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:
if ladies be but young and fair,
They have the gift to know it.
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--
I doubt if she said to you much that could act
As a thought or suggestion: she did not attract
In the sense of the brilliant or wise: I infer
’Twas her thinking for others made you think of her.
She never found fault with you, never implied
Your wrong by her right: and yet men at her side
Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town
The children were gladder that pulled at her gown....
The weak and the gentle, the ribald and rude,
She took as she found them, and did them all good:
It always was so with her--see what you have!
She has made the grass greener even here ... with her grave.
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.
Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,
Makes that, and the action, fine.
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:
nec fertilis ilia juvencis
Nec pecori opportuna seges nec commoda Baccho--
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