A House of Air. Hermione Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ think about such things. The shock of Mrs Hilyard’s mysterious poverty drives him out to visit the slums in Carlingford, even though he has no idea how to go about it. He believes everything he is told, gives money to everyone who asks, and returns penniless and exhausted. This is a beginning. But the wild scenes of flight and pursuit in which he is soon caught up distance him from Carlingford altogether. This, I think, is the effect Mrs Oliphant wanted. When at long last he admits to Salem that his old certainties are gone and that now he only faintly guesses ‘how God, being pitiful, has the heart to make man and leave him on this sad earth,’ he is talking about things which he could only have learned outside Carlingford, and beyond it.

      When John Blackwood, however, said that the novel came very near greatness, but just missed it, he was probably regretting the disappearance of Salem for so many chapters. And if some of the readers thought that the book must be by George Eliot (this caused Mrs Oliphant an indescribable mixture of pleasure and annoyance), they, too, were thinking of Salem: Mrs Oliphant inherited the Victorian novelist’s birthright, the effortless creation of character. In Salem she is totally at her ease. She lets her readers know the people of Grove Street better than poor Arthur Vincent ever does. This is true even of those who only make two or three appearances. Mr Tufton, for example, Arthur’s predecessor, is a homely old minister who has fortunately been ‘visited’ by paralysis—‘a disease not tragical, but drivelling’—giving the congregation an excuse to retire him with a suitable present. A bland self-deceiver, he has never admitted his own failure, and the congregation (this is a convincing touch) has forgotten it. They assume that it will do the new minister all the good in the world to visit the old one and draw on his wisdom. Arthur suffers agonies of impatience in the Tuftons’ stuffy front parlour, dominated by its vast potted plant. But this place of amiable self-deception is, unexpectedly, also the source of truth. The crippled daughter, Adelaide, strikes the sour note of absolute frankness and absolute unpleasantness. Her eyes have ‘something of the shrill shining of a rainy sky in their glistening whites.’ She explains that she has no share in life ‘and so instead of comforting myself that it’s all for the best, as Papa says, I interfere with my fellow creatures. I get on as well as most people.’ She takes no pleasure in it; it is an ‘intense loveless eagerness of curiosity’ that the complacent old Tuftons scarcely notice. At the end o f the book Adelaide plays a curious small part in deciding Arthur’s future. This kind of detail, a novelist’s second sight, is characteristic of Mrs Oliphant.

      Mr Tozer, the senior deacon of Salem, seems at first to represent the Victorian idea of the good tradesman. Never quite free of the greasiness of the best bacon and butter, he is proud of being ‘serviceable’ to the gentry and is all that is meant or implied by ‘honest’ and ‘worthy.’ He makes the familiar equation between morality and trade. All accounts, financial and spiritual, must be squared, and the new pastor’s sermons must ‘keep the steam up.’ His household, where the apprentices eat with the family, is patriarchal, and, it is suggested, belongs to times past. So, perhaps, does his unaffected kindness. Often, Salem knows, ‘he’s been called up at twelve o’ clock, when we was all abed, to see someone as was dying.’ All this is predictable, but Mrs Oliphant refuses to simplify it. Tozer is Arthur’s champion, but partly, at least, because he backed him from the first and can’t endure to be put in the wrong. When Arthur touches despair, Tozer shows him Christian kindness, but doesn’t conceal his pride in managing the minister’s affairs. Arthur finds it hard to bear Tozer’s perfect satisfaction over his own generosity. He feels, and so do we, that it would be ‘a balm’ to cut Tozer’s remarks short, and to ‘annihilate’ him. At this point he is goodness in its most exasperating form. Yet we can’t miss the weight of his reproach when the wretched young man ‘breaks out’ (his sister is suspected of murder): ‘Mr Vincent, sir, you mustn’t swear. I’m as sorry for you as a man can be; but you’re a minister, and you mustn’t give way.’

      Comic characters on this scale generate their own energy, and grow beyond themselves. Tozer escapes from the confines of his ‘worthiness.’ In his own way—although Arthur feels he must be ‘altogether unable to comprehend the feelings of a cultivated mind’—he is a connoisseur, and even an aesthete. This appears in his description of a tea meeting, ‘with pleasant looks and the urns a-smoking and a bit of greenery on the wall,’ and, more surprisingly, in his tribute to Lady Western’s beauty: ‘She’s always spending her life in company, as I don’t approve of; but to look in her face, you couldn’t say a word against her.’ Again, Tozer’s reverence for education goes deep, although he is too shrewd to expect others to share it. It would, he thinks, be unwise to charge an entrance fee to Arthur’s lectures. ‘If we was amusin’ the people, we might charge sixpence a head; but, mark my words, there aren’t twenty men in Carlingford, nor in no other place, as would give sixpence to have their minds enlightened. No, sir, we’re conferring of a boon, and let’s do it handsomely.’ He, too, has his battle to fight, with his second deacon, Pigeon, who cannot believe that Salem needs a highly educated minister. And, in practical terms, Pigeon turns out to be right, but we can never doubt Tozer’s claim to authority. The last sight we have of him is his red handkerchief; he has drawn it out to wipe away a tear or so, and to Arthur, preaching for the last time in Salem Chapel, ‘the gleam seemed to redden over the entire throng.’ This is Tozer heroic. Mrs Oliphant herself, although she always refused to make any high claims for her own work, admitted that Tozer had amused her.

      Salem can settle back to its own level, and find its own peace. ‘Unpeace’—this is Mrs Tozer’s word—is at all costs to be avoided. But there is no easy solution for Arthur Vincent, who has been called upon for something less than he can give, but has given, all the same, less than he might have done. Like The Rector and The Doctor’s Family, Salem Chapel points forward to the future without exactly defining it. As the story ends, Arthur knows what it is to mistake one’s calling, and to be misunderstood, and to suffer. He still has to learn what it is to be happy.

      VI. The Perpetual Curate

Frank Wentworth, the Perpetual Curate, was one of Mrs Oliphant’s favourites. ‘I mean to bestow the very greatest care on him,’ she told her publisher, William Blackwood, as she set to work, with her usual rush of energy, to expand Frank’s story from the glimpses we get of him in The Rector and Salem Chapel. In this fourth Chronicle, Carlingford is as respectable, slow moving, and opinionated as ever. Frank, on the other hand, is ‘throbbing…with wild life and trouble to the very finger-points.’ He is a dedicated priest, he is in love, and he is still (as he was in The Rector) too poor to marry, certainly too poor to marry Lucy Wodehouse, the young woman he loves.³

      To be a perpetual curate, in the 1860s, meant exactly that. He was in charge of a church built, in the first place, to take the pressure of work off a large parish. To a great extent he was independent. But to rise higher he had (like any other curate) either to be preferred to a family living, or to be recommended by the Rector to his Bishop. If, however, he was ‘viewy’—meaning if he had views that his superiors didn’t accept—the result was bound to be a high-spirited clash with the Rector, with which the chance of recommendation was likely to disappear.

      Frank Wentworth is ‘viewy.’ He is a Ritualist. At his little church, St Roque’s, built in hard stony Gothic, there are candles, flowers, bells and a choir in white surplices. The worship there represents the later phase of the Tractarian movement whose effect was so disturbing that the Established Church had begun to take legal action against it. (One of the first of these cases, in fact, was brought against the Perpetual Curate of St James’s, Brighton, who refused to give up hearing confessions.) Frank remains a good Anglican, and Mrs Oliphant never makes it very clear how extreme his opinions are, only that he holds them sincerely. And his Ritualism, of course, is not a matter of outward show, but of symbolizing the truth to all comers. But the candles and flowers of St Roque’s are a scandal to three-quarters of Carlingford.

      Frank, however—and here he is in deeper trouble—doesn’t confine himself to St СКАЧАТЬ