A House of Air. Hermione Lee

(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 Roque’s. By the 1860s the Tractarian movement had spread out from Oxford into missions to England’s industrial slums. Frank’s first Rector, old Mr Bury, had asked the energetic young man 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