THE VICTORIAN BACKGROUND
I
I intend, in this and two following lectures, Gentlemen, taking my illustrations in the main from Victorian times, to examine with you how one and the same social question, urgent in our politics, presented itself to several writers of imaginative genius, all of whom found something intolerable in England and sought in their several ways to amend it.
At the beginning of this enquiry let me disclaim any parti pris about the duty of an imaginative writer towards the politics of his age. Aristophanes has a political sense, Virgil a strong one even when imitating Theocritus; Theocritus none: yet both are delightful: Lucretius has no care for politics, Horace has any amount, and both are delightful again: the evils of his time which oppress the author of Piers Plowman, affect Chaucer not at all: Dante is intensely political, Petrarch, far less sublime as a poet, disdains the business; Villon is for life as it flies, Ronsard for verse and art (and the devil take the rest); Spenser, with a sore enough political experience, casts it off almost as absolutely as does Ariosto. Shakespeare has a strong patriotic sense and a manly political sense: but he treats politics—let us take King John and Coriolanus for examples—artistically, for their dramatic value. He knows about
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
and that they can be unendurable: but he does not use them for propaganda (odious word!) whatever the minute of utterance. Milton put all his religion into verse, his politics into prose; save for a passage or two in Lycidas and Paradise Lost he excluded politics from his high poetry. On the other hand Dryden had a high poetic sense of politics, and it pervades the bulk of his original poetry, while the opening of his famous Essay of Dramatic Poesy strikes an introductory note as sure as Virgil’s, through whom a deep undercurrent of politics runs from the first page of the Eclogues to the last of the Æneid. Our poets of the eighteenth century were social and political in the main: since if you once take Man for your theme, you, or some one following you, must be drawn on irresistibly to compare the position you assign him in the scheme of things with his actual position in the body politic, to consider the “Rights of Man,” “man’s inhumanity to man” and so forth. An Essay on Man (with the philosophy Pope borrowed for it) leads on to The Deserted Village:
—to Crabbe’s Poor House, Hall of Justice, Prison; to Blake’s lyrical laments over small chimney-sweeps, blackamoors, foundlings and all that are young and desolate and oppressed, and the vow to sweep away “these dark Satanic mills” (of which I shall have more to say by and by) “and build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.” Turn now to Keats and you are returned upon mere poetry, in the Latin sense of mere. Keats has no politics, no philosophy of statecraft, little social feeling: he is a young apostle of poetry for poetry’s sake.
But of course, to put it solidly, that is a vague observation—to anyone whom life has taught to face facts and define his terms, actually an uneducated conclusion, albeit most pardonable in one so young and ardent. Let us, for a better, go on to the last and grandest word of his last, unfinished, poem:
Such a spirit, preëminently, was Shelley; of whom, when the last word of disparagement has been said, or the undeniable truth, put into a phrase by Mr. Max Beerbohm, “a crystal crank,” the equally undeniable fact remains that Shelley suffered tortures over the woes of his fellow-creatures, while Byron (for a contrast) cares scarcely at all for the general woe surrounding him, everything for his own affliction in a world which had paid him tribute far above the earnings of common men, and yet not only (as Shelley does) casts the blame on tyrants and governments, but the cure for his egoistical troubles on political machinery, revolutions. I go on, taking names and illustrations almost at random. Contrast any Radical utterance of Tennyson’s—his Lady Clara Vere de Vere, for example—with poor Thomas Hood’s Song of the Shirt. Why, it fades away: Hood’s passionate charity simply withers up the other’s personal self-assertive inverted snobbery. If you have stuff in you, contrast the note of
with the whine of Lady Clara Vere de Vere—
—which is just
—on the pianola. Observe, pray, that I am not comparing the poetic gift, in which (as in other gifts of the gods) Tennyson very greatly outweighted Hood. I am merely setting some poets against others and contrasting the degrees in which they exhibit social or political sensitiveness. We should all allow, probably, that Robert Browning was a greater poet and a stronger thinker than his wife: but probably deny to him the acute indignation against human misery, social wrong, political injustice, evinced by the authoress of The Cry of the Children or Casa Guidi Windows. Of the two friends, Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, we should as probably admit Arnold to be the better poet as Clough to be the less occupied with his own soul, the more in vain attempt to save other men. So again among the Pre-Raphaelites Swinburne raves magnificently for the blood of tyrants: but when it came to lifting the oppressed, to throwing himself into the job, what a puff-ball was he beside William Morris who had announced himself as no more than “the idle singer of an empty day”!
II
So far we have spoken of poets—fairly selected, I trust—and have found that there are poets and poets; and some are Olympian in attitude, looking down deep below the surface from a great height as a gannet spies his fish; but high aloof, concerned rather with universal themes than with the woman of Canaan clamorous in the street crying for her daughter, “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”
Now if we turn to our novelists, from Defoe to Scott, we find that the novel from its first virtual beginning in our country and for a century or more, has for social diseases in the body politic little concern and practically no sense at all. Defoe has strong political sense, but keeps it for his tracts and pamphlets: in Robinson Crusoe (and specially in the third volume, The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe), in Moll Flanders, in Roxana, he is always a moralist, but a religious moralist. If—to twist a line of Hamlet—there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark, it does not come within the scope of the novelist whose office is to combine amusement with general edification. So—leaving out the edification—it is in Tristram Shandy, so in The Vicar of Wakefield. Richardson is all for the human heart as he reads it, and female virtue. Fielding with his genial manly morality—Fielding, magistrate of a London Police Court, and a humane one—discloses little sense in his novels of any vera causa in our system supplying the unfortunates for whom, in daily life, he tempers justice with mercy. You will not, I think, cite Jonathan Wild against me. Noble fellow, as he drops down the Thames—stricken to death, and knowing it—on that hopeless voyage to Lisbon, his thoughts are hopeful for England and the glory of her merchant shipping: and (says he) it must be our own fault if it doth not continue glorious:
for continue so it will, as long as the flourishing state of our trade shall support it, and this support it can never want, till our legislators, shall cease to give sufficient attention to the protection of our trade, and our magistrates want sufficient power, ability, and honesty to execute the laws: a circumstance not to be apprehended, as it cannot happen till our senates and our benches shall be filled with the blindest ignorance, or with the blackest corruption.
Smollett’s recipe for a novel is just a rattling picaresque story enlivened by jocular horse-play. Respect Fanny Burney and idolise Jane Austen as we will, they move their plots on a narrow and sheltered stage: while the romantics, working up from Horace Walpole to Scott, call in the past to redress the poverty of the present and the emptiness of a general theory of the arts which, deservedly sovereign in its day, has passed by imitation into convention, and through convention, as always, into mere inanition.
III
Now if you will take, as a convenient starting-point for your enquiry, the year 1832—the year that saw the passing of the Great Reform Bill and the death of Scott: if you will start (I say) with that year beyond which, when I first made acquaintance, with the English School here, our curiosity was forbidden to trespass—you will find that then, or about then, certain terrible diseases in our Commonwealth were brewing up to a head. As everyone now recognises, we must seek the operating cause of these in what we now agree to call the “Industrial Revolution”; that is in the process as yet unrestricted by law, encouraged by economic theory, moving at once too fast for the national conscience to overtake or even to realise it and with a step of doom as rigidly inexorable as the machinery, its agent and its symbol, converting England into a manufacturing country, planting the Manchester of those days and many Manchesters over England’s green and pleasant land, and leaving them untended to grow as they pleased polluting her streams, blackening her fields, and covering—here lies the indictment—with a pall of smoke, infinite human misery: all this controlled and elaborated by cotton-lords and mine-owners who prospered on that misery.
The plight of rural, agricultural, England is another story. Here in Lancashire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire was a monstrous revolution gathering strength (as I say) beyond men’s power even to realise it. And if they realised it, there was Political Economy assuring them that it had to be. And it continued (as you will remember) long after poor Wragg strangled and left her illegitimate infant on the dismal Mapperly hills and the egregious Mr. Roebuck asked, if, the world over or in past history, there was anything like it. “Nothing. I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last.”
We all recognise it now, and the wicked folly of it—or at least I hope we do. My purpose to-day, Gentlemen, is not to excite vain emotions over a past which neither you nor I can remedy at all, but simply to show that—as, after all, we are a kindly nation—the spectacle of industrial England about and after 1832 became intolerable to our grandfathers: how it operated upon two extraordinarily different minds: and (if I can) how irresistible is the wind of literature, through what mouthpiece soever it breathes with conviction.
IV
But before examining how two of the most dissimilar minds conceivable—one a man’s, the other a woman’s—reacted upon it, I must indicate the enormity of the challenge.
France had passed through her Revolution and her Terror, with graphic details of which our public speakers and writers had taken pains to make our country familiar enough: and England had won out of the struggle, having taken the side she chose, all oblivious (as we are, maybe, to-day) that victory in arms is at best but the beginning of true victory, and that she herself was in the throes of a revolution not a whit the less murderous than that of France, and only less clamant because its victims, instead of aristocrats and politicians and eminent saviours of their country following one another by scores in tumbrils to die scenically in the Place de la République, the Place of the Guillotine, were serfs of the cotton-mill and the mine, wives, small children, starved unscenically, withered up in foetid cellars or done to death beside the machines of such a hell-upon-earth as Manchester had grown to be out of towns in which an artificer, however humble, had once been permitted to rejoice in that which alone, beyond his hearth and family, heartens a man—the well-executed work of hand and brain. The capitalists of that time simply overwhelmed these towns, expanding, converting them into barracks for workers. Who these workers were, let an advertisement in a Macclesfield paper of 1825 attest—
To the Overseers of the Poor and to families desirous of settling in Macclesfield. Wanted between 4,000 and 5,000 persons between the ages of 7 and 21 years.
Yes, let us pass the hideous towns with but one quotation, from Nassau Senior—
As I passed through the dwellings of the mill-hands in Irish Town, Ancoats and Little Ireland, I was only amazed that it was possible to maintain a reasonable state of health in such homes. The towns, for in extent and number of inhabitants they are towns, have been erected with the utmost disregard of everything except the immediate advantage of the speculative builder.... In one place we found a whole street following the course of a ditch, because in this way deeper cellars could be secured without the cost of digging, cellars not for storing wares or rubbish, but for dwellings of human beings. Not one house in the street escaped the cholera.
“Such,” wrote Chadwick, that careful observer, “is the absence of civic economy in some of our towns that their condition in respect of cleanliness is almost as bad as that of an encamped horde or an undisciplined soldiery.”
But from the poor men and women—who had sold themselves into these slums and industrial slavery—let us turn to their hapless children, who, after all, had never asked to be born. Your Malthus in that age, and your Mr. Harold Cox in this, are positive (God forgive them!) that a number of these brats never ought to be born. (I don’t know the price of millstones, but they ought to be cheap and handy, and properly labelled.) I shall lay stress on these children, Gentlemen, because—as children do so often—they brought back the gospel—or something of it. For these weaklings, as they were the foundation of the manufacturer’s wealth, by their illimitable woe enabling him to cut his wages, in the end brought about his exposure. To us—for always to us in our day the past wears a haze softening it into sentiment—Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Cry of the Children is nothing, or suspected as sentimental, to be classed alongside with anything (say) by Mrs. Hemans or L. E. L. Listen to a couple of stanzas or three—
V
Now, I dare say some of you, even while I read this, were dismissing it in your minds as early-Victorian humanitarianism, faded philanthropy, outworn sentiment. Yes, but even a sentiment, if it works simultaneously upon a generation of great and very dissimilar writers, is a fact in the story of our literature—a phenomenon, at least, which made itself an event—to be studied by you scientifically. One of the first rules of good criticism, and the sheet-anchor of the historical method, is to put yourself (as near as may be) in the other fellow’s place: and if you take but a very little pains to do so, you will soon discover that Mrs. Browning was not writing “for the fun of the thing,” exuding, or causing to be exuded, any cheap tears. We are accustomed to Manchester to-day: we take it for granted as a great community with a most honourable Press to represent its opinions. But we only take it for granted because it has become tolerable, and it only became tolerable, then dignified—it only became a city—because our Victorian writers shamed its manufacturers out of their villainies. In the twenties, thirties, and “hungry forties” of the last century Manchester was merely a portent, and a hideous portent, the growth of which at once fascinated our economists and frightened our rulers. Think of the fisherman in the Arabian Nights who, unstopping the bottle brought ashore in his net, beheld a column of smoke escape and soar and spread, and anon and aloft, overlooking it, the awful visage of a Genie. Even so our economists watched an enormous smoke ascend from Manchester and said, “Here is undreamed-of national prosperity”; while our ministers stared up into the evil face of a monster they had no precedent to control. You understand, of course, that I use “Manchester” as a symbolic name, covering a Lancashire population which grew in the first twenty years of the century from 672,000 to 1,052,000. But let a very different person from Mrs. Browning—let Benjamin Disraeli, then a young man, describe the portent.
From early morn to the late twilight our Coningsby for several days devoted himself to the comprehension of Manchester. It was to him a new world, pregnant with new trains of thought and feeling. In this unprecedented partnership between capital and science—
Mark you, not between capital and labour, but between capital and science, still by machinery arming capital to vaster strength—
In this unprecedented partnership between capital and science, working on a spot which Nature had indicated as the fitting theatre for their exploits, he beheld a great source of the wealth of nations which had been reserved for these times, and he perceived that this wealth was rapidly developing classes whose power was imperfectly recognised in the constitutional scheme, and whose duties to the social system seemed altogether omitted
—“and whose duties to the social system seemed altogether omitted.” There, in Disraeli’s words, you have it. Every prolonged war raises a new governing class of prosperous profiteers who turn their country’s necessity to glorious gain. So it was a hundred years ago at the conclusion of the long Napoleonic struggle: so it is to-day. So it goes on ever. A profiteering class of speculators and (as Cobbett would say) “loan-mongers” emerges at the top of any great war. Ex-soldiers tramp the roads for work, for bread. Decent folk, bred in the incurable belief that England, whoever suffers, must pay her debts, sell out and suffer, breaking up old homes, cutting neighbourly ties, disappearing, taxed out of endurance, electing to suffer, for honour’s sake. Succeeds a generation or two which, at school or University, are baptised into the old honourable cult. The gravity of an Englishman, because they are English after all, revives and takes possession of young hearts, made generous by education, forgetful of old woes. And so in time—give it a couple of generations—the descendants of the sponge and the parvenu will have shed the hair from the hoof, will leap to the summons of noblesse oblige, and in their turn make haste to die by Ypres or the Somme, transmitting somehow the mettle of England into a future denied to them.
VI
But you will say that, although this revolt in the better minds of England, a hundred years ago, may be a fact, I have as yet quoted but the evidence of a poetess and a novelist. Very well, then: I go to Blue Books and the reports of several commissions, reminding you that I lay most stress on the children because it happened through their almost inconceivable sufferings that, such as it was, victory came.
In 1831 Michael Sadler (a great man, in spite of Macaulay, and the ancestor of a great one—if I may insert this word of long admiration for the first senior man who spoke to me at my first undergraduate dinner in Hall, more than forty years ago)—in 1831 this Michael Sadler, member for Newark, introduced a Ten Hours Bill, and moved its second reading in a speech that roundly exposed, along with other woes of the poor, the sacrifice of child life in the mills. The Bill was allowed a second reading on condition that the whole subject should be referred to a Select Committee, over which Sadler presided.
Now let me quote a page from Mr. and Mrs. Hammond’s recently published study of Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, who, though so many have laughed at him, devoted his life that they should laugh if they chose, but willy-nilly on the right side of their mouths, and not with a grin unacceptable to any Divinity presumed as having created Man in His image—
The Report of Sadler’s Committee is a classical document; it is one of the main sources of our knowledge of the conditions of factory life at the time. Its pages bring before the reader in the vivid form of dialogue the kind of life that was led by the victims of the new system. Men and women who were old at twenty, from all the industrial districts, from Manchester, from Glasgow, from Huddersfield, from Dundee, from Bradford, from Leeds, passed before their rulers with their tale of weariness, misery, and diseased and twisted limbs. A worsted spinner of Huddersfield, Joseph Hebergram, aged seventeen, described his day’s work at the age of seven. His hours were from five in the morning to eight at night, with one solitary break of thirty minutes at noon. All other meals had to be taken in snatches, without any interruption of work. “Did you not become very drowsy and sleepy towards the end of the day and feel much fatigued?” “Yes; that began about three o’clock; and grew worse and worse, and it came to be very bad towards six and seven.” “What means were taken to keep you at your work so long?” “There were three overlookers; there was one a head overlooker, and there was one man kept to grease the machines, and there was one kept on purpose to strap.” His brother, who worked in the same mill, died at sixteen from spinal affection, due to his work, and he himself began to grow deformed after six months of it. “How far do you live from the mill?” “A good mile.” “Was it very painful for you to move?” “Yes, in the morning I could scarcely walk, and my brother and sister used, out of kindness, to take me under each arm, and run with me to the mill, and my legs dragged on the ground; in consequence of the pain I could not walk.” Another witness, an overseer in a flax spinning mill at Dundee, said that there were nine workers in the room under his charge who had begun work before they were nine years old, and that six of them were splay-footed and the other three deformed in other ways. A tailor at Stanningley, Samuel Coulson, who had three daughters in the mill, described the life of his household when the mill was busy. In the ordinary time the hours were from six in the morning to half-past eight at night; in the brisk time, for six weeks in the year, these girls, the youngest of them “going eight,” worked from three in the morning to ten or half-past ten at night. “What was the length of time they could be in bed during those long hours?” “It was near eleven o’clock before we could get them into bed after getting a little victuals, and then at morning my mistress used to stop up all night, for fear that we could not get them ready for the time; sometimes we have gone to bed and one of us generally awoke.” “Were the children excessively fatigued by this labour?” “Many times; we have cried often when we have given them the little victualling we had to give them; we had to shake them, and they have fallen asleep with the victuals in their mouths many a time.”
Another witness, Gillett Sharpe, described how his boy, who had been very active and a good runner, gradually lost the use of his limbs at the mill. “I had three steps up into my house, and I have seen that boy get hold of the sides of the door to assist his getting up into the house; many a one advised me to take him away; they said he would be ruined and made quite a cripple; but I was a poor man, and could not afford to take him away, having a large family, six children under my care.”
—and so on, and so on. Sadler forced the horrible tale upon Parliament. Unhappily, being pitted against Macaulay at Leeds in the General Election of 1832, he lost his seat, though Manchester sent an appeal signed by 40,000 factory-workers: and he never returned to the House of Commons. He died in 1835 at fifty-five, worn out by his work on behalf of these poor children.
VII
His mantle descended to Lord Ashley: and Ashley, after bitter defeats, won on the mine-children what had been lost in the cotton-mills. For the mines took an even more hideous toll of childhood than did the mills. Listen to this, extracted from the Report of the Commission of 1840–1842, which shocked all England by its disclosures—
In every district except North Staffordshire, where the younger children were needed in the Potteries, the employment of children of seven was common, in many pits children were employed at six, in some at five, and in one case a child of three was found to be employed. Even babies were sometimes taken down into the pits to keep the rats from their fathers’ food. The youngest children were employed as trappers; that is, they were in charge of the doors in the galleries, on the opening and closing of which the safety of the mine depended. For the ventilation of the mine was contrived on a simple principle; there were two shafts, one the downcast, the other the upcast. A fire was lighted at the foot of the upcast to drive the air up the shaft, and air was sucked down through the downcast to fill the vacuum. This air was conducted by means of a series of doors through all the workings of the mine on its passage to the upcast, and these doors were in the charge of a little boy or girl, who sat in a small hole, with a string in his or her hand, in darkness and solitude for twelve hours or longer at a time. “Although this employment,” reported the Commission, “scarcely deserves the name of labour, yet as the children engaged in it are commonly excluded from light, and are always without companions, it would, were it not for the passing and re-passing of the coal carriages, amount to solitary confinement of the worst order.”
Children were also employed to push the small carriages filled with coals along the passages, and as the passages were often very low and narrow, it was necessary to use very small children for this purpose. “In many mines which are at present worked, the main gates are only from 24 to 30 inches high, and in some parts of these mines the passages do not exceed 18 inches in height. In this case not only is the employment of very young children absolutely indispensable to the working of the mine, but even the youngest children must necessarily work in a bent position of the body.” As a rule the carriages were pushed along small iron railways, but sometimes they were drawn by children and women, “harnessed like dogs in a go-cart,” and moving, like dogs, on all fours. Another children’s task was that of pumping water in the under-bottom of pits, a task that kept children standing ankle-deep in water for twelve hours. In certain districts children were used for a particularly responsible duty. In Derbyshire and parts of Lancashire and Cheshire it was the custom to employ them as engine men, to let down and draw up the cages in which the population of the pit descended to its depths and returned to the upper air. A “man of discretion” required 30s. a week wages; these substitutes only cost 5s. or 7s. a week. Accidents were, of course, frequent,—on one occasion three lives were lost because a child engineman of nine turned away to look at a mouse at a critical moment,—and the Chief Constable of Oldham said that the coroners declined to bring in verdicts of gross neglect from pity for the children.
VIII
Do you ask “What has all this to do with literature, or what has literature to do with these things”? I answer that, as a matter of mere history, literature in the nineteenth century did immensely concern itself with these things: and I add that, as literature deals with life, so if it deserve a place in any decent state, it should deal with these things. And to this again I add, because they dealt righteously and unsparingly with these things, Shelley, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin—yes and, later, William Morris—live on the lips of men to-day. For they let in light upon dark places; not only revealing them to the public conscience, but, better still and better far, conveying light and waking eyesight in the victims themselves.
Denunciation has its uses: and if you want to hear denunciation, listen to Carlyle—
British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge poison-swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral; a hideous living Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive; such a Curtius’ gulf, communicating with the Nether Deeps, as the Sun never saw till now. These scenes, which the Morning Chronicle is bringing home to all minds of men,—thanks to it for a service such as Newspapers have seldom done,—ought to excite unspeakable reflections in every mind. Thirty-thousand outcast Needlewomen working themselves swiftly to death; three million Paupers rotting in forced idleness, helping said Needlewomen to die: these are but items in the sad ledger of despair.
Thirty-thousand wretched women, sunk in that putrefying well of abominations; they have oozed-in upon London, from the universal Stygian quagmire of British industrial life; are accumulated in the well of the concern, to that extent. British charity is smitten to the heart, at the laying-bare of such a scene; passionately undertakes, by enormous subscription of money, or by other enormous effort, to redress that individual horror; as I and all men hope it may. But, alas, what next? This general well and cesspool once baled clean out to-day, will begin before night to fill itself anew.
Yes, denunciation has its uses: and public exposure is salutary, or at least sanitary, though its first revelations sicken to such despair as Carlyle’s. But the true operation of light is upon the sufferer’s own eyes, the promise in its salutation is for them. Listen to this one sentence from Porter’s Progress of the Nation, published in 1851—
In 1839, 1840 and 1841, 40 per cent. of the men and 65 per cent. of the women married or witnessing marriages in Lancashire and Cheshire could not sign their names
—and at this time Leonard Horner, Inspector of Factories, reported that in an area of thirty-two square miles comprising Oldham and Ashton, with a population of 105,000, there was not a single public day school for poor children. Consider these millions of children who grew up to be men and wives in purlieus not once penetrated by so much as a glint of the romance, the poetry, that as we look back—you a short way, Gentlemen—I a long one—we see as Heaven lying about us in our infancy. There lay the soul’s tragedy—
There lay the tragedy: there the seat of cure: and if, with so much left undone, it has become possible from this desk to preach, without serious rebuke, that humanism can be taught even in our Elementary Schools, and, further, that to see it is so taught may well concern even a great University, these humanitarians of the nineteenth century were the men and women who invaded the borders of Zabulon and Nephthalim, until for them which sat in darkness, in the region and shadow of death, light is sprung up.
IX
But I recall myself to my purpose; which in two following lectures shall be as literary, as merely critical, as I can keep it. To-day I have set out the theme and tried to show you how it had perforce to occupy men’s minds and—since artists and imaginative writers must have feelings as well as intellect—almost to dominate our literature and art in the last century. In that domination of interest you will find implicit, and will easily evolve for yourselves, the reason why the novel in particular, being a social form of art and lending itself in so many ways to episode, discussion, even direct preaching, became political as it never was in the days of Richardson and Fielding, Scott and Jane Austen. The preponderance of the theme being granted, I next propose to examine how it took possession of two persons of genius: a man and a woman; the man assertive, personally ambitious, full of fire and opulent phrase: the woman staid, self-abnegating, to me wearing the quiet, with the intensity, of a noble statue. I can conceive, if one would trace in literature the operation of a compelling idea, no two exponents more essentially disparate than Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell.