MRS. GASKELL
I
We think of her habitually—do we not?—by her married title of “Mrs. Gaskell.” Who Mr. Gaskell was this generation does not, in an ordinary way, pause to enquire: a neglect which does injustice to a gentleman of fine presence, noble manners and high culture. She was a beautiful woman: they married in 1832, and had children, and lived most happily.
So it is as “Mrs. Gaskell” that we think of her: and I dare to wager that most of you think of her as Mrs. Gaskell, authoress of Cranford. Now heaven forbid that anything I say this morning should daunt your affection for Cranford, as heaven knows how long and sincerely I have adored it. I have adored it at least long enough and well enough to understand its devotees—for Cranford has not only become popular in the sense, more or less, that Omar Khayyam has become popular—by which I mean that, at this season or thereabouts, numbers of people buy a copy in limp suède, with Hugh Thomson’s illustrations, and only hesitate over sending it to the So-and-So’s with best wishes on a chilling doubt that they sent it last year, with the identical good wishes—if indeed they are not returning the identical volume they received! Well, let us be merry and careless!—in the course of a week or two these soft bricks will be dropping on every hearth.
But seriously, one finds devotees of Cranford everywhere; and especially, in my experience, among scholarly old men. They have Cranford written on their hearts, sometimes hardly covering a cherished solution of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Cranford and the novels of Jane Austen—you never know how many delightful persons cherish them, have them by heart, pore over their text as over an Ode of Pindar’s. And they are fierce, these devotees, as the noble new edition of Jane Austen by Mr. Chapman of the Oxford Press has recently been teaching us. Here are five volumes edited with all the care that study and affection can lavish on the task. Yet from here, there and everywhere lovers start up from firesides—scattered widowers of this dear maiden—challenging over variae lectiones, feeling for the hilt on the old hip to champion (we’ll say) “screen” as the right word against “scene” as printed—
It is as serious, almost, as all that: and so it is with Cranford, and Miss Jenkyns and Captain Brown and adorable Miss Matty.
Yet, let us admit there are certain works which conquer some of us, we cannot tell why. To go a very long way from Cranford, take Tristram Shandy. No one can really criticise Tristram Shandy, and all pretence to do so is mere humbug. Either you like Tristram Shandy (as I do, for one) or you don’t, and there’s an end to it. My sole complaint against the devotees of Cranford is that, admiring it, revelling in it, they imagine themselves to have the secret of Mrs. Gaskell, stop there, and do not go on to explore her other works of which one at any rate I shall presently dare to proclaim to you as the most perfect small idyll ever written in English prose.
II
The sin is the worse because every one acknowledges the Life of Charlotte Brontë to be—after Boswell’s Life of Johnson, admittedly beyond competition—among the two or three best biographies in our language. Conceive the Brontës—not Charlotte alone, but the whole family—the whole of that terrible family in that terrible parsonage at Haworth—as this staid lady, wife of a Unitarian minister, faithfully depicts them—the wastrel son, Branwell: through long nights tearing his own heart out, with his stern old father’s, in the bedroom they had, for safety, to occupy together: in the end pulling himself up to die standing: the shuddering sisters listening on the stairs; Emily, doomed and fierce, she too in her turn standing up to die. Consider—I will not say Wuthering Heights, or Charlotte’s well-known magnificent description, in Villette, of Rachel and her tortured acting—but consider if only by illustration of contrast this most maddened poem by Emily—and there are others as tragic—
The Prisoner
Consider, I say, that the authoress of Cranford not only lived with these fierce women and comforted them as their benign friend, with a comfort that no soul can give to another without understanding, but portrayed them (their struggles ended) in a book that combines the English (even the Victorian English) with the Greek, a fidelity to awful fact with a serene judgment, a tender mercy—the two so discovering and covering all, that—whether it be in charity or in justice—its core of truth has never been challenged: that it stands yet among the noblest few of English biographies. I put it to you that, if you but set together those two books—Cranford and the Life of Charlotte Brontë—at once you must recognise the operating hand—the quietly operating hand—of genius. But this, even when Mrs. Gaskell’s longer novels are thrown into the scale, has avoided, I think—because she herself is so equable, so temperate—its right recognition. Yes, her very portrait has a Hellenic look, so beautiful it is, so penetrating its calm gaze.
III
Yet maybe you think it strange that I find so much of high Hellenic quality in this quiet lady—born a Stevenson, to be sure—but christened Elizabeth Cleghorn, names not to us reminiscential of Hybla or the Ilissus. Her father was a Unitarian minister, who preached in that capacity, in Dob Lane Chapel, Manchester—which again does not suggest the Acropolis. In 1832 she married a Unitarian minister, son of a prosperous manufacturer, minister to a Chapel in Cross Street, Manchester, and prominent on the Home Missionary Board. For these and some particulars that follow I go to the best sources known to me.4
4 Sir Adolphus Ward’s various Introductions to the Knutsford Edition (8 volumes, published by John Murray) and the article on her in the Dictionary of National Biography, by the same writer, whose scholarship, when devoted to this dead lady, reaches to a religious note of chivalry.
Her married life was one of unbroken happiness. Her husband had literary leanings, and in 1838 she writes to Mrs. Howitt, “We once thought of trying to write sketches among the poor, rather in the manner of Crabbe (now don’t think this presumptuous), but in a more beauty-seeing spirit: and one—the only one—was published in Blackwood, January, 1837.5 But I suppose we spoke our plan near a dog-rose, for it never went any further.”
5 The curious may read it in Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. CCIV, or in Sir Adolphus Ward’s Biographical Introduction.
So you see that she had already made Manchester her home, and was already interested in the poor.
Also one may interpose here that (without evidence of her portrait) she was acknowledged by all who met her to be a person of quite remarkable beauty, and as little conscious of it as any beautiful woman has any right to be: since as Jaques noted:
Above all, she had the ineffable charm of being the least assertive, the most concerned with others, in any company. I think that of her rather than of any other writing-woman one may quote Mrs. Browning’s lines on her Kate—
Such a woman, as I trace her portrait, was Mrs. Gaskell, and I think the end of the story will confirm my reading of her. She made no show: without interfering she saw beauty in the lives of the poor: she lived with the misery of Manchester and pitied it; and across a personal bereavement—or (shall we say?) out of the very anguish of her own breast—she relieved her heart in her first long book in pity for that place.
In 1844 Mr. and Mrs. Gaskell revisited Festiniog, in North Wales, a halt of their wedding tour. They took their children with them; and at the inn there the eldest daughter caught the scarlet fever. Mrs. Gaskell removed her with her infant brother to Portmadoc, where he sickened of the fever and died. It was in search of an anodyne for sorrow that the mother began to write Mary Barton. Read that book with just these two or three facts in your mind, and you will find an illustration—though it almost shames me to give you one so poignant—of the way in which the sincerest art is begotten and brought forth: that is, by lifting one’s own experience up to a Universal, and then bringing it back to reclothe it in imaginary, particular, men and women.
IV
In two previous lectures, Gentlemen, I have given you—it may well be ad nauseam—the conditions of life among the industrial poor of that period as they can be gathered from Blue Books and out of Hansard. In my last lecture I tried to indicate how they affected the ambitious (and to that extent selfish) but yet chivalrous mind of Disraeli. I shall be shorter with Mrs. Gaskell, who invents no political novel, but just tells the tale and passes on. But she tells it, and I select here to read to you a passage to illustrate rather how gently and charitably she tells it than to make out the worst of the case, which yet may be found in her pages.
At all times it is a bewildering thing to the poor weaver to see his employer removing from house to house, each one grander than the last, till he ends in building one more magnificent than all, or withdraws his money from the concern, or sells his mill, to buy an estate in the country, while all the time the weaver, who thinks he and his fellows are the real makers of this wealth, is struggling on for bread for his children, through the vicissitudes of lowered wages, short hours, fewer hands employed, etc. And when he knows trade is bad, and could understand (at least partially) that there are not buyers enough in the market to purchase the goods already made, and consequently that there is no demand for more; when he would bear and endure much without complaining, could he also see that his employers were bearing their share; he is, I say, bewildered and (to use his own word) “aggravated” to see that all goes on just as usual with the mill-owners. Large houses are still occupied, while spinners’ and weavers’ cottages stand empty, because the families that once filled them are obliged to live in rooms or cellars. Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food,—of the sinking health, of the dying life, of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times?
I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters: but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks.
But there are earnest men among these people, men who have endured wrongs without complaining, but without ever forgetting or forgiving those whom (they believe) have caused all this woe.
Among these was John Barton. His parents had suffered; his mother had died from absolute want of the necessaries of life. He himself was a good, steady workman, and, as such, pretty certain of steady employment. But he spent all he got with the confidence (you may also call it improvidence) of one who was willing, and believed himself able, to supply all his wants by his own exertions. And when his master suddenly failed, and all hands in the mill were turned back, one Tuesday morning, with the news that Mr. Hunter had stopped, Barton had only a few shillings to rely on; but he had good heart of being employed at some other mill, and accordingly, before returning home, he spent some hours in going from factory to factory, asking for work. But at every mill was some sign of depression of trade! Some were working short hours, some were turning off hands, and for weeks Barton was out of work, living on credit. It was during this time that his little son, the apple of his eye, the cynosure of all his strong power of love, fell ill of the scarlet fever. They dragged him through the crisis, but his life hung on a gossamer thread. Everything, the doctor said, depended on good nourishment, on generous living, to keep up the little fellow’s strength, in the prostration in which the fever had left him. Mocking words! when the commonest food in the house would not furnish one little meal. Barton tried credit; but it was worn out at the little provision shops, which were now suffering in their turn. He thought it would be no sin to steal, and would have stolen; but he could not get the opportunity in the few days the child lingered. Hungry himself, almost to an animal pitch of ravenousness, but with bodily pain swallowed up in anxiety for his little sinking lad, he stood at one of the shop windows, where all edible luxuries are displayed; haunches of venison, Stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly—all appetising sights to the common passer by. And out of this shop came Mrs. Hunter, his late employer’s wife! She crossed to her carriage, followed by the shopman loaded with purchases for a party. The door was quickly slammed to, and she drove way; and Barton returned home with a bitter spirit of wrath in his heart, to see his only boy a corpse!
You can fancy, now, the hoards of vengeance in his heart against the employers. For there are never wanting those who, either in speech or in print, find it their interest to cherish such feelings in the working classes; who know how and when to rouse the dangerous power at their command; and who use their knowledge with unrelenting purpose to either party.
Now you know from actual evidence given you in my two previous lectures that this account is not overstrained. You see how the writer makes allowances; and how, all allowances made, her thrust is as deadly as any in Disraeli’s Sybil.
V
But now comes in the difference. Mrs. Gaskell knew these people as Disraeli did not. She had lived among them, and to all the angry protests evoked by Mary Barton she returned, of her knowledge, gentle, but gently firm answers which could not be refuted.6 The story, at any rate, exercised at once a “commanding effect,” and the width of that effect was attested by translations into many foreign languages—French, German, Spanish, Hungarian and Finnish.
6 I should mention here, by the way, on Sir Adolphus Ward’s authority, the virtual certainty that before writing her own novel she “had remained quite unacquainted with both Coningsby and Sybil.”
She did not go on to exploit that success, that effect. She had said what she had to say; and having found, in the saying of it, her gift as a writer, she passed on to other things. A very beautiful necklace of novels was the result. But this serene indifference to what might with others have meant a very strong “literary” temptation implied no failing devotion to the poor whose woes the book had, once for all, championed. Some eighteen years later, in 1862–3, a time of trouble came over Manchester and South-west Lancashire in general, which
called forth one of the most notable, and certainly one of the best-organized efforts of goodwill and charity which this country has ever seen. In the long struggle between masters and men, the times of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, due to the outbreak and continuance of the American Civil War, brought about a protracted truce, in which the kindly feelings inspired by the self-sacrificing efforts of many leading employers of manufacturing labour cannot but have counted for much.
I am quoting from Sir Adolphus Ward:
Mrs. Gaskell, whose name had so good a sound among the Lancashire working classes that we hear of an Oldham man regularly bringing his children to gaze upon the house in Plymouth Grove where dwelt the authoress of Mary Barton, gave many proofs in these times of trouble of her readiness to help suffering in every way in her power.
The relief problem, in short, claimed her almost entirely during that long tribulation of her people. “We were really glad,” she writes to a friend, “to check one another in talking of the one absorbing topic, which was literally haunting us in our sleep, as well as being our first thoughts in wakening and the last at night.” In organising, superintending, working sewing-rooms, providing dinners, she would work for six or seven hours of her day.
The shadow of these and other industrial troubles recurs, indeed, in some of the later novels, particularly in North and South: but always you see that with her there is no political axe to grind, nor scarce a consciousness of there being any such thing: and this disinterested charitableness leads her, as it were, imperceptibly into regions of which Disraeli, with all his genius, never won ken. The first incentive, I have tried to show, operated on both. But whereas he went off into a life of action—great and powerful action, let all admit—to return in his old age to revisit with Endymion the glimpses of the moon and his boyish dreams, this unambitious Victorian lady, having found her literary talent, went on to employ it with a serenity unmoved to worship any idols of the market. Glad of course she was to enjoy and use her gift: very modestly glad (as what true woman or man is not?) of the recognition it brought, but following the path to the end to bequeath to the world several noble novels and three shining masterpieces. Of these, of course, the Life of Charlotte Brontë is one and Cranford the second: and for the moment I leave you to guess at the third. For the moment I wish you to picture this woman. In her writing, as in her daily life, she had no mannerisms. She copied neither Disraeli, nor Dickens, who also championed the poor and was moreover her encourager and editor; nor the Brontës, for all the spell of their genius; nor Trollope, nor George Eliot; though all were great and flattered her with their admiration. Past them all we see her quietly keeping the tenor of her way. Now and again she seems to falter and ask herself—herself, mind you—Is this trouble to speak the simple truth as best I can, without heat, really worth its reward as set against the heat and acrimony it provokes? The strictures passed on her Life of Charlotte Brontë gave her, for a time, a distaste for it all. But she wrote on, after a little, and on Sunday, November 12, 1865, killed of a sudden by a pang of the heart—carried away, as her epitaph at Knutsford (which is “Cranford”) says, “Without a moment’s warning”—she left her writings all just as clean and bright as the bunch of her household keys.
VI
I shall pass the catalogue of these writings very quickly in review. The authoress of Mary Barton was hailed at that time, when novels were yet few and even poetry but beginning to recover its strength, by great men and by Dickens especially, who engaged her pen for the first number of his serial adventure, Household Words. In 1853 appeared her second important novel, Ruth (which possibly influenced Dickens’ own Hard Times, published a year later). Then in June, 1853, came Cranford, made into a book from papers contributed to Household Words between December, 1851, and May, 1853. North and South ran in Household Words from September, 1854, to January, 1855, and appeared as a book, with some slight alterations, in that year. In that year also (on March 31st) Charlotte Brontë died and Mrs. Gaskell consented, at the old father’s urgent request, to write the Biography. She gave herself up to the work and finished it in the spring of 1857. The strictures on it—truth, as Milton says, never comes into the world but as a bastard—broke her spirit for a while for all but occasional writing: and then came the cotton famine, of which I have spoken, to tax all her energies. But after the stress of this they revived. In 1863 appeared Sylvia’s Lovers, in 1863–4 Cousin Phillis in the pages of the Cornhill Magazine. In this magazine (August, 1864–January, 1866) followed her last story, Wives and Daughters, published soon after in that year as an unfinished work. So you see the whole tale of it lies within the central years of the last century, beginning with Mary Barton in 1848 and ending sharply just eighteen years after.
VII
I do not propose to discuss the toll of her work this morning. I wish that those of you who aspire to write, and are here learning to write, would study it—for two reasons. For the first, while I admit many flaws, it seems to me elementally of the best literary breeding, so urbane it is, so disposedly truthful; so much of the world, quizzing it; so well aware, all the while, of another. For my second, that here you have, refuting, an exception to all hasty generalisations about the nineteenth century, the Victorian Age, horsehair sofas, the Evangelicals, the Prince Consort, the Great Exhibition of 1851 and all that bagful of cheap rubbish. In 1851 this lady was writing Cranford: in 1863 she was writing Cousin Phillis: and considering that most lovely idyll, I am moved to ask, “Do you, at any rate, know it, this Sicilian yet most English thing of the mid-nineteenth century?” I am moved to say, “Yes, Keats is lovely, and was lovely to me alas! before ever you were born: but quit your gushing and your talk about ‘romantic revivals’—which are but figments invented by fellows who walk round and round a Grecian urn, appraising it scholastically. Quit it, and try to make a Grecian urn. The horses on the frieze of the Parthenon are good horses: but you have as good to study to-day or to-morrow if you will but take a short journey out to Newmarket and study them. Which is better?—to watch a gallop between two colts on a heath, or to bend a congested nose over Ferrex and Porrex?”
To be classical is not to copy the classics: to be classical is to learn the intelligence of the classics and apply just that to this present world and particularly to this island of ours so familiar and yet so romantic.
VIII
I spoke, a while back, of three masterpieces of Mrs. Gaskell, naming two, leaving you to guess the third. Lay by your Cranford, and take up and study Cousin Phillis.
I suppose its underlying sadness has kept it out of popular esteem—this tale of scarcely more than a hundred pages—a pale and shadowy sister of Cranford. It has none, or little of Cranford’s pawky fun: it has not Cranford’s factitious happy ending. But it beats me to guess how any true critic can pass it over and neglect a thing with all that is best in Theocritus moving in rustic English hearts. And it is not invented. It has in all its movements the suggestion of things actually seen—of small things that could not have occurred to any mind save that of an eye-witness—of small recognitions, each in its turn a little flash of light upon the steady background of rural England. It is England and yet pure Virgil—as purely Virgilian as the vignette, in the Fourth Georgic, of the old man of Corycus tilling his scanty acres:
who yet brought home his own-grown vegetables at night and cast them on the table, in his mind equal to the wealth of kings. I shall read you two passages—the first of young Paul’s introduction, by his cousin Phillis, to her father the ex-minister and Virgilian scholar turned farmer and labouring with his hinds—
“There is father!” she exclaimed, pointing out to me a man in his shirt-sleeves, taller by the head than the other two with whom he was working. We only saw him through the leaves of the ash-trees growing in the hedge, and I thought I must be confusing the figures, or mistaken: that man still looked like a very powerful labourer, and had none of the precise demureness of appearance which I had always imagined was the characteristic of a minister. It was the Reverend Ebenezer Holman, however. He gave us a nod as we entered the stubble-field; and I think he would have come to meet us, but that he was in the middle of giving some directions to his men. I could see that Phillis was built more after his type than her mother’s. He, like his daughter, was largely made, and of a fair, ruddy complexion, whereas hers was brilliant and delicate. His hair had been yellow or sandy, but now was grizzled. Yet his grey hairs betokened no failure in strength. I never saw a more powerful man—deep chest, lean flanks, well-planted head. By this time we were nearly up to him; and he interrupted himself and stepped forwards, holding out his hand to me, but addressing Phillis.
“Well, my lass, this is cousin Manning, I suppose. Wait a minute, young man, and I’ll put on my coat, and give you a decorous and formal welcome. But—Ned Hall, there ought to be a water-furrow across this land: it’s a nasty, stiff, clayey, dauby bit of ground, and thou and I must fall to, come next Monday—I beg your pardon, cousin Manning—and there’s old Jem’s cottage wants a bit of thatch; you can do that job to-morrow, while I am busy.” Then, suddenly changing the tone of his deep bass voice to an odd suggestion of chapels and preachers, he added, “Now I will give out the psalm: ‘Come all harmonious tongues,’ to be sung to ‘Mount Ephraim’ tune.”
He lifted his spade in his hand, and began to beat time with it; the two labourers seemed to know both words and music, though I did not; and so did Phillis: her rich voice followed her father’s, as he set the tune; and the men came in with more uncertainty, but still harmoniously. Phillis looked at me once or twice, with a little surprise at my silence; but I did not know the words. There we five stood, bareheaded, excepting Phillis, in the tawny stubble-field, from which all the shocks of corn had not yet been carried—a dark wood on one side, where the wood-pigeons were cooing; blue distance, seen through the ash-trees, on the other. Somehow, I think that, if I had known the words, and could have sung, my throat would have been choked up by the feeling of the unaccustomed scene.
The hymn was ended, and the men had drawn off, before I could stir. I saw the minister beginning to put on his coat, and looking at me with friendly inspection in his gaze, before I could rouse myself.
And now let me read you this exquisite passage—there are many almost as lovely—of Phillis in love, walking with her cousin Paul—alas! not her beloved.
We talked about the different broods of chickens, and she showed me the hens that were good mothers, and told me the characters of all the poultry with the utmost good-faith; and in all good-faith I listened, for I believe there was a great deal of truth in all she said. And then we strolled on into the wood beyond the ash-meadow, and both of us sought for early primroses and the fresh green crinkled leaves. She was not afraid of being alone with me after the first day. I never saw her so lovely, or so happy. I think she hardly knew why she was so happy all the time. I can see her now, standing under the budding branches of the grey trees, over which a tinge of green seemed to be deepening day after day, her sun-bonnet fallen back on her neck, her hands full of delicate wood-flowers, quite unconscious of my gaze, but intent on sweet mockery of some bird in neighbouring bush or tree. She had the art of warbling, and replying to the notes of different birds, and knew their song, their habits and ways, more accurately than any one else I ever knew. She had often done it at my request the spring before; but this year she really gurgled, and whistled, and warbled, just as they did, out of the very fulness and joy of her heart. She was more than ever the very apple of her father’s eye; her mother gave her both her own share of love and that of the dead child who had died in infancy. I have heard cousin Holman murmur, after a long dreamy look at Phillis, and tell herself how like she was growing to Johnnie, and soothe herself with plaintive inarticulate sounds, and many gentle shakes of the head, for the aching sense of loss she would never get over in this world.
My eyes, to be sure, are not what they were: but to them the prose of this shimmers with beauty. In Mrs. Gaskell, as with many another ageing writer, one can detect towards the close a certain sunset softness—a haze, we may call it—in which many hard experiences are reconciled. To take the highest, we agree that it so happened to Shakespeare. To step down to the man with whom for a study in the differences of literary genius starting from a like incentive—the woes of the poor, and operating in the same literary form, the novel—I have been—I hope, Gentlemen, not whimsically—contrasting this very noble lady, we know that in his later days, in Endymion, Disraeli saw his youth so, casting back to it. And you, maybe, will say that these sunset softening colours are all a mirage. Well, a great deal of it all is that. I believe that, as you grow older, you will find yourselves more and more tending to make less, and still less, account of definitions, of sharp outlines and judgments based on them; of anybody’s positive assertions, be he never so young.
IX
I have been speaking, however, to-day of one whose measure in any light has never to my thinking been accurately taken. The crew of Odysseus were Greeks. They beached their ship (says Homer) on the isle of the Laestrygonians: and there came down to them the Queen of the Laestrygonians, “a woman as tall as a mountain,” and they hated her. The Victorian Age lent itself to excess; and its excessive figures are our statues for some to deface or bedaub. But I, who have purposely compared Elizabeth Gaskell with her most ornate contemporary, dare to prophesy that when criticism has sifted all out, she will come to her own, as a woman of genius, sweetly proportioned as a statue, yet breathing; one of these writers we call by that vain word—so vain, so pathetic even when used of the greatest poet—“immortal.”