of them born after her husband’s death. Working, as usual, in the middle of the night, she continued her chronicles of provincial life with Salem Chapel.

      At the heart of her new book is the unwelcome clash of the idealist with the world as it is. The world, this time, is represented by Salem—the Dissenters of Carlingford, in satisfied possession of their thriving shops and of the red brick chapel which they have built themselves. Salem, in appearance, is modest. On the shabby side of Grove Street, the chapel is surrounded by the ‘clean, respectable, meagre little habitations’ where the congregation live. They, of course, are condescended to by the gentry; they are tradespeople. But their independent worship and their free choice of their own minister, to be replaced if he fails to suit, give them an agreeable sense of power. Salem folk, the women in particular, are never happier than when they СКАЧАТЬ