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MRS. OLIPHANT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.* Tars as a sad book,—the history of a sacrifice, and of a sacrifice which did not succeed. From her early youth Mrs. Oliphant was obliged to work, and to work incessantly—for money—and thus, by over-production, she consciously over- burdened her great genius. As Carlyle said of Thomas Camp- bell, she turned her head into a shop instead ot a:manufactory. That it was her duty to sacrifice art to money-making she regretted, but never really doubted. As she tells us, DeStiny reversed for her the positions of God and Mammon. The three boys for whom she gave up everything all died in early manhood, two before they had succeeded, one not before he had hopelessly failed. In these desultory bio- graphical notes, written at different times, Mrs. Oliphant "unpacks her soul," and the reader will hardly look at her wares without tears. She was born at Wallingford—we suppose in Scotland—but first opened her eyes to life in the village of Lasswade, six miles from Edinburgh. Here the reader is introduced to a Scotch family, badly off, but educated and very proud.
"I was brought up," she says "with the sense of belonging to an old chivalrous, impoverished race. I have never got rid of the prejudice, though I don't think our branch of the Oliphants was much to brag of. I would not, however, do anything to dispel the illusion, if it is one, for my mother's sake, who held it stoutly, and without a doubt." Among dim memories of childish days the proud mother stands out by far the most interesting figure. A clever, hot-tempered Scotch woman, passionately devoted to her children, who "though her kindness was inexhaustible and her love boundless—yet she could drive her opponent of the moment half frantic with half-a-dozen words and cut to the quick with a flying phrase." We gather there was no great affection between her and a selfish, taciturn husband who hated the sight of a stranger, particularly if that stranger was a guest in his own house. The two sons of the house were several years older than their sister, one of them a plodding, satisfactory boy, and one very clever and loveable, but who came during Mrs. Oliphant's childhood " by some sort of defeat in life,"—a moral one we gather. Before she was twenty she wrote and published Margaret Maitland. The success of this book comforted the family, she tells us, for another trouble caused by poor Willie, " with whom things had gone wrong again." Accordingly, his sister was sent to London, where Willie was studying theology, to take care of him and keep him out of mischief. This she seems to have succeeded in doing, and it was on this visit to London that she met her cousin, Frank Oliphant, an artist, whom she subsequently married. We hear nothing about her courtship, and not a great deal about her married life till the last year of it in Italy. Mr. Oliphant was always ailing and never successful. We gather that the little house- hold, first in Harrington Square and then in Harley Street, depended almost entirely on Mrs. Oliphant for its main- tenance. At last the doctors insisted that she should take her husband to Italy, knowing, though she did not, that he was far advanced in consumption, and would never come back. The pictures she gives of this time in Italy would be quite tragic but for the gleams of gaiety she manages with consummate art to throw in by way of contrast. Up td six weeks before the birth of her last child, Mrs. Oliphant nursed her husband and wrote for Blackwood to keep him and the children. His illness had many painful details, and. does not seem to have brought with it that feverish hopefulness which consumption sometimes gives its victims, but only • Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. Oliphant. Arranged and edited by lire. Harry Coghill. London: William Blackwood and Sons. [21n] a deep, silent gloom. She tells us she sometimes snatched a few moments from her work or her nursing to go to look at a particular Virgin in the Pitti Gallery, because she " had no other woman to go to to be comforted." Just before her husband's death, he insisted on leaving Florence and going to Rome, where he seems to have caught a fever which hastened his end. "Frank died, kissing me even after his lips were cold and without an anxiety." Mrs. Oliphant began her widowhood with £1,000 of debt, three little children, and £200 from her husband's life insurance. Her publishers were kind, and we gather her debts were of the nature of advances. Some months after her husband's death, Mrs. Oliphant returned to England and settled in a little house at Ealing, where she began the series of novels called The Chronicles of Carlingford. The success of these stories was, she tells us, her nearest approach to fame. They deal with lower middle- class, country-town Dissenters, and are marvellously con- vincing ; but Mrs. Oliphant never knew any English Dissenters, or anything about chapels, she tells us. " I took the sentiment and a few details from our old church in Liverpool [where she passed her later childhood] which was Free Church of Scotland, and where there were a few grocers and other such good folk whose ways with the minister were wonderful to behold. The saving grace of their Scotchness being withdrawn, they became still more wonderful as dissenting Deacons, and the truth of the picture was applauded to all the echoes." At Ealing she became acquainted with the Blacketts. It was she who introduced Miss Muloch, an acquaintance of the old Harrington Square days, to Mr. Blackett. He published shortly after John Halifax, the novel which made Miss Muloch's fortune, a better fortune than Mrs. Oliphant ever made, as she tells us rather ruefully. These pleasant years at Ealing ended with a visit to Rome, where she went with the Tullochs, taking her children, and where her eldest child, a little girl of eleven, died of fever.
This was an almost unbearable blow to her. For a long time she seems to have been incapacitated for everything, even work. Writing of this loss at the end of her life, after the death of her sons and her nephew, she says :— "Up to five years ago I could not say her dear name without the old pain coming back ; since then, when there came to be another to bury in my heart, my little girl seemed all at once to become a tranquil sweet recollection, and now that all are gone she is but a dear shadow far in the background ; while my boys take up in death as in life the whole of the darkened scene."
Mrs. Oliphant took up the thread of her life again and at Eton, where she went for the education of her boys, where she lived almost till her death. Here she had several happy years, somewhat clouded by money anxiety (she was a bad manager of money), and besides her own sons she maintained for years her brother and his son and two daughters. Her nephew went to Eton with her own boys, and she became greatly attached to him. " My dear, steady boy," she calls him. He, alas ! died in India directly after his " Cooper's Hill " success,—he was only just grown up. The brother to whom she had been devoted as a child seems to have been rather difficult to live with as a man, having failed and having nothing to do. He always " disapproved of her ways," she says. Perhaps of her want of economy,—not as shown in taking him and his children to live with her, we should suppose. But whether her brother noticed it or not, the want of what she calls the " Scotch grace of thrift" seriously contributed to make her life a tragedy. She had no time nor inclination for economy. Sometimes with four extra people added to her family, two of whom she tells us were expensive, she had a hard tug to make both ends meet. " I always managed it somehow, thank God, very happy (presuming a little on my privilege) when I saw the way tolerably clear before me, and I knew at the beginning of the year where the year's income was to come from, but driving and ploughing on when I was not at all sure of that, all the same, and in some miraculous way getting through. I made on the whole a large income,—and spent it." What would have happened had her health given way ? Certainly the line between trusting God and tempting Providence is, as she herself points out, very fine. Writing of herself in this mood, Mrs. Oliphant makes very light of her gifts. " My own stories in the making of them were much what other peoples were in the reading. I am no more interested in my own characters than I am in Jeanie Deans. I do not remember them half so well, nor do they come back to me with the same steady friendship." To keep the domestic pot boiling, or rather to give her family—boys, girls, brother, and all—every pleasure she could afford, and hide the struggle she made to afford it, might strike the casual reader as all Mrs. Oliphant thought her story-telling talent good for. But this was not, we think, her true estimate of herself. We think she made a great sacrifice, and made it with her eyes open, but at any rate she thought she did. Her supernatural stories, notably The Beleaguered City, were, in her own eyes, her best work.
She never wrote on the supernatural but "when it came to her." Her irritation at commonplace praise of this book must prove to the reader—we quote—" that she thought no small beer of herself." The passage beginning "I can't help won- dering what I might have done had I lived like George Eliot in a mental hothouse," proves the same thing ; so does the drift of many passages which space forbids us to quote.
The following sentences in a letter to Mr. Blackwood explain her real attitude in this matter :—" How good of Mr. Kinglake to interest himself about the poor little reputation which thae muving things ca'ed means' have forced me to be so careless of. I think, though, if ever the time comes that I can lie on my oars after the boys are out in the world, or when the time comes, which there is no doubt about, when I shall be out of the world, that I will get a little credit—but not much now, there is so much of me." Later on, when her sons were dead—one of a lingering disease, and one after he had grievously " missed his footing "—Mrs. Oliphant's ambition, which she had so splendidly curbed, died altogether. " What is the reputation of a circulating library to me ? " she cries. It irritates her that people should think it can be any consola- tion. All she longs for is to be able again "to move about the house and serve my children with my own hands." " My God, what is the good done by any work such as mine, or even better than mine 4 " But this was the cry of a broken heart, not the words of a sound judgment. Perhaps Mrs. Oliphant never wrote anything better, even in The Beleaguered City, than the last pages of her autobiography, when all alone she looks back at " ces beaux jours quand j'etais si malheureuse ":— " The moments of relief were so great and so sweet, they seemed compensation for the pain. I remembered no more the anguish. Lately in my many sad musings it has been brought very clearly before my mind how often all the horrible tension, the dread and anxiety which there are no words strong enough to describe—which devoured me, but which I had to conceal, often behind a smiling face—would yield in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound of a voice, at the first look, into an ineffable ease and the over- whelming happiness of relief from pain—sometimes when I opened a door, sometimes in a letter—in all simple ways I cannot explain, but if this should ever come to any woman in the passion and agony of motherhood she will more or less understand. I was thinking lately, or rather, as sometimes happens, there was suddenly pre- sented to my mind like a suggestion from some one else, the recol- lection of these ineffable happinesses ; and it seemed to me that it meant that which would be when one pushed through that last door—and was met—by what—or by whom i'—by instant relief."
Supposing we are right, and Mrs. Oliphant did knowingly sacrifice the children of her imagination, who might have been of use to the world, to the children of her body, who were not of very much, the question forces itself upon us, Was she right or wrong 7 Was her whole life a great mistake and failure, or had it in it something of the sublime 4 One cannot say for certain. It all depends what she has found on the other side of " that last door."
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