A House of Air. Hermione Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ to help him, for the time being, in Wharfside, Carlingford’s brickworking district down by the canals. Here his daily contact with extreme hardship, and the difficult lives and deaths of the poor, has brought out Frank’s true vocation. In Wharfside he is respected and loved. His plain-spoken sermons fill the little tin chapel. But Wharfside is not in Frank’s district. He has only come to think of it as his own. It is this that the new Rector, Mr Morgan, finds intolerable. Unquestionably the success of his ministry has gone to Frank’s head, Morgan challenges him directly. He proposes to sweep away the tin chapel and build a new church in Wharfside. This is not power politics, it is a dispute over a ‘cure of souls,’ but still a dispute. And ‘next to happiness,’ as Mrs Oliphant puts it, ‘perhaps enmity is the most healthful stimulant of the human mind.’

      Since Frank cannot compromise on a matter of principle, he faces a future without advancement. This means the long-drawn-out waste of his love and Lucy’s. Here is the central concern of the novel, and there are two minor episodes, comic and pathetic by turns, which stand as a kind of commentary on it. In the first place, the Morgans themselves have waited prudently through many years of genteel poverty. The appointment to Carlingford has been their first chance to marry. But by now Mrs Morgan is faded, her nose reddened by indigestion, while Morgan has the short temper of middle age. With a touching determination they brace themselves, after so many delays, to make the best of things. The railway, for example, runs close behind the Rectory, the first house they have ever lived in together. The old gardener suggests that it won’t show so much when the lime trees have ‘growed a bit,’ but poor Mrs Morgan is ‘reluctant to await the slow processes of nature’; the processes, that is, which have tormented her for the past ten years. Then there is the terribly ugly, but perfectly good carpet left behind by the last Rector. Mrs Morgan detests this carpet. But she tells herself, with hard-won self-control, ‘It would not look like Christ’s work…if we had it all our own way.’ She cannot afford to complain. Time has robbed her of the luxury of ingratitude. And in her heart she is afraid that it has narrowed her husband’s mind, although this makes her more loyal to him than ever. ‘If only we had been less prudent!’ Mrs Oliphant shows that, in spite of everything, the love between the Morgans goes deep, but Frank, passing them in Grange Lane, sees them as grotesque, and feels his own frustration as demon thoughts.

      Secondly, there is the story of the elder Miss Wodehouse, the gentle, ‘dove-coloured,’ forty-year-old spinster who appears in The Rector. To all appearances she is resigned to a life without self, devoted to her pretty and much younger sister. But the Reverend Morley Proctor returns to Carlingford and offers her her ‘chance.’ True, he proposes disconcertingly with the words ‘You see we are neither of us young.’ But he allows Miss Wodehouse, for the first time, to set a value on herself, ‘a timid middle-aged confidence.’ She even has it in her power, for a while at least, to patronize Lucy. She will have a home of her own. When Lucy’s happiness makes this unimportant, Miss Wodehouse has ‘a half-ludicrous, half-humiliating sense of being cast into the shade.’ A truly good-hearted woman, she cannot understand these new feelings. We have to recognize them for her.

      Love, money, duty, passing time, the powerful interactions of the mid-Victorian novel, all bear down on the Perpetual Curate. But there is a possible way out. The Wentworths are a landed family and they have a living, with a good income, in their gift. The living is expected to fall vacant and Frank is the natural successor, unless—and the Wentworths have heard disturbing rumours of this—he has ‘gone over’ to Ritualism. To investigate this, Frank’s unmarried aunts, all firm Evangelicals, arrive in Carlingford. They are there to take stock of the flowers and candles, to hear whether their nephew preaches ‘the plain gospel,’ and to deliver their verdict accordingly. Although Mrs Oliphant objected to the fairy-tale element in Dickens, surely she is allowing herself to use it here. Three aunts—one gracious, one sentimental, whose hair ‘wavered in weak-minded ringlets’; one stern and practical—install themselves in Grange Lane. From there they circulate through the town, at once menacing and ridiculous.

      It is no surprise, however, in a novel by Mrs Oliphant, to find enterprise in the hands of the women. Frank’s father, the Squire, is an attractive figure, but a bewildered one, with only ‘that glimmering of sense which keeps many a stupid man straight’. He is shown, in fact, as acting largely on instinct. Outside his broad acres (where he is shrewd enough) he seems at a loss. From his three marriages there are numerous children with conflicting interests, and he hardly seems to know what to do with them either. And the family not only descends remorselessly on Frank but summons him home to deal with the problem of his stepbrother Gerald.

      Gerald is the Rector of the parish of Wentworth itself. But he has been struggling with doubts and has now been converted—‘perverted,’ the aunts call it—to the Roman Catholic Church. The wound to his family and their sense of betrayal leaves them almost helpless. ‘Rome, it’s Antichrist,’ says the old Squire. ‘Every child in the village school could tell you that.’ More monstrous still, Gerald hopes to become a Catholic priest. And then there is a very real obstacle: he is married. His wife, Louisa, is a fool. While Gerald struggles to be ‘content to be nothing, as the saints were,’ Louisa complains, through ready tears, ‘We have always been used to the very best society!’ But she has the power of weak, silly women, a power that fascinated Mrs Oliphant, herself an intelligent woman who had to struggle to survive. Gerald, obsessed with his wife’s troubles and his own ordeal, is ‘like a man whom sickness had reduced to the last stage of life.’

      Frank’s generous heart aches for his brother. The whole family relies on him to bring Gerald to his senses, and the debate between the two of them is extended through the central part of the novel. It begins at Wentworth Rectory, where the solid green cedar tree on the lawn outside the windows seems to stand for ancient certainties, and it echoes the painful divisions in so many English families after the turning point of Newman’s conversion in 1845. Frank is aware that if Gerald resigns the Wentworth living it will be there for himself and Lucy, but he hates himself for remembering this. Indeed, all he has time for is the distress of his brother’s sacrifice.

      Mrs Oliphant herself was no sectarian. The ‘warm Free Churchism’ of her early days was behind her, or rather it had expanded, in the course of a hard life, into tolerance. Forms of worship interested her very little. She knew only, as she told one of her friends, that she was not afraid of the loneliness of death because of ‘a silent companion, God walking in the cool of the garden.’ Time and again she relates religion to instinct and nature. This doesn’t mean that she treats Gerald and Frank’s debate as unimportant, only that it follows its own lines. There is, for instance, nothing like Charlotte Brontë’s romantic approach to the question in Villette (1853). The real point at issue is reached in Chapter 40 when Gerald explains himself in terms of authority. He needs a Church that is ‘not a human institution,’ one that gives absolute certainty on all points. Although the steps by which he has reached this decision aren’t given, there is a hint here of Charles Reding, the hero of Newman’s Loss and Gain (1848). Frank’s answer is unexpected. He bases it, not upon freedom of conscience, but on the sufferings and inequalities of this life. How can the Catholic Church, which can no more explain these things than anyone else, claim that its authority is sufficient when it comes to doctrine? If trust in God is the only answer left to us for the pain of life, then, says Frank, ‘I am content to take my doctrines on the same terms.’

      Frank is to be seen here as the true priest, because he puts himself at the service of human suffering without pretending to be able to explain it. He understands, too, the relief from anxiety, which Mrs Oliphant herself thought was ‘our highest sensation—higher than any positive enjoyment in this world. It used to sweep over me like a wave, sometimes when I opened a door, sometimes in a letter—in all simple ways.’ The complement of this is the sympathy for others which relief brings, ‘the compassion of happiness,’ and this, too, Frank feels at the last. But this is the same Frank Wentworth who has to restrain himself from whacking his aunt’s horrible dog, and who lies awake maddened by the sound of the drainpipe—his landlady has ‘a passion for rain-water.’ Mrs Oliphant is determined to keep him human. Indeed, it СКАЧАТЬ