# Works by Mrs. Oliphant

Akin to Jane Austen — Mrs. Margaret Maitland — Lilliesleaf — The House on the Moor — Chronicles of Carlingford — Miss Majoribanks — The Rector; and, The Doctor's Family — Salem Chapel — The Perpetual Curate — Katie Stewart and The Quiet Heart — Life of Edward Irving
       From The British Quarterly Review.
WORKS BY MRS. OLIPHANT.
If we may judge from the publishers' advertising lists and from the critical columns of the reviews, there is at this moment a sensible decline in the power of Women's Novels, an indication that the feminine genius of this generation has touched its highwater mark, and that the ebb has begun. No general vote of popularity has exalted any young authoress into sudden fame and fortune for some years past. We who remember the acclaim that greeted 'Currer Bell' and 'George Eliot,' listen in vain for any thrill of the same universal voice. Mr. Thackeray's daughter has draped his mantle very gracefully on her shoulders, but she requires a cultivated taste for her due appreciation, and a cultivated taste is not the taste of the majority; Miss Braddon keeps up her name and multiplies her editions, but her clients are of the lower intellectual order. In default, therefore, of any new star of the first magnitude in the literary firmament, we are truly thankful for the favourite old luminaries who rose above the horizon twenty years since, and still go on mildly shining over the waste of literary waters that heave and rock all round this restless and reforming age; and for none are we more thankful than for Mrs. Oliphant, perhaps, the fullest, steadiest light of them all.
The Macaulays of posterity, if there be any gratitude in them, will surely avow themselves indebted to this generation for the mass of solid, reliable, social history embodied in its novels. Supposing a case:—Should the Church of England, as a State religion, not see the century out—an eventuality we could not affect to deplore—the clerical annals of Mr. Thackeray, Mr. Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Mrs. Oliphant will be of some service. As long as any library preserves a copy of them, it will be difficult to assert, without risk of contradiction, that it fell by the corruption of its parish clergy; from amongst them came the Puritans of Elizabeth's and James's days, the Nonconformists of the Restoration Period, and the Methodists of the Georgian Era; leaving in the Church, it cannot be honestly denied, with many of a different character, as good livers and as pious divines as themselves, who were yet sincerely attached to its constitution.
Most of us can admit, now that we are far enough away and safe from the fires of Roman bigotry, that the Roman monks and missionaries did some excellent work; so, possibly, when the old Church of England is gone, and the generations to come review it in the living pictures of these nineteenth century novelists, they may feel that its past is worthy of much respect. The poet and the imaginative writer of Nonconformity, the Milton and the Defoe of this generation, have yet to arise; and surely in the ancient trials and persecutions of Nonconformists and in their present life there are true elements of poetry for talent to combine. In 'Rufus Lyon,' George Eliot has done justice to a somewhat eccentric type of Nonconformist minister, but the majority of the best-known sketches of Nonconformity, lay or clerical, are mere caricatures by persons who know it only from the outside. For a true and sympathetic view of modern life amongst Dissenters, we want a writer born and bred in dissent, and with that endowment of genius which is the gift of God. We shall give him a warm welcome when he appears; and the world beyond us will, no doubt, give him a warm welcome too.
Mrs. Oliphant manifests a lively interest in every system of ecclesiasticism with which she is acquainted; and, as she expound their various developments in common life, she makes her readers share this interest. She wishes us perfectly to understand that she does not consider Christianity to be the exclusive property of any sect; in her philosophy, one religious profession is as good as another, and she preaches her principles of tolerance from this text in some of the cleverest novels that the language boasts. She is a very prolific writer, and her method has naturally undergone modifications; we will not say that her tone has changed, but it has certainly relaxed; and is now just so much easier than at first as the South is softer than the North. It was with a distinctly serious intent that she portrayed, many years ago, the Scotch minister in his manse, in both poverty and riches, prosperous in quiet days, and then involved in the dissensions of the kirk to the loss of his living; but since she left the bracing air of moor and moss, and settled down in the good society of Carlingford, within a pleasant distance of London, where most people are 'brought up in the old-fashioned orthodox way of having a great respect for religion and as little to do with it as possible,' she has gradually acquired more and more of the airs and manners of Carlingford, and has learnt to indulge in a vein of sarcasm when talking of the clergy which is no doubt extremely entertaining to light-minded persons, but to the serious is gravely reprehensible. In this vein she gives us an Archdeacon of the Broad Type; Rectors High Low, and Negative in their views: a Perpetual Curate responsible only to his Bishop, and a poor Curate, with a poor spirit to match, responsible to his Rector's wife; and more incisively than any of these, she limns a Nonconformist preacher, a young genius fresh from Homerton, writhing in the alternate embraces and clutches of his flock, and his low-bred friend who, casually occupying his pulpit, makes 'an' it,' and ultimately supersedes him in his office of pastor to the delightful Carlingford 'connection' worshipping at Salem Chapel.
It will be seen that Mrs. Oliphant's clerical portraits are numerous, and we allow that they are well done. Nor will we complain that there is no very pure or lofty spirit amongst them—no Curate Crawley, or Rufus Lyon. She knows her own strength best when she refrains her pen from the highest humanity. Her picture-gallery is full of every-day people—a crowd of them—but they all please us more or less from their likeness to the people we know. As an artist she is akin to Miss Austen, but much more diffuse. She makes us smile often, but she very rarely moves us to tears, either by her pathos or her tragedy, for she encumbers both with too many words. She describes everything with precision, and by the time we have done with the piled-up anguish, we are too familiar with it, and too weary for sympathy. This is a fault, but when an artist gives us such fair pictures of middle-class life, in fair flowing English, we are more than contented, though they may not bear the sign-manual of genius.
It is curious to observe to what opposite styles of fiction the term Novel is applied. What a gulf lies between 'Lady Audley' and 'Mrs. Margaret Maitland,' for instance; yet non-discriminators, whose principle it is to distrust and denounce all fiction, shake their wise heads at them both as common 'Three-volume Novels,' blindly classing them in the same category; though the first is a resuscitation of the notorious poisoner Brinvilliers, enacting a series of modern crimes, and the second is a beautiful sermon in action on pure and holy living. These perverse lovers of mere facts are now, however, an insignificant and daily decreasing minority. This is a reading generation. and it must have literary provender of one sort or another. The store of old facts is necessarily limited, and the supply of new ones is not enough for its needs; besides, many old facts are worn threadbare, and not all are valuable or wholesome; indeed, we think that some real lives would be better forgotten, and many events that have happened would be as well lost in the mists of antiquity. The magazines are so numerous now that they are hard put to it for materials to fill their pages, and an industrious collector for one of those most deservedly popular, gave us lately a nightmare of murders as 'Old Stories Retold.' They are true—they are undeniable facts; nevertheless, we are distinctly of opinion that the most sensational of blood-and-thunder romances would be infinitely less likely to prove harmful than are these cold, elaborate details of cruelties done and suffered for by men and women whose names enjoy the 'ghastly celebrity of the 'Newgate Calendar.'
We are, therefore, ready to maintain, at the point of the critical pen, that novels are necessary: that a good novel is a good thing: that a poor novel is better than the dressing up, gala-fashion, of old iniquities: and that the veriest failure of a novel is less vexatious than a bad biography, or than any history that pretends to be true, and falls short of its subject. Our own preference inclines to the sunshiny view of life in fiction, though we do not object to tragedy now and then, nor even to a chapter from the dark side of morals, if it be painted with a firm, stern touch. But the cynical novel we like not, be it ever so clever—the novel that casts into immortal types the baser metal of humanity, and photographs into permanent blackness the transient suggestions of evil that come and go on the mind of the million; for we can never separate from the art of a book its influence; and many simple stories of simple life, told without pretension, are rich in 'those grains of hidden manna, those sweet and wholesome thoughts which nourish the soul, and refresh it when it is weary.'
Such a book is the first work of Mrs. Oliphant: 'Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland of Sunnyside, written by Herself:' a book that charmed and soothed us when we were young, and which we can read over still on summer days and winter nights with undiminished satisfaction. Mrs. Margaret Maitland is no echo and no wraith, but a real living woman, set in the midst of the loving, hoping, fearing, stirring little world of a Scotch rural parish. The place in our regard that dear old lady of Sunnyside originally achieved she keeps, and we think of her always as a person whom we have known. Her story is very simple, but her way of telling it is delightful; and when, after the lapse of a few years, she takes up the thread of it again, and in 'Lilliesleaf' relates the married trials of 'the dear bairns' whose early days are the brightest passages in her own life, we take it up with her, and listen to the story as if it concerned personal friends of our own from whom we have been severed for a while.
It is a great merit in a writer when she can thus compel us to realize her characters, and it is a power that Mrs. Oliphant possesses in a very high degree. These two books, 'Mrs. Margaret Maitland' and 'Lilliesleaf,' should be read consecutively. The personal experiences of Mrs. Margaret Maitland are not told in detail until she is 'an eldern person,' left alone in the quiet, pretty cottage of Sunnyside, to which she and her mother have betaken themselves on the death of the minister, her father. She has had her griefs of heart, but they are over, and God has comforted her; we get occasional glimpses of them, and very bitter they are, but the main story is that of her brother's children, Claud and Mary, at the manse of Pasture Lands, and of Grace, a little lassie,whom 'she brings up at Sunnyside in simple, pious ways, quite unwitting that her charge is a rich heiress. In her sweet bright maidenhood Grace is reclaimed by her selfish father, and put under the care of fashionable Mrs. Lennox, his sister, to be mysteriously suppressed, and, if possible, bullied out of her inheritance of Oakenshaw, which is derived from her ill-used mother. Grace, however, bears a high spirit, and having discovered the truth about herself, she calmly resists her persecutors. We are very indifferent to this part of her adventures. She is much more at home at Sunnyside than in Edinburgh; and her heart being given to Claud Maitland before she is carried away, she returns eventually in triumph, having defeated wicked father, bad aunt, and foolish suitor, with her guardian's commands not to quit Suunyside again at any one's bidding but his; and who should this guardian (a sarcastic old bachelor) be, but the lost love of Mrs. Margaret Maitland! Between Claud and Grace there are no difficulties but such as true love makes light of, and soon overcomes; but between Mary and Allan Elphinstone of Lilliesleaf there are weighty obstructions, doubts, fears, and sorrows of his own causing, and which we know will have their sequel when the two are married, and the first series of the Sunnyside Chronicle ends.
During the interval that elapses before Mrs. Margaret Maitland again takes up her pen the clouds have begun to gather visibly about the house of Lilliesleaf; and that she has a prescience of them is clear, from the saddened strain in which she resumes her narrative.
'When I came to Sunnyside the place looked strange to me. There it was upon its quiet brae, looking down upon Burrowstown, with the thorn hedge grown up high around it, and the ash trees midway down the road arching over to meet one another, and the very apple trees and currant bushes grown high and big, like the bairns that once played about the gate. It made my heart sad to look upon this house; I knew not wherefore. It minded me of the days when I was in my middling age, and when Grace and Mary, my dear bairns, with their young pleasures and their young troubles, were the joy of my heart. Woe's me! I was an aged woman now, and had little help to give them, that aye were used to come to me for counsel, and life was upon their bonnie heads with all its weights and its burdens; and I thought in my heart upon this lone house of Sunnyside, and the past that dwelt in it, and kent it was even like my old age and me. My maid Jenny was aged like myself; but Jenny was ever a cheery body, and aye was able for her canny work, and her crack with her old neighbours; and it was a comfort to see her kindly face again..... I tarried at the door looking down upon the town; truly change comes upon us, but the heavens and the earth change not. It might still have been that day twenty years ago when I came here with my mother, for all the difference that was in the place, or in what I looked forth upon. It was a pleasant day; the young ash leaves were loosing out from the branches, and there was a chirp in the air of all the birds of spring—and truly, I was both cheered and cast down in my own spirit, and [ knew not which most. When I went in, it was aye still the same—the old things that aye put me in mind of old days, all standing as they used to stand, and my own very chair drawn to the new-kindled fire, as if Grace herself had put it there. I laid down my bonnet upon the table, and sat at the lone fireside, from which both life and pleasantness had passed away; and I could not send back the tear from my eye that came at the thought of what was gone; for truly the fireside of Claud, my brother, was, as deserted as mine. “Jenny,” said I, it is an eerie thing to think upon, Do you mind what a pleasure it was to do everything for the bairns? and now the bairns are sober men and women, and have their ain firesides, and their ain troubles; truly nature and the course of life are hard upon old folk.” “But, Miss Marget, they're a' so weel,” said Jenny, who was at the fire, rousing up the newly-lighted coals with the poker to make a blaze. “If any ane of them was in distress I would mak my maen; but just to look at that bonnie bairn-time at Lilliesleaf—it's enough to make ony heart rejoice.” “Ay, Jenny, but the mother of a family like that has many cares,” said I, for I was, without doubt, in a thankless and repining frame. “And what would ye have, Miss Marget?” said Jenny, “as lang as they're thriving, what's care but joy? Bless their bonnie faces every ane! I would like to ken wha daur be wae tor Miss Mary, with yon four darlings at her fit. If it was the minister himself, he suld never say sae to Jenny.”
At sight of the young generation, of 'Miss Mary's' four darlings, 'Miss Marget' catches some of her old servant's cheerful and wise philosophy. Was there ever a sweeter picture than this, though you see the shadow of an invisible trouble in the background of it?
'I did not go to the door, but stood at the window, watching them. And in they came—all the bairns, skipping through the shadows of the trees, and running into the blithe morning light that was like themselves, so bonnie and fresh and innocent. They all gathered close about Jenny on the door steps; and every one had a word to tell her; and Jenny was so fain and so pleased that she was nigh to greeting; and I saw what a delight these little things were to every old person that had a right to them. Truly, there is nothing in the world so sweet or so blessed as the heritage of bairns. Susie, for all so genty and quiet a bairn as she was, was mounted up upon Jenny's shoulder; and that was how she came in to me, to the parlour where I was waiting. Jenny had on a short gown, made of a thrifty print, and a checked apron tied about her, as was right in the morning; and truly the strings had need to have been well sewn on, for the strain Claud gave them, tearing at the apron; though what the laddie wanted with it, except just mischief, I know not. Cosmo was behind them all, with his mamma. He was a big callant of his years, strong, and well grown; and it was his pride to be aye beside her, like a grown up man, taking care of her. Doubtless, Mary was proud of him, such a fine bold, bonnie boy as he was; but I could not help minding that there was aye a glance in Cosmo's eye, which meant that his father should have been there, and defied everybody to think less of his mother than of the Queen upon her throne.'
There is heartache in the story of 'Lilliesleaf,' but not heartbreak, for love abides still between the one who strays away and those who stand fast by duty, and justifies itself as the greatest power for good that God has given to his creatures, by bringing the prodigal home to his own roof and people in final repentance, forgiveness, and peace.
There is a changeful legend of young love woven into the serious warp and woof of the married lives at Oakenshaw, which brightens and relieves the book. The heroine of it is Rhoda, Grace's half-sister, who has lived concealed from her for seventeen ears, and is then abruptly thrown upon her charity by their unprincipled father. There is a streak of genius in Rhoda, but she is a wilful passionate girl, who hates her dependence, and tells her long-suffering entertainers that she would rather work with the reapers in the fields than live at ease in their fine house, and eat their bitter bread. Her lover is a match for her in pride, discontent, and temper, and though they both mend a little, and have a considerable fund of perverse affection between them, when they are finally married and quit the happy walls of Oakenshaw, with ambitious hopes and projects of getting on in the world, we have no desire to follow their fortunes. Soon after this event Mrs. Margaret Maitland takes her leave of us, being now old, and stricken in years. All is well at last; at Lilliesleaf and at Oakenshaw are great quiet and peace of heart. The labour of the elder generation prospers at the good bidding of the Lord, and 'the light of His countenance has brightened upon the path of all the bairns.'
Mrs. Oliphant is far too voluminous a writer to permit us to treat all her works in detail. We must in the majority of cases content ourselves with a passing allusion, and devote our space to the consideration of those novels by which her fame is, we trust, secured beyond this generation. 'Merkland' was her second story, and the scenery is Scotch again, as it is also in 'Harry Muir,' 'The Laird of Norlaw,' and 'Adam Graeme of Mossgray'; but in 'The House on the Moor' she has crossed the Border, and written a story as eerie and dreary as a sunless day on the fells in November. It is not a pleasant book. The bad people fill far more than their fair share of the stage, and they are dismal and uninteresting, and the misery amongst them is as all-pervading as an east-wind. The germ of the story is an iniquitous will, by which a man, with cunning spite against his son, leaves all his large possessions to accumulate in the hands of trustees until the said son's death, when they are immediately to devolve upon his grandson—a fine opportunity indeed, for the devil to set the evil passions of father and child to work! The authoress lets the Old Enemy avail himself of it to his heart's content. He has it entirely his own way; neither resists him, neither shows fight for an hour. Meaner, uglier domestic scenes than pass in 'The House on the Moor' were never drawn. The disinherited father allows his son to grow up an utter cub, ignorant of his future. and a companion of village ale-house popularity. The two are of the same thoroughly bad and sour nature, and hatred, malice, and uncharitableness thrive between them as such ill-weeds will in a congenial soil. Only by grace of Susan, the daughter, do we ever get a gleam of sunshine throughout the ignoble tragedy. We shall not transcribe any of its scenes; it is a good situation wasted, which might have been put to excellent profit, if the authoress had but taken it up in her sweeter vein, and shown the victims of the old man's wicked device, resisting the devil with the natural affection and confidence of their kinship, instead of giving place to him at his first assault; and it would have been, so far as our judgment goes, a truer story, and certainly a pleasanter and more healthy story to study.
It is, however, by 'The Chronicles of Carlingford' that Mrs. Oliphant will most probably live and amuse her grandchildren to the third and fourth generation. They were published originally in 'Blackwood's Magazine,' and in their collected form fill nine substantial volumes. They are capital studies of country-town life in our own times; and Carlingford has by their means become a much more real place to hundreds of readers than half the chief cities and celebrated places on the railway map.
'It is a considerable town now-a-days, but there are no alien activities to disturb the place—no manufactures, and not much trade. And there is a very respectable amount of very good society at Carlingford. To begin with, it is a pretty place—mild, sheltered, not far from town; and naturally its very reputation for good society increases the amount of that much-prized article. The advantages of the town in this respect have already put five per cent. upon the house-rents; but this, of course, only refers to the real town, where you can go through an entire street of high garden walls, with houses inside full of the retired exclusive comforts, the dainty economical refinements peculiar to such places; and where the good people consider their own society as a warrant of gentility less splendid, but not less assured, than the favour of Majesty itself.'
Reversing the order of the 'Chronicles,' we shall first review the career of 'Miss Majoribanks,' the public-spirited young lady who created this famous good society of Carlingford. Before her time it was a mere chaos of scattered and unapplied materials, like many another spot which remains to this hour dull as Tadmor-in-the-Wilderness, for want of an organizer like her. She is infinitely more loveable and admirable than heroines of novels in general, and though we are meant to laugh at her good-humoredly throughout her trials and triumphs, we never lose sight of her honourable, liberal, serviceable qualities, or waver in our allegiance and liking.Mrs. Oliphant displays in this story an excess of that shrewd humour in which Lucilla Majoribanks is so gloriously deficient, and she becomes now and then as sarcastic as Mrs. Woodburn, who was the terror of Carlingford society when Lucilla was forming it. There is, indeed, a strong touch of caricature in several of her delineations in the 'Chronicles,' but even in the most exaggerated, the natural features are preserved. Every character is distinct as life, and their variety is as wonderful as life. But their portraits are laboured at. There is no question of etching or sketching with Mrs. Oliphant; she draws her faces and figures by line and rule, and paints every bit of them with minutest care. She takes nearly a score of lines to describe Miss Majoribank's hair, and nearly a dozen to show us her hands and feet. Perhaps it is not too much for so useful and remarkable a young woman; and there we have her at last, complete and rounded, thoroughly capable of the mission before her—a large girl, full and well-developed at fifteen, with a face that might ripen into beauty and become grandiose, and a mass of tawny hair that curled to exasperation. She lost her mother at this date, and would fain have remained at home to be 'a comfort to her dear papa,' but Dr. Majoribanks found himself so well able to dispense with her consolations (having his practice and an excellent old cook to see to his little dinners) that he sent Lucilla back to school for three years,and then to travel another year abroad, by which time she was a finished gentlewoman, and there could no longer be any pretence for keeping her away from the sphere which she was destined to revolutionize and enlighten, Like a judicious girl, she timed her journey to arrive at home by the train that reached Carlingford at half-past five, and the scene in which her coming is announced to Nancy, the important functionary who had hitherto ruled over the widowed establishment of Dr. Majoribanks, is a capital introduction for these leading personages in Lucilla's story.
'My daughter is coming home, Nancy,' said Dr. Majoribanks; 'you will have to make preparations for her immediately. So far as I can make out from this letter, she will arrive tomorrow by the half-past five train.'
'Well, sir,' said Nancy, with a tone of a woman who makes the best of a misfortune, 'it ain't every young lady as would have the sense to fix an hour like that. Ladies is terrible tiresome in that way; they'll come in the middle of the day, when a body don't know in the world what to have for them, or they'll come at night, when a body's tired, and ain't got the heart to goin to a supper. There was always a deal of sense in Miss Lucilla, when she hadn't got nothing in her head.'
'Just so,' said Dr. Majoribanks, who was rather relieved to have got through the announcement so easily; 'you will see-that her room is ready, and everything comfortable, and of course to-morrow she and I will dine alone.'
'Yes, sir,' said Nancy; but this assent was not given in the decisive tone of a woman whose audience was over, and then she was seized with a desire to arrange in a more satisfactory manner the cold beef on the sideboard. When she had secured this little interval for thought, she returned again to the table, where her master ate his breakfast with a presentiment. 'If you please, sir,' said Nancy, 'not to give you no vexation nor trouble, which every one knows it has been the aim o' my life to spare you, as has so much on your mind, but it's best to settle afore commencing, and then we needn't have no heart-burning—if you please, am I to take my orders of Miss Lucilla or of you, as I've always been used to? In the missus's time,' said Nancy, with modest confidence, 'as was a good missus, and never gave no trouble as long as she had her soup and her jelly comfortable, it was always you as said what there was to be for dinner. I don't make no objections to doing up a nice little luncheon for Miss Lucilla, and giving a little more thought now and again to the sweets; but it ain't my part to tell you, sir, as a lady's taste, and more special a young lady's, ain't to be expected to be the same as yours and mine, as has been cultivated like. I'm not one as likes contention,' continued the domestic oracle, 'but I couldn't abear to see a good master put upon; and if it should be as Miss Lucilla sets her mind on messes as ain't got no taste in them, and milk puddings and stuff, like the most of the ladies, I'd just like to know out of your own mouth, afore the commencement, what I'm to do?'
Dr. Majoribanks was so moved by this appeal that he laid down his knife and fork, and contemplated the future with some dismay. 'It is to be hoped Miss Lucilla will know better,' he said. 'She has a great deal of good sense, and it is to be hoped that she will be wise enough to consult the tastes of the house.'
But the Doctor was not to be let off so easily. 'As you say, sir, everything's to be hoped,' said Nancy steadily, 'but there's a many ladies as don't seem to me to have got no taste in their mouths; and it ain't as if it was a thing that could be left to hopes, Supposin' as it comes to that, sir, what am I to do?'
'Well,' said the Doctor, who was himself a little puzzled, 'you know Miss Lucilla is nineteen, Nancy, and my only child, and the natural mistress of the house.'
'Sir,' said Nancy austerely, 'them is things as it ain't needful to name; that ain't the question as I was asking. Supposin' things come to such a point, what an I to do?'
'Bless me, it's half-past nine,' said the Doctor, 'and I have an appointment. You can come just as usual when we are at breakfast, that will be the best way,' he said, as he went out at the door, and chuckled a little to himself, when he felt he had escaped. He rubbed his hands as he bowled along to his appointment, and thought within himself that if Lucilla turned out to be a girl of spirit, as he expected, it would be good fun to see her struggle with Nancy for the veritable reins of government. If Doctor Majoribanks had entertained any positive apprehensions that his dinners would be spoiled in consequence, his amusement would have come to an abrupt conclusion; but he trusted entirely in Nancy and a little in Lucilla, and suffered his long upper lip to relax at the thought without much fear.'
Dr. Majoribanks' confidence was not misplaced. Lucilla was even cleverer than he supposed, and the way in which she took her proper place in the house is excellently told. 'The young sovereign gave no intimation of her future policy;' but the morning after her arrival, she usurped her father's place in front of the urn and tea-pot with such amiable ingenuousness, that the old Doctor only said 'Humph,' and abdicated. When Nancy came in and saw what was done, she stared aghast, and though she did not, perhaps, see the joke of it so clearly as her master, she was dethroned with the same consummate tact and grace to which he had succumbed. Her domestic rule initiated, Lucilla in the course of the day walked serenely forth to view the country she had come to conquer. We are informed that the social condition of the town at her advent was deplorable. 'There was nothing that could properly be called a centre. To be sure, Grange Lane was inhabited, as at present, by the best families in Carlingford; but then, without organization, what good does it do tu have a lot of people together?' Mr. Berry, the evangelical rector, was utterly unqualified to take any lead; his wife was dead, his daughters were married, and his maiden sister, who kept his house, asked people to tea-parties where the Dissenting minister, Mr. Tufton, was to be met, and other Dissenters, small tradesmen, to whom the rector, in his universal benevolence, held out the right hand of fellowship. Dr. Majoribanks gave only dinners, to which naturally, while there was no lady in the house, ladies could not be invited; and, besides, he was rather a drawback than a benefit to society, since he filled the men with such expectations in the way of cookery, that they were never content with a good family dinner after. Then the ladies, from whom something might justly have been expected in the way of making society pleasant, were incapacitated either by character or by multiplicity of children. Mrs. Centum was too busy in her nursery; Mrs. Woodburn liked nothing so well as to read novels, and 'take off' her neighbours when anybody called on her; Mrs. Chiley was old and hated trouble, and her husband, the colonel, could not enjoy his dinner if he had more than four people to help him to eat it; in short, you might have gone over Grange Lane, house by house, finding a great deal of capital material, but without encountering a single individual capable of making anything out of it.
'And yet nobody could say that there were not good elements to make society with. When you add to a man capable of giving excellent dinners, like Dr. Majoribanks, another man like young Mr. Cavendish, Mrs. Woodburn's brother, who was a wit and a man of fashion, and belonged to one of the best clubs in town, and brought down gossip with the bloom on it to Grange-lane, and when you join Mrs. Centum, who was always so good and so much out of temper, that it was safe to calculate on something amusing from her, the languid but trenchant humour of Mrs. Woodburn, not to speak of their husbands, and all the nephews, and cousins, and grandchildren, who constantly paid visits toold Mr. Western and Colonel Chiley, and the Browns, when they were at home, with their floating suite of admirers, and the young ladies who sang, and the young ladies who sketched, and the men who went out with the hounds, and the people who came when there was an election, and the barristers who made the circuit, and the people who came for the races, not to speak of the varying chances of curates who could talk and play the piano, and the occasional visits of the lesser county people, and the county clergymen, it will be plainly apparent that all that was wanting to Carlingford was a master hand to blend these different elements.'
This master-hand was now come in the person of Miss Majoribanks.
We have not words to express our admiration of Lucilla's social strategy. Would that she were multiplied a thousandfold, that women in her likeness might rise everywhere and pioneer a way through the density and obstruction of provincial dulness! On her very first walk abroad, with the luck that attends the brave, she heard resounding from the plebeian side of Grove-street, three doors from Salem Chapel, a magnificent contralto voice, which she knew would go charmingly with her own; the voice of an old schoolfellow, of Barbara Lake, the eldest daughter of Lake, the drawing-master. Instantaneously there germinated in her brain the rudiments of those Evenings by which society in Carlingford was disciplined to its present perfection. Lucilla was not one to be limited by the canons of gentility. The Lakes were not 'in society,' but Barbara's voice was a glorious compensation for the want of birth and money, and Lucilla at once determined to make it available for her purposes of civilization. She publicly resolved, and avowed her resolution to remain ten years at home 'to be a comfort to her dear papa;' and the way in which she put aside a looming obstacle in the shape of her cousin Tom, who had the sense to wish to appropriate her, is exquisitely humorous. She persuaded her father to re-furnish her drawing-room with pale green to suit her rosy complexion, and as a prelude to bringing everybody together on the first of her immortal Thursday evenings, she presided at one of the Doctor's little dinners, supported by old Mrs. Chiley. It could not have been more successful had she been in harness a dozen years.
'To speak first of the most important particular;the dinner was perfect. As for the benighted men who had doubted Lucilla, they were covered with shame, and at the same time with delight. If there had been a fault in Dr. Majoribank's table under the ancient régime, it lay in certain want of variety, and occasional overabundance, which wounded the feelings of the young Mr. Cavendish, who was a person of refinement. To-night, as that accomplished critic remarked, there was a certain air of feminine grace diffused over everything, and an amount of doubt and expectation, unknown to the composed feasting of old, gave interest to the meal.'
After this good beginning, people naturally grew excited about the Evenings. They wanted to see the renovated drawing-room, and in their curiosity frankly forgave Lucilla for being in advance of their provincial notions. 'Don't expect any regular invitation,' she had said. 'I hope you will all come, or as many of you as can. Papa has always some men to dinner with him that day, you know, and it is so dreadfully slow for me with a heap of men. That is why I fixed on Thursday. I want you to come every week, so it would be absurd to send an invitation; and remember it is not a party, only an evening.' Nearly the whole action of this story is transacted at these Thursday evenings, which soon become an institution in Carlingford. Love and love-making, and divers other complications occur, but we shall not attempt to unravel them, as they are only subsidiary to Lucilla's noble work of social regeneration. Like other conquerors, Miss Majoribanks was destined to build her victory on sacrifice; but she was always equal to her duty, and great alike in failure as in success. She was never seen to flinch at difficulty, and from some passages of arms out of which other women would have emerged with a sense of ignominious defeat, she came with flying colours, and with never so much as a scratch on her shield. Mr. Cavendish had began to pay attention to her in what Mrs. Chiley thought a marked way, but at the very first evening appeared on the scene the powerful syren, Barbara Lake, with her rich contralto, her splendid eyes and striking figure, and captivated the man of surface refinement. Lucilla patronized them, and when they married, dismissed them with her blessing. General Travers, who was produced in Carlingford specially to admire her, neglected her ample charms, and admired instead the sweet and rosy little face of Barbara's sister Rose, who designed patterns and had a tender feeling for art; but Lucilla was judicially calm on the occasion, and when Archdeacon Beverley, who really promised well for a while, was suddenly rapt away by his old and only love, whom he discovered living under Lucilla's generous protection, she smoothed the way to their reconciliation, and feasted her own heart on the pleasant thought of 'Cousin Tom,' who had always appreciated her. We should feel, indeed, as Mrs. Chiley did, that these accidents were rather hard upon her, if we had not a comforting presentiment that Lucilla is all the time saving up for her cousin Tom, and that he is sure to come at the proper moment and carry her off.
Amongst Mrs. Oliphant's many clever caricatures, Archdeacon Beverley is one of the cleverest. She informs us that he was Broad Church, and had a way of talking on many subjects which alarmed his hostess, Mrs. Chiley.
“It was the custom of good society in Carlingford to give a respectful assent to Mr. Bury's extreme Low Churchism, as if it were profane, as it certainly was not respectable, to differ from the rector, and to give him as wide a field as possible for his missionary operations by keeping out of the way. But the Archdeacon had not the least regard for respectability, nor for that respect for religion which consists in keeping as clear of it as possible; and the way in which he spoke of Mr. Bury's views wounded some people's feelings. Altogether he was, as Mrs. Chiley said, an anxious person to have in the house; for he just as often agreed with the gentlemen in their loose way of thinking, as with the more correct opinions by which the wives and mothers who had charge of their morality strove hard to keep them in the right way.... He was very nice, had a nice position, but he was not like what clergymen were in her time. For one thing, he seemed to think that every silly boy and girl ought to have an opinion, and to be consulted, which was just the way to turn their heads, and make them quite insupportable.'
The contrast of this gentleman's liberal theories with his dogmatic manner is very amusing, and so is the consternation of all right-thinking people, when it is confidently reported that the Rector had invited Mr. Tufton, of Salem Chapel, to meet the Archdeacon, and that, but for the Dissenting minister's good sense, that unseemly conjunction would have taken place. And here our authoress condescends to, or at least paints, the unworthy and insulting commonplace of modern journalism, that the Dissenter must necessarily belong to a lower caste of society—a blunder from which her own associations ought to have kept her. The encounter of the Rector and Archdeacon at Dr. Majoribanks' table verges on the comic. Mrs. Oliphant represents the evangelical clergy as peculiarly fond of good living. The disagreeable curate always turns up at the Rector's house ten minutes before dinner, when there is a certain excellent pudding, and Mr. Bury is said to have had a way of sneering at 'the flesh,' while sparing no pains to nourish it, which provokes Dr. Majoribanks into launching at his spiritual ruler a shaft of medical wit.
'“I have no doubt,” the Doctor would say, “that an indigestion is an admirable way of mortifying the flesh, as our excellent Rector says. Fasting was the suggestion of a barbarous age, and it must have kept those anchorite fellows in an unchristian strength of stomach. And it's far more philosophical to punish the offending body, as Mr. Bury does, by means of made dishes;” and when he had thus disturbed his reverend guest's enjoyment, the Doctor would go on with his dinner with great relish. This, however, was not the only danger to which the peace of the party was exposed. For the Rector, at the same time, regarded Mr. Beverley with a certain critical suspiciousness, such as is seldom to be encountered except among clergymen. He did not know much about his clerical superior, who had only recently been appointed to his archdeaconry, but there was something in his air, his looks and demeanour, which indicated what Mr. Bury thought a loose way of thinking. When the Archdeacon made any remark, the Rector would pause and look up from his plate to listen to it, with his fork suspended in the air the while, and then he would a glances with his sister.'
The second of the 'Carlingford Chronicles,' in order of time, recounts the wooing and wedding of Dr. Ryder, the purchaser of the practice of Dr. Majoribanks, whose sudden death in embarrassed circumstances is skilfully made use of by the authoress to bring out in a new light the genuine goodness and affectionateness of his daughter. If any reader wishes to know what manner of woman succeeded Lucilla in her charming drawing-room, when she retired from Carlingford on her marriage, to the family estate of Marchbank, they will find Mr. Ryder's prenuptial life and adventures most entertainingly set forth under the title of 'The Doctor's Family,' and then, for information as to how Carlingford society maintained itself after its fair reformer went to carry light and progress into the society of the country, we must refer them to the stories of the a eae of 'The Rector' who succeeded Mr. Bury, of 'The Perpetual Curate' of St. Roque's, and of the minister of 'Salem Chapel.'
There is some capital writing in 'The Rector,' which opens with a sketch of Carlingford, and introduces the successor of Mr. Bury in the course of a morning call on one of the pleasantest families in Grange Lane—the family of Mr. Wodehouse. The scene, which is as effective as a good drawing in water colours, is in the garden—the warm, well-furnished garden, where high brick walls, all clothed with fruit-trees, shut in an enclosure of which there was not a morsel, except the velvet grass, with its nests of daisies, which was not under the highest and most careful cultivation. Tall plumes of lilac and stray branches of apple-blossom gave friendly salutations over the walls to the world without; within, the sweet summer snow dropt on the bright head of Lucy Wodehouse, and impertinently flecked the Rev. Frank Wentworth's Anglican coat. She was twenty, pretty, blue-eyed, and full of dimples, with a Leghorn hat and blue ribbons; she had great gardening gloves on, and the grass at her feet was strewn with the sweetest spring blossoms,—narcissus, lilies, hyacinths, gold ranunculus globes, and sober wallflower. He was the perpetual curate of St. Roque's, and there was that indefinable harmony in their looks which prompts to the bystander the suggestion of 'a handsome couple.' On a green bench under the great May-tree sat the elder Miss Wodehouse, who was pious and leisurely, and verging on forty; and not far off shone the bright English house all beaming with open doors and windows. On this charming domestic out-of-door scene entered, by the door in the wall, Mr. Wodehouse, 'a man who creaked universally:' introducing the new rector, Mr. Proctor, fifteen years Fellow of All Souls', who, on his own confession, knew very little about ladies, and had brought down to the rectory, in lieu of a wife, only a dear old shrewd lively mother whom he longed to compensate for her tedious dull life so many years without him. Their brief housekeeping together is very prettily told; but Mr. Proctor is not happy in his strange position; fifteen years of college seclusion do not prove to have been a good apprenticeship for parish work, and after a signal failure or two, feeling his incompetence keenly, he makes up his mind to return to All Souls', and leave his rectory to Morgan, the next fellow on the list, who wants to get married. We meet him again in the history of 'The Perpetual Curate,' a kind and honourable man whom we like, and are glad to take final leave of in pleasant circumstances.
The Rev. Frank Wentworth and Lucy Wodehouse play hero and heroine in, the next 'Chronicle;' but there are several groups of subsidiary characters, each with a central interest, not always essential to the development of the story-in-chief, which often drags, and would have been more effective for pruning, or careful compression. It begins with the arrival of Mr. Morgan and his wife—a couple who have waited to be married until the bloom is off both their lives, and who experience a slight flavour of disappointment with each other in consequence. They are 'two fresh, new, active, clergymanly intellects, entirely open to the affairs of the town, intent upon general information and sound management;' and it seems a highly doubtful business whether Mr. Wentworth and Mr. Morgan will find Carlingford big enough to hold them both. They do not, and how and why not is the pith of the whole 'Chronicle.'
Mrs. Oliphant drops into her shrewdest satiric vein the moment she mentions the middle-aged rector and his middle-aged wife, The grievance of the former is Mr. Wentworth's activity in a certain low district of the town which in strictness does not belong to his chapelry of St. Roque; the vexation of the latter is the drawing-room carpet of Mr. Proctor's choosing—a carpet strewn with gorgeous bouquets, which only high Christian principle enables the poor lady to endure. Their characters are well studied up to a certain point; that of Mrs. Morgan is good throughout, but in her husband the darker shades are much exaggerated. His prejudice against the perpetual curate is the root of all the mischief in the story. It begins with their earliest acquaintance, when the rector, who naturally loves the 'constituted authority' that is vested in himself, finds a sisterhood in grey cloaks, a provident society, and all sorts of things going on in his parish under Mr. Wentworth's direction; even an impromptu chapel, which he mistakes at first sight for a little Bethel, where the curate has two week-day services, and a Sunday evening service for the bargemen of Wharfside. Mr. Morgan makes up his mind that the young Anglican must be taught to know better than to interfere in another man's parish; and in the process of teaching he allows the enmity in his heart to expand into active persecution. We cannot but think that here Mrs. Oliphant's lively satiric fancy carries her out of the bounds of probability. We believe that she libels common human nature in the remarkable story of how the hard-working and deservedly-popular curate becomes all at once the most suspected and despised of men. It is a proverb, that 'a good man's character swears for him;' yet this good Mr. Wentworth, who is a gentleman by birth and education, and a Christian in principle and life, on what seems to us the most preposterously inadequate evidence, is supposed to be guilty of folly and sin, which, if proved against him, would deprive him of his gown. We can conceive nothing more glaringly absurd and disagreeable than this portion of the 'Chronicles.' The character of a minister of God is delicate as a woman's, and ought not to be breathed upon. What should we expect to take place in 'the world' if a clergyman whom we had always seen active in his duty, pure in his life, refined in his habits, were wildly accused of removing from her home and secreting a pretty little coquettish miss, his clerk's niece, on the strength of her having been seen haunting his lodgings, and once conducted home by him after dark, and given by to her guardians with a sharp admonition? In real life, we believe that the accusation would never be made, or if made by vulgar and credited by silly persons, would be strongly repudiated by every man and woman blessed with a grain of common sense. But what does Mrs. Oliphant represent as the probable course of action in such a community as Carlingford? She represents Mr. Wentworth as almost universally condemned! Rose Elsworthy vanishes, and her uncle, accompanied by another tradesman, impudently assails him as her abductor; Sarah, the maid-of-all-work at his lodgings, thinks that perhaps, after all, Mr. Elsworthy may be right; Mrs. Hadwin, the widow lady under whose roof he had lived ever since he came to St. Roque's, grows troubled with contemptuous pity for the poor young man; but it never occurs to her that his good sense and pride and superior cultivation may have been sufficient defence against little Rose's dimples and blue eyes; his Aunt Dora, who has known and loved him from boyhood, quite coincides in Mrs. Hadwin's fears and sentiments; Dr. Majoribanks, meeting him on his way to a dying bed, prayer-book in hand, remarks to his colleague, Dr. Ryder, 'I confess that, after all, there are cases in which written prayers are a sort of security'; Mr. Leeson, the odious curate who is fond of All Souls' pudding, hears the tale, swallows it greedily, and promptly reports it to Mr. Morgan; Mr. Morgan is only too glad to credit the worst—he even sees the hand of Providence in it for the humiliation of his popular rival; the poor folk of Wharfside, to whom he had done nothing but good, eye him askance; a trio of pious old evangelical maids are ready to testify against him with personal witness;even his sweet Lucy does not stand by him as a true lover should;—indeed, the only people who reject the vulgar slander imperatively, as it deserves, are the bad or unpleasant people of the story:—Mr. Wentworth's reprobate brother Jack, his disagreeable Aunt Leonora, and Mrs. Morgan; and their behaviour on the occasion redeems all their little naughtinesses and asperities. The scandal being countenanced by so many respectable persons, becomes the common town's talk, and at length necessitates a semi-public inquiry into the curate's life and conversation. Of course, the reader, who knows all along that he is innocent, expects him to come out of the investigation triumphantly, and so he does; while shame and confusion descend like a cloud on the rector, the parish clerk, and the shabby scoundrel who is Rosy's real deluder. Lucy's eyes brighten again on her persecuted lover, and though he loses the family living of Skelmersdale, because his views are not precisely the same as those of his ultra-evangelical Aunt Leonora (one of the three partronesses), Mrs. Oliphant, who has no morbid taste for narrow circumstances, does not set the wedding-bells a-ringing until she has put her hero in the way of affording to her heroine all the comforts and enough of the luxuries of life to make them happy in the marriage-state, and to enable them to keep up a position in the very best Carlingford society. With a fine stroke of her good-humoured irony, she puts the moral of her story into the mouth of the reprobate Jack, whose airs of penitence are most assuming and delusive while they last.
'“I have had things my own way since I came here,” said the prodigal, who no longer pretended to be penitent; “somehow it appears I have a great luck for having my own way. It is your scrupulous people who think of other's, and of such antiquated stuff as duty, and so forth, that get yourselves into difficulties. My dear aunt, I am going away; if I were to remain an inmate of this house—I mean to say, could I look forward to the privilege of continuing a member of this Christian family—another day, I should know better how to conduct myself; but I am going back to my bad courses, Aunt Dora; I am returning to the world.” “Oh! Jack, my dear, I hope not,” said Aunt Dora, who was much bewildered, and did not know what to say. “Too true,” said the relapsed sinner; “and considering all the lessons you have taught me, don't you think it is the best thing I could do? There is my brother Frank, who has been carrying other people about on his shoulders, and doing his duty; but I don't see that you good people are at all moved in his behalf. You leave him to fight his way by himself, and confer your benefits elsewhere, which is an odd sort of lesson for a worldling like me. “If my convictions of sin had gone just a step farther,” said the pitiless critic, “if I had devoted myself to bringing others to repentance, as is the first duty of a reformed sinner, my aunt Leonora would not have hesitated to give Skelmersdale to me—” “Jack, hold your tongue,” said Miss Leonora; but though her cheeks burned, her voice was not so firm as usual, and she actually failed in putting down the man who had determined to have his say. “Fact, my dear aunt,” said Jack: “if I had been a greater rascal than I am, and had gone a little farther, you and your people would have thought me quite fit for a cure of souls. I'd have come in for your good things that way as well as other ways; but here is Frank, whom even I can see is a right sort of person. I don't pretend to fixed theological opinions,” said this unlooked-for oracle, “but so far as I can see, he's a kind of fellow most men would be glad to make a friend of when they were under a cloud—not that he was ever very civil to me. I tell you, so far from rewarding him for being of the true sort, you do nothing but snub him, that I can see. He looks to me as good for work as any man I know; but you'll give your livings to any kind of wretched make-believe before you'll give them to Frank. I am aware,” said the heir of Wentworth, with a momentary flush, “that I have never been considered much of a credit to the family; but if I were to announce my intention of marrying and settling, there is not one of the name who would not lend a hand to smooth matters. That is the reward of wickedness,” said Jack, with a laugh. “As for Frank, he is a perpetual curate, and may marry perhaps fifty years hence; that's the way you good people treat a man who never did anything to be ashamed of in his life; and you expect me to give up my evil courses after such a lesson? I trust I am not such a fool,” said the relapsed prodigal. He sat looking at them all in his easy way, enjoying the confusion, indignation, and wrath with which he was received. “The man who gets his own way is the man who takes it,” he concluded, with his usual composure pouring out Miss Leonora's glass of claret as he spoke.'
This Aunt Leonora is an admirably-drawn character, and with fewer traits of exaggeration than Mrs. Oliphant usually gives to those whom she depicts as wise and pious in their own conceits. Every religious community has its Aunt Leonora—its feminine pope;and probably the sketch of this lady's state of mind after her reprobate nephew's harangue, has delighted and comforted thousands who have suffered under such a yoke as hers. We give it as a good specimen of Mrs. Oliphant's serio-sarcastic vein.
'Miss Leonora, who never had known what it was to have nerves in the entire course of her existence, retired to her own room with a headache, to the consternation of the whole family. She had been a strong-minded woman all her life, and had managed everybody's affairs without being distracted and hampered in her career by those doubts of her own wisdom, and questions as to her own motives, which will now and then afflict the minds of weaker people when they have to decide for others. But this time an utterly novel and unexpected accident had befallen Miss Leonora; a man of no principles at all had delivered his opinion upon her conduct—and so far from finding his criticism contemptible, or discovering in it the ordinary outcry of the wicked against the righteous, she had found it true, and by means of it had, for perhaps the first time in her life, seen herself as others saw her.... She recognized the fact that she had committed herself.... and that, instead of dispensing her piece of patronage like an optimist to the best, she had, in fact, given it up to the most skilful and persevering angler, as any other woman might have done. The blow was bitter; not to say that the unpleasant discovery was aggravated by having it thus pointed out by Jack, who in his own person had taken her in, and cheated his sensible aunt. She felt humbled and wounded in the tenderest point, to think that her reprobate nephew had seen through her, but that she had not been able to see through him, and had been deceived by his professions of penitence. The more she turned it over in her mind, the more Miss Leonora's head ached; for was it not growing apparent that she, who prided herself on her impartial judgment, had been moved, not by heroic and stoical justice and the love of souls, but a good deal by prejudice, and a good deal by skilful artifice, and very little indeed by the highest motive, which is called the glory of God? And it was Jack who had set all this before her clear as daylight. No wonder the excellent woman was disconcerted. She went to bed gloomily with her headache'—
And there we will leave her to salutary humiliation and repentance.
It will be seen that there is much amusing reading in the 'Chronicles' that we have already reviewed; but it is to 'Salem Chapel' that we should accord the palm for most laughable entertainment. When it first came out in the pages of 'Maga' it was a revelation to its staunch old torified Church and State readers, which delighted them infinitely. We are all apt to imagine that our own words and ways, being perfectly familiar to ourselves, must needs be so to the world at large. But this is a signal mistake. Church-folk, born and bred in the Church, are (or rather were) for the most part, as ignorant of the customs of Noncomformity at home as of the customs of the Mahometans; and to the excitement of reading a good story was therefore added the pleasure of surveying a piquant and exaggerated caricature of a social and religious state of things in the midst of us of which they were previously unaware. It is so cleverly done, that being published anonymously, the chapel portions of the story raised a general suspicion that the author of it was that greatest genius amongst living women, George Eliot. Mrs. Oliphant surpasses herself here, or the subject inspires her with a humour as rare as it is real. The tragedy of the tale is, as usual with her, far too long drawn out; and it is always a relief to escape from the woes of Mrs. Hilyard to the society of Mr. Vincent's chapel friends.
According to the latest information, Salem Chapel is still the only dissenting place of worship in Carlingford, where there are no Dissenters above the rank of the milkman or the grocer. It is a small red brick building, on the shabby side of Grove Street, 'presenting a pinched gable, terminated by a curious little belfry, not intended for any bell, and looking not unlike a handle to lift up the edifice by to public observation.' Its chronicle is contemporary, or nearly so, with the story of 'The Perpetual Curate,' and opens with the retirement of Mr. Tufton and the ' call' of Mr. Vincent, ' fresh from Homerton, in the bloom of hope and intellectualism, a young man of the newest school,' who was almost as particular as Mr. Wentworth, of St. Roque's, about the cut of his coat.and the precision of his costume, and decidedly preferred the word clergyman to the word minister. He had been brought up upon the 'Nonconformist' and the 'Electic Review,'and believed that the Church Establishment, though outwardly prosperous, was a profoundly rotten institution; that the eyes of the world were upon the Dissenters as the real party of progress; and (greatest delusion of all) that his own eloquence and the Voluntary principle were quite enough to counterbalance all the ecclesiastical advantages on the other side, and make for himself a position of the highest influence in his new sphere. How the eyes of the young enthusiast were opened to the indifference of Society to a Dissenting ministers, and the intolerable bondage of his position as pastor of Salem Chapel, is the main interest of the 'Chronicle.'
Mrs. Oliphant has given a loose rein to her liveliest powers of satire in this story, and Dissenters have laughed as much as other readers at the exaggerated fun of her caricatures. There are, undoubtedly, busybodies and small social tyrants, pests of ministers' lives, in all little communities, and—and patronesses of the most signal unpleasantness. There are literates in the Church, now-a-days, whose offences against grammar quite equal those of the 'young man from Homerton,' from whose taking discourse the letter h was conspicuously absent. But is it right or fair to hold up the vulgar literate as a specimen of the Church of England curate furnished by the Universities, or the conceited Dissenting preacher, with his defect of speech, as a specimen of the men whom Homerton, under its learned President, Dr. Pye Smith, sent out, after a six years' training, into the Congregational ministry? It is as preposterous as it is unfair. With a more accurate knowledge of the class she was describing, Mrs. Oliphant would have made her portraits of Dissenting ministers more faithful and also more effective.
The new minister is the son of a minister, who has no private means, and whose mother and sister live in humble obscurity at Ashford. In his first flush of confidence, he has blissful ambitious dreams, which even Mr. Tozer, the butterman, and the other chapel managers cannot dissipate. He imagines the aristocratic doors of George Lane flying open to welcome him, and the dormant minds of the dwellers in those serene places rousing up at the fire of his eloquence. He is handsome, has talent, and is 'well educated and enlightened in his fashion,' 'but entirely ignorant of any world' except the narrow one in which he had been brought up. He comes to Carlingford with elevated expectations of getting into its highest sphere, as his natural place; but his first invitation is to tea at Mrs. Tozer's, at six o'clock, where he meets the leading chapel members, and has the pleasure of hearing their views.of a pastor's duty. The scene is so admirable that we shall quote it—not at length, but in those passages where the peculiarities of the company are most naïvely displayed. We are apprized that to go out to tea at six was a wonderful cold plunge for the young man, who had been looking forward to Mr. Wodehouse's capital dinners and the charming breakfasts of the pretty Lady Western; but he smiled over the note of invitation written by Phœbe, the butterman's daughter, and went in a patronizing frame of mind, expecting quite a pleasant study of manners amongst the good homely people. And in that he was not disappointed.
'Tozer, who awaited the minister at the door, was fully habited in the overwhelming suit of black and the white tie, which produced so solemnizing an effect every Sunday at chapel; and the men of the party were, with a few varieties, similarly attired. But the brilliancy of the female portion of the company overpowered Mr. Vincent.... Could these be the veritable womankind of Salem Chapel? Mr. Vincent saw bare shoulders and flower-wreathed heads bending over the laden tea-table. He saw pretty faces and figures not inelegant, remarkable among which was Miss Phœbe's, who had written him that pink note, and who was herself pink all over—dress, shoulders, elbows, cheeks, and all.... As for the men, the lawful owners of all this feminine display, they huddled all together, indisputable cheese-mongers that they were, quite transcended and distinguished by their wives and daughters. The pastor was young, and totally inexperienced. In his heart he asserted his own claim to an entirely different sphere.... He was shy of venturing upon those fine women, who surely never could be Mrs. Brown, of the Devonshire dairy, and Mrs. Pigeon, the poulterer's wife; whereas Pigeon and Brown themselves were exactly like what they always were on Sundays, if not perhaps a trifle graver, and more depressed in their minds.
'“Here's a nice place for you, Mr. Vincent—quite the place for you, where you can hear all the music, and see all the young ladies; for I do suppose ministers, bein' young, are like other young men,” said Mrs. Tozer, drawing aside her brilliant skirts, to make room for him on the sofa. “I have a son myself as is at college, and feel mother-like to those as go in the same line. Sit you down comfortable, Mr. Vincent. There ain't one here, sir, I'm proud to say, as grudges you the best seat.” “Oh, mamma, how could you think of saying such a thing?” said Phœbe, under her breath; “to be sure, Mr. Vincent never could think there was anybody anywhere that would be so wicked—and he the minister.” “Indeed, my dear,” said Mrs. Pigeon, who was close by, “not to affront Mr. Vincent, as is deserving of our best respects, I've seen many and many's the minister I wouldn't have given up my seat to; and I don't misdoubt, sir, you've heard of such as well as we. There was Mr, Bailey, at Parson's Green, now. He went and married a poor bit of a governess, as common-looking a creature as you could see, that set herself up above the people, Mr. Vincent, and was too grand, sir, if you'll believe me, to visit the deacons' wives. Nobody cares less than me about the vally of them vain shows. What's visiting, if you know the vally of your time? Nothing but a laying up of judgment. But I wouldn't be put upon neither by a chit that got her bread out of yours and my husband's hard earnings; and so I told my sister, Mrs, Tozer, as lives at Parson's Green.” “Poor thing!" said the gentler Mrs. Tozer. “It's hard lines on a minister's wife to please the congregation. Mr. Vincent here, he'll have to take a lesson, That Mrs. Bailey was pretty-looking, I must allow.” “Sweetly pretty!” whispered Phœbe, clasping her plump pink hands. “Pretty-looking! I don't say anything against it,” continued her mother; “but it is hard upon a minister, when his wife will take no pains to please his flock. To have people turn up their noses at you ain't pleasant.” “And them getting their living off you all the time,” cried Mrs. Pigeon, clinching the milder speech. “But it seems to me,” said poor Vincent, “that a minister can no more be said to get his living off you than any other man. He works hard enough generally for what little he has. And really, Mrs. Tozer, I'd rather not hear all these unfortunate particulars about one of my brethren.” “He ain't one of the brethren now,” broke in the poulterer's wife. “He's been gone out o' Parson's Green this twelvemonths. Them stuck-up ways may do with the Church folks as can't help themselves, but they'll never do with us Dissenters. Not that we ain't glad as can be to see you, Mr. Vincent, and I hope you'll favour my poor house another night like your favouring Mrs. Tozer's. Mr. Tufton always said that was the beauty of Carlingford, in our connection. Cheerful folks, and no display. No display, you know—nothing but a hearty meeting, sorry to part, and happy to meet again. Them's our ways. And the better you know us, the better you'll like us, I'll be bound to say. We don't put it all on the surface, Mr. Vincent,” continued Mrs. Pigeon, shaking out her skirts, and expanding herself on her chair; “but it's all real and solid; what we say we mean—and we don't say no more than we mean—and them's the kind of folks to trust to wherever you go.” ... “We never have had nobody in our connection worth speaking of in Carlingford but's been in trade,” said Mrs, Brown; “and a very good thing too, as I tell Brown. For if there's one thing I can't abear in a chapel it's one set setting up above the rest. But bein' all in the way of business, except just the poor folks, as is all very well in their place, and never interferes with nothing, I don't count there's nothing but brotherly love here, which is a deal more than most ministers can say for their flocks. I've asked a few friends to tea, Mr. Vincent, on next Thursday, at six. As I haven't got no daughters just out of a boarding-school to write notes for me, will you take us in a friendly way, and just come without another invitation? All our own folks, sir, and a comfortable evening; and prayers, if you'll be so good at the end. I don't like the new fashion.” said Mrs. Brown, with a significant glance at Mrs. Tozer, “of separatin' like heathens, when all's of one connection. We might never meet again, Mr. Vincent. In the midst of life, you know, sir. You'll not forget Thursday, at six.” “But, my dear Mrs. Brown, I am very sorry; Thursday is one of the days I have specially devoted to study,” stammered forth the unhappy pastor. “What with the Wednesday meeting and the Friday committee——” Mrs. Brown drew herself up as well as the peculiarities of her form permitted, and her roseate countenance assumed a deeper glow. “We've been in the chapel longer than Tozer,” said the offended deaconess, “We've never been backward in taking trouble, nor spending our substance, nor puttin' our hands to every other good work; and as for makin' a difference between one member and another, it's what we ain't been accustomed to, Mr. Vincent. I'm a plain woman, and speak my mind, Old Mr. Tufton was very particular to show no preference. He always said it never answered in a flock to show more friendship to one nor another; and if it had been put to me, I wouldn't have said, I assure you, sir, that it was us as was to be made the first example of. If I haven't a daughter fresh out of boarding-school, I've been a member of Salem five-and-twenty years, and had ministers in my house many's the day, and as friendly as if I were a duchess; and for charities and such things, we've never been known to fail.” ... Such was the Salem Chapel connection and its requirements; and such was Mr, Vincent's first experience of social life in Carlingford.'
The visit of the young minister to the old man he had superseded is as admirable as Mrs. Tozer's tea-party. Mr. Tufton strikes us as quite the proper type of pastor for such a flock. His counsel to his ambitious, ardent successor is excellent. We almost hear him speak as he raises his fat forefinger and slowly shakes it. 'Be careful, my dear brother;you must keep well with your deacons, you must not take up prejudices against them. Dear Tozer is a man of a thousand—a man of a thousand! Dear Tozer, if you listen to him, will keep you out of trouble. The trouble he takes and the money he spends for Salem Chapel is, mark my words, unknown—and,' added the old pastor, awfully syllabling the long word in his solemn bass, 'in-con-ceiv-able.' Adelaide Tufton, the minister's daughter, a dreadful shrewd invalid, like a malign parrot, predicts that Mr. Vincent will not last out two years under the chapel managers, and when we hear the much-lauded Mr. Tozer aspiring to rule in the pulpit as well as in the vestry, we begin to agree with her. 'I'm very partial to your style, Mr. Vincent,' said the deacon; 'there's just one thing I'd like to observe, sir, if you'll excuse me. I'd give 'em a coorse; there's nothing takes like a coorse in our connection. Whether it's on a chapter or a book of scripture, or on a perticklar doctrine, I'd make a point of giving 'em a coorse if it was me. There was Mr. Bailey, of Parson's Green, as was so popular before he married—he had a historical coorse in the evenings, and a coorse upon the eighth of Romans in the morning; and it was astonishing to see how they took....' The deacon's version of this poor minister's dismissal is a caution for Mr. Vincent, who asks the reason why of his going. Tozer shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. 'All along of the women: they didn't like his wife; and my own opinion is he fell off dreadful.... and the managers found the chapel falling off, and a deputation waited on him; and to be sure he saw it his duty to go.'
The young minister follows the butterman's advice about the 'coorse,' and soon fills the chapel to overflowing; but he suffers his heart to go madly astray after that 'bright particular star' of the highest Carlingford society, Lady Western, and that is an irretrievable blunder. There is something ludicrous as well as painful in his passion, which brings him nothing but mortification and grief. The enthusiasm of pretty Phœbe Tozer and her compeers is lost on him,and general discontent in the connection results. The flock rebels, and when the pastor falls into trouble, falls away from him—all but Tozer, that 'man of a thousand,' and his family. These improbable events and others, not connected with the chapel business, but mixed in with it by the dexterous art of the story-teller, bring on the scene one of the best characters in the book—Vincent's proud, brave, discreet little mother. But the crisis is past her management, and her discretion and valour avail only to secure for her son a dignified retreat from Carlingford. Disappointed in his love, disgusted with his vocation, he determines to resign his pastorate, and in his farewell oration to his flock he sums up the opinions of Nonconformity, which are all his brief experience has left him.
'“I am one of those who have boasted in my day that I received my title of ordination from no bishop, from no temporal provision, from no traditionary church, but from the hands of the people. Perhaps I am less sure than I was at first, when you were all disposed to praise me, that the voice of the people is the voice of God; but, however that may be, what I received from you I can but render up to you. I resign into your hands your pulpit which you have erected with your money, and hold as your property. I cannot hold it as your vassal. If there is any truth in the old phrase which calls a church a cure for souls, it is certain that no cure of souls can be delegated to a preacher by the souls themselves who are to be his care. I find my old theories inadequate to the position in which I find myself, and all I can do is to give up the post where they have left me in the lurch. I am either your servant, responsible to you, or God's servant, responsible to Him—which is it? I cannot tell; but no man can serve two masters, as you know.”'
'A Church of the Future, an ideal corporation, grand and primitive, shone before his eyes, as it shines before so many; but in the meantime the Nonconformist went into literature, as was natural, and was, it was believed in Carlingford, the founder of the “Philosophical Review,” that new organ of public opinion.' The golden vision of the enthusiastic young minister, what is it but the grand old medieval theory born again? A church free above the world and universal—and so in the round of ages extremes meet, the earth swings on, but human nature never changes, and there is no new thing under the sun.
Our remarks on the famous 'Chronicles of Carlingford' have run out to so great a length that we must sum up briefly what we have to say about the writer's other works. We regret this the less because Mrs. Oliphant does not provoke to much variety of criticism. When we have said that her English is good, her method diffuse, her sarcastic vein excellent, her moral tone unimpeachable, we have said almost all there is to say of her style. It is not so strongly characterized that we can ever declare with certainty on taking up a new story in 'Blackwood' that it is hers or not hers. By the time we have read half way through if we are no longer in doubt, but she has not the individuality by which we can assert at once, 'This is Mrs. Oliphant's—her mark.'
Some years before the 'Chronicles' there appeared in 'Blackwood's a charming group of shorter stories of which we retain the pleasantest recollections; of these 'Katie Stewart,' and 'The Quiet Heart' were the chief. 'Zaidée,' and 'The Athelings' were amongst Mrs. Oliphant's earlier pictures of English society, and amongst her most recent are 'Madonna Mary,' and 'Agnes,' both tales of sorrow. In 'A Son of the Soil,' she goes back to Scottish ground and her most serious vein; and in the 'Brownlows,' her last published work, we detect a slight flavour of Carlingford.
Besides her novels by which she is most widely known, Mrs. Oliphant has written a 'Life of Irving,' which deserves a permanent place amongst the biographies of national worthies. We will not do it so ill a service as to treat of it at the fag end of an article; we will but quote the criticism of a shrewd old woman of the cottage class, who having read leisurely through it from the first word to the last, remarked: “That's a real good book, and very interesting;” and then wiping her spectacles, moved her mark backwards and added, “I'll read it over again.” It will indeed bear reading over again many times, and in a cheaper form would, we think, achieve the popularity it certainly merits.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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