“The kindly spirit which thinks no ill looks out of her pages irradiate;
and while we read them, we breathe the purer intelligence that prefers to
deal with emotions and passions which have a living root in minds within
the pale of salvation, and not with those that rot without it. This
spirit is more especially declared in _Cousin Phillis_ and _Wives and
Daughters_—their author’s latest works; they seem to show that for her
the end of life was not descent among the clods of the valley, but ascent
into the purer air of the heaven-aspiring hills.
“We are saying nothing of the merely intellectual qualities displayed in
these later works. Twenty years to come, that may be thought the more
important question of the two; in the presence of her grave we cannot
think so; but it is true, all the same, that as mere works of art and
observation, these later novels of Mrs. Gaskell’s are among the finest
of our time. There is a scene in _Cousin Phillis_—where Holman, making
hay with his men, ends the day with a psalm—which is not excelled as a
picture in all modern fiction; and the same may be said of that chapter
of this last story in which Roger smokes a pipe with the Squire after the
quarrel with Osborne. There is little in either of these scenes, or in a
score of others which succeed each other like gems in a cabinet, which
the ordinary novel-maker could ‘seize.’ There is no ‘material’ for _him_
in half a dozen farming men singing hymns in a field, or a discontented
old gentleman smoking tobacco with his son; still less could he avail
himself of the miseries of a little girl sent to be happy in a fine house
full of fine people; but it is just in such things as these that true
genius appears brightest and most unapproachable.” (_Cornhill Magazine_,
1865.)