A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  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 are ‘hearing candidates.’ As a community they are inward-looking—the poor of Carlingford are the church’s business, not theirs—but there is warmth and dignity in Salem, the warmth of neighbourliness and the dignity of self-help. To them comes Arthur Vincent, their just-elected minister, a gentlemanly young scholar fresh from theological college, ‘in the bloom of hope and intellectualism,’ asking only for room to proclaim the truth to all men. He is met by what Mrs Oliphant calls ‘a cold plunge.’ Salem wants him to fill the pews with acceptable sermons, and to do his duty at tea-meetings.

  There is a strong hint, too, that the very best a young minister can do is to choose a wife from the flock, which in practice means the pinkly blooming Phoebe Tozer, the grocer’s daughter. He is told of another young pastor who failed ‘all along of the women; they didn’t like his wife, and he fell off dreadful.’ Arthur’s instincts prompt him to escape. ‘Their approbation chafed him, and if he went beyond their level, what mercy was he to expect?’ As in the two previous novels of the series, Carlingford will prove a test for the newcomer that is all the more painful because it is only half understood. Salem Chapel makes no claim to show the impact of Dissent on English life. There can be no kind of comparison, for instance, with George Eliot’s treatment of Methodism in Adam Bede. Non-conformism is not even shown as a significant moral force. ‘As a matter of fact,’ Mrs Oliphant admitted, ‘I knew nothing about chapels, but took the sentiment and a few details from our old church in Liverpool, which was Free Church of Scotland, and where there were a few grocers and other such good folk whose ways with the ministers were wonderful to behold.’ One of her earlier editors, W. Robertson Nicholl, pointed out that she got several of these details wrong. But this, even if she had realized it, would not have deterred Mrs Oliphant.

  What she did understand, from the depths of her Scottish being, was the power of the spoken word as a communication from heart to heart. Arthur Vincent’s progress as a preacher, through the length of the book, is from mere eloquence to a painful success (which he no longer wants) before an assembly that ‘scarcely dares draw breath.’ In the second place, Salem, as she presents it, is a small community which, however comfortable and unassuming it is, claims a power that may be beyond the human range. Her concern is still with the urgent question that she had raised in The Rector: what does it mean for a man, living among men, to call himself their priest? Vincent has received his title to ordination, not from a bishop, but from the vote of the congregation itself, and when he first arrives in Carlingford he is proud of this. He agrees to deliver a course of lectures attacking the Church of England, a hierarchy paid for by the State. But the experience of ministry makes him question not only what he is doing, but who he is. If he is answerable to God for the souls of human beings, can these same human beings hold authority over him?

  Almost certainly Mrs Oliphant had in mind two great unorthodox Scottish ministers, Edward Irving and George Macdonald, both rejected for heresy by their congregations. Only a year earlier, in 1860, she had been writing her memoir of Irving, in which she let fly, with generous indignation, at the ‘homely old men, unqualified for deciding any question which required clear heads,’ who had passed judgement on the great preacher. And Arthur Vincent, like Irving, comes to dream of a universal Church, with Christ as its only head, ‘not yet realised, but surely real.’ Irving, however, was the son of a tanner, and Macdonald the son of a crofter. Both of them were giants of men, with their own primitive grandeur, quite unlike the dapper young man from Homerton. But the distant echo of their battles can be heard in Salem Chapel.

  Arthur believes that his first duty is to save himself from ‘having the life crushed out of him by ruthless chapel-mongers,’ all the more so because he constantly risks the ludicrous. His meditation on his high calling as a soldier of the Cross is interrupted by Phoebe Tozer, who blushingly comes to offer him a leftover dish of jelly. But, at all levels, the conflict is not as simple as he believes. The real fighting ground is psychological. He could, for example, have accepted the dish of jelly graciously, Mrs Oliphant tells us, if he had not been a poor widow’s son. His poverty and his Dissent give a painful edge to his ambition. English society, he finds, in Carlingford as elsewhere, is ‘a phalanx of orders and classes standing above him, standing close in order to prevent his entrance.’ He had hoped to make Salem a centre of light. Now, as Salem’s minister, he finds himself shaking hands ‘which had just clutched a piece of bacon.’ And in all the pride—not to say the vanity—of his intellect, he discovers not only how difficult it is to accept these people, but how easy it is to manipulate them. He sees himself as a teller of tales to children, and feels delighted, in spite of himself, with his own cleverness. This two-edged danger returns more than once. He grows disgusted with his own work, but ‘contemptuous of those who were pleased with it.’

  In Mrs Oliphant’s novels, men turn for help to women. But in Carlingford the two women who mean most to Arthur act, in a sense, as his opponents without intending it or even knowing it. Beautiful Lady Western, with whom he falls so disastrously and pitiably in love, means no harm, either to him or to anyone else. She is quite conscious of her power, but not of the damage it is doing. Then there is Mrs Vincent, Arthur’s mother. The formal distance between Mrs Oliphant and
her subject is often very slight, particularly when she introduces these frail, anxious widows who come to the rescue of their families with the unexpected strength of ten. Evidently she is drawing on her own experience here, and indulging herself a little. There is too much about the widow’s self-sacrifice, and far too much about her spotless white caps. But Mrs Oliphant is still able to take a clear look at Mrs Vincent. She loves Arthur dearly, her simple faith puts him to shame, and in his defence she confronts Salem, and even Lady Western, successfully, but she is a minister’s widow, and to her the ministry is everything. Nothing can make her see beyond the limits of pastoral duty. For this reason, in the end, she can be of comfort, but not of help, to her son.

  Arthur Vincent’s struggle is a real one, and not only in terms of the mid-nineteenth century. He has enough to contend with, it might he thought, in Salem. Why did Mrs Oliphant feel it necessary to involve him, as she does, in such a lurid sub-plot? It starts off well enough with the mysterious, sardonic Mrs Hilyard, stitching away for a living at coarse material that draws blood from her hands. She and her dark sense of injustice are successfully presented, and it seems appropriate that she eventually puts the crucial question of the book, when she begs Arthur, as a priest, to curse her enemy, and he offers instead, as a priest, to bless her. But when the eagle-faced Colonel Mildmay makes his appearance (‘“She-Wolf!” cried the man, grinding his teeth’), and Arthur and his mother begin to chase up and down the length of England to save his sister from ‘polluting arms,’ the effect is not so much mystery as bewilderment, turning, sooner or later, to irritation. Arthur himself is singularly inefficient—at one point he arrives at London Bridge just in time to ‘glimpse’ not one, but two of his suspects gliding out of the station in separate carriages. Even Mrs Oliphant herself became doubtful about her contrivances. ‘I am afraid,’ she wrote to her publishers, ‘the machinery I have set in motion is rather extensive for the short limits I had intended.’

  Like her contemporary Mrs Gaskell, she was not at ease with the ‘machinery,’ and this is the only time it appears in the Carlingford Chronicles. It is true that she was an admirer of Wilkie Collins (though not of Dickens), and in particular of The Woman in White. In May 1862 she wrote a piece for Blackwood’s under the title ‘Sensation Novels,’ which praised Collins for using ‘recognisable human agents’ rather than supernatural ones. But the goings-on of Colonel Mildmay are not much, if at all, in the style of The Woman in White. They are stock melodrama—abduction, bloodshed, repentance—though admittedly there is nothing supernatural about them. Mrs Oliphant however, was determined to produce a bestseller at all costs, and she did. Salem Chapel began running as a serial in Blackwood’s for February 1862, and came out in book form in 1863. ‘It went very near,’ she recollected, ‘to making me one of the popularities of literature.’ It paid the family’s bills, at least for the time being, and gave her the courage to ask an unheard-of £1,500 for her next novel.

  This was a sturdy professional attitude, but I think she had another reason for the sensational elements in Salem Chapel. Arthur Vincent cannot come to terms with himself, or with his gift of words, until he has encountered what Mrs Oliphant (who knew something about it) called ‘the dark ocean of life.’ Poor though he is, he has been sheltered from the sight of absolute want and misery, and at Homerton he has never been led to 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 othe
rs 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.