A House of Air

A House of Air Hermione Lee Penelope Fitzgerald WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEEThe previously uncollected occasional prose of a great English writer – full of wit, feeling and illumination.Penelope Fitzgerald was a prolific letter writer. She avoided the phone if she could, never even contemplated the possibility of going online. Her warmth, humour and supreme storytelling abilities found their best forum here. Surprising, wonderfully funny, definitive, this is a major collection of Penelope Fitzgerald’s reviews, essays and autobiographical writings.This collection includes pieces on contemporary novelists Giles Foden, Anne Enright, Carol Shields, Rose Tremain, Roddy Doyle; on classic writers Muriel Spark, A.E. Housman, Rose Macaulay, M.R. James, Stevie Smith, Dorothy L. Sayers; on remembering her grandfather E.H. Shepard; on her love of Devon and Spain and William Morris: on writers in their old age; and witty and poignant recollections of her schooldays, her life on a Thames barge, her childhood in Hampstead and the ghost who lived next door but one.This is a fantastically funny book – as much of an entertainment as the Kingsley Amis letters. A House of Air Selected Writings Penelope Fitzgerald Edited by Terence Dooley with Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff Introduction by Hermione Lee For Valpy, Tina and Maria and in memory of Desmond, Mary and Evoe, and Mops Table of Contents Cover Page (#ua3b62f33-3364-5a51-bb1f-af94d452e54a) Title Page (#u239eb966-c594-5057-b001-09771fcbab38) Dedication (#ufb371d63-fa7c-5071-8c71-0276e27b0296) Introduction (#u6d37e6f3-bd70-58b8-8ec6-018ceea813b3) Editor’s Note (#u72301845-3e17-5b2d-a447-5f6fc45007c4) PART I Master-Spirits (#u3fbeda90-3e7e-5d71-a3da-0c0d787f14c5) JANE AUSTEN Emma’s Fancy (#u71141055-79dc-5751-88e2-cf90467ef3d3) WILLIAM BLAKE The Unfading Vision (#ufb9b81ce-67d3-509d-9225-8d7e8ab13b5a) SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE Talking Through the Darkness (#ua19d8309-49ef-593e-93c2-9dcf09ae808e) SARAH ORNE JEWETT The News from Dunnet Landing (#u7fff1ca5-a067-53f3-beef-4b7bfc2b0d9b) GEORGE ELIOT The Will to Good (#u3d89498b-e183-58c7-9607-597cb2fa47d0) MRS OLIPHANT The Heart and Soul of Carlingford (#u5f674468-8484-51b6-8d22-7ca4247b53ba) THE VICTORIANS Called Against His Will (#ud46e6669-6765-52c3-8fd2-54c00cf4c5e6) WILLIAM MORRIS His Daily Bread (#u0f4a340d-ff4c-5f91-a502-bb2f2c7c1aed) ARTS AND CRAFTS Lasting Impressions (#uab5c4161-68bb-5983-9fa6-e6aa125adcf3) RHYME AND METRE Obstacles (#litres_trial_promo) M. R. JAMES Monty and His Ghosts (#litres_trial_promo) THE WORLD OF PUNCH Thin, Fat, and Crazy (#litres_trial_promo) YEATS AND HIS CIRCLE A Bird Tied to a String (#litres_trial_promo) NEW WOMEN AND NEWER Dear Sphinx (#litres_trial_promo) BLOOMSBURY A Way Into Life (#litres_trial_promo) MODERNS AND ANTI-MODERNS The Great Encourager (#litres_trial_promo) THE FORTIES AND AFTER What’s Happening in the Engine Room (#litres_trial_promo) PART II Writers and Witnesses 1980-2000 (#litres_trial_promo) WRITERS A Secret Richness (#litres_trial_promo) WITNESSES Grandmother’s Footsteps (#litres_trial_promo) PART III Places (#litres_trial_promo) THE MOORS (#litres_trial_promo) PART IV Life and Letters (#litres_trial_promo) CURRICULUM VITAE (#litres_trial_promo) SCENES OF CHILDHOOD Well Walk (#litres_trial_promo) ASPECTS OF FICTION Following the Plot (#litres_trial_promo) WHY I WRITE (#litres_trial_promo) How I WRITE: DAISY’S INTERVIEW (#litres_trial_promo) PART V Coda (#litres_trial_promo) LAST WORDS (#litres_trial_promo) INDEX (#litres_trial_promo) About The Author (#litres_trial_promo) Praise (#litres_trial_promo) By the same author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) INTRODUCTION by Hermione Lee (#ulink_4aacf172-9bf2-596b-a404-ea6167071039) Because Penelope Fitzgerald’s genius as a writer of fiction lay so much in reticence, quietness, and self-obliteration, her admirers will come to her posthumously collected nonfiction with intense curiosity, searching for her likes and dislikes, her preferences and opinions and feelings, in these wonderfully sympathetic, curious, and knowledgeable pieces on writing, art, craft, places, history, and biography. And, in a generous selection of twenty years’ worth of essays and reviews, we do find (especially in the last section, on ‘Life and Letters’) Fitzgerald’s point of view very plainly set out. She believed, as a novelist, that (as she said to me in an interview in 1997) ‘you should make it clear where you stand.’ Here, speaking of E. M. Delafield, she asks: ‘What is the use of an impartial novelist?’ She is forthright and candid here about her moral position in her novels: ‘I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?’ ‘Everyone has a point to which the mind reverts naturally when it is left on its own. I recalled closed situations that created their own story out of the twofold need to take refuge and to escape, and which provided their own limitations. These limitations were also mine.’ Such utterances throw a revealing light on the novels. But they are also rather cryptic: she expects us to understand what she means by the ‘point’ the mind ‘reverts to naturally’; she doesn’t tell us what she thinks her limitations are. She has a way of saying strange, challenging, unsettling things in a matter-of-fact way, as if these were self-evident truths. Her manner is plai n and mild; her prose never shows off. She is practical and vivid and clear and exact about her subject, and leads you right to the heart of the matter: the feeling of a novel, the nature of a life, the understanding of how something or someone works, the sense of a place or a time. All the same, when you get there, you may still feel much left unsaid or unexplained. There is often that sense of something withheld in her novels, as in the mysterious forest encounter in The Beginning of Spring, or the meaning of the story of the ‘blue flower,’ never completed, never spelled out. As Fritz tells Sophie in that novel: ‘If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching.’ At the end of the story ‘Desideratus’ (in her posthumously published collection The Means of Escape) the boy who has lost his keepsake and been on a strange journey to recover it, is told: ‘You have what you came for.’ But his quest journey remains baffling and mysterious. And she doesn’t care much for explanations. In that 1997 interview she told me (as she often told interviewers) that her books were so short because she didn’t like to tell her readers too much: she felt it insulted them to over-explain. She says here in an essay on Charlotte Mew (which preceded her moving and eloquent biography of the poet) that she is a writer who ‘refuses quite to be explained.’ She is amused by Byron’s impatience with Coleridge’s metaphysics: ‘I wish he would explain his explanation.’ She likes readers to have their wits about them, and she likes exercising her own, as with her pleasure in Beckett’s dialogue: What a joy it is to laugh from time to time, [Father Ambrose] said. Is it not? I said. It is peculiar to man, he said. So I have noticed, I said…Animals never laugh, he said. It takes us to find that funny, I said. What? he said. It takes us to find that funny, I said loudly. He mused. Christ never laughed either, he said, as far as we know. He looked at me. Can you wonder? I said. She comments: ‘This kind of dialogue shows us what we could say if we had our wits about us, and gives us its own peculiar satisfaction.’ Beckett’s hollow laughter is a surprising preference for Fitzgerald, who is not herself a player with words or a lugubrious comic. And there are other surprises here. There are pieces on writers we might have guessed she would like—Sarah Orne Jewett for her deep, quiet knowledge of a small community, its silences, pride, and cruelties; John McGahern for his poetic realism, his attention to ‘small acts of ceremony,’ and his ‘magnificently courteous attention to English as it is spoken in Ireland’; William Trevor for his empathy with the innocent and the dispossessed; Olive Schreiner for her strangeness, dreaming, and courage. But there are others she champions more unexpectedly: Roddy Doyle, Carol Shields, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce (even Finnegans Wake). This is not a narrow, prissy, or parochial critic. At the heart of her intellectual passions is a political commitment to an English tradition of creative socialism, a vision at once utopian and practical, of art as work and of the usefulness of art to its community. Her English heroes are Blake, Ruskin, Burne-Jones, William Morris, Lutyens. She is inspired by Morris’s dedication to ‘the transformation of human existence throughout the whole social order.’ (Though, as in The Beginning of Spring, she sees the comedy and pathos of Utopianism too, manifested in the early twentieth century in ‘Tolstoyan settlements, garden cities and vegetarianism tea-rooms, Shelley’s Spirit of Delight…and the new Rolls-Royce.’) She deeply admires Morris’s painful mixture of neurosis, work ethic, resolution, and struggle for self-control. But she likes her idealists best at their most down-to-earth: Ruskin on the joy of shelling peas (‘the pop which assures one of a successful start, the fresh colour and scent of the juicy row within…’) or the cunning arrangements at Burne-Jones’s studio at The Grange: ‘the huge canvases could be passed in and through slits in the walls, there were hot-water pipes, and a skylight so that it could be used for painting with scaffolding.’ The work of Morris that most delights her is the Kelmscott Press and his experiments with typography. She pays great attention to serious craftsmanship, practised skills, and technical mastery. (There is always a job to be done in her novels: running a bookshop or a school, keeping a barge afloat.) The best compliment she can pay to the biographies she often reviews is ‘calm professionalism.’ She is just as interested in non-verbal professions; there is a great deal about art in this book. She tells us about Francis Oliphant’s failed attempts at glass painting. William de Morgan’s luminous tiles, Charles Ashbee’s high-minded devotion to handicrafts (all the same, ‘he was an architect whose houses stood up’), and Edward Lear’s heavenly Mediterranean paintings. She has an eye for illustrations—John Minton’s decorations for Elizabeth David’s first cookery book, ‘a kind of delicious ballet in and out of the text,’ or Ernest Shepard (her step-mother’s father) and his feeling for line (‘You can recognize it in…a study of…a young man cutting long grass…The braces are only just sketched in, but you can see how they take the strain’). She loves small well-made books, like J. L. Carr’s ‘delightful tiny booklets’, The Little Poets (‘I only wish I had a complete set now’). One of her favourite quotations is from the socialist woodworker Romney Green, who held that ‘if you left any man alone with a block of wood and chisel, he will start rounding off the corners.’ Romney Green was a friend of Harold Monro, founder of the Poetry Bookshop, which had a quirky, idealistic, and influential life from the 1910s to the early 1930s. This is Fitzgerald’s golden age: she doesn’t like ‘Georgian’ to be used as a term of abuse. Born in 1916, she remembered hearing Walter de la Mare reading at the Poetry Bookshop, and many of her best-loved writers are connected to that period and that atmosphere: A. E. Housman, Edward Thomas, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Stevie Smith. Again, one of the things she liked best about the Poetry Bookshop was the look of its rhyme sheets, which, ‘in the spirit of William Blake,’ and using some of the best illustrators of the time (including John and Paul Nash, David Jones, and Edward Bawden), were designed for ‘the verse and the picture to make their impression together.’ ‘We tacked them on our walls, above our beds and our baths.’ Harold Monro was a lost cause in the end, a pathetic and gloomy alcoholic, and the Bookshop was carried on gallantly for a while, and then wound up, by his passionate Polish widow, Alida. As in her novels, Fitzgerald is drawn to failures, and some of her most vivid characterizations here, in life as in fiction, are of despairing figures whose struggles and defeats are at once funny and terrible. She is drawn to the sad minor characters in minor English novels. There is the poor faded shabby-genteel Mrs Morgan in Mrs Oliphant’s The Rector (‘She cannot afford to complain. Time has robbed her of the luxury of ingratitude’). There is the ‘uncompromisingly plain Anne Yeo’ in Ada Leverson’s Love’s Shadow, ‘hideously dressed in a mackintosh and golf-cap and “well aware that there were not many people in London at three o’clock on a sunny afternoon who would care to be found dead with her.”’ There is the unmarried Monica in E. M. Delafield’s Thank Heaven Fasting, a prisoner of early-twentieth-century middle-class English domestic servitude: ‘Heavy meals come up from the basement kitchen, clothes are worn which can’t be taken off without the help of a servant, fires blaze, bells are rung, hairdressers arrive by appointment—every morning and evening bring the spoils of a comfortable unearned income. It is the only home Monica has ever known, and we have to see it turn first into a refuge for the unwanted, and then into a prison.’ You might not call Penelope Fitzgerald, at first glance, a feminist writer, but she is one. So conscious of how cruel life can be to its victims, she is generally kind herself. However, she should not be mistaken for a pushover, and can be lethal about poor work. One biographer, busy seeing off his predecessor as ‘conventional,’ is dealt with thus: ‘This leads you to expect a bold treatment of some debatable points, but that would be a mistake.’ Another is described as writing with ‘flat-footed perseverance.’ She is often at her most ironical when writing about biography, a form that fascinates and exasperates her (and that, in her lives of Charlotte Mew and the Knox brothers, she made entirely her own). She always insists on the need for the fullest possible historical context, and she knows all about the problems of the genre: ‘The years of success are a biographer’s nightmare.’ ‘The “middle stretch” is hard for biographers.’ ‘Perhaps the worst case of all for a biographer, nothing definable happened at all.’ In any life-story, she is alert to cruelty, tyranny, or unfairness, and she has no time for horrible behaviour—severely recalling Larkin, on an Arts Council Literature Panel, saying (in response to a query about the funding of ‘ethnic arts centres’) that ‘anyone lucky enough to be allowed to settle here had a duty to forget their own culture and try to understand ours,’ or summing up the character Evelyn Waugh assumed for visitors and admirers as ‘the tiny Master threateningly aloof in his study, emerging with the message: I am bored, you are frightened.’ Like her father, Evoe Knox, when he was editor of Punch, she always speaks out against tyrants. And she has an acute feeling for—and memory of—the vulnerability of children. She responds to writers (like Walter de la Mare, or Blake, or Olive Schreiner) who enter into the child’s dreams, or feelings of exile or homesickness; she is very alert to ‘the bewilderment of children growing up without love.’ At her memorial service, appropriately, Humperdinck’s ravishing and consolatory lullaby for the two lost children, Hansel and Gretel, was sung. Hansel and Gretel (whose lullaby is also heard in The Bookshop) believe in angels; Penelope Fitzgerald probably did, too. She certainly believes in minor phenomena like ghosts and poltergeists, and she does a great deal of thinking about religion, as is only natural for the granddaughter of bishops and the niece of a Socialist priest, a notable Roman Catholic convert and translator of the Bible, and a fiercely sceptical cryptographer. Her novels argue, quietly, over belief, and the relation between the soul and the body. ‘Because I don’t believe in this…that doesn’t mean it’s not true,’ is Frank’s position in The Beginning of Spring. The Russian priest he is listening to says to his congregation: ‘You are not only called upon to work together, but to love each other and pity each other.’ Fitzgerald has described herself as ‘deeply pessimistic,’ but she seems to believe in that sort of ideal. Writing here about Middlemarch and its hope that ‘the growing good of the world’ may depend on the diffusive effect of obscure acts of courage, heroism, and compassion, Fitzgerald says, not entirely confidently: ‘We must believe this, if we can.’ ‘Pity’ is one of the emotions—or qualities—she most values, especially in comedy. She certainly has a lively interest in little-read late-Victorian theological fiction, and a sharp eye for religious patches seeping through into secular-seeming texts, like Jane Austen’s Evangelicism leading Emma to weep over ‘a sin of thought,’ or Virginia Woolf inheriting from her father ‘a Victorian nonconformist conscience painfully detached from its God.’ But she is extremely reticent about her own beliefs. The people she admires are those who have a habit of ‘not making too much of things.’ She takes aesthetic pleasure in control and restraint: writing about Angus Wilson’s homosexuality, she says, with a rare touch of primness: ‘Getting rid of the restraints didn’t improve him as a writer—when does it ever?’ What autobiography we get here comes in glimpses—she says of her father that ‘everything that was of real importance to him he said as an aside.’ At one point in her life she started to write a biography of her friend L. P. Hartley, but stopped when she realized that it would give pain to his surviving relative. She thinks of him as resisting investigation; one of his characters, when unconcious, is subjected to ‘a complete examination’ by a famous specialist, ‘which in all his waking moments he had so passionately withstood.’ One of the very few personal details she gives us in these essays—that she once had a miscarriage—is offered only to illustrate the profound reserve of Ernest Shepard, who came to see her and handed her a bunch of flowers ‘without a word.’ She has a lot of time for silence: the silence that falls after a life-story like Coleridge’s, the world of Jewett’s stories ‘where silence is understood,’ the reserve which kept James Barrie from telling us what Mrs Oliphant said on her death-bed. This collection ends with Virginia Woolf’s posthumously published description, in her last novel, of a woman writer—a comic failure, of the kind Fitzgerald enjoyed writing about, too—leaving her audience behind (‘she took her voyage away from the shore’) and taking with her some mysterious unspoken words. EDITOR’S NOTE (#ulink_8c1e316a-93dd-57d0-a6c3-6f3444fb7cd3) I am grateful for the assiduity, grace under pressure, support of and devotion to Penelope’s writing, and her memory, of my collaborators and friends: Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff. PART I Master-Spirits (#ulink_0860d3a8-672b-58ef-bf7c-6387297624c5) JANE AUSTEN Emma’s Fancy (#ulink_affd3f48-4f18-5012-90a0-7f99251c003a) An introduction to Emma Emma (1814—15) is the last novel Jane Austen wrote before, at the age of forty, she began to feel the warning symptoms of her last illness. If a writer’s career can ever be said to have a high summer, this was hers. Emma Woodhouse, we are told, is handsome, clever, and rich, and has lived nearly twenty-one years in this world ‘with very little to disturb or vex her.’ Feeling the muted irony of this, we know that quite soon something will happen to distress her. It will be due partly to her own temperament—‘a disposition to think a little too well of herself’—partly to her upbringing in quiet Highbury. As in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, visitors arrive to unsettle the neighbourhood, but, unlike Elizabeth Bennet or Fanny Price, Emma meets them from a position of undisputed authority. Her reckless desire to manage and control is felt as the result of confining a keenly energetic character within a small space. She is, as Jane Austen is careful to show, very well-adapted to her life. She is the capable manager of a not very easy household and estate (which seems to include a piggery). She is generous and realistic towards the poor, a patient visitor to the cottagers, not expecting gratitude. But this strong-minded, affectionate young woman happens also to be an ‘imaginist,’ ‘on fire with speculation and fancy.’ One might feel, in fact, that she has the potentialities of a best-selling novelist. To Jane Austen, however, the contemporary of Byron, ‘that very dear part of Emma, her fancy,’ represents a danger of a specific kind. It is shown as the enemy not of reason, but of truth. It tempts Emma to see the blooming, commonplace Harriet as the heroine of a romance, and leads her on through absurd schemes—when she pretends, for instance, to lose the lace of her ‘half-boot’ so that Harriet and Mr Elton can walk on together—to the moment when, overcome with disappointments and disillusions, she cries out, ‘O God! that I had never seen her!’ Jane Austen’s novels are constructed on a delicate system of losses and gains, or retreats and advances. She undertakes, I think, to show that Emma’s release of her creative imagination—in spite of her intervals of remorse and repentance—gradually becomes more and more dangerous, not only to others, but to her own nature. Undoubtedly she was worried about this new heroine ‘whom nobody but myself will much like.’ To Mr Clarke, the librarian of Canton House, with whom she was corresponding over the question of dedicating Emma to the Prince Regent, she wrote: ‘I am strongly haunted with the idea that to those readers who have preferred “Pride and Prejudice” it will appear inferior in wit, and to those who have preferred “Mansfield Park” inferior in good sense.’ ‘Haunted’ is a strong word, and she does not sound as though she is making a conventional disclaimer. Rather it is as if she knew she was taking a risk, the risk, that is, of letting Emma go too far. The great Harriet undertaking is, after all, intended for the benefit of Harriet. It has ‘the real good will of a mind delighted with its own ideas.’ Robert Martin, Harriet’s suitor, must be got rid of and ‘Mr Elton was the very person fixed on by Emma for driving the young farmer out of Harriet’s head.’ The very strength of ‘fixed’ and ‘driving’ seem to echo her determination to make the unreal real. But the fact remains that her object was to ‘better’ her unassuming friend and her regret—while it lasts—is very real, ‘with every resolution confirmed of repressing imagination all the rest of her life.’ By the time the second movement of the novel begins, her imagination—unrepressed—has taken a turn for the worse. She is paying a call on the talkative, poor-genteel Miss Bates. M iss Bates is expecting a long visit from her niece, Jane Fairfax, who is leaving her post as governess to the daughter of old friends. This daughter was recently married to a Mr Dixon. ‘At this moment, an ingenious and animating suspicion enter[ed] Emma’s brain with regard to Jane Fairfax [and] this charming Mr Dixon.’ It is the word ‘animating’ that betrays Emma here. The unkind, even heartless, and quite unfounded notion is like a breath of new life to her. How can she go so far as to share it, as an amusing confidence, with Frank Churchill? What has become of her greatest virtues, compassion and generosity? This, unlike her first fantasy, is not intended to benefit anyone. Indeed, it can only cause immeasurable harm, as Emma not only deceives herself but is in turn deceived by Frank, the gleefully mischievous intruder. Something is painfully wrong. We realize, certainly by the evening of the box-of-letters game at Hartwell, that Emma is hardly herself. This appears during the day’s outing to Box Hill, a harmless party of pleasure to which only Jane Austen could have given such chilling significance. When Emma makes her cutting remark, her openly rude put-down, to Miss Bates, it is as though the heavens—ironically clear and fine—might fall. Miss Bates ‘did not immediately catch her meaning; but when it burst on her, it could not anger, though a slight blush showed that it could pain her.’ Poor Miss Bates, always to be borne with, like some gentle natural force, is a moral test for the whole of Highbury, who are in a kind of neighbourly conspiracy to make her feel wanted. Emma, of all people, fails the test. ‘It was badly done, indeed!’ says Mr Knightley. And Emma, who has a great capacity for suffering, has to bear not only this reproach, but, later on, Miss Bates’s ‘dreadful gratitude.’ Her intrigues have led her farther and farther away from ‘everything that is decided and open.’ Not one of the heroines of Jane Austen’s other novels is so deluded. None of them is so obstinate. None of them, certainly, makes such a brutal remark. And yet Jane Austen is successful. We love Emma, and hate to see her humbled. The very structure of the book asks us to compare her with Jane Fairfax. Jane is faultless, delicate, unfortunate, and mysterious, but we do not, even for a moment, feel for her as we do for Emma. We have to watch her struggle. She has ‘two spirits,’ Mr Knightley reminds her, the vain and the serious. The two spirits are self-will and conscience, and Emma, in the last instance, has to battle it out for herself. She has, of course, a safe guide in Mr Knightley. I once asked some students for an alternative title to the novel, and they suggested ‘Mr Rightly.’ He is ‘a sensible man about seven—or eight-and-thirty’ (much more convincing than if we knew exactly which). He has knowledge, experience, and the courage to speak out. He acts, while others talk. At the dinner party at the Westons’, when all are discussing the fallen snow and the impossibility of driving back, Mr Knightley goes out to have a look for himself, and is able to answer ‘for there not being the smallest difficulty in their getting home, whenever they liked it.’ Frank Churchill, the weak romantic hero, rescues Harriet from the gypsies, but it is Mr Knightley, when she has been grossly humiliated by the Eltons, who asks her to dance. And yet he too has something to learn. Even before Frank’s long-delayed arrival in Highbury, the sanely judging Mr Knightley has taken unreasonably against him, or rather against Emma’s interest in him. ‘“He is a person I never think of from one month’s end to another,” said Mr Knightley, with a degree of vexation, which made Emma immediately talk of something else, though she could not comprehend why he should be angry.’ Nor can he. Mr Knightley is pre-eminently the right man in the right place. Highbury, it is true, is less lively than it used to be—its ‘brilliant days’ are past, and the ballroom is used for a whist club—but the village lies in what seems unthreatened prosperity, surrounded by fields of wheat, oats, turnips, and beans and the parkland and strawberry beds of substantial houses. Jane Austen has been careful to make it a haven of only lightly disturbed peace. Since Mr Knightley himself is the local magistrate, there is nothing to fear. Emma, unlike the heroines of the other novels, makes no journeys, has never even seen the sea, but we come to realize that Donwell and Hartfield, ‘English verdure…English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive,’ won’t, after all, be restrictive to her soaring temperament. Indeed, she accepts it herself as she stands looking out of the door of Ford’s, Highbury’s one large draper’s shop: when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer. This passage lies at the very heart of the book, an interlude, not of idleness, but of busy tranquillity. In Northanger Abbey Jane Austen refers to the ‘rules of composition’ of ‘my fable.’ What were her rules of composition? It is sometimes said that in her later novels she shows contempt and even hatred for her wrongthinkers and wrongdoers. Certainly she was a writer in whom the comic spirit burned very strongly and who felt that some inhumanities are hard to forgive. But although she had the born satirist’s opportunity to punish, she surely used it very sparingly in Emma. Frank Churchill, in his negligent way, causes more pain than anyone else in the book. He misleads Emma, largely to safeguard himself, and teases the helpless Jane almost to breaking point. What is his reward? In Mr Knightley’s words, ‘His aunt is in the way.—His aunt dies.—He has only to speak.—His friends are eager to promote his happiness.—He has used every body ill—and they are all delighted to forgive him.—He is a fortunate man indeed!’ Miss Bates, on the other hand, the woman of ‘universal good-will,’ might, by any other writer, have been rewarded, but nothing of the kind occurs. ‘She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and if she live to old age, must probably sink more.’ Mr Elton, however, and his insufferable wife both flourish. Their satisfaction in themselves is not disturbed. They are the unreachables of classic comedy. Beneath the moral structure of Jane Austen’s novels lie, not hidden but taken for granted, her religious beliefs. In Emma they are openly expressed only once. After Mr Knightley declares himself Emma finds that ‘a very short parley with her own heart produced the most solemn resolution of never quitting her father.—She even wept over the idea of it, as a sin of thought.’ ‘Sin of thought’ is a phrase familiar from the Evangelical examination of the conscience, and the book here is at its most serious. Emma’s love for her father has been, from the first, the way of showing the true deep worth of her character. But Jane Austen gave her family (so her nephew says in his Memoir) ‘many little particulars about the subsequent careers of her people.’ She told them that ‘Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage, and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years.’ The story ends, then, with a quite unexpected irony: Mr Woodhouse was right, after all, to fancy that his health was in a dangerous state. It is hard to imagine Highbury without him, as Jane Austen evidently could. But it is a corresponding relief to think of Emma—the warmhearted, headstrong, even dangerous Emma—safe and in ‘perfect happiness’ at Donwell. Introduction to the Oxford University Press World Classics edition of Emma, 1999 WILLIAM BLAKE The Unfading Vision (#ulink_faf51fe4-4690-50dc-acd9-3d184eeb9d8d) Blake, by Peter Ackroyd Blake was one of those for whom, in William James’s definition, ‘religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.’ He spoke with his visions on equal terms, sat down with them and answered them back. They came as welcome visitors: Jesus Christ, the angel Gabriel, Socrates, Michelangelo, his own younger brother Robert, dead at the age of nineteen. What seemed external reality he called a cloud interposed between human beings and the spiritual world, which would otherwise be too bright to bear. He wanted us all to know this. At one point in his biography of Blake, Peter Ackroyd speaks of him as ‘keeping his own counsel,’ but, as the book shows, Blake didn’t. It was his mission to recall us from materialism to the freedom and joy of the imagination, and it was humanity’s duty to listen to his prophecies. The Blakes were a plain-living London tradesman’s family, pious, sober, dissenting and radical. William (1757—1827), the third child of James and Catherine Blake, was born on Broad Street, a little to the southeast of what is now Oxford Circus. A workhouse and a slaughterhouse were just around the corner, but so too, to the south, was Golden Square, where the gentry lived. William saw the face of God at the window when he was seven or eight years old, wrote poetry as a child, and was apprenticed at fourteen to James Basire, engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. A republican his whole life, he was involved (we don’t quite know how) in the riots of 1780, when the London crowds battled the militia and set fire to Newgate prison. Perhaps on this account, perhaps because of an illness and a disappointment in love, William was sent across the river to recuperate at the house of a market gardener in Battersea. A year or so later he married the gardener’s daughter, Catherine Boucher. He started well enough, opening his own print shop and developing what he called ‘W. Blake’s original stereotype.’ This was a method of relief printing on copper, each impression being hand-tinted, so that no two were alike. In this way the Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, and the great series of prophetic books were offered (quite unsuccessfully) to the public. His work as a jobbing engraver began to run out, and he had to retreat to a cottage at Felpham, on the south coast. But although Felpham was a place of inspiration—it was the first time Blake had ever seen the sea—he was back three years later in the soot-and-dung-laden air of London that suited him and his wife so well. ‘In his later life,’ Mr Ackroyd writes, ‘he was known only as an engraver, a journeyman with wild notions and a propensity for writing unintelligible verse. He laboured for his bread, eccentric, dirty and obscure.’ It might be added that he was childless, and there is no way of calculating the pain that caused him. But Blake is also the poet of joy, and it could be argued that he was a fortunate man. Although he created the overwhelming tyrant figure Urizen, or old Nobodaddy, his own father seems to have been mild enough, never sending William to school because ‘he so hated a blow.’ Blake’s loyal wife, illiterate when they married, was, as he said, ‘an angel to me.’ (He had fallen in love with her because she pitied him, which seems to surprise Mr Ackroyd, but pity was the great eighteenth-century virtue that Blake most earnestly tells us to cherish.) Although his earnings ran out, he was never without a patron, and although he had always kept radical company, he never got into serious trouble. When he was living in Felpham he was arrested after a row with a drunken soldier who accused him of speaking seditiously against the King—and so he very well may have done—but at the quarter sessions, where poor Catherine deposed that yes, she would be ready to fight for Bonaparte, Blake was miraculously acquitted. And at the end of his life he acquired a new circle of much younger admirers, artists who called themselves Ancients and understood, partly at least, Blake’s transcendent view of history and eternity. One of them, George Richmond, closed Blake’s eyes when he died in 1827 in his two-room lodgings, and then kissed them ‘to keep the vision in.’ ‘Yet there was really no need to do so,’ says Mr Ackroyd, feeling perhaps he has earned the right to a fine phrase. ‘That vision had not faded in his pilgrimage of seventy years, and it has not faded yet.’ Mr Ackroyd’s Blake is much more reader-friendly than his Dickens. This time he doesn’t make what have been called his Hitchcock-like appearances in the text, but he is there at your elbow, a brilliant guide and interpreter. Blake, he says, ‘is a “difficult” poet only if we decide to make him so,’ and he fearlessly expounds the prophetic books and the technique of their illustrations, which conjure up in dazzling orange, green, violet, and crimson ‘a wholly original religious landscape.’ Like all his predecessors, Mr Ackroyd is left with the (possibly not true) ‘familiar anecdotes.’ Did Thomas Butts (a respectable civil servant) really find the Blakes sitting naked, in imitation of Adam and Eve, in their back garden? Did Blake really encounter the Devil on his way down to the coal cellar? Mr Ackroyd tells the stories as they come. Blake, like Yeats, mythologized (but never falsified) himself, and the best thing is to accept the myth. More important to Mr Ackroyd is the re-creation of the poet as a great Londoner—part of his long-term biography of his home city. He invites us to accompany Blake, in his knee breeches and wide-brimmed hat, on one of his long walks through the streets. This is not in itself a new idea. Stanley Gardner, in 1968, was one of the first to study the county survey of late-eighteenth-century London inch by inch and to suggest (for example) that Blake’s Valley of Innocence must have been the green fields of Wimbledon, where orphans at that time were put out to nurse. Mr Gardner didn’t supply his readers with a map, nor does Mr Ackroyd, but he is immensely more detailed. ‘A woman filling her kettle at the neighbourhood pump, the washing hanging out from poles…the bird cages and pots of flowers on the windowsills, the shabby man standing on a corner with a sign in his hat saying “Out of Employ,” while another sells toy windmills, the dogs, the cripples, the boys with hoops.’ These things, of course, aren’t what William Blake saw: he saw walls reddened with soldiers’ blood or blackened with the soot that killed off young chimney sweeps, while a single bird cage was for him enough to set heaven in a rage. But this is emphatically not a political biography. Its object isn’t to enlist Blake as a primitive Marxist but to show him as an individual of genius, awkward to deal with, sometimes nervous, often contradictory, but incorruptible. Blake himself believed there were eternal ‘states’ of rage and desire, even of selfhood, through which a man passes, keeping his soul intact. ‘He knew precisely what he saw,’ says Mr Ackroyd affectionately, ‘and with the sturdy obstinacy of his London stock he refused to be bullied or dissuaded.’ Blake was unaccountably true, indeed, even to his strangest prophecies. He had promised his wife that he would never leave her, and after his death he came back, she said, for several hours a day, sat down in his usual chair, and talked to her. New York Times Book Review, 1996 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE Talking Through the Darkness (#ulink_1eae11e1-cebe-57ac-b06c-4bf9d236732b) Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804—1834, by Richard Holmes Ten years ago, in 1989, Richard Holmes left Coleridge under the stars on an April night in Portsmouth, starting out, in one of the many impulsive moves of his life, for Malta. He asked us to imagine how it would have been if the poet had died on the voyage, as he and all his friends clearly expected. He would then have been remembered as the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a brilliant young Romantic early extinguished. But he didn’t die, and the next three decades, Holmes told us, would be more fascinating than anything that had gone before. This second volume, he said, would be subtitled ‘Later Reflections,’ but it has turned out to be ‘Darker Reflections.’ Possibly he himself has changed a little in this time. In any case, ‘darker’ suggests the water imagery that haunted Coleridge even more closely as his life flowed to an end. Holmes hoped to make him ‘leap out of these pages—brilliant, animated, endlessly provoking—and invade your imagination (as he has done mine).’ Certainly, in his superb second volume, he has succeeded in this. He also has to show his subject as frequently sunk in melancholy, constipated, a heavy drinker and addicted (as he had been since the winter of 1801) to opium. Coleridge went to Malta in 1804 partly on account of his health, partly to escape from his marriage and perhaps from his long-term infatuation with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson, partly—since Malta was a wartime base for the British fleet—in hope of getting some kind of administrative post. He did get employment, as diplomatic secretary to the Governor, for whom he wrote what are now called position papers on Britain’s strategic situation in the Mediterranean. As a hardened journalist, quick to seize the main points of any situation, Coleridge, as long as he was sober, had no difficulty with the work. On his return to England he made it clear that he was not coming back to his wife, although he always did his erratic best to support her and their three children. Lecturing seemed the ideal occupation for the great talker who rarely paused for an answer, and he lectured, on and off, for almost the whole of the rest of his life—at Bristol (where he was an hour late for his first appearance, having been secured by his friends and deposited on the platform), at the Royal Institution (where he collapsed into opium and missed five engagements), at the Philosophical Institution, at the Surrey Institution, at the Crown and Anchor, at the Royal Society of Literature (on Prometheus). Organizers were always ready to book him, audiences almost always ready to hear him. What did he look like? Like a wildly dishevelled Dissenting minister. What did he sound like? Sometimes he was unintelligible, but when he caught fire (as for instance in his celebrated lecture on Hamlet) it was agreed that he talked as no man had talked before him. In 1809 he was taken with the idea of writing and publishing his own journal, The Friend. This, he thought, could be done from the Lake District. He stayed there at first with Wordsworth, whose household, with its dutiful womenfolk, was always under good control. But The Friend lasted for only twenty-seven numbers. It was at this point, when Wordsworth saw little or no hope of his recovery, that Coleridge absconded to London and began what started as a fortnight’s stay (it turned into six years) with the Morgans, whom he had known in Bristol. John Morgan took down whatever Coleridge could be persuaded to dictate; his wife and daughter put in order Coleridge’s papers and notebooks. In January 1813 a play, which he had written many years earlier and now renamed Remorse, was put on at the Drury Lane Theatre. It was an unexpected success, and he received ?400 (although in a few months he was penniless). Meanwhile, news came that the Wordsworths’ dearly loved little son Tom had died. Coleridge dithered, delayed, and did not go to Grasmere. Can he be forgiven? On the other hand, during one of his worst periods of opium overdose and suicidal depression he rallied himself, Heaven knows how, to write five articles in praise of the paintings of his old friend Washington Allston. His manic energy and generosity have to be set against his recurrent paralysis of the will, when he could be becalmed like the Mariner on his stagnant sea. Remorse had been put on partly at the request of Lord Byron, who, however impatient he might be with Coleridge’s metaphysics (‘I wish he would explain his explanation’), shared the impulse felt by so many that he was worth saving at all costs. Charles Lamb, who had been at school with him at Christ’s Hospital, continued a faithful friend; so did the publisher Joseph Cottle, who attributed Coleridge’s ills not to alcohol and opium but to satanic possession; so did the young De Quincey and Daniel Stuart, the sage editor of The Courier. He had, of course, plenty of unsparing enemies who couldn’t forgive him for deserting the radical cause. But for forty disorganized years Coleridge was never at a loss for someone to give him a home. Would the twentieth or the twenty-first century take him in so generously? In his Notebooks Coleridge is a witness, often deeply remorseful, to his own life, creating a double viewpoint. Holmes is perfectly attuned to this, and in addition creates what he calls a ‘downstage voice’ in his footnotes, ‘reflecting on the action as it develops.’ Anything less than this would not represent the multiplicity of STC. This often unexpected downstage commentary is particularly valuable when Holmes comes to discuss the Biographia Literaria, which Coleridge wrote while he was with the Morgans and which he described to Byron as ‘a general Preface’ to his collected poems, ‘on the Principles of philosophic and genial criticism relative to the Fine Arts in general; but especially to Poetry.’ In fact, it began as a dialogue, or rather an argument at a distance, with Wordsworth. But that was not enough. He had much more to say on his own personal philosophical journey from the materialism of Locke to the perception that faith in God is not only beyond reason but a continuation of it. He produced forty-five thousand words in six weeks, anxiously watched by the faithful Morgan. Hard pressed, he borrowed passages wholesale from the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling. Holmes admits the plagiarism, but you can rely on him for a spirited defence. The plagiarisms, he claims, ‘form a kind of psychodrama within the heart of the Biographia.’ We have to wait for the true Coleridge to free himself and emerge. Coleridge’s last years were spent in Highgate, then a hill village just north of London, with the humane Dr James Gillman and his motherly wife, Ann. Gillman regulated the opium taking, tactfully overlooking the extra supplies secretly bought from the local chemist, and arranged for Coleridge something quite new, holidays by the seaside. The Gillmans’ fine house and garden was a retreat where he could receive visitors—Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Fenimore Cooper. A familiar figure by now in the village, Coleridge, looking twenty years older than he was, had become a ‘white-haired, shuffling sage,’ walking, according to young John Keats, like an after-dinner alderman but, as he talked, casting the same enchantment still. ‘At 6.30 a.m. on 25 July 1834 he slipped into the dark.’ I could wish that Richard Holmes hadn’t felt that here, at the very end, ‘dark’ was the right word. But it’s impossible to describe the extraordinary quality of this biography, felt on every page. ‘There is a particular kind of silence which falls after a life like Coleridge’s,’ Holmes says, ‘and perhaps it should be observed.’ New York Times Book Review, 1999 SARAH ORNE JEWETT The News from Dunnet Landing (#ulink_eb448846-ab6b-5721-8320-1de97f1a5ccb) Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories, edited by Michael Davitt Bell The author of the novel The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett, born in 1849, was widely read at the turn of the century, much less after the First World War. Now that a selection of her works is in the Library of America series, perhaps she will be read again. Sarah Orne Jewett was a New Englander, descended from a well-to-do merchant family in South Berwick, Maine. Her father was a doctor with a local practice (although he later became Professor of Obstetrics at Bowdoin), and she was brought up as one of an extended family in the ‘great house’ of her grandfather Jewett in South Berwick. It was a place of hospitality where she could listen to the stories told at leisure by visitors, among them superannuated sea captains and ship owners and relatives from the lonely inland farms. As a child she was not a great scholar, preferring hopscotch and skating and her collections of woodchucks, turtles, and insects. ‘In those days,’ she wrote, ‘I was given to long childish illnesses, to instant drooping if ever I were shut up in school,’ so that her father, trusting in fresh air as a cure, took her with him on his daily rounds, teaching her at the same time to keep her eyes open, and telling her the names of plants and animals. He recommended her to read (in her teens) Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Milton’s L’Allegro, and the poetry of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. Her mother and grandmother advised Pride and Prejudice, George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Pearl of Orr’s Island. In 1867, Jewett graduated from Berwick Academy with serious thoughts of studying medicine. The echo of her debate with herself can be heard in her novel A Country Doctor (1884). Nancy Price, ‘not a commonplace girl,’ has been left alone in the world. Her guardian is the beloved country practitioner Dr Leslie, whose principle is ‘to work with nature and not against it.’ He believes the wild, reckless little girl is born to be a doctor, and he turns out to be right. Although on a visit away from home she meets a young lawyer to whom she is in every way suited, she gives him up. In the face of criticism from nearly everyone in her small-town community, she goes back to her medical training. Jewett herself never had to face the test of society’s disapproval. She gave up the idea of becoming a doctor simply because she was not well enough. Rheumatism became a familiar enemy, tormenting her all her life long. A legacy from her grandfather meant that she would never have to earn a living, and she decided against marriage, perhaps because she felt she was not likely to meet anyone to match her father. But her writing, which had begun with small things—stories for young people, occasional poems, and so forth—had become by 1873 ‘my work—my business, perhaps; and it is so much better than making a mere amusement of it, as I used to.’ Like so many great invalids of the nineteenth century, Jewett continued, with amazing fortitude, to travel, to make new friends, to move according to the seasons from one house to another. Wherever she went she answered letters in the morning and wrote in the afternoons. For twenty years she spent the summer and winter months with Mrs Annie Fields (it was one of those close friendships known as ‘Boston marriages’) and spring and autumn in ‘the great house’ in South Berwick, making time, however, for trips to Europe to meet pretty well everyone she admired. In July 1889 she visited Alice Longfellow (the daughter of the poet) at Mouse Island, in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. This was her first visit to the district of the ‘pointed firs.’ She made several more before 1896, when her novel The Country of the Pointed Firs appeared, first as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and then in November from the publisher Houghton Mifflin. This short novel is her masterpiece, no doubt about that, but it is difficult to discuss the plot because it can hardly be said to have one. Dunnet Landing is ‘a salt-aired, white-clapboarded little town’ on the central coast of Maine, more attractive than the rest, perhaps, but much like them. ‘One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf.’ She is a writer who has taken a lodging in the town, in search of peace and quiet. Her landlady, Mrs Almira Todd, is the local herbalist, being a very large person, majestic almost, living in the last little house on the way inland. In a few pages Jewett establishes forever the substantial reality of Dunnet Landing. We know it, we have been there, we have walked up the steep streets, we taste the sea air. Now we have got to get to know the inhabitants, slowly, as the narrator does herself, and, in good time, to hear their confidences. Jewett knew all about fishing and small-holding and cooking haddock chowder, about birds, weather, tides, and clouds. She had a wonderful ear for the Maine voice, breaking the immense silences. She quotes, more than once, what her father said to her: ‘Don’t write about things and people. Tell them just as they are.’ And she understood the natural history of small communities, where you will find impoverished, lonely people, often old but proud, self-respecting and respected. The narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs rents the local schoolhouse, for fifty cents a week, as her study. Here her first visitor, apart from the bees and an occasional sheep pausing to look in at the open door, is Captain Littlepage, an ancient retired shipmaster. His reminiscences are not what we expect: he tells a story of the unseen—a voyage west of Baffin Island which fetched up ‘on a coast which wasn’t laid down or charted’ where the crew saw, or half-saw, the shapes of men through the sea-fog ‘like a place where there was neither living nor dead.’ These were men waiting between this life and the next. Captain Littlepage offers no further explanation, and, indeed, it’s generally felt in Dunnet Landing that he has overset his mind with too much reading, but Mrs Todd, with a sharp look, says that ‘some of them tales hangs together tolerable well.’ Loneliness and hospitality are the two extremes of the hard existence on the coast of Maine. Elijah Tilley, one of the old fishermen, thought of as a ‘plodding man,’ has been a widower for the past eight years. ‘Folks all kept repeating that time would ease me, but I can’t find it does. No, I just miss her the same every day.’ It is his habit to lapse into silence. What more is there to say? Towards the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett gave some words of advice to the young Willa Cather: ‘You must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up.’ Otherwise it may remain unexpressed, as it often does in Dunnet Landing. Joanna, Mrs Todd’s cousin, whose young man threw her over, withdrew to live alone on tiny Shell-heap Island, ‘a dreadful small place to make a world of.’ She had some poultry and a patch of potatoes. But what about company? She must have made do with the hens, her one-time neighbours think: ‘I expect she soon came to making folks of them.’ But Joanna maintained the dignity of loss. She lived, died, and was buried on Shell-heap Island. We are in a world where silence is understood. When the time comes for the narrator to leave, Mrs Todd, who has become a true friend, hardly speaks all day, ‘except in the briefest and most disapproving way.’ Then she resolutely goes out on an errand, without turning her head. ‘My room looked as empty as the day I came…and I knew how it would seem when Mrs Todd came back and found her lodger gone. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.’ Jewett is an expert in the homely and everyday who gives us every now and then a glimpse of the numinous. (That, perhaps, is why Rudyard Kipling wrote to her about The Country of the Pointed Firs, ‘I don’t believe even you know how good that work is.’) She does this, for instance, in a short story, ‘Miss Tempy’s Watchers.’ Upstairs lies the outworn body of kindly Miss Temperance Dent, while in the kitchen, two of her old friends, keeping vigil before the next day’s funeral, gradually nod off. ‘Perhaps Tempy herself stood near, and saw her own life and its surroundings with new understanding. Perhaps she herself was the only watcher.’ In one of the later Dunnet Landing stories, ‘The Foreigner,’ Mrs Todd observes: ‘You know plain enough there’s something beyond this world: the doors stand wide open.’ There are moments, too, of communication or empathy between friends that go beyond understanding. Friendship, for Sarah Orne Jewett, was the world’s greatest good. On 3 September 1902, her fifty-third birthday, she was thrown from her carriage when the horse stumbled and fell. She suffered concussion of the spine and never entirely recovered. ‘The strange machinery that writes,’ as she described it, ‘seems broken and confused.’ For long spells she was in fact forbidden by her doctors to read or write, which must have been a cruel deprivation. In 1909 she was back in South Berwick, where she had the last of a series of strokes, and died in the house where she was born. Books and Company, Winter 1999 GEORGE ELIOT The Will to Good (#ulink_20f93f5b-274f-522e-b0d0-32493786d122) An Introduction to Middlemarch George Eliot began what is now Book Two of Middlemarch early in 1869. She wrote slowly, because for her it was a year of illness and trouble, and in the winter of 1870 she put this work aside and began a new story that is now Book One, ‘Miss Brooke.’ She made a note in her journal that the ‘subject…has been recorded among my possible themes ever since I began to write fiction.’ What is this subject? Middlemarch is set in the years just before the Reform Bill of 1832. In Chapter 10 Mr Brooke, the uncle and guardian of Dorothea and her sister Celia, gives a dinner party at his house, Tipton Grange. Maddening, vacillating, kindhearted Mr Brooke is a local magistrate and a countryman—so too, of course, is the Rector, Mr Cadwallader, with his magnificently sharp-tongued wife. The Reverend Mr Casaubon, scholarly, withering into dry old age, is also a man of property, as is Sir James Chettam, Brooke’s guileless neighbour. But to meet these gentry Mr Brooke has rather enterprisingly invited guests from Middlemarch itself: the upper ranks, that is, of the townspeople—Mr Vincy, the mayor, Mr Chicheley, the coroner, and the Evangelical banker, Mr Bulstrode. They are talking about Dorothea and about Lydgate, the new doctor. These two have also been talking to each other, discussing model housing and the proposed fever hospital, and we get Lydgate’s first impression, as he leaves the party, of Dorothea: ‘She is a good creature—that fine girl—but a little too earnest.’ She would not do, therefore, for Lydgate, who wants relaxation after his work, and smiling blue eyes. This is George Eliot’s particular method of turning an incident around, so that we can look at it with her, and from different angles. In this way we have been introduced to the field of action and the beginning of what she calls ‘the stealthy convergence of human lots.’ George Eliot’s living creed—painfully arrived at—was meliorist (a word she believed she had invented). We should do all we can, during a short human lifetime, to achieve ‘some possible better,’ and the ‘should’ is all the more binding because we cannot have a direct knowledge of God. But the individual will to good is affected by social and natural forces—by the kind of society we are born into and the kind of temperament we are born with. In Middlemarch Eliot is considering a money-making professional society, based on Coventry, where she lived from 1841 to 1850. Middlemarch is a manufacturing town—‘the people in manufacturing towns are always disreputable,’ says Mrs Cadwallader—with a corruptible local paper, electioneering for and against a reforming parliament, professional charities, and deeply distrusted advances in medicine and hygiene. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. What is to be hoped for from this thriving borough, where nearly all are loudly certain of their own opinion? ‘I know the sort,’ cries Mr Hawley, the town clerk, hearing that Casaubon’s cousin, Ladislaw, is of foreign extraction; ‘some emissary. He’ll begin with flourishing about the Rights of Man and end with murdering a wench. That’s the style.’ At the Tankard in Slaughter Lane it is ‘known’ to Mrs Dollop, the landlady, that people are allowed to die in the new hospital for the sake of cutting them up, ‘a poor tale for a doctor, who if he was good for anything should know what was the matter with you before you died.’ To be ‘candid’ in Middlemarch means that you are about to let a man know the very worst that is being said about him. ‘The gossip of the auction room, the billiard room, the tea table, the kitchen,’ as Frank Kermode puts it, ‘is the more or less corrupt blood of the organism.’ The challenges to Middle-march come from young Dr Lydgate and young Miss Brooke. Lydgate has the impulse to mercy and healing and the ambition to research. But he is impatient and too self-confident and does not mind it being known that he is better born than other country surgeons. He is drawn, by fatal degrees, into the evil secret of Bulstrode’s past (a favourite theme of George Eliot’s and as old as fiction itself). And yet his only real error is his marriage to Rosamond Vincy. He is overwhelmed by the ‘terrible tenacity of this mild creature.’ She is, what is more, one of the world’s unteachables. Whatever George Eliot’s scheme of moral effort and retribution may be, Rosamond is quite exempt from it. Through all vicissitudes she quietly keeps her self-esteem. Her dream of existence is shocked, then rights itself, and she will continue, blonde and imperturbable. The world as it is seems created for Rosamonds. Dorothea, on the other hand, never comes into direct conflict with Middlemarch. Her faults, like Lydgate’s, are put to us very clearly, since George Eliot’s methods are analytic. Having set herself, as she said, to imagine ‘how ideas lie in other minds than my own,’ she begins ironically, with Dorothea and sensible Celia dividing the jewellery their mother left them. Dorothea, who has renounced finery, feels an unexpected wish to keep one set of emeralds (a delicate premonition of her passion for Will Ladislaw). We are shown that she doesn’t know her own nature, doesn’t know life, certainly doesn’t know ‘lower experience such as plays a great part in the world,’ is ruthless to Sir James and, of course, to herself, and hopelessly astray in her search for ‘intensity and greatness.’ But Dorothea is noble. On her honeymoon visit to Rome, for instance, she is so much the finest spirit there, seen in contrast not only with those around her but with the motionless statuary of the Vatican Museum. She doesn’t know this. She has ‘little vanity.’ She says: ‘It is surely better to pardon too much than to condemn too much.’ We would give anything to be able to step into the novel and join Celia and Sir James in trying to stop this rare spirit from making her disastrous choice. But why can’t Dorothea aim at something greater? Why is she left, as the Finale puts it, to lead a ‘hidden life,’ and be buried in an ‘unvisited tomb’? Florence Nightingale, among many others, asked this question, giving as an example not herself, but Octavia Hill, the pioneer of public-housing management. It is true that Dorothea (born about 1812) was too early to have been, for instance, a student at Girton College, Cambridge (founded in 1869). But George Eliot’s attitude to the position of women was, in any case, perplexing. In October 1856 she signed a petition for women to have a legal right to their own earnings, and in 1867 she told a friend that ‘women should be educated equally with men, and secured as far as possible with every other breathing creature from suffering the exercise of any unrighteous power.’ She was, however, resolutely opposed to women’s suffrage. But these questions are not stressed in Middlemarch, and Dorothea is not shown as a great organizer, but as having ‘the ardent woman’s need to rule beneficently by making the joy of another soul.’ The drawback here is that the other soul turns out, in the end, to be Will Ladislaw’s; and what are we to make of Ladislaw? Critics usually consider him to be, like Stephen Guest in The Mill on the Floss, one of George Eliot’s failures. But perhaps she intended him to be exactly what he appears—that is, at the best, ‘a bright creature full of uncertain promises.’ He becomes, of course, a Radical MP, but ‘in those times’—as she reminds us—‘when reforms were begun with a young hopefulness of immediate good which has been much checked in our days.’ George Eliot’s point, however, made both in the Prelude and the Finale of her book, delivers us from having to think of Dorothea as nothing more than a noble woman who loses her head over a questionable young man. Dorothea’s decisions were not ideal, George Eliot tells us, and conditions are not right for a nineteenth-century St Theresa, but her life was not wasted: ‘the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive.’ This is part of the book’s great diminuendo, not tragic but majestic, drawing back, after all its vast complications, into itself, the characters’ prospects narrowing as the story closes. But we have actually seen the effect of Dorothea’s being on those around her, in her generous gift to Lydgate and—in a superb chapter—her yet more generous visit to Rosamond. On these ‘unhistoric acts’ in an undistinguished ribbon-manufacturing town in the Midlands, the growing good of the world may partly depend. We must believe this, if we can. There was nothing in Middlemarch, George Eliot assured her long-suffering publisher, John Blackwood, ‘that will be seen to be irrelevant to my design, which is to show the gradual action of ordinary causes rather than exceptional.’ This, however, suggests a deliberate, even mechanical method of construction that is quite at odds with the intensely human effect of her great novel. One of the advantages of its sheer length is that there is room in it for hesitations, even moments of relenting, which give the story another dimension, like music heard at a distance. At the end of Book Four, for instance, Dorothea has not only admitted to herself the misery of her marriage to Mr Casaubon but has glimpsed that his lifetime’s work, the ‘Key to all Mythologies,’ is a meaningless accumulation of references. She has gone to her room, and waits for him in the darkness to come upstairs from his library. But she did hear the library door open, and slowly the light advanced up the staircase without noise from the footsteps on the carpet. When her husband stood opposite to her, she saw that his face was more haggard. He started slightly on seeing her, and she looked up at him beseechingly, without speaking. ‘Dorothea!’ he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone. ‘Were you waiting for me?’ ‘Yes, I did not like to disturb you.’ ‘Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.’ When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea’s ears, she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature. She put her hand into her husband’s, and they went along the broad corridor together. The possibility is there, for long enough for us to think about it, of perhaps not happiness between them, but peace. The moment passes, as it does for Mary Garth, who has never realized that Mr Farebrother cared anything for her, and still doesn’t, fully, when he comes to see her to plead Fred Vincy’s cause. But ‘something indefinable, something like the resolute suppression of a pain in Mr Farebrother’s manner, made her feel suddenly miserable, as she had once felt when she saw her father’s hands trembling in a moment of trouble.’ Here Mary herself can’t define her sensation. There is time in Middlemarch, as in life itself, for these echoes or intimations of paths not taken. Another one, which remains just under the surface but is never put into words, is: what if Dorothea had married Lydgate? There is another complication in Middlemarch, which runs very deep. Meliorism looks cautiously forward, and indeed George Eliot agreed with Gladstone that there was no use in fighting against the future. But she was always true to her own past, her rural childhood when she had been a ‘little sister,’ running through green fields. All around Middlemarch stretches northeast Loamshire, ‘almost all meadows and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty, and to spread out coral fruit for the birds…These are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls.’ (This recalls the passage from The Mill on the Floss, ‘We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it…’) It is noticeable that although 1830 saw the height of England’s agricultural distress and, in consequence, of rioting and rick burning—the Cambridgeshire fires could be seen at a distance of eight miles against the night sky—Loamshire, in this novel, is relatively tranquil. (Unrest is represented by Mr Brooke’s visit to Dagley’s smallholding, where he is defied by the drunken Dagley and behaves in a way much less dignified than his own dog, the sagacious Monk.) The reason for this, surely, is that George Eliot needs to indicate an ideal experience and existence. In Middlemarch the country represents work, steadiness, harmony, peace. If we ask ourselves, or let ourselves feel, how human happiness is measured, we have to turn to Fred Vincy. Fred’s love for Mary, in spite of his shortcomings, is the truest emotion in the book, and it is as an expert on the cultivation of green crops and the economy of cattle-feeding that he steadies down to a happy life: ‘On enquiry it might possibly be found that Fred and Mary still inhabit Stone Court—that the creeping plants still cast the foam of their blossoms over the fine stone walls…’ Their marriage is a pastoral. Then again, late on in the book, Dorothea has a moment of vision that is in the nature of an epiphany. It is after her sleepless night of extreme misery over Will Ladislaw. She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance… What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness. Dorothea’s inspiration, at this late stage, comes from the early-morning sight of the labourer and the wayfarer. This, too, is pastoral. George Eliot, of course, did not deceive herself. If her Warwickshire childhood had been an Eden, it was one that she had lost. But it remained as her surest way of judging life as it hurried forward through the unpeaceful, expanding nineteenth century. Introduction to the Folio Society edition of Middlemarch, 1999 Not Herself George Eliot, Voice of a Century: A Biography, by Frederick R. Karl ‘[Burne-Jones] came across her standing monumentally alone at Waterloo Station, and, as he talked with her, they walked for a short distance along the platform. Suddenly Lewes rushed up to them, panic-pale and breathlessly exclaiming “My God! you are HERE!” George Eliot gravely admitted it. “But,” stammered Lewes, “I left you THERE!”’ This story (from Graham Robertson’s Time Was) belongs to the 1870s, when George Eliot had become not only a precious charge to G. H. Lewes but also an object of general reverence as the greatest of secular teachers and (after Dickens died) the supreme English novelist. Opinion turned against her not long after her death in 1880. (A book I’ve got here, a Practical Text Book for Senior Classes published by Harrap in 1923, doesn’t even include her in its chart of the Chief Victorian Novelists.) She had to wait for rescue by F. R. Leavis and above all by Professor Gordon Haight, with his nine volumes of letters and a classic biography (1968). Endlessly helpful, Haight reckoned to be able to say what she was doing at any given moment on any day of her life, even before her written diaries begin, in 1854. Frederick Karl’s new biography is seven-hundred-odd pages long and has taken him five years’ hard labour. He has consulted, he thinks, all the available material, notably Eliot’s brave but embarrassing letters to Herbert Spencer (‘If you become attached to anyone else, then I must die’). In his acknowledgements he thanks Haight as the most dauntless of scholars, but, six hundred pages on, he calls the 1968 Life ‘narrow, squeezed, protective, and carefully conventional.’ This leads you to expect a bold treatment of some debatable points, but that would be a mistake. Of John Chapman, the publisher in whose house she lodged when she first came to London, he says ‘it is quite possible she and Chapman were intimate, although we will probably never have definite proof one way or another.’ Why did John Cross, her second husband, twenty years younger than herself, jump from the balcony during their honeymoon into the Grand Canal? Professor Karl examines the evidence at length, and concludes that the incident only seems amusing ‘if we put on hold the pain of the participants.’ In fact he is more protective of his subject than Haight himself, refusing to accept that she was emotionally dependent on a succession of men, beginning with her father and her elder brother Isaac. Although she believed that ‘there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it,’ George Eliot invented herself (though probably not more than most women). She let it be understood that her right hand was larger than her left because of the dairy work she did as a girl, but Isaac declared she had never made a pound of butter in her life. She gallantly defied society when she threw in her lot with the all-purpose journalist and philosopher George Henry Lewes, and yet what she longed for was acceptance and solid respectability, the right wallpaper, the right callers on her Sunday afternoons. Karl patiently admits these contradictions, but relates them to the troubled consciousness of Victorian society, with all its divisions and paradoxes. George Eliot trusted passionately in the individual, coming to believe that each of us should create his own church, but at the same time dreading the chaos and disorder to which freedom might lead. To Karl she is the ‘voice of the century.’ All her changes of name, he says—Mary Anne, Marian, Mrs G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Mater, Mutter, Madonna—correspond to willed transformations, the moral and spiritual versions of self-help. Her responsibilities, as she said, weighed heavily on her, and Professor Karl can’t be called light-footed either. For the most part he plods along with dignity by the side of his Mary Anne. He is strong on her years with Chapman’s Westminster Review and on the details of her business affairs. Lewes, acting as her manager, was a sharp customer, and John Blackwood, most noble-minded of publishers, had reason to complain. But respectability had to be earned, or, as Karl puts it, ‘the inflow of money was an indisputable form of empowerment.’ In the background were Lewes’s legal wife and children, whom he supported to the very end. The book goes less well when it parts company from hard facts. In the last twenty years or so, Karl tells us, we’ve come to expect from the biographer ‘the psychological analysis of possibilities and potentialities’ from patterns in the work itself. If by ‘we’ he means the readers, then we have brought deconstructionism on ourselves. From these patterns Karl feels able to suggest that the theft of Silas Marner’s life savings from the floor of his cottage ‘does seem linked to Eliot’s uncertainty about her work,’ or perhaps ‘Eliot saw herself as part of a “theft”…she had “stolen” a particular kind of life in the face of social opprobrium,’ while Hetty, the kitten-like dairy-maid in Adam Bede, is a ‘subtle yet demonic double of Eliot’s own desire to rise, achieve, emerge.’ It’s as if he was allowing himself a well-earned holiday from his long search for exactness. The search itself is on the grand scale, but never, it seems to me, quite arrives. Frank Kermode was surely right in distinguishing, in George Eliot’s fiction, between the given and the calculated. Dorothea Brooke is ‘given.’ Middle-march, when the novel begins to expand in Chapter 10, is ‘calculated.’ Silas Marner was ‘given’ to such an extent that his image ‘came across my other plans by a sudden inspiration’ and Eliot had to write it before she could go back to the ‘calculated’ Romola. Of course, she was well aware of the difference, telling Cross that ‘in all she considered her best writing, there was a “not-herself” which took possession.’ Certainly it would be difficult to write the story of a not-herself, but that is what is missing from this biography. Observer, 1995 MRS OLIPHANT The Heart and Soul of Carlingford (#ulink_23a58482-5841-55f6-8781-76157d8df883) I. A Fighting Life In the winter of 1860—61, Mrs Margaret Oliphant, a penniless, undaunted little Scottish ‘scribbling woman,’ called at the office of the brothers Blackwood. It was a very severe winter, and it was severe on me too…I had not been doing very well with my writing. I had sent several articles to Blackwood’s [Magazine] and they had been rejected. Why, this being the case, I should have gone to them…I can’t tell. But I was in their debt, and had very little to go on with. They shook their heads, of course, and thought it would not be possible to take such a story—both very kind, and truly sorry for me, I have no doubt. I think I see their figures now against the light, standing up, John with his shoulders hunched up, the Major with his soldierly air, and myself all blackness and whiteness in my widow’s dress, taking leave of them as if it didn’t matter, and oh! so much afraid that they would see the tears in my eyes. I went home to my little ones, and as soon as I had got them into bed, I sat down and wrote. I sat up all night in a passion of composition, stirred to the very bottom of my mind. The story was successful, and my fortune, comparatively speaking, was made. This is Mrs Oliphant’s own account, in what she called her ‘few autobiographical bits,’ of the origin of the Chronicles of Carlingford. (#ulink_d7120d6f-9762-5112-ab6d-8384ba59bd54) If we get the idea that she saw herself to some extent as the heroine of her own novel, and that she knew it perfectly well, we should be right, and right too in recognizing her as a woman with a strong visual imagination and an even stronger sense of human relationships. She sees the group in terms of dark and light, and feels the publishers’ embarrassed decency and her own desperation. For nearly fifty years she led a working, or rather a fighting life as a writer. Her industry became a legend (‘I too work hard, Mrs Oliphant,’ Queen Victoria said to her.) She never, it seems, had more than two hours to herself, except in the middle of the night. Up to a few days before her death she was still correcting proofs. But her fortune, alas, was not made in 1861, either comparatively speaking or ever. She was twice an Oliphant (it was her mother’s name as well as her husband’s) and the family was an ancient one, ‘though I don’t think,’ she wrote, ‘that our branch was anything much to brag about.’ Although she was Scottish born (4 April 1828) she was brought up in Liverpool where her father worked in the customs house. It was a close-knit, plain family life, and from the outset it was a household of weak men and strong women. The father counted for very little, and her two elder brothers never came to much. All the fire and generosity of life seemed to come from the mother. Maggie herself, from a tender age, was out on the streets delivering radical pamphlets, and hot in defence of the Scottish Free Church. No formal education is mentioned. At six years old she learned to read and did so prodigiously, mostly Scots history and legends. When, in her teens, she began to write her own tales, ‘my style,’ she said, ‘followed no sort of law.’ Writing, of course, was in the intervals of housekeeping and sick-nursing. In 1849 (by which time her first novel had been published) she went up to London to look after her amiable brother Willie, who was studying for the ministry, and to keep him clear of drink and debt. ‘I was a little dragon, watching over him with remorseless anxiety.’ Lodging upstairs was her cousin Francis Oliphant, an artist; three years later, after some mysterious hesitations, she married him. This meant a hand-to-mouth studio life, in the course of which her first two babies died, and two more were born. Although he exhibited history pieces at the Academy, Francis was by profession a glass painter, who had worked for eleven years as assistant to Pugin. (Margaret, unfortunately, had almost no feeling for art, and when he took her to the National Gallery she was ‘struck dumb with disappointment.’) He was not the kind of man ever to succeed on his own: when he set up his own studio, in 1854, he couldn’t manage either the workmen or the accounts. His failure has always been put down to the decline in demand for ‘mediaeval’ painted glass, but in fact there was no decline until well after 1870. ‘His wife’s success,’ wrote William Bell Scott, ‘was enough to make him an idle and aimless man.’ This is unkind, but certainly Margaret was the breadwinner from the first, even though she allowed seven of her first thirteen novels to appear under Willie’s name in the hope of setting him up on his feet. And poor Francis was consumptive. In 1858, when he was told there was no hope, his comment is said to have been ‘Well, if that is so, there is no reason why we should be miserable.’ They went off, as invalids so ill-advisedly did in the 1850s, to the cold winter damp of Florence and the malarial heat of Rome. To spare his wife, Francis did not tell her the truth. She never forgave him this, and was honest enough to admit it. When he died she was left pregnant, with two children to look after, and about ?1,000 in debts. This was mostly owed to Blackwood’s, who had been generously sending her ?20 a month, whether they printed her articles or not. Margaret Oliphant gathered up her dependants and returned, first to Edinburgh, then to Ealing, west of London. Before long she found herself supporting not only her own children and the feckless Willie but also her brother Frank (he had failed in business) and his family of four. Like some natural force she attracted responsibilities towards her. But with this strength of hers there went a wild optimism and an endearing lack of caution. She was openhanded, like her mother. Nothing was too good for her friends. Her sons, whatever the expense, must go to Eton. Yet both of them, as they grew up, drifted into elegant idleness. Their vitality faded and she could not revive it. She had to watch them die in their barren thirties, one after the other. It is at this point that her autobiography breaks off. ‘And now here I am all alone. I cannot write any more.’ Mrs Oliphant’s novels show little of the indulgence of Jane Austen or George Eliot towards attractive weaklings. Did she, out of her love and generosity, encourage, or even create, weakness in men? Her autobiography is deeply touching, partly because she recognizes this. ‘I did with much labour what I thought the best…but now I think that if I had taken the other way, which seemed the less noble, it might have been better for all of us.’ She did not think of herself as in any way exceptional. She believed she had had the ‘experiences of most women.’ They had been her life and they became the life of her books. II. A Small Town and an Unseen World Mrs Oliphant’s Carlingford (#ulink_8d4aedca-dd9b-5cb8-803c-cb5db6245790) is described for us in much less detail than, say George Eliot’s Milby in Scenes of Clerical Life. To draw an accurate map of it would be difficult. The railway station, with unhelpful porters, is to the south. The High Street is for shopping, George Street (with the Blue Boar Inn) is the business district. To the east of the town, Wharfside, down by the canal, is a slum, ignored by the respectable. Grange Lane and Grove Street are for the gentry, though Grove Street has ‘a shabby side’ and backs onto narrow lanes. St Roque’s, the chapel of ease for the Parish Church, is to the north. In the last of the Chronicles, however, Phoebe Junior, the sun is said to set behind St Roque’s. Plainly Mrs Oliphant is less interested in topography than in people. But in giving the atmosphere of a small community, almost resentful of arrivals and departures (although these are its main source of interest), complacent, hierarchical, inward-looking, and conscious of one direction, the canal-side, in which it dare not look—here she cannot put a foot wrong. Within these tight limits human beings must discover what a real life is, and contrive, somehow, to have it. I should like to say something here about her observation of human nature, but mustn’t, because she herself thought the idea an impertinence. All she ever did, she said, was to listen attentively. Her first approach to Carlingford (though by no means its only one) is through its churchgoing. This was a natural choice for the mid-nineteenth century. Only a few years later Dickens, close to death, fixed on a cathedral city and its clergy for his last novel. For present-day readers, Carlingford means a direct plunge into the rich diversity of Victorian Christianity. At one end of the spectrum there are ‘viewy’ High Churchmen, inheritors of the Oxford Movement, eager to reunite England with its Catholic past and to show truth by means of ritual. Ritual, confession, vestments, candles, are all an offence to everyday worshippers—un-English, or worse. To the Low Church, shading into the Evangelicals, plainness and simplicity are also a way of showing holiness. Church building is still in its hard Gothic heyday. (St Roque’s, where the perpetual curate is ‘viewy,’ is by Gilbert Scott.) The Dissenters have only one red brick building, Salem Chapel, in Grove Street. It is attended mainly by ‘grocers and buttermen.’ Beyond lie the poor. Here both the Ritualists and the Evangelicals see their duty. They visit, and bring blankets and coal. But what church, if any, the bargees and brickworkers attend, we are not told. On a lower level a thriving competition is in progress between the Parish Church, St Roque’s, and Salem. How many pews are filled, how many paid-for ‘sittings’ are taken up, will the Sunday sermon lose or gain supporters? But, unlike Trollope, Mrs Oliphant does not treat organized religion as a variant of the political structure, occupied in manoeuvres for position. The preoccupations of Carlingford are unspiritual and often ludicrous, but the church, no matter how far it falls short, is there to link them with an unseen world. In this way, although her human comedy is so much narrower than Trollope’s, it has a dimension that can hardly be found in Barchester. III. The Rector The Rector most characteristically begins with a new arrival at Carlingford. Mrs Oliphant opens her story in a tone of shrewd irony, presenting Carlingford as its ‘good society’ sees itself—that is, the ‘real town,’ not the tradespeople or, of course, Wharfside. This real town stays secluded in Grange Lane, behind high walls ‘jealous of intrusion, yet thrusting tall plumes of lilac and stray branches of apple-blossom, like friendly salutations to the world without.’ These households, the mainstay of the Parish Church, are half-agreeably disturbed by the thought of a new incumbent. He may be a Ritualist, like young Mr Wentworth of St Roque’s. He may be Low Church, like the late Rector, who absurdly exceeded his duties and actually went down to preach to the ‘bargemen’ of the canal district. To look at it from another point of view, there are unmarried young ladies in Carlingford, and it is known that the new Rector, also, is unmarried. This, like A Christmas Carol and Silas Marner, is the novel as parable. The houses of Grange Lane, as we first see them in the May sunshine, are an earthly paradise. To open the Wodehouse’s garden door—‘what a slight, paltry barrier—one plank and no more’—is to be elected, to find it shut is to be cast out. As the story opens the young curate, Frank Wentworth, is already, though not securely, admitted to the garden, the falling apple blossoms making light of his ‘black Anglican coat.’ He is too poor to propose marriage to Lucy, the pretty younger daughter. When the door closes behind him he walks stiffly away along the dry and dusty road. Out goes the frustrated young man from the display of fertile greenery, in comes the shy, celibate newcomer. ‘A tall, embarrassed figure, following the portly one of Mr Wodehouse, stepped suddenly from the noisy gravel to the quiet grass, and stood gravely awkward behind the father of the house’ in contrast to the blazing narcissi and the fruit trees. Morley Proctor has been ‘living out of nature.’ For the last fifteen years he has been immured in the college of All Souls, preparing an edition of Sophocles. ‘He was neither High nor Low, enlightened nor narrow-minded. He was a Fellow of All Souls’—about which Mrs Oliphant probably knew very little except for the irony of the name for an establishment which cared for so few of them. Proctor is honourable enough, upright and sincere, but in company he is ‘a reserved and inappropriate man.’ His heart is an ‘unused faculty.’ He is out of place, as he knows at once, in the vigorously flowering garden. But Morley Proctor, too, has come from a Paradise to which he looks back regretfully, a haven of scholarship and ‘snug little dinner-parties undisturbed by the presence of women.’ This is in spite of the fact that his mother has come from Devonshire to look after him, a dauntless little mother who treats him with the mixture of love and impatience at which Mrs Oliphant (in fiction as in life) excelled. Old Mrs Proctor, young in heart, regards her son as a child, but as one who should be settled down with a wife. One of the Wodehouse daughters would do—the kindly, plain, elder one whose reserve seems an echo of Morley’s own timidity, or perhaps the dazzling Lucy. Having placed this situation, Mrs Oliphant asks us to see it in a different light. It turns out that the new Rector has left All Souls, somewhat against his conscience, precisely in order to give his mother a good home. When he ‘turned his back on his beloved cloisters’ he knew very well what the sacrifice was, but he was determined to make it. I have said that Mrs Oliphant is not writing of the religious life simply as a social mechanism, or for the sake of the psychological tension that it produces. Proctor’s flight from the possibility of marriage (not without an unexpected twinge of sexuality, since Lucy is so pretty) is domestic comedy of a delicious kind, since Lucy does not want him in the least. But the crisis of the story, when it comes, is spiritual. As a sharp interruption to the dull services that he conducts and the dinner parties that he awkwardly attends, the Rector is called to the bedside of a dying woman. He is asked to prepare her soul for its last journey. His reaction to the agony is dismay, and a very English embarrassment. Without his prayer book he is at a loss for a prayer. He has to leave even that duty to young Wentworth, who providentially comes in time to the sickroom. The Rector ‘would have known what to say to her if her distress had been over a disputed translation.’ The heart of the story is his trial and condemnation, and he has to conduct the trial himself. Carlingford doesn’t reject him—quite the contrary. But he perceives that Wentworth, ‘not half or a quarter part as learned as he,’ was ‘a world farther on in the profession which they shared.’ Among those who are being born, suffering and perishing he has no useful place. His training has not prepared him for such things. And yet, can they be learned by training? ‘The Rector’s heart said No.’ Mrs Oliphant, in fact, is asking: what is a man doing, and what must he be, when he undertakes to be an intermediary between man and God? She returns to the question later, in Salem Chapel. The answer, in her view, has nothing to do with formal theology, or she would not have proposed it. Nor is it a matter of duty. Morley Proctor was right, in his anxiety, to consult his heart. IV. The Doctor’s Family The Doctor’s Family enlarges the view of Carlingford and takes us to a different part of it. The Doctor, however, like the Rector, has to face a painful ordeal of reality. This is all the more telling because in his hard-working medical practice he might be thought to be facing it already. But Mrs Oliphant shows him as another, although very different example of the unused heart. Edward Rider is a surgeon, still, at that date, professionally inferior to a doctor. He is no hero, and Mrs Oliphant defines carefully what are ‘the limits of his nature, and beyond them he could not pass.’ He is shown as wretchedly in need of a woman, but unwilling to marry because he can’t face the expense and responsibility. His surgery is in the dreaded brickworkers’ district, partly because he is not a snob, but largely because he has to make a living. He would work in Grange Lane if he could, but that is the domain of old Dr Marjoribanks, who attends the ‘good society.’ To this ‘poor young fellow,’ as Mrs Oliphant calls him, strong-minded, short-tempered, comes a terrible visitation. His drunken failure of an elder brother, Fred, has come back in disgrace from Australia and installed himself in the upstairs room. ‘A large, indolent, shabby figure,’ he is incapable of gratitude but is always ready with a pleasant word for the neighbours, who prefer him, in consequence, to the doctor. Fred’s foul billows of tobacco smoke define him and hang over the first part of the book, just as the surgery lamp shines defiantly at the beginning and the end. Mrs Oliphant was well acquainted with sickbeds and travel and the support of idle relations. The story seems almost to tell itself. It moves fast, as though keeping pace with the doctor’s rounds in his horse and drag, the quickest-moving thing on the streets of Carlingford. One encounter follows another, each outbidding the last. Fred is followed from Australia by his feebly plaintive wife and a pack of children. All have arrived in charge of his forceful young sister-in-law, Nettie. She is a tiny, ‘brilliant brown creature,’ a mighty atom, afraid of nothing ‘except that someone would speak before her and the situation be taken out of her hands.’ Having a little money left, she undertakes to support the whole lot of them, and whisks them away to new lodgings. The title The Doctor’s Family can now be seen in all its irony. First Rider, who has been too cautious to marry, is threatened with a whole family of wild children: Nettie comes to his rescue, but this is no relief to the doctor, who falls violently in love with her. Fred’s squalid death in the canal may look like a solution, but isn’t. It means, or Nettie convinces herself that it does, that she has no right to marry and desert her weak-spirited sister. All the action seems checked, until the arrival of another Australian visitor, ‘the Bushman,’ who ‘fills up the whole little parlour with his beard and his presence,’ gives it quite a new direction. From the secluded top room where Dr Rider once hid away his brother, the whole drama has come into the open. There it has to be played out to the amazement of watching Carlingford, from the bargemen who drag in Fred’s bloated body to mild, elderly Miss Wodehouse, with whose gentle observations the book comes to rest. Dr Rider and Dr Marjoribanks, Frank Wentworth and the Wodehouses, will return in the later Chronicles, all of them less than perfect human beings. Mrs Oliphant is not much concerned with faultless characters. An exception, in The Doctor’s Family, is the honest Bushman, but even he, Miss Wodehouse points out, has made a woeful mistake. And by avoiding the Victorian baroque, the luxurious contrast between the entirely good and pure and the downright wicked that even George Eliot sometimes allowed herself, Mrs Oliphant creates a moral atmosphere of her own—warm, rueful, based on hard experience, tolerant just where we may not expect it. One might call it the Mrs Oliphant effect. In part it is the ‘uncomprehended, unexplainable impulse to take the side of the opposition’ that she recognized in herself and in Jane Carlyle. It is the form that her wit takes, a sympathetic relish for contradictions. We are quite ready, for example, to accept Nettie as the saving angel of The Doctor’s Family, but when the drunken Fred says ‘Nettie’s a wonderful creature, to be sure, but it’s a blessed relief to get rid of her for a little,’ it’s impossible, just for the moment, not to see his point of view. Later on, when Nettie’s responsibilities unexpectedly disappear, she feels, not gratitude or ‘delight in her new freedom,’ but a bitter sense of injury. She has never had to see herself as unimportant before. Again, Freddie, the youngest child, adores her and refuses to leave her. But this passion, says Mrs Oliphant, is simply ‘a primitive unconcern for anyone but himself.’ Anybody who has looked after young children must reluctantly admit the truth of this. ‘When I am a man, I shan’t want you,’ says Freddie. In The Rector, young Mr Wentworth, even in his deep concern for the dying woman, cannot help feeling annoyed that the Rector was there before him. Mrs Oliphant hardly implies that men, women, and children should not be like this, only that this is the way they are. The often not-quite-resolved endings of her novels produce the same bittersweet effect. In Hester (1883) the strong heroine, who has shown herself perfectly capable of an independent career, is left without hope of the work she meant to do, but with two men, neither of them up to her mark, who want to marry her. ‘What can a young woman desire more,’ writes Mrs Oliphant dryly, ‘than to have such a possibility of choice?’ To take a very different example in one of her short stories, ‘The Open Door’ (1882), the ghost of a young man knocks at the door of a house in Edinburgh, ceaselessly trying to make amends to the family who lived there a century ago. A minister persuades the spirit to leave its haunting, but whether it is at peace as a result there is no way of telling. 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 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. (#ulink_a59c02cb-0ce2-5528-9051-78a4f134e2c8) 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 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 Bront?’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 is only on those terms that he can truly be a priest. After the success of Salem Chapel, Mrs Oliphant had asked for, and got, ?1,500 for the The Perpetual Curate. It was the highest payment she ever had from a publisher. John Blackwood’s old clerk (she was told) turned pale at the idea of such a sum, and remonstrated with his master. The story began to run in Blackwood’s in June 1863, and was produced under even greater difficulties than usual. Mrs Oliphant wrote it only one or two instalments in advance—this at her own request, as the monthly deadline, she said, ‘kept her up.’ In the autumn she travelled, with her usual large party of friends and children, to Rome. There, in January 1864, her only daughter fell sick, and died within a few weeks. Maggie was ten, ‘the beloved companion,’ as Mrs Oliphant had been as a little girl, to her own mother. ‘It is hard to go out in the streets,’ she wrote, ‘to look out of the window and see the other women with their daughters. God knows it is an unworthy feeling, but it makes me shrink from going out.’ In spite of this, ‘the roughest edge of grief,’ as she found it, she missed only one instalment for Blackwood’s, for May 1864. Stress, perhaps, was responsible for a few mistakes (the church architect is called first Folgate, then Finial), and for the weakness of the sub-plot, involving Frank, as it does, in unlikely misunderstandings. Fourteen years earlier Mrs Oliphant had sent her first novel, Margaret Maitland, to the stout old critic Francis Jeffrey; he told her it was true and touching but ‘sensibly injured by the indifferent matter which has been admitted to bring it up to the standard of three volumes.’ The difficulty remained, the standard length was still demanded in the 1860s by publishers and booksellers, and she set herself to meet it. Certainly the story, with its comings and goings from house to house, moves slowly at times. But Mrs Oliphant, I think, is able to persuade the reader to her own pace, so that we can truly say at the close that we know what it is like to have lived in Carlingford. Whatever we may think of the turns of the plot, she is at her shrewdest in this book, and at the same time at her most human. Her refusal to moralize is striking, even disconcerting. It is here in particular that she stands comparison with Trollope, whose titles Can You Forgive Her? and He Knew He Was Right challenge readers not so much to judge as to refer to their own conscience. In The Perpetual Curate the worthless do not repent. Jack Wentworth, the bon viveur, seems on the point of sacrificing his inheritance but the old Squire tells him sharply to do his duty. Everyone is fallible. Young Rosa, who causes so many complications, looks as though she is going to be a helpless victim of society. She turns out to be nothing of the sort. Miss Wodehouse becomes not gentler, but tougher. In Chapter 43 she is treasuring up an incident that might be useful to her in arguments with her future husband. Lucy, because she had made up her mind to sacrifice herself and marry Frank, even though it means being a poor man’s wife, can’t rejoice whole-heartedly at his success; it lessens her, she feels ‘a certain sense of pain.’ And when Frank speaks of poetic justice, Miss Leonora says, ‘I don’t approve of a man ending off neatly like a novel in this sort of ridiculous way.’ Frank Wentworth’s story returns to the problem of The Rector and Salem Chapel—What does it mean for a man to call himself a priest? and, closely related to this—What can he do without the partnership of a woman? ‘Partnership’ is the right word here. In The Perpetual Curate, the lesson Frank learns is this: ‘Even in Eden itself, though the dew had not yet dried on the leaves, it would be highly incautious for any man to conclude that he was sure of having his own way.’ Adapted from the introductions to the Virago editions of The Rector (1986), The Country Doctor (1986), Salem Chapel (1986) and The Perpetual Curate (1987) The Mystery of Mrs Oliphant Mrs Oliphant, ‘A Fiction to Herself’: A Literary Life, by Elisabeth Jay ‘I don’t think I have ever had two hours uninterrupted (except at night, with everybody in bed) during the whole of my literary life,’ said Mrs Oliphant. At night, therefore, she wrote—nearly one hundred novels, more than fifty short stories, history, biography, travel, articles ‘too numerous to list’ in the index even of this meticulous book. She was born in 1828 in Wallyford, near Edinburgh, and brought up in Liverpool. Her father, a clerk, seems never to have counted for much. The mother kept everything going, and this pattern—the helpless man, the strong woman—persisted through her life and in her fiction. Of her two brothers, one became a drunkard, the other a bankrupt invalid. She married her cousin, an unpractical stained-glass designer. He died (for which she found it hard to forgive him), leaving her to drift about Europe for cheapness’ sake, with ?1,000 in debts and three young children to feed. Before long, her brothers, nieces, and nephews would also look to her for support. Words had to be spun into money, even when her only daughter died at the age of ten, leaving her to ‘the roughest edge of grief.’ She never expected help from her two idle, graceless sons; indeed she indulged them absurdly. Part of her rejoiced in taking charge and preferred her dependants to be weak. She knew this tendency of hers, and described it unsparingly in The Doctor’s Family. In her new biography of Mrs Oliphant, Elisabeth Jay calls her ‘completely self-aware,’ able to see herself in both comic and tragic lights, or as ‘a fat little commonplace woman, rather tongue-tied.’ This phrase comes from her Autobiography, still unpublished when she died in 1897. It reads as a spontaneous outpouring of love and grief, with sharp passages, too, when other women authors come into her mind. (‘Should I have done better if I had been kept, like George Eliot, in a mental greenhouse and taken care of?’) Jay, who edited the Autobiography in 1990, makes it her starting-point here. But she didn’t want, she says, to go through the life and the work, comparing them blow by blow: a career is linear, but a woman’s life is cyclical. Her part-headings speak for themselves: ‘Women and Men,’ ‘A Woman of Ideas,’ ‘The Professional Woman.’ Her only firm ground, she tells us, has been Mrs Oliphant’s attempt to ‘evaluate her gender role,’ but her book, after eight hard years of original research, is much more comprehensive than this. Mrs Oliphant, in any case, wasn’t evaluating so much as surviving. The necessities of the long battle made her unpredictable. More than once she described her visit, in 1860, to Blackwood’s offices—‘myself all blackness and whiteness in my widow’s dress,’ a humble supplicant who understood little about money—but when that didn’t work she negotiated advances with the best. She believed that women should be given the vote, but not that she herself would ever want to use it. She could be ‘almost fearsomely correct and in the middle of it become audacious.’ Often, too, her stories don’t give her readers the satisfaction of closure—a conventionally happy or even a well-defined ending. She doesn’t want us to expect too much of life, certainly not consistency. Her subjects were the staples of Victorian women’s fiction—money, wills, marriages, church and chapel, disgraceful relatives, family power-struggles, quarrels, deathbeds, ghosts—though she fearlessly stepped outside this in her Little Pilgrim stories, which take place beyond the grave. ‘Is she worth reading?’ Elisabeth Jay has been asked time and again. The question is difficult to answer, since the books are so hard to find, and publishers who do reprint them always go back to the Chronicles of Carlingford, probably because the title suggests Trollope’s Barchester series (from which Mrs Oliphant borrowed a little when she felt like it). But although she wrote with marvellous fluency—writing, she said, felt to her much like reading—the length of the three-volume novel seems not to have suited her. She is at her very best in novellas and short stories. Two of them, which might well be reprinted together, are ‘The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow’ in which a conventional widow with a large estate falls in love with her coarse-mannered steward, and ‘Eleanor and Fair Rosamond’. Here the wife finds out that her husband has made a bigamous marriage. She has the other woman’s address, and resolutely sets out for the distant suburb, the street, the house. What follows is ‘tragifarce,’ as Mrs Oliphant calls it, ‘the most terrible of all,’ and she risks a conclusion that dies away into silence and echoes. This is a valuable study, strong on Mrs Oliphant’s religious experiences and on her professional life. As to her bewildering personality, perhaps no one understood her better than the thirty-years-younger James Barrie. In 1897, when she lay dying of cancer, he called to see her and ‘the most exquisite part of her, which the Scotswoman’s reserve had kept hidden, came to the surface.’ But he does not say what she told him. Observer, 1995 1 (#ulink_33a8e7d2-46f3-5d7b-a683-c16f5fa3aab6)The first story was ‘The Executor,’ which appeared in Blackwood’s, May 1861, but in the end was not part of the Carlingford series. These are The Rector and The Doctor’s Family, published together in three volumes by Blackwoods (1863), Salem Chapel (1863), The Perpetual Curate (1864), Miss Marjoribanks (1866), and Phoebe Junior: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford (1876). During this period she published twenty-one other full-length books. 2 (#ulink_d6f616cb-2878-5760-bede-69fab71ee975)If Carlingford is to be identified at all, I would suggest Aylesbury, where Francis Oliphant designed some windows for St Mary’s Church. Characteristically, when no donor came forward he offered to pay for them himself. 3 (#ulink_f66b8e9a-bee5-5bf8-9e49-97e160b21848)Frank’s stipend isn’t given, but in Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (1861) the Reverend Josiah Crawley, Perpetual Curate of Hogglestock, earns ?130 a year. THE VICTORIANS Called Against His Will (#ulink_bdde4232-f426-5516-be14-f3afc74cd5d2) Father of the Bensons: The Life of Edward White Benson, Sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, by Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd It’s more of a difficulty than a help that so much has been written about the Bensons (Palmer and Lloyd have already done a biography of Fred Benson) and that the family should have written so much about themselves. The Archbishop kept diaries, and his wife Minnie wrote two—one a dutiful sightseer’s journal, kept at her husband’s suggestion on her honeymoon, another one, years later that told some, at least, of the story of her heart. (There is also a contemporary diary of Minnie’s for 1862—63.) Arthur Benson wrote four and a half million words of diaries, a book of family reminiscences, a family genealogy, lives of his father, his sister Maggie and his brother Hugh, and a memoir of his sister Nellie. Fred wrote Our Family Affairs, Mother, As We Were, and (almost on his deathbed) Final Edition. He also kept a diary. The Bensons, ‘a rather close little corporation,’ as Arthur called them, had a boundless talent for self-expression, self-justification and self-explanation. Yet they did not give themselves away. Edward White Benson took charge of his five brothers and sisters at the age of fourteen, after the death of his father in 1842. This father had been an unsuccessful research chemist who had invested what money he had in a process for manufacturing white lead, but Edward, fearing the taint of ‘business,’ refused to let his mother carry on with it. This was probably wise, since he already had a career in the Church in mind. ‘To a boy of tender home affections there is perhaps no pain more acute than can be caused by the discovery that his schoolfellows think slightingly, on the score of poverty or social distinctions, of those who are dearest to him in the world.’ This is from the biography of one of my grandfathers, later Bishop of Lincoln: it tactfully conceals the fact that in the 1860s his father kept a shop, and got hopelessly into debt. Edward Benson was spared this, but when his mother died in 1850 he was still working for his tripos at Cambridge, and since she had been living on an annuity the family faced the future on a little over a hundred pounds a year. He was rescued by the rich and childless bursar of his college, Francis Martin, who had heard of his troubles, and offered to support him until he could earn his own living. Martin lavished affection on the handsome, hard-pressed scholar, but, the authors say, ‘the younger man did not fall in love with the older although he was willing to accept both the devotion and all the advantages that went with it.’ This seems hard. Affection can’t be regulated, and by 1852 Edward had in any case determined to make eleven-year-old Minnie, daughter of his widowed cousin Mrs Sidgwick, his future wife. Neither of his relationships, with the doting Mr Martin or the bewildered Minnie, was considered in any way strange in the 1850s. No one who has written about the Bensons has been able to help making Minnie the heroine of the story. They married in 1859, when she was eighteen and Edward thirty. ‘An utter child,’ she wrote, ‘with no stay on God. Twelve years older, much stronger, much more passionate, and whom I didn’t really love. How evidently disappointed he was—trying to be rapturous—feeling so inexpressibly lonely and young, but how hard for him.’ Edward went on to be a master at Rugby, the first Master of Wellington College, Chancellor of Lincoln, the first Bishop of Truro, and in 1883, Archbishop of Canterbury. Minnie bore him six children, all of whom loved her dearly, and from her early days as a muddled extravagant housekeeper she grew into the doyenne of vast households. She liked meeting distinguished people and was certainly a great gainer from her marriage. Gladstone called her ‘the cleverest woman in Europe.’ She was not clever, but she was generously responsive, and had a genius for following her instincts even when she hardly admitted them. She was, as became clear early on, a woman who loved women, and had agonizingly keen relationships, emotional and spiritual, with a series of female friends, some of them quite dull. It says a great deal for the Bensons that they made a go of an ill-assorted marriage, a brilliant, bizarre, self-centred family, and a career that reached the very summit. Edward’s present biographers take a calm and judicious tone, but they call him a ‘natural bully’ and say that his children all emerged ‘scarred,’ except his eldest son Martin, who died at seventeen, and Nellie, his eldest daughter, who was not afraid of her father. But all of them, even the amiable Fred, inherited his neurasthenia and spells of black depression, and Maggie, the younger daughter, became suicidally insane, recovering only for the last few days of her life. Hugh, the treasured last-born, looks in his childhood photographs like a changeling, palely staring. The three sons grew up homosexual and each of them, in their distinctive way, avoided taking responsible posts. Arthur, when the point came, did not want to be headmaster of Eton. Fred became a popular novelist and a resolutely genial bachelor. Hugh, having converted to Catholicism, lived as a priest without a parish. Their father was integrity itself, a mighty force always heading the same way, excluding other opinions with an absolute certainty of their wrongness. His system was total: music, literature, travel, social behaviour, the careful folding of an umbrella, the management of gravy and potatoes on the plate, were all judged not from the aesthetic but the moral viewpoint. We know that he was a flogging headmaster, that to Ethel Smyth (a friend of Nellie’s) ‘the sight of his majestic form approaching the tea-table scattered my wits as an advancing elephant might scatter a flock of sheep,’ that conversation with him was not to be undertaken lightly and that Hugh—for example—felt like ‘a small china mug being filled at a waterfall.’ He dearly liked his children to be near him and anxiously waited for their love. But circumstances were against him, because as schoolmaster, bishop and archbishop his family were always on show and must be urged and interrogated into perfection. Meanwhile the children themselves were longing, perhaps praying, for him to go away. ‘No one,’ Betty Askwith wrote in Two Victorian Families, ‘who has not experienced some taste of Victorian family life (for it survived in places well into the twentieth century) can quite understand the extraordinary sense of living under the domination of one of those vital, strong-willed tyrants. If the tyranny be accompanied, as it frequently was, with vivid personality and wide-ranging intellectual interests there was an excitement about it which was incommunicable.’ Edward Benson was a great man, and Palmer and Lloyd give a sympathetic account of a formidable career. He loved to rule, although he believed the choice was not in his hands—‘if calls exist,’ he wrote, ‘called I was, against my will’—and they think he was at the very height of his powers in Truro, working as a creative pioneer, with a new cathedral to build, and on the way to revealing his own personal conception of the episcopacy and of religion itself. As Primate ‘his acquaintance with the practical affairs of Church and State was slight, and he knew he would quickly have to master all the administrative problems that would surround him. Everything poetical and romantic, the very essence of his view of life, would be left behind in Cornwall.’ But Edward of course went courageously into new duties and controversies—temperance, patronage, disestablishment, the guidance of missionary societies, ‘the wretchedness of the poorest classes, their ignorance and wildness and false friends,’ reunion between the churches, ritual. His Lincoln judgement of 1890 was given after months of hard work and anxiety. The Bishop of Lincoln was on trial on charges of ‘irregular and unlawful ritual,’ and in particular of adopting the eastward position with his back to the congregation during the consecration, so that the people could not see what the priest was doing. Benson finally allowed the eastern position as optional, but insisted that the consecration of the elements itself must be before the people. ‘What he meant by this was illustrated at my consecration in St Paul’s Cathedral,’ wrote my grandfather (my other one, the Bishop of Manchester). ‘He thus deliberately differentiated the English Holy Communion from the Roman Mass. But this provision of his has been generally disregarded.’ Who cares? But in February 1889, crowds besieged Lambeth Palace on the first day of the trial, long before the doors opened at eleven o’clock, and the police had to be called in to keep order. This grandfather, by the way, although he worked himself almost to death, allowed himself not to answer letters from obvious lunatics. But Benson, apparently, told his chaplain that they must all be answered, since they might have been of importance to the men who wrote them. He never retired, but died (in October 1896) on a visit to the Gladstones, at early Communion in the church at Hawarden. ‘He died like a soldier,’ said Gladstone. And he had lived like one, too, constantly at his post. But Palmer and Lloyd might, perhaps, have said more about his interest in the supernatural. At Cambridge, in the late 1840s, he and his friends had founded a Ghost Club. He is usually said to have lost interest in such matters or even to have come to disapprove of them, but in his notebooks for 12 January 1895, Henry James writes: Note here the ghost story told me at Addington…by the Archbishop of Canterbury…the story of the young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country house…The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children; the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon, whom they invite and solicit, from across dangerous places, the deep ditch of a sunk fence, etc so that the children may destroy themselves, lose themselves, by responding, by getting into their power. So long as the children are kept from them, they are not lost; but they try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them. It is a question of the children ‘coming over to where they are.’ Edward Benson told this story in the year before his death. There are two principles within each soul—we have to choose, we have to renew the struggle every hour. He had preached this so long and so earnestly, but here it is in the form of a powerful tale of haunting. How can it be said, then, that he left everything poetical and romantic behind him in Cornwall? London Review of Books, 1998 The Need for Open Spaces Octavia Hill was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, in 1838, the youngest but two of a family of eleven children, ten of them girls. She had no formal education, for her strong-minded mother believed in letting her children do what they were best at, and in letting them be outdoors as much as possible. When Octavia was fourteen, the family moved from the country into London: she never forgot the loss of green fields and fresh air. However, she needed to earn her living, so she became the manager of a toy-making workshop run for the benefit of girls from what was then called a ragged school. Hill went on to become a crusader for housing reform, managing small blocks of slum property and making sure the apartments were fit to live in. She grew into authority and sat on select committees and royal commissions, but without wavering an inch from her first principles. She didn’t believe in charity as such. What she asked for, for everyone, was access to education, employment at a fair wage, and, above all, space ‘for the sight of sky and of things growing.’ She felt strongly that people, and the poor in particular, needed open space, but she also set herself to see that they got it. This is the work for which she is now best remembered, as one of the founders of the National Trust. The campaign, based on the open spaces movement in the United States, began in the late 1880s with a protest against the closing of rights of way and footpaths. The first stretch of land to be presented to the trust was four and a half rocky acres on the coast of Wales. By the time Hill died, in 1912, the trust’s property had expanded beyond all calculations, and some American conservationists had taken to looking to Hill for inspiration. Evidently, to achieve so much, Hill had to be an impressive but also an infuriating woman. Tiny, stout, noticeably badly dressed, with a hat like a pen wiper (her lifetime friend John Ruskin couldn’t bear her dowdiness), she was obstinate—no, more than obstinate, absolutely inflexible. She has been called one of the noblest women ever sent upon earth, but it didn’t do to disagree with Octavia Hill. New York Times Magazine, 1999 In the Golden Afternoon Lewis Carroll: A Biography, by Morton N. Cohen, and The Red King’s Dream, or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland, by Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone In a letter of 1874 the author of Alice described to a child friend how he had been seen off at the railway station by two affectionate friends, Lewis Carroll and Charles Dodgson. Here he is dividing himself not into two, but three. This was never a matter of conflicting selves. It was a game, though one he took seriously, as mathematicians do. Morton N. Cohen, after thirty years of faithful research and scholarship, has undertaken a complete biography of the whole man, and finds himself driven to call him ‘Charles.’ In a certain sense, there is little to relate. Dodgson was born in 1832, the eldest child of the parsonage at Dares-bury in Cheshire, where ‘even the passing of a cart was a matter of great interest.’ He was deaf in one ear and stammered. At Rugby, he suffered uncomplainingly for four years. At home, he edited nursery-table magazines, The Rectory Umbrella and others, for his brothers and sisters, and took responsibility for them when the parents died. In 1851, he went up to Christ Church, and spent the rest of his working life there. He was elected to a studentship in mathematics and became a rather contentious member of the very contentious governing body and Curator of the Common Room, laying down some good wine and, in 1884, instituting afternoon tea. He had rooms, first of all in the Library building, and then, when he had more money, in Tom Quad. His study was as full of devices and puzzles as a toyshop, and up and down his stairs came scores of little girl visitors and their mothers. (When speaking to children, he did not stammer.) As a Ruskinian in search of beauty and, at heart, a gadgeteer, he became a notable amateur photographer. His subjects were almost all celebrities—he stalked the Tennyson family, catching them at last in the Lake District—and children. In 1880, perhaps because the new dry-plates made the whole thing too easy, he put away his camera. In 1867, he had made an expedition to Russia with his old friend Henry Liddon; he never went abroad again, never married, and was ordained only as a deacon, never as priest. Meanwhile he worked relentlessly, though sedately, publishing three hundred titles, of one kind or another, in thirty-five years. He also, of course, became famous, and yet perha ps the most dramatic incident of his life was the river expedition to Nuneham when his whole party, including his aunt, two of his sisters, and Alice herself, got wet through and had to be taken to a friend’s house to dry off. In 1898, almost as an afterthought, Dodgson died of a cold and cough. Morton Cohen is as heroic as a biographer, in his way, as Dodgson was with his camera. This means going painstakingly into university and college politics, and making a serious attempt to sum up Dodgson’s professional career. ‘A modest, none too successful lecturer of mathematics,’ in Roger Lancelyn Green’s judgement, ‘whose writings on the subject are hardly remembered to-day.’ This, naturally, is not enough for Cohen, who calls in expert opinion, mostly in favour but sometimes against, on every syllabus, textbook and pamphlet. Then there are the puzzles and ciphers, and the almost unplayable games. Even Cohen, perhaps, hasn’t tried ‘Croquet Castles.’ The book is arranged chronologically, but pauses from time to time to consider a subject at greater length. It is a disadvantage, certainly, that the four years from 1858 to 1862 are missing from Dodgson’s diaries. These volumes would cover the beginning of his acquaintance with Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church, the strong-minded Mrs Liddell and their young family. By 1862, Alice was nearly ten. The fourth of July was the ‘golden afternoon’ (although Cohen anxiously points out that the meteorological records show that it was raining) when Alice and her two sisters listened to the earliest version of her adventures underground. Two years later, Dodgson had apparently fallen quite out of favour at the Deanery. He had applied in vain for leave to take the girls out on the river, ‘but Mrs Liddell will not let any come in future: rather superfluous caution…Help me O God, for Christ’s sake, to live more to Thee. Amen!’ What precisely, or even imprecisely, had gone wrong? Dodgson had disagreed with Liddell over college business, but scholars and Heads of Houses were used to arguments on a much grander scale than this, and the Dean would never have let such things interfere with personal mat ters. Perhaps the worst case of all for a biographer, nothing definable happened at all. At this point, Cohen gives way to ungainly speculations. Perhaps, he thinks, in 1863, when the newly married Prince and Princess of Wales visited the Deanery, Alice might have impetuously piped up: ‘I’m going to marry Mr Dodgson.’ And if Charles were present, perhaps taking it as a teasing remark, or not, he might have picked up the thread and replied: ‘Well said, and why not!’ Ah, teasing. That might have much to do with the case. Young females can bat their eyes, shake their heads, toss their locks about, feign innocence, and make outrageous suggestions all with intent to shock and call attention to themselves. And the three clever Liddell sisters were probably expert in these arts. The biographer’s task, however, isn’t to picture wild scenes at the Deanery, but, as Cohen tells us, ‘to look beyond the writings and into the artist.’ He has set himself to account for Dodgson’s shyness, reserve, and melancholy and the springs of his magical creative power. His conclusion is that Dodgson, as a rector’s eldest son, bore ‘scars of guilt’ because he was a childless bachelor and a mathematician who would never be a priest. The father must, it seems, have been oppressive, although there is very little evidence for this and Cohen has to end the section rather lamely: ‘Had Charles managed to forge a union with Alice or some other object of his desire he would have been a far happier man than he was.’ Alice in Wonderland, he claims, is, in fact, about Dodgson himself, and his adolescent trials and stresses (although Alice could in no circumstances be anything but a little girl, absolutely certain of the rules she has learned and able to put down any amount of nonsense). Through the Looking-Glass is about Alice Liddell, but the game is more advanced. She climbs the social ladder and ‘becomes a woman.’ This doesn’t account for the irresistibility of the stories, which Cohen, in orthodox style, puts down to emotional and sexual repression. He has made a checklist of the prayers entered in the diaries for purity and a new life. There are many more of these, he calculates, when Dodgson was meeting the Liddell children regularly. His diverted sexual energy ‘caused him unspeakable torments,’ but we can consider ourselves fortunate, since it was in all probability the source of his genius. Meanwhile, without ever compromising his conscience or his religious faith, he had to endure his existence as ‘the odd man out, an eccentric, the subject of whispers and wagging tongues.’ Although Cohen accepts Mavis Batey’s identification (published in 1991) of the stories with their Christ Church background, he seems never quite to realize how well Dodgson was suited to mid-Victorian Oxford. Oxford hostesses were good judges of eccentricity, and the college halls were used to nervous, stammering, opinionated, riddling and joking guests. My grandfather, a tutor at Corpus in 1870, notes, ‘Heard this evening the last new joke of the author of Alice in Wonderland: he (Dodgson) knows a man whose feet are so large that he has to put his trousers on over his head.’ There is a kind of friendly resignation about this, certainly not hostility. As to Alice herself, she was a creature of the golden age of indulged small girls, when Ruskin piled up valuable books for them to jump over, when Oscar Wilde rowed little Katie Lewis on the Thames, delighted with her selfishness, when Flaubert wrote a letter to his niece from her doll and Gladstone buttered his granddaughter’s bread on both sides. And Alice becomes a queen, but her reign will be short. As the century turned, the little girls of fiction were replaced by boys (Peter Pan, Le Grand Meaulnes) who were either unwilling or unable to grow up, but that is not the world of Alice. ‘I had known dear Mr Dodgson for years,’ Ellen Terry said. ‘He was as fond of me as he could be of anybody over the age of ten.’ Dodgson believed that ‘anyone that ever loved one true child will have known the awe that falls on one in the presence of a spirit fresh from God’s hands on whom no shadow of sin has yet fallen,’ but between ten and fourteen the shadow did fall. On 11 May 1865, he met Alice (by now thirteen) with Miss Prickett, ‘the quintessence of governesses,’ in Tom Quad. ‘Alice seemed changed a good deal, and hardly for the better probably going through the usual awkward stage of transition.’ Like every other child friend (though none of them were so dear), she had withdrawn her true self into time past. In Chapter 23 of Sylvie and Bruno, he expresses his nostalgia as a melancholy joke when with the help of the Professor’s Reversal Watch he turns time backward, only to find himself cruelly cheated. It is distressing that Morton Cohen seems to care so little for Sylvie and Bruno, Dodgson’s parable of love and forgiveness. It is here that he is closest to his friend George MacDonald, whose Phantastes was written as a ‘fairy-tale for adults.’ When (in the introduction to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded) he says that he has imagined a possible psychical state in which a human being ‘might sometimes become conscious of what goes on in the fairy world, by actual transference of their immaterial essence,’ he is talking about something of the greatest importance to him. It is not enough to say, as Cohen does, that ‘Charles retreated inward when he should have travelled outward.’ Cohen, however, may well think that after thirty years’ patient study of the material he has earned the right to his own interpretations. Certainly he has avoided ‘the eccentric readings [that], while they may amuse, do not really bring us any closer to understanding the work,’ although, judging from his true grit as a biographer, he has probably read them all. The Red King’s Dream is yet another one. Here the authors, Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone, set out with the apparent advantage of living at Hawarden Castle, a few hundred yards from the Gladstone Library at St Deiniol’s. Their quest seems to have started there, with a strange conviction that, in Tenniel’s Wonderland illustration, the Lion is Disraeli and the Unicorn (in spite of his unmistakable goatee beard) is Gladstone. Tenniel was a political cartoonist, therefore the whole book must be a contemporary satire. (Dodgson, in fact, chose Tenniel not because of his work for Punch, but because the animals were so good in his Aesop’s Fables.) The White Knight must be Tennyson, and Tennyson’s two sons (not twins) must be Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In default of other evidence, an anagram will do. For instance, it is decided that the Mad Hatter is Charles Kingsley, so that the Hare must be his brother Henry: the Hare’s reply, ‘It was the best butter,’ is an anagram (though unfortunately it isn’t quite) of The Water Babies. But ‘we still did not know who the Dormouse could be…we could not fit him into the Kingsley coterie.’ It is anybody’s guess, but fit in he must, and he turns out to be F. D. Maurice, while Dean Stanley is the Cheshire cat, and Millais, because of his commercial success, is the Lobster who is baked too brown. And so on, faster and faster. The only compensation is that the authors seem to be enjoying themselves so much. In this way at least their research is part of what Dodgson called ‘those stores of healthy and innocent amusement that are laid up in books for the children that I love so well.’ Times Literary Supplement, 1995 Old Foss and Friend Edward Lear: A Biography, by Peter Levi Edward Lear (1812—1888) made his reputation as a water-colourist after almost no training, and invented himself as an Old Man with a Beard. He is a very attractive example of Victorian self-help. It was not an easy life, of course. English humorists are all depressive, and Lear suffered to the very end from ‘fits of the morbids.’ Vivien Noakes’s Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968), her book on his painting, and her catalogue for the 1985 Exhibition are classics. Peter Levi acknowledges her work without reserve. It has left him free to write an eccentric, affectionate biography, and to indulge himself as well as his subject. Lear was born in Holloway in 1812, the youngest of twenty-one children. When he was four, his father, a stockbroker, was declared bankrupt. Edward had perhaps five years at school and scarcely knew some of his family. He was lucky that his much older sister Anne looked after him tenderly, and he never had to go out to work as a clerk. He was unlucky in having poor sight until he was given spectacles, everything he saw was ‘formed into a horror’, in being epileptic and asthmatic, and in having (at the age of ten) been put through an experience by a brother and a cousin that he remembered as ‘the greatest evil done to me in life excepting that done by C.’ Who was ‘C’? Lear kept diaries, but later destroyed all of them up to the year 1858. By the time he was sixteen, he was ‘drawing for bread and cheese,’ then made a serious start as a bird painter, and was summoned to Knowsley by the old twelfth Earl of Derby to draw the menagerie. Another benefactor, Lord Egremont, asked him: ‘But where is all this going to lead to, Mr Lear?’ It led to the life of a wanderer, or rather of a voluntary exile. In 1837, Lord Derby (and others) paid his passage to Rome. Lear got himself an attic in the via del Babuino, and began to learn Italian. What was to be drawn was beyond anything he could have imagined, not the antiquities, but the views. At that time, as Levi points out, you could still see the tip of Mount Soracte from the middle of Rome, glittering white in winter, and then there was the Campagna. Levi believes that Lear ‘became happy from the time he decided to become a landscape painter.’ After nine years in Rome, and the publication of two volumes of Excursions in Italy, there was an unexpected interlude when the Queen, pleased with the Excursions, sent for him to improve her drawing. This was a new opening, perhaps, but it came to nothing. From Rome he went on, travelling in discomfort inconceivable, to Calabria, Sicily, Corfu, Greece, Turkey, Albania, Egypt, Palestine, Athens, Crete. It was his ambition to paint the whole Mediterranean coast, with one last expedition to India. In the 1870s he eventually settled down in a villa at San Remo. As a young man, he had walked almost the whole distance from Milan to Florence. As an old one, he had to be lifted in and out of railway carriages ‘like a bundle of hay.’ But he continued to work. In recording the lands of summer, he made something like ten thousand watercolours. Levi writes finely about images he loves of countries which he himself knows well. Temperamentally, I think he is drawn to sketches more than to finished pictures, to ‘dew-freshness and variety,’ ‘the heavenly-fresh sketch of the bridge at Scutari,’ yet, on consideration, he believes that the chromolithographs of the Ionian islands are Lear’s masterpiece, and out of these he selects for his one permitted colour illustration the view of Zante, which had worried Lear because he didn’t see how it could be made picturesque. ‘In fact it was that failure which lay at the root of his success…He drew a picture of perfect provincial peace and quiet, enlivened, if at all, only by a few normal-looking goats, but in doing so he expresses the true genius of place…The image has stood still in his eye.’ Lear was deeply interested in technical processes that might create a larger market for him, photography in particular; he didn’t seem to see how threatening it might become to a painter of views. Meanwhile, he continued to make a living in the only way he knew, and as his hero, Turner, had done he either got commissions, or showed his finished works to people who might be likely to buy them. Apart from these, there were his travel albums and the Nonsense books, both of which sold moderately. Apparently he thought seriously of marriage and proposed twice to the same girl, but since she was forty-six years younger, he must have been certain of a ‘No.’ Friends, the visits of friends, their unaccountable behaviour, their many-paged and always-answered letters, were the defence against ‘cruel loneliness’ and the support of his life, partly because he lived a good deal through theirs. Frank Lushington, the dearest of all, he followed to Corfu. When he heard that another close friend, Chichester Fortescue, had been made Secretary for Ireland, he threw a fried whiting, in his joy, across the hotel dining room. There were tears, also, and ‘angries.’ Not a hint of homosexuality here, Levi insists, but this ignores the many lights and shades of that golden age of male friendship. Undoubtedly, however, the real married couple of the household were Lear and his grumbling old Suliot servant, Giorgis, an unsatisfactory cook (‘Fried oranges again!’) but faithful to the death. Giorgis did not think a poor man should want to live more than sixty years, and in fact died before Old Foss, Lear’s favourite cat, the other presiding genius of the villa at San Remo. Lear had escaped the fate of a mid-Victorian jester to the gentry, established his own life and planted his own garden. Now, accepting his stoutness, his beard, his strange nose, he mythologized himself, delightfully, though more wistfully, perhaps, than the circumstances warranted, as the desolate Yonghy Bonghy Bo and finally as Uncle Arly, who wandered the world in shoes too tight for him. There was a mythical version, too, of Old Foss. Levi wanders amiably and sometimes confusingly in and out of the diaries and letters, and up and down the years. But the book arose, he tells us, ‘from an attempt to put together a lecture on Lear as a poet,’ and it seems a pity that in the end he has left himself so little room for this. Lear was a skilled metrist, partial to dactyls (‘Calico,’ ‘Pelican,’ ‘runcible’), and a magic songwriter, with something like a reverence for the absurd. Levi says something about this, and, as a poet, he defends the limericks from anyone who may have found them disappointing because of the repeated last rhymes. But he goes over the edge, surely (as he does several times in this book), when he says that in the 1880s Lear was writing poetry which ‘no one but Tennyson (until Hardy) could rival for its lively and startling originality.’ What’s become of Browning? Times Literary Supplement, 1995 The Sound of Tennyson I think of Tennyson as one of the greatest of the English-rectory-bred wild creatures. In matters of theology, love, doubt, grief, and loss he is usually felt to have said what most people wanted to hear, but when he was in the grip of his daemon, as he surely was in ‘Break, Break, Break,’ or ‘Tears, Idle Tears,’ with its strange series of comparisons, or ‘In the Valley of Cauterez,’ or the last five verses of ‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava,’ he is not definable and not resistible. He was a superb metrist, who scarcely needed to care for the opinions of Indolent Reviewers, but did care, and he was someone who could hear the authentic voice of the English language. By this I don’t mean onomatopoeia (in any case many of his subjects for this—immemorial elms, church bells, steam trains—have unfortunately almost disappeared), but the sound of the language talking to itself. Take his round ‘o’s, which can be heard as he pronounced them himself in his recorded reading of ‘The Ballad of Oriana’: ‘When the long dun wolds are ribbed with snow…’ When my grandfather, as Bishop of Lincoln, preached the centenary sermon at Somersby, he quoted ‘Who loves not knowledge?’ and was told afterwards ‘You should have said know-ledge. Lord Tennyson always pronounced it so.’ Every round ‘o’ had its weight and its considered position. ‘Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!’—‘Naay, no? mander o’ use to be callin’ him Ro?, Ro?, Ro? [Rover]/For the dog’s sto?n deaf, and ’e’s blind, ’e can neither stan’ nor go?.’ That is the Spilsby variation, of course. At times Tennyson seems to me to be listening, rather as Pavarotti does, in apparent amazement simply to the beauty of the sound s that he is inexplicably able, as a great professional, to produce. Times Literary Supplement, 1992 The June-blue Heaven Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife, by Ann Thwaite In 1984, Ann Thwaite wrote, most successfully, the biography of Edmund Gosse, the Man of Letters. Now she has made a close study of another almost extinct profession, the Great Man’s Wife. It was a role that could end tragically, as it did for the second Mrs Watts, who had to live on in the painter’s house and studio for more than thirty years after his death, while his reputation faded to almost nothing. Emily Tennyson only survived her husband by four years, giving her time to work, with her son Hallam, on the two volumes of Memoirs. They first met each other as Lincolnshire children. She was the daughter of Henry Sellwood, a Horncastle solicitor; he came from the disastrous Rectory family at Somerton. She did not marry her Ally until she was thirty-six years old. By this time the worst of his financial troubles were over (although he had formed a chronic habit of grumbling about money), and a few months later he was appointed Poet Laureate. But for the past seven years the two of them had been eating their hearts out, while her well-meaning father forbade them to correspond. Sellwood was thinking of the drinking and smoking, the restlessness, the black moods and indeed the ‘black blood’ of the Tennyson family, the father an epileptic drunkard, one brother in an asylum, another one violent, a third addicted to opium from Lincolnshire’s homegrown poppies. Beyond this, Emily was a steadfast believer, while Tennyson was tormented and unresolved, particularly over God’s reason for creating sin and suffering. Another gulf to cross was the ‘deeper anguish’ of Arthur Hallam’s death, which had left Tennyson, as he said, ‘widowed,’ so that he ‘desired to die rather than to live’. But this, at least, was not a drawback to Emily. As a strengthening influence, she thought of herself as Hallam’s appointed successor. It seems a difficult concept, but it illustrates the depth, the purity, and the strange nature of Victorian emotional relationships. Even Ann Thwaite, the most thoroughgoing of researchers, can’t tell exactly how it was that the crisis was resolved. They were married on 13 June 1850, at Shiplake-on-Thames. Tennyson said, in apparent surprise, that it was the nicest wedding he had ever been at. Now Emily embarked on her profession, which was primarily a defensive campaign on many fronts. Tennyson had to be protected against distress of body and mind—against noise and disturbance, against the servant situation (which Georgie Burne-Jones, herself an expert campaigner, described as ‘a bloody feud or a hellish compact’), against visitors, sightseers, vexatious relatives, against a monstrous daily post (every amateur poet in the country sent their verses for his opinion), against contemptible hostile criticism and a writer’s own self-doubt and self-reproach. He seems to have managed up till then without her, largely by moving about. Indeed, even after his marriage, the Tennysons moved often, and for years Emily had two houses to run, Farringford at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight and Aldworth, near Haslemere, where they went in summer to avoid the holiday-makers. Ann Thwaite’s book is long, but her painstaking method is the only way to give an idea of Emily’s immensely troublesome, immensely rewarding daily life. Almost everything that could go wrong with the two houses did, including that traditional enemy, the drains. In 1856, for example, Emily was weeding potatoes, binding Alfred’s manuscripts, and planning a new dairy: she paid the bills and subscriptions, kept the accounts…found tenants…organized and supervised builders. She became deeply involved with the Farringford farm when they took it over in 1861. Emily would often consult Alfred—about the rent they should ask for the chalkpit, for instance—but he would say, ‘I must leave it in thy hands to manage.’ In 1865, Queen Emma of the Sandwich Islands arrives with her Hawaiian entourage. The children’s rooms are needed for the royal party, and they are crammed into the lodge, while Emily’s cousin and aunt, who are staying ‘indefinitely,’ are stowed away elsewhere. Later, Dr James Acworth arrives; his wife is a spiritualist medium and ‘in A’s study,’ Emily’s diary records, ‘a table heaves like the sea.’ In 1871, there is a full house at Aldworth, but Mrs Gladstone is told to come and bring as many of the family as possible. ‘We have room, both in house and heart.’ Some guests have to be encouraged, some consoled. Tennyson, although a generous host, is unpredictable. In 1859, Edward Lear, a favourite guest, is so rudely treated that he goes upstairs to pack; Emily soothes him and buys one of his drawings. Meantime, her two sons, Hallam and Lionel, are brought up from golden-haired darlings, encouraged to walk on the dinner table, to become unrebellious, affectionate, quite dull young men. Thwaite gives them almost as much importance in her biography as they must have had in their own family. She is following, she says, Christopher Ricks’s advice to her—‘Parents are formed by their children as well as children formed by their parents.’ But did Emily ever change? Some personal difficulties she solved simply by letting them be—the poet’s dirty shirts, for example, his dark muttering or bellows of complaint after dinner, his skirmishes with pretty women visitors and his compulsion to wander. ‘I trust Saturday will indeed bring thee back, but do not come if there is anything for which thou wouldst wish to stay,’ she writes in 1859. These indulgences irritated friends of long standing who saw Emily as a kind of saint, certainly much better than Alfred deserved. ‘Do not throw away your life,’ Jowett wrote to her. He thought ‘there was hardly enough of self in her to keep herself alive.’ Lear (half envious of the closeness of marriage, half repelled by it) wrote in his diary that ‘no other woman in all this world could live with [A. T.] for more than a month.’ They were mistaken, however, if they thought Tennyson was ungrateful. He knew very well that he was blessed, and would, he said, have worked as a stonebreaker to be allowed to marry her earlier. ‘If she were not one of the sweetest, justest natures in the world, I should be almost at my wits’ end.’ And the two of them faced together the death of two children—their first son, who was stillborn, and Lionel, who died at sea in 1885 on the passage home from India. The usual image of Emily Tennyson is that of one more sickly Victorian woman, ruling from her sofa. (That, certainly, was how Virginia Woolf represented her in her play Freshwater.) From early childhood she had been considered a weak creature and as a married woman she was often in too much pain to walk, and yet, as Thwaite points out, when her sons were little she writes of climbing ladders, scrambling over rocks, and getting down the Alum Bay cliffs with her feet in eel-baskets. It was not until Hallam and Lionel were students that she had some kind of serious collapse. But nineteenth-century ailments defeat twentieth-century biographers. Reducing sufferers to a wreck, pain was accepted as a lifetime companion. Patience was prayed for, a cure was hardly expected. It’s a relief to know that Emily was a great believer in champagne, and brandy in her bedtime arrowroot. After five years of research, Thwaite asks herself and the reader: was Emily Sellwood’s life (as Jowett put it) ‘effaced’? After she left school to become an angel in the house, she educated herself, like so many spirited Victorian daughters, by reading. (My own step-grandmother entered in her diary on her wedding-day: ‘Finished Antigone; Married Bishop.’) Emily read Dante, Goethe, Schiller, science, and theology, as Thwaite says, ‘as though in preparation for eternity.’ When she was introduced to Queen Victoria, they talked ‘of Huxley, of the stars, of the millennium, of Jowett.’ Did she squander her intelligence, or worse still, did she wear herself out for nothing? Mrs Gilchrist (the widow of Blake’s first biographer) told William Rossetti that she believed that Emily did positive harm, when ‘watching him with anxious, affectionate solicitude, she surrounds him ever closer and closer with the sultry, perfumed atmosphere of luxury and homage in which his great soul—as indeed any soul would—droops and sickens’. Edward Fitzgerald, the sardonic friend, considered, in the 1870s, that Alfred would have done better with ‘an old Housekeeper like Moli?re’s’, or perhaps ‘a jolly woman who would have laughed and cried without any reason why’; Tennyson’s best things, he thought, had gone to press in 1842. What, then, is the value of a woman, and what is poetry worth, even one poem, say Maud, or ‘To the Rev. F. D. Maurice’? Thwaite, although she gently reproves Fitzgerald, doesn’t discuss these things. She has set her own limits, and she is not writing a book about Tennyson, but about Emily. In fact, Tennyson understood, or at least comprehended his wife very well. He knew that she was motivated by love in its highest form of compassion, not only for himself but for every other human being. Motherless herself, she was conscious every hour of the day of ‘the forlorn ones.’ It wasn’t only that she dreamed on a large scale of old-age pensions for the poor, justice in Schleswig-Holstein, furnished rooms for single working women. Her instinct to rescue and console extended to the future and the past. Admiring Turner’s paintings, she added ‘How one wishes one might have done something to make his life happy.’ Simply to be unfortunate was a good enough claim on Emily. Her faith, Tennyson wrote in the dedication to his last poems, was ‘clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven.’ Easy enough to treat this ironically or even satirically, but Ann Thwaite has done neither—she has gone right in among these people like a good, if inquisitive, neighbour who becomes a lifelong friend. She persuades us, or almost persuades us, that Emily mustn’t be thought of as a victim, since she believed her work was as important as it was possible to be. This doesn’t mean that she was satisfied with it. ‘I could have done more,’ she said on her deathbed. Times Literary Supplement, 1996 Twice-Born Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life, by Georgina Battiscombe Christina Rossetti (1830—1894) wrote ‘If I had words’ and ‘I took my heart in my hand’ and ‘If he would come today, today’ and ‘What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through’ and: I bent by my own burden must Enter my heart of dust. Her poetry she described as ‘a genuine “lyric cry,” and such I will back against all skilled labour.’ Biographers, though not Christina herself, feel themselves obliged to explain where the passion came from, how it was restrained, and what ought to have been done with it. Then they have to face her preoccupation not only with death but with the grave, and the sensation of lying, remembered or forgotten, under the turf. There was, too, a sardonic Christina, whose comment on art and life was this: The mangled frog abides incog, The uninteresting actual frog: The hypothetic frog alone Is the one frog we dwell upon. But she was also, and this was central to her whole existence, twice-born. At the age of about thirteen she became, in company with her mother and sister, a fervent High Anglican. The keynote, which Pusey and Keble had set, was self-sacrifice. To find enough to sacrifice and to suffer for, ‘not to keep back or count or leave’—the same impulse as Eliot’s ‘Teach us to care and not to care’—became her prayer, in extremity. She saw herself as a stranger and a pilgrim in this world, waiting for release. She was born the youngest of a family of happily settled Anglo-Italian exiles: a pedantic, sentimental, slightly cracked father, an imperturbable mother, Italian visitors and refugees in and out at all hours. The children had their grandfather’s fruit garden near Amersham for a paradise, poverty to keep them from contact with the outside world, admiring relatives to pet them and their mother to educate them. Dante Gabriel and Christina were the ‘storms’ of the family, and, when in a rage, Christina could be a ripper and a smasher. The elder sister, Maria, and loyal William Michael were the ‘calms.’ On ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ William’s editorial comment was: ‘I have more than once been asked whether I could account for the outburst of exuberant joy evidenced in this celebrated lyric; I am unable to do so.’ Christina needed both the saintly narrow-minded sister and the ‘brothers brotherly,’ and there they were: ‘wherever one was, the other was, and that was almost always at home.’ Like Emily Bront?, Charlotte Mew, and Eleanor Farjeon, she knew the greatest happiness of her hushed life-drama very early on. No wonder that the most radiant of her lyrics are the children’s verses of ‘Sing-Song,’ or others that children readily understand (‘In the Bleak Midwinter,’ ‘Does the Road Wind Uphill?’) or half-understand and can’t get out of their minds, like ‘Goblin Market.’ It is easy to remember this luscious and suggestive temptation poem not quite as it is—or perhaps one remembers it wrong on purpose. ‘The central point,’ as William insisted, is that ‘Laura having tasted the fruits once, and being at death’s door through inability to get a second taste, her sister Lizzie determines to save her at all hazards; so she goes to the goblins, refuses to eat their fruits, and beguiles them into forcing their fruits upon her with so much insistency that her face is all smeared and steeped with the juices; she gets Laura to kiss and suck these juices off her face, and Laura, having thus obtained the otherwise impossible second taste, rapidly recovers.’ It is a story of salvation, which Christina, for what reason we can’t tell, dedicated to her sister Maria. As it turned out, she never left the family’s shelter. She became a fountain sealed, a Victorian daughter ageing in the company of her aunts and her beloved mother. Dante Gabriel described her ‘legitimate exercise of anguish under an almost stereotyped smile.’ She broke off two engagements to be married on religious grounds—not, surely, as Maurice Bowra thought, because she was afraid of ‘the claims of the flesh,’ but because she had twice found a sacrifice that was worth the offering. Of the dozen or so biographies of Christina, the latest, by Georgina Battiscombe, is the most readable and certainly the most judicious. As an Anglican who has written lives of both Keble and Charlotte M. Yonge, Mrs Battiscombe understands the wellspring of Christina’s religious experience, and she explains it admirably. She is very good, too, on the dutiful day-to-dayishness of the outer life. With calmness and accuracy she counters earlier interpretations that seem to her out of proportion—by Lona Mosk Packer (obsessed with the idea that William Bell Scott was Christina’s lover), Maureen Duffy (engrossed in the phallic symbolism of ‘Goblin Market’), Maurice Bowra, Virginia Woolf. She has, of course, her own explanation. She sees Christina as a warm-blooded Italian conforming through strength of will to a strict Anglicanism—an awkward fit. ‘The poetry’s tension arises when her thwarted experience of eros spilled over into her expression of agape; but to explain her intense love of God simply in terms of repressed sex is too cheap and easy an answer. Love is none the less genuine because it is “sublimated.”’ The subtitle of the book is A Divided Life. On the technique of the poetry, as apart from its subject matter, she has less to say, and she doesn’t do much about relating it to the Tractarian mode, as Professor G. B. Trevelyan has done in his recent Victorian Devotional Poetry. But the story itself could not be more clearly told. London Review of Books, 1982 WILLIAM MORRIS His Daily Bread (#ulink_d6217506-f62c-5a84-8873-e6bbc9dc50ca) William Morris: An Approach to the Poetry, by J. M. S. Tompkins As a schoolboy, Rudyard Kipling used to stay in North End Road, Fulham, with his aunt and uncle, the Burne-Joneses. One evening William Morris came into the nursery and, finding the children under the table and nobody else about, climbed onto the rocking-horse and slowly surging back and forth while the poor beast creaked, he told us a tale full of fascinating horrors, about a man who was condemned to dream bad dreams. One of them took the shape of a cow’s tail waving from a heap of dried fish. He went away as abruptly as he had come. Long afterwards, when I was old enough to know a maker’s pains, it dawned upon me that we must have heard the Saga of Burnt Njal…Pressed by the need to pass the story between his teeth and clarify it, he had used us. Morris’s open-heartedness, his shyness, his reckless treatment of the furniture, his concentration on whatever he had in hand as though the universe contained no other possible goal, all these can be felt clearly enough. Kipling, however, was really listening not to Burnt Njal but to the Eyrbyggia Saga. This was first pointed out by a sympathetic but strong-minded scholar, Dr J. M. S. Tompkins. For twenty years, both before and after publishing her Art of Rudyard Kipling, Joyce Tompkins worked on her study of Morris’s poetry. In December 1986 she died, at the age of eighty-nine. Now her book is out at last, not quite in finished form. She grew old and ill, never had the chance to consult the original manuscripts, and could not make her final revisions. Morris did, though, and protested forcibly against so many things that the critic has to protect himself. He may know a lot about the first generation of European Communists but less about papermaking or indigo or Victorian business management, Morris being one of the pioneers of a ‘house style.’ In spite of this, all the emphasis today is on his wholeness. In the annotated bibliography that they bring out in two-yearly instalments, David and Sheila Latham ‘resist categorising under such subjects as poetry and politics because we believe that each of Morris’s interests is best understood in the context of his whole life’s work.’ Joyce Tompkins, also, wants to see Morris whole. ‘The wide and varied territory,’ she says, ‘has an integrity which adds to the complexity of study.’ But commentators have to advance in separate fields, keeping in touch as best they can. Although she doesn’t make the claim herself, her book can be seen as a complement to E. P. Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1961). ‘We have to make up our minds about William Morris,’ Thompson said. ‘Either he was an eccentric, isolated figure, personally admirable, but whose major thought was wrong or irrelevant and long left behind by events. On the other hand, it may be that [he] was our greatest diagnostician of alienation.’ Joyce Tompkins is making the case for the Morris who has lost his readers, the narrative poet. The telling of tales, as Kipling had realized, was essential to Morris, both before and after he declared for socialism. ‘They grew compulsively,’ Joyce Tompkins writes, ‘from his private imaginative life. It is this imaginative life which is my subject.’ But stories, Morris believed, were also necessary as daily bread to human beings, who should listen willingly. If, a hundred years later, they seem to be unwilling, what can be done? Her book is divided into six parts, each one aimed at ‘the chief omissions in contemporary understanding and evaluation.’ She begins with The Defence of Guenevere. This was Morris’s first book of poems, appearing in 1858, the year before Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Ballads inspired by (or possibly the inspiration of) Rossetti’s watercolours stand side by side ‘with hard-edged Froissartian themes: “The Haystack in the Floods,” “The Judgment of God.”’ Here Joyce Tompkins believes that modern readers are adrift through ignorance. They are no longer familiar with the field of Arthurian reference. She has noticed, however, that although they have lost the sense of magic, they respond to the tougher element in the poems, the sound ‘between a beast’s howl and a woman’s scream.’ Godmar turned grinning to his men, Who ran, some five or six, and beat His head to pieces at their feet. Ten years later, in The Earthly Paradise, Morris’s voice has changed. This was to be ‘the Big Book,’ his dearest project in the late 1860s, in which he hoped to unlock the world’s tale-hoard from the North, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. But in spite of their wide range, it was the serene and even soporific quality of the stories that gave them great success. (Florence Boos, in a study of the Victorian response to The Earthly Paradise, quotes Alfred Austin’s review: ‘Under the blossoming thorn, with lazy summer sea-waves breaking at one’s feet—such were the fitting hour and mood in which—criticism all forgot—to drink in the honeyed rhythm of this melodious storier.’) Knowing that ‘it is not easy now to feel good will towards Morris’s linear narrative,’ Joyce Tompkins tells us to read the stories with attention to their rich detail. We ask, she thinks, not too much of them, but too little. There are two kinds of movement in The Earthly Paradise, one defined by Walter Pater as ‘the desire of beauty quickened by the desire of death,’ the other a gradual progress through the melancholy and distress of the second and third parts to the ‘tolerance and resolution’ of the fourth, where in ‘Bellerophon in Lycia’ the hero learns first to forgive himself, then to forgive others. To Sigurd the Volsung, the great epic of the North drawn from all the versions of the Volsung and Nibelung story that Morris could lay hands on, her approach is somewhat different. Jessie Kocmanova, in The Maturing of William Morris, interpreted Sigurd as corresponding to three stages of society—the barbarian, the early Nordic, and the feudal—which brought dissent and ruin. Joyce Tompkins sees Sigurd as a redeemer, and the whole poem not as Christian, but presented at least ‘in words and images that recall the Christian legacy.’ This is one of the underlying ideas or perhaps hopes of her book. She takes, for example, the cold and empty glance of the King of the Undying in The Story of the Glittering Plain as representing Morris’s loss of faith as a young man. About this, however, he never showed the slightest regret, anchoring himself in human happiness and human work, and to ‘the earth and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it.’ He refused, in any case, to discuss religion, and ‘in the circumstances’—as she says— ‘there is perhaps nothing to do but to imitate his silence.’ The last section of the book is left for the late romances, on which so much work has been done in the past few years. As always, Joyce Tompkins is thorough, discussing in detail the neglected Child Christopher and Fair Goldilind and the unfinished Desiderius and Killian of the Closes. One of her main concerns is to rescue Morris’s land-wights, sending-boats and magic islands from a rigid political interpretation. Both the young Morris and the harassed middle-aged socialist looking back on his former self can, she thinks, be recognized here. The stories ‘testify to the constant habits of his imagination.’ London Review of Books, 1988 Something Sweet to Come An introduction to The Novel on Blue Paper, by William Morris The novel that William Morris began to write early in 1872 is unfinished and unpublished and also untitled. I have called it The Novel on Blue Paper because it was written on blue lined foolscap, and Morris preferred to call things what they were. The only firsthand information we have about it is a letter that Morris wrote to Louie Baldwin, Georgie Burne-Jones’s sister, on 12 June 1872. Dear Louie, Herewith I send by book-post my abortive novel: it is just a specimen of how not to do it, and there is no more to be said thereof: ’tis nothing but landscape and sentiment: which thing won’t do. Since you wish to read it, I am sorry ’tis such a rough copy, which roughness sufficiently indicates my impatience at having to deal with prose. The separate parcel, paged 1 to 6, was a desperate dash at the middle of the story to try to give it life when I felt it failing: it begins with the letter of the elder brother to the younger on getting his letter telling how he was going to bid for the girl in marriage. I found it in the envelope in which I had sent it to Georgie to see if she could give me any hope: she gave me none, and I have never looked at it since. So there’s an end of my novel-writing, I fancy, unless the world turns topsides under some day. Health and merry days to you, and believe me to be Your affectionate friend, William Morris The tone of gruff modesty, and in particular the catchphrase from Dickens (the Circumlocution Office’s ‘How Not to Do It’), is habitual to Morris and can be taken for what it is worth. In spite of the disapproval of Georgiana Burne-Jones, whose opinion he valued at the time above all others, he did not destroy his MS, but kept it, and after what was presumably further discouragement from Louie, he kept it still. He must have been aware, too, why he had been given no hope. J. W. Mackail tells us, in his Life of Morris (1899), that Morris ‘had all the instinct of a born man of letters for laying himself open in his books, and having no concealment from the widest circle of all,’ and (of the Prologues to The Earthly Paradise) that there is ‘an autobiography so delicate and so outspoken that it must needs be left to speak for itself.’ That, we have to conclude, was the trouble with the novel on blue paper; it did speak for itself, but much too plainly. The background of the novel—the ‘landscape’—is the Upper Thames valley, the water meadows, streams, and villages round about Kelmscott on the borders of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Morris had gone down to inspect Kelmscott Manor House in May 1871, and in June he entered into a joint tenancy of the old house with Rossetti at ?60 a year. The grey gables, flagged path, enclosed garden cram-full of flowers, lime and elm trees ‘populous with rooks,’ white-panelled parlour, are all recognizably described in this novel, although Morris when he wrote it had never spent a summer there. It was the house he loved ‘with a reasonable love, I think.’ Rossetti, not a countryman, had hoped that the place would be good for his nerves. But in the seclusion of the marshes his obsession with the beauty of Jane Morris, and his compulsion to paint her again and again, reached the point of melancholy mania. Morris had a business to run and was obliged to be in London a good deal. The seemingly intolerable tension arose between the three of them that has been so often and so painfully traced by biographers. To Morris it was ‘this failure of mine.’ Mackail, cautiously describing the subject of the novel as ‘the love of two brothers for the same woman,’ evidently saw no farther into it than the failure. Once, however, when I was trying to explain the situation, and its projection as myth, to a number of overseas students, one of them asked a question that I have never seen in any biography: ‘Why then did Morris not strike Rossetti?’ I hope to show that this question is very relevant to the novel on blue paper. Certainly Morris was not ‘above,’ or indifferent to, his loss. It is a mistake to refer to his much later opinions, as reported by Shaw (‘Morris was a complete fatalist in his attitude towards the conduct of all human beings where sex was concerned’) or Luke Ionides (‘Women did not seem to count with him’) or Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (‘He was the only man I ever came in contact with who seemed absolutely independent of sex considerations’). It is a mistake, too, to refer to opinions expressed in News from Nowhere to his ‘restless heart’ of 1868—73. Which of us would like to be judged, at thirty-nine, by our frame of mind at the age of fifty-seven? Morris himself knew this well enough. ‘At the age of more than thirty years,’ he wrote in Killian of the Closes (1895), ‘men are more apt to desire what they have not than they that be younger or older.’ And Morris might have been pressed into a violent demonstration at this time by yet another cruel test, the profoundly unsettling behaviour of his greatest friend, Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones had been married since 1860 to Georgie, the charming, tiny, and indomitable daughter of a Methodist minister. The Neds had started out in lodgings with ?30 between them, and their happy and stable marriage, together with Burne-Jones’s designs for the Firm, were part of the very earth out of which Morris’s life and work took growth. But in 1867 the quiet Ned suddenly claimed, much more openly than Rossetti, the freedom to love unchecked. He had been totally captivated by a most tempestuous member of the Greek community in London, Mary Zambaco. Of this radiantly sad and unpredictable young woman he drew the loveliest by far of his pencil portraits; ‘I believed it to be all my future life,’ he told Rossetti. The affair came and went and came again, to the fury of Ionides and the sympathetic interest of the Greek women. It lingered on, indeed, until 1873. (#ulink_70627fce-9f77-50bf-8a5e-9063a7dc8d6e) Morris, stalwart, stood by his friend, but the effect of this new confounding of love and loyalty, on top of his own ‘failure,’ must have been hard to master; the effect of Mary herself can be guessed at, perhaps, from the strange intrusion of one of the characters, Eleanor, into the novel on blue paper. Meanwhile, Georgie was left to manage her life and her two children as best she could. In his loneliness and bewilderment Morris felt deeply for her, and at this time he was unquestionably in love with her. Some of his drafts and manuscript poems of 1865—70 show this without disguise, though always with a chivalrous anxiety. He must not intrude; he thanks her because she ‘does not deem my service sin.’ A pencil note reads on one draft ‘we two are in the same box and need conceal nothing—scold me but pardon me.’ He is ‘late made wise’ to his own feelings, and can only trust that time will transform them into the friendship that will bring him peace. Meanwhile the dignity and sincerity with which she is bearing ‘the burden of thy grief and wrong’ is enough, in itself, to check him. …nor joy nor grief nor fear Silence my love; but those grey eyes and clear Truer than truth pierce through my weal and woe… Georgie, in fact, was steadfast to her marriage, and strong enough to wait. ‘I know one thing,’ she wrote to her friend Rosalind Howard, ‘and that is that there is love enough between Edward and me to last out a long life if it is given us.’ In the meantime, what was Morris’s outward response to the assault on his emotions? Work, as always, was his ‘faithful daily companion.’ After returning from Iceland in September 1871 he illuminated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, designed the Larkspur wallpaper, began his novel, and fiddled about in ‘a maze of re-writing and despondency’ with his elaborate masque, Love Is Enough. But the moral of Love Is Enough (as Shaw complained) is not that love is enough. Pharamond, coming back from his quest for an ideal woman to find that his kingdom has been usurped by a stronger man, accepts that frustration and loss are worthy—‘though the world be awaning’—to be called a victory in the name of love. But Morris knew, as Shaw knew, that this is nonsense. The victory, melancholy as it is, is for self-control. Renunciation is achieved through the will and strengthens the will, not the emotions. And this, with a far more positive hero than poor Pharamond, is, I believe, the real subject of the novel on blue paper. Morris had been delicate as a child, but as soon as he grew into his full strength he was subject to fits of violent rage, possibly epileptic in origin. To what extent these were hereditary it is impossible to say. His father was said to be neurotic, and may well have clashed with his eldest son; when Morris was eleven he was sent as a boarder to his school at Woodford, although it was only a few hundred yards away from his home. What seems strange in his later life is the attitude of his close friends, who appear to have watched as a kind of entertainment his frenzied outbursts, followed by the struggle to control himself and a rapid childlike repentance. At times he would beat himself about the head in self-punishment. ‘He has been known to drive his head against a wall,’ Mackail wrote, ‘so as to make a deep dent in the plaster, and bite almost through the woodwork of a windowframe.’ Yet with the exception of the day when he hurled a fifteenth-century folio at one of his workmen, missing him but breaking a door panel, there is no record of his making a physical attack on anyone. To return to the student’s question, Morris did not strike anybody, least of all the ailing Rossetti, because he waged almost to the end of his life a battle for self-control. The recognition of restraint as an absolute duty may be referred back to the tutor who prepared Morris, when he was seventeen years old, for his entrance to Oxford. This tutor, the Reverend F. B. Guy, was one of the faithful remnants of the Oxford Movement who had survived Newman’s conversion, or desertion, to Rome. Morris believed at this time that he was going to enter the Church, and could not fail to learn from Guy the Movement’s insistence on sacrifice and self-correction, even in the smallest things. The Tractarians saw the religious impulse not as a vague emotion, but as a silent discipline growing from the exercise of the will. All that we ought to ask, Keble had said, is room to deny ourselves. And Morris, willingly enlisted in a struggle that he was never to win, persisted in it long after he had parted from orthodox Christianity. At the age of twenty-three he concluded that he must not expect enjoyment from life—‘I have no right to it at all events—love and work, these two things only.’ In 1872, when love had betrayed or rejected him, he wrote: ‘O how I long to keep the world from narrowing on me, and to look at things bigly and kindly.’ The most telling expression of Keble’s doctrines in fiction was Charlotte M. Yonge’s Heir of Redclyffe (1853). It was said to be the novel most in demand by the officers wounded in the Crimean War, and it was the first book greatly to influence Morris. Here he read the family story of a tragic inheritance. Guy, the heir, has the ferocious temper of his Morville ancestors, and has to struggle as best he can with ‘the curse of sin and death.’ All his ‘animal spirits,’ all his great capacity for happiness is overshadowed by the temptation to anger, and he is driven to strange extremes, cutting up pencils, biting his lips till the blood runs down, and refusing, in obedience to a vow, even to watch a single game of billiards. ‘Resistance should be from within.’ He sees his whole life as ‘failing and resolving and failing again.’ Philip, on the other hand, the high-minded young officer, provokes the heir and leads him, from the best possible motives, into temptation. Here the novel sets out to show the evil that good can do, and when Guy dies to save him from fever, Philip is left to suffer forever ‘the penitence of the saints.’ The Heir of Redclyffe, as an exemplary text, asks for a kind of inner or even secret knowledge from its readers. From page to page we are reminded of Kenelm Digby’s Broadstone of Honour (1822—27), which held up the example of mediaeval chivalry to Young England. That is why Guy’s nearest railway station is called Broadstone. Again, Guy and his sweetheart Amy are, in a sense, acting out the story of Sintram (the book which Newman would only read when he was quite alone). (#ulink_2b6af5fc-cbb6-59a5-a7e1-9ff685457b96) Sintram, tempted by the world, the flesh, and the devil, and burdened by his father’s crime, has to toil upward through the snows to reach Verena, his saintly mother. That is why the widowed Amy calls her child Verena. And Sintram itself makes mysterious reference to its frontispiece, a woodcut version of D?rer’s engraving The Knight, Death, and the Devil, over which Morris and Burne-Jones, as students, had ‘pored for hours.’ These potent images remained with Morris, even though in The Earthly Paradise he had unlocked half the world’s tale-hoard. In the second of his late romances, for example, The Well at the World’s End (1892—93), Sintram’s evil dwarf reappears. In 1872, the time of his greatest emotional test and stress, he set to work on this novel that is a temptation story, although the hero must proceed simply on his own resolution, without prayer, without divine grace, without the saving hand of the loved woman. And, most unexpectedly, Morris returned from his dream-world, the ‘nameless cities in a distant sea,’ to place the story in a solid English parsonage, or, to be more accurate, in Elm House, Walthamstow, the first home that he could remember. Morris opens his tale with the sins of the father. One of those impulses which ‘sometimes touch dull, or dulled, natures’—a distinction which Morris was always careful to make—arouses the train of memory in Parson Risley. Eleanor’s letters follow. The parson’s sin is not that he was Eleanor’s lover. This is shown clearly enough later in Mrs Mason’s reproach: ‘Mr Risley, if my husband likes to make love to every girl in the village, he has a full right to it, if I let him’—a remark that blends well with the ‘sweet-smelling abundant garden’ and the fertile melon beds. Risley’s guilt then, is not a matter of sexuality but a denial of it, firstly through cold cowardice in rejecting a woman ‘like the women in poetry, such people as I had never expected to meet,’ and secondly through his vile temper. These two aspects of his nature are his legacy to his sons. The parsonage, as has been said, recalls the house in Walthamstow where Morris was born, and in the two boys, John and Arthur, he represents the opposing sides, as he understood them, of his own character. In some ways the brothers are alike or even identical. Both are romantically imaginative and given to dreaming their lives into ‘tales going on,’ both are fond of fishing (not a trivial matter to Morris), both, of course, love Clara, both dislike their father yet resemble him. ‘As to the looks of the lads, by the way, it would rather have puzzled anyone who had seen them to say why the little doctor should have said that either was not like his father. Some strange undercurrent of thought must have drawn it out of him, for they were obviously both very much like him.’ John, however, is manly, open, friendly, bird-and-weather-noticing; Arthur is a bookworm, and sickly. (‘Love of ease, dreaminess, sloth, sloppy goodnature,’ Morris said, ‘are what I chiefly accuse myself of.’). Arthur is ‘versed in archaeological lore,’ while John is in touch with earth and water—‘with a great sigh of enjoyment he seemed to gather the bliss of memory of many and many a summer afternoon into this one’—and yet, perversely, Arthur is to be the farmer and John the businessman. From the guilty father John inherits anger, Arthur cowardice. John’s loss of temper alarms Arthur; ‘Are you in a rage with me? Why, do you know, your voice got something like Father’s in a rage.’ But just as Parson Risley fails to answer Eleanor’s letter, so Arthur conceals John’s. John’s struggle for self-control is marked by very small incidents. Resistance, as The Heir of Redclyffe recognizes, must be from within. At the beginning of the day’s outing, when Clara greets Arthur tenderly, ‘they did not notice that John turned away to the horse’s head.’ At Ruddywell Court, when Arthur begins to do the talking and Clara is entranced, John ‘got rather silent.’ On the return to the farm, when Clara kisses Arthur, John is left ‘whistling in sturdy resolution to keep his heart up, and rating himself for a feeling of discomfort and wrong.’ When she is poised for a few moments between the two of them in the rocking boat, but at length sits down by Arthur, so that both of them are facing the golden sunset to which John’s back is now turned, he pulls at the oars ‘sturdily,’ exerting his strength for them in silence. These small everyday victories of the will lead up to a disastrous failure, the furious and destructive letter, and the despairing attempt to redeem it by a postscript—‘tell Clara I wrote kindly to you.’ Arthur, on the other hand, the ‘saint’ of the novel, is shown indulging himself in the sweetness of his dreams and the horror of his nightmares, and even when he becomes the centre of consciousness this self-indulgence is obvious. Clara’s love for him is founded, in the Chaucerian mode, on pity. When he reads John’s letter, he is afraid. He lies to Clara, who against her better judgement accepts the lie. Arthur is, in fact, almost without will power, while John, in his blundering way, understands keenly the importance of the will. ‘Nobody does anything,’ he tells Mrs Mason, ‘except because he likes it. I mean to say, even people who have given up most to please other people—but then, they’re all the better people, to be pleased by what’s good rather than by what is bad.’ And he has ‘a feeling, not very pleasant, of not being listened to.’ In 1872 Samuel Butler published Erewhon, Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, and George Eliot, Middlemarch. All of these seem very far removed from the unfinished taletelling on blue paper. But when Morris told Louie Baldwin that he was impatient at having to deal with prose, he underrated the poetry of his story. This lies in the interrelationship of the three journeys—the passage of a summer’s day, the first walk upstream to the paradise of the farm, and the crucial turning point of John’s adolescence. The June prologue of The Earthly Paradise opens (also in the meadows of the Upper Thames)— O June, O June, that we desired so, Wilt thou not make us happy on this day? Across the river thy soft breezes blow Sweet with the scent of beanfields far away, Above our heads rustle the aspens grey, Calm is the sky with harmless clouds beset, No thought of storm the morning vexes yet. This is the exact poise of the novel, between past darkness, present happiness (John when he first goes to Leaser is ‘happier than he was last year’), and the coming unknown discontent. And so John, at seventeen, stands on the confines of his own home, with ‘the expectant longing for something sweet to come, heightened rather than chastened by the mingled fear of something as vague as the hope, that fills our hearts so full in us at whiles, killing all commonplace there, making us feel as though we were on the threshold of a new world, one step over which (if we could only make it) would put life within our grasp. What is it? Some reflex of love and death going on throughout the world, suddenly touching those who are ignorant as yet of the one, and have not learned to believe in the other?’ Mackail quotes this passage in part, but dismisses the novel as ‘certainly the most singular of his writings.’ Jane Morris’s comment on the Life, however, is interesting: ‘You see, Mackail is not an artist in feeling, and therefore cannot be sympathetic while writing the life of such a man.’ Introduction to the Journeyman Press edition, 1982 ‘Whatever Is Unhappy Is Immoral: William Morris and the Woman Question’ A protector by nature, Morris felt for women tenderness with hardly a hint of patronage. When he was at work on The Earthly Paradise he disliked writing about the thrashing of Psyche, and ‘was really glad to get it over.’ His care for his wife extended to her tedious sister, and his affection for his handicapped daughter, who got so dreadfully on Janey’s nerves, was described by Mackail as ‘the most touching element in his nature.’ Called upon for advice to a deserted lover, he suggested: ‘Think, old fellow, how much better it is that she should have left you, than that you should have tired of her, and left her.’ Tenderness and responsibility, of course, are not the same as understanding, still less a recognition of equality. It can be fairly said, however, that as soon as his own personality defined itself, Morris began to treat women as people. Quite certain, from his own experience, that pleasurable work was necessary to happiness, he tried to find out what they could do. Embroidery became, under his persuasion, their natural activity. It was a queen’s work, and also a peasant’s and guarded against the threat of idle or empty hands. Mary Nicholson, who kept house for Morris and Burne-Jones in the 1850s, was perhaps the first to learn. Morris stitched, she copied his stitches. ‘I seemed so necessary to him at all times,’ she said—this, if unconsciously, being part of the persuasion. During the early years of his marriage—‘a time to swear by,’ wrote Georgiana Burne-Jones, ‘if human happiness were doubted’—Morris and Janey worked together on English embroideries, unpicking old pieces to see how they were done. In the Seventies he admired and promoted the work of Catherine Holliday, who remembered that ‘when he got an unusually fine piece of colour he would send it off for me or keep it for me, and when he ceased to dye with his own hands I soon felt the difference.’ Yet Mrs Holliday and her skilled colleagues were for the most part executants rather than designers, and no better off in this respect than the ‘paintresses’ of the Potteries. This was a limitation of Morris’s own mind. Writing in 1877 to Thomas Wardle about a figure designer for high-warp tapestries, he says he has ‘no idea where to find such a man, and therefore I feel that whatever I do I must do chiefly with my own hands…a cleverish woman could do the greeneries, no doubt.’ On the administrative side, May took over the management of the embroidery section from 1885 onwards, but there was apparently never any suggestion that she should become a partner in the Firm. There is not much evidence, in fact, of what Morris thought about women in the professions, or in public life. He worked, of course, side by side with them in the Movement, and made a strong protest at the arrest of Annie Cobden-Sanderson, but Mrs Besant tried him sorely not only, I think, on account of her Fabianism, but because she was Mrs Besant. By the time Georgie Burne-Jones entered local politics, ‘going like a flame’ through the village of Rottingdean, Morris had ceased to have much interest in ‘gas-and-water socialism,’ or in anything short of total change. In that same year (1884) he watched the haymakers, men and women both, distorted and ugly through overwork, and dreamed of the outright battle that would be needed to restore the fields to the labourers. But might he not, in any case, have agreed with Yeats that a woman in politics is a windy bellows? In an unpublished letter to Bruce Glasier he allowed himself some tart remarks about the Woman Question: [B]ut you must not forget that childbearing makes women inferior to men, since a certain time of their lives they must be dependent on them. Of course we must claim absolute equality of condition between women and men, as between other groups, but it would be poor economy setting women to do men’s work (as unluckily they often do now) or vice versa. Old Hammond, in News from Nowhere, undertakes to discuss it, but becomes evasive. There are no women members of Parliament in Nowhere, he says, because there is no Parliament. Ruskin, in his strange treatise on woman’s education, Of Queen’s Gardens (1865), gives her the distinctive powers of ‘sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision,’ to which Morris would have added perspicacity and strength. That strength he greatly respected—he told his sister Isabella, who worked in the slums of South London, that she practised what he could only preach—and he depended perhaps more than he knew on his wife, and more than he could ever express on Georgie Burne-Jones. There is a confusion of viewpoints in the later poems and romances, where, as E. P. Thompson puts it, ‘the mournful Pre-Raphaelite ladies of earlier days have given way to maidens who can shoot with the bow, swim, ride, and generally do most things, including making love, a good deal more capably than their young men.’ In The Pilgrims of Hope the speaker, his wife, and his friend set out to join the Communards in besieged Paris, ‘we three together, and there to die like men.’ News from Nowhere depicts a land of effortless female superiority, and Ellen is the spirit of the earth itself and all that grows from it. On the other hand, in A Dream of John Ball, Will Green’s daughter is sent away from the skirmish and told to ‘set the pot on the fire, for that we shall need when we come home,’ and, to return to Nowhere, Mistress Philippa is an Obstinate Refuser, who works obsessively at her woodcarving although the men could manage without her (‘Could you, though?’ grumbled the last named from the face of the wall). It has to be admitted, also, that at the Guest House the comely women (however much Old Hammond tries to explain it away) are waitressing. But Morris had dedicated himself, in the face of all discouragements and even of his own inconsistencies, to the transformation of human existence throughout the whole social order. Nothing less than this would do, ‘nor do I consider a man a socialist at all who is not prepared to admit the equality of women as far as condition goes.’ This last phrase sounds like a qualification, but Morris is as clear as spring-water in his condemnation of the marriage and property laws, which made women the slaves of slaves: ‘Whatever is unhappy is immoral. We desire that all should be free to earn their livelihood…with that freedom will come an end of these monstrosities, and a true love between man and woman throughout society.’ To his old friend Charlie Faulkner, who was exercised on the subject and wished to ‘blow off,’ Morris expanded his views a little. ‘Copulation is worse than beastly unless it takes place as the result of natural desire and kindliness on both sides.’ The divorce laws he saw as particularly hard on the poor, who were cooped together for good like fowls going to a market. In a true partnership husband, wife, and children would all be free, the children having their inalienable right of livelihood. A woman would not be considered ‘ruined’ if she followed a natural instinct, and separation would always be by consent, though Morris adds ‘I should hope that in most cases friendship would go along with desire, and would outlive it, and the couple would remain together, but always be free people.’ The most striking thing about this letter, written ten years before Morris’s death, is that he had married Jane Burden in 1859 with much the same convictions. There is no other way to explain the patience of this impatient man during the ‘specially dismal time’ from 1869 to 1873, when his marriage was at breaking point. Whatever the pain of it, Morris regarded Janey as a free agent, because he believed she was truly in love with another man, and love has a right to freedom, and, on the other side, a right to grant it. He left his wife to make her choice because anything else would have been ‘shabby,’ and twenty years later had not changed his mind. ‘A determination to do nothing shabby…appears to me to be the socialist religion, and if it is not morality I do not know what is.’ Contribution to William Morris Today (Catalogue for Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London), 1984 1 (#ulink_6667910a-93cf-5022-a731-9f196c793e58)The head of the Greek community in Victorian London was Constantine Ionides, ‘the Thunderer,’ a wealthy stockbroker and a generous patron of the arts. Mary Zambaco was a granddaughter of the House of Ionides, a wealthy beauty with ‘glorious red hair and almost phosphorescent white skin’ who had left her commonplace husband in Paris in 1866 and come to London. She was also a talented sculptress, with a temperament that Burne-Jones described as ‘like hurricanes and tempests and billows…only it didn’t do in English suburban surroundings.’ In 1868 he made his first attempt to break with her; she threatened to throw herself into the Regent’s Canal. In 1869 he painted her as Phyllis pleading with Demopho?n, with the epigraph Dic mihi quod feci? nisi non sapienter amavi (Tell me what I have done, except to love unwisely). Rossetti was in their confidence, writing in 1869 to Jane Morris that Mary had become more beautiful ‘with all her love and trouble…but rainy walks and constant journeys are I fear beginning to break up her health.’ 2 (#ulink_50605bce-1b88-5bf0-b04a-c9ac284ae254)H. de la Motte Fouqu?. The Seasons: Four Romances from the German (English trans: 1843). Sintram and His Companions is the winter romance. ARTS AND CRAFTS Lasting Impressions (#ulink_9eb2cf10-435c-538e-8c5e-454ef88e7638) The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure, by William S. Peterson William Morris did not think the human race was ever likely to solve the question of its own existence, but he wanted society to change in such a way that the question would not be ‘Why were we born to be so miserable?’ but ‘Why were we born to be so happy?’ By 1890 he knew he probably would not see these changes in his lifetime. He felt old, he knew he had diabetes, and he realized that his outstanding natural energy was deserting him. Work was his natural recreation. It was at this point that he turned to the last of his handcrafts, making books. It was to be ‘a little typographical adventure,’ to see whether he could produce books through traditional craftsmanship ‘which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing.’ At first there was no thought of selling, although later on Morris found he had to do so to meet some of the costs. Characteristically, he spent a year of inquiry and research into how things should be done. With an expert friend, the printer and process engraver Emery Walker, he looked into presses, inks, and handmade papers. (The artist Robin Tanner, lecturing in 1986 at the age of eighty-two, held up a sheet of the paper Morris chose: ‘Listen to it! How it rings! What music!’) New types, of course, had to be designed. For his Golden type Morris turned for a model to fifteenth-century Venice, and for the blackletter Troy to fifteenth-century Germany. What mattered to him most was the total effect of the integrated pages, verso and recto together. Disagreeing fiercely with many other designers, both then and now, he believed that the page should be a solid, brilliant black and white. Between 1891 and 1898 the Kelmscott Press (named for Morris’s house by the river in Oxfordshire) issued fifty-two wonderful books. Some were illustrated, some had lavish borders and initials designed by Morris himself, some were small, delicate 16mo volumes. The only way to judge them is to hold them and turn the pages. The culmination of the whole series, the great Kelmscott Chaucer, was finished only just in time. In June 1896, after more than three years in production, the sumptuous first copy was put into Morris’s hands. Three months later he was dead. ‘But I cannot believe,’ he had said, ‘that I shall be annihilated.’ This year, 1991, then, is the centenary of the Kelmscott Press, and its history, The Kelmscott Press, has now been written by William Peterson, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, who also, in 1984, produced the bibliography of the press. He says that he suspects more has been written about William Morris than any other printer but Gutenberg. But a great deal of new evidence has become available since the last full-length study, in 1924, by Henry Halliday Sparling, Morris’s unsatisfactory son-in-law. All of it is here, in the clearest, most readable, most scholarly form that anyone could ask for. First Mr Peterson gives the background of Victorian book production, correcting the notion that the Kelmscott Press arose, without precedents, out of nowhere. He considers the life-giving force of Victorian medievalism and Morris’s part in it, and, on the other hand, Morris’s awkward position as a socialist employer and as a producer of fine books that only the rich could afford. Mr Peterson follows the story of the press itself step by step, with all its improvisations and successes. In a particularly helpful chapter he pauses to give the production history of three individual Kelmscott books—Morris’s own Poems by the Way (1891), The Golden Legend (1892), and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s Love-Lyrics & Songs of Proteus (1892). All these illustrate Morris’s progress as a typographer, and Songs of Proteus, as Mr Peterson says, ‘gives off echoes of very odd psychological resonances’ since Blunt, only a few years earlier, had been the lover of Morris’s wife, Jane. The history of the press, in fact, is also a history of human emotions and human friendships. Fortunately, Mr Peterson is as interested in these as in the art of the book. He doesn’t let us lose sight of the helpful, patient, skilled craftsman, Emery Walker, who nursed Morris in his last illness; the invaluable but deeply self-satisfied secretary, Sydney Cockerell; and the oldest friend of all, the artist Edward Burne-Jones. If he is capable of unfairness Mr Peterson is perhaps a little unfair to Burne-Jones. True, his delicate, silvery pencil drawings for the Chaucer meant endless hard work for other people before they could appear as wood engravings, but Morris wanted Burne-Jones illustrations and no others. At every turn, however, Mr Peterson’s attitude is courteous and sympathetic, above all to Morris himself. Indeed, Morris and Mr Peterson seem to be in a kind of partnership, interpreting together Morris’s genius and his shortcomings. The influence of the ‘typographical experiment’ was powerful in northern Europe and the United States until the turn of the century, but is difficult to assess today. Reluctantly Mr Peterson concludes that the gap between the private printer and ‘the automated realm of offset presses and computerized typesetting’ has come to define two separate worlds. But he still believes that ‘the profound questions that Morris posed about the triumph of the machine’ are relevant to everyone in a technological society. Can we recover not only simpler and slower methods and infinitely higher quality, but a joy and freedom in work which, perhaps, once existed? Can we rebuild the foundations? Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/hermione-lee/a-house-of-air/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.