A House of Air. Hermione Lee

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