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Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign: A Book of Appreciations

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Title: Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign: A Book of Appreciations

Author: Mrs. Oliphant
        Mrs. Alexander
        E. Lynn Linton
        Edna Lyall
        Katharine S. Macquoid
        Emma Marshall
        Louisa Parr
        Adeline Sergeant
        Charlotte M. Yonge


        
Release date: July 6, 2011 [eBook #36641]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36641

Credits: Produced by Delphine Lettau, Pat McCoy and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMEN NOVELISTS OF QUEEN VICTORIA'S REIGN: A BOOK OF APPRECIATIONS ***




Produced by Delphine Lettau, Pat McCoy and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









  WOMEN NOVELISTS

  _Of_

  QUEEN VICTORIA'S REIGN





  Women Novelists

  _Of_

  Queen Victoria's Reign

  _A Book of Appreciations_

  By

  Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Lynn Linton
  Mrs. Alexander, Mrs. Macquoid, Mrs. Parr
  Mrs. Marshall, Charlotte M. Yonge
  Adeline Sergeant & Edna Lyall

  London

  Hurst & Blackett, Limited
  13 Great Marlborough Street
  1897


  _ALL RIGHTS RESERVED_

  Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.

  At the Ballantyne Press




  CONTENTS


  THE SISTERS BRONTE
      _By_ MRS. OLIPHANT                            _Page_   1

  GEORGE ELIOT
      _By_ MRS. LYNN LINTON                         _Page_  61

  MRS. GASKELL
      _By_ EDNA LYALL                               _Page_ 117

  MRS. CROWE
  MRS. ARCHER CLIVE
  MRS. HENRY WOOD
      _By_ ADELINE SERGEANT                         _Page_ 149

  LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON
  MRS. STRETTON
  ANNE MANNING
      _By_ CHARLOTTE M. YONGE                       _Page_ 193

  DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
      _By_ MRS. PARR                                _Page_ 217

  JULIA KAVANAGH
  AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS
      _By_ MRS. MACQUOID                            _Page_ 249

  MRS. NORTON
      _By_ MRS. ALEXANDER                           _Page_ 275

  "A. L. O. E." (MISS TUCKER)
  MRS. EWING
      _By_ MRS. MARSHALL                            _Page_ 291





  PUBLISHERS' NOTE


_Having been concerned for many years in the publication of works of
fiction by feminine writers, it has occurred to us to offer, as our
contribution to the celebration of "the longest Reign," a volume having
for its subject leading Women Novelists of the Victorian Era._

_In the case of living lady fictionists, it is too early to assess the
merit or forecast the future of their works. The present book,
therefore, is restricted to Women Novelists deceased._

_It was further necessary to confine the volume within reasonable
limits, and it was decided, consequently, that it should deal only with
Women who did all their work in Fiction after the accession of the
Queen. This decision excludes not only such writers as Lady Morgan, Mrs.
Opie, Miss Ferrier, Miss Mitford, Mrs. Shelley, and Miss Jane Porter,
who, although they died after 1837, published all their most notable
stories early in the century; but also such writers as Mrs. Gore, Mrs.
Bray, Mrs. S. C. Hall, Mrs. Trollope, Lady Blessington, and Mrs. Marsh,
who made their debuts as novelists between 1823 and 1834._

_As regards some of the last-named, it might be urged that the works
they produced have now no interest other than historical, and can be
said to live only so far as they embody more or less accurate
descriptions of Society early in the Reign. The "Deerbrook" and "The
Hour and the Man" of Miss Martineau are still remembered, and, perhaps,
still read; but it is as a political economist and miscellaneous writer,
rather than as a Novelist, that their author ranks in literature; while
of the tales by Miss Pardoe, Miss Geraldine Jewsbury, and others once
equally popular, scarcely the titles are now recollected._

_On the other hand, the eminence and permanence of the Brontes, George
Eliot, and Mrs. Gaskell are universally recognised; the popularity of
Mrs. Craik and Mrs. Henry Wood is still admittedly great; the
personality of Mrs. Norton will always send students to her works; Mrs.
Crowe and Mrs. Clive were pioneers in domestic and "sensational"
fiction; Lady Georgiana Fullerton produced a typical religious novel;
Miss Manning made pleasing and acceptable the autobiographico-historical
narrative; the authors of "The Valley of a Hundred Fires" of "Barbara's
History," and of "Adele" have even now their readers and admirers; while
"A. L. O. E." and Mrs. Ewing were among the most successful caterers for
the young._

_It has seemed to us that value as well as interest would attach to
critical estimates of and biographical notes upon, these representative
Novelists, supplied by living mistresses of the craft; and we are glad
to have been able to secure for the purpose, the services of the
contributors to this volume, all of whom may claim to discourse with
some authority upon the art they cultivate. It is perhaps scarcely
necessary to say that each contributor is responsible only for the essay
to which her name is appended._




THE SISTERS BRONTE

_By_ MRS. OLIPHANT




THE SISTERS BRONTE


The effect produced upon the general mind by the appearance of Charlotte
Bronte in literature, and afterwards by the record of her life when that
was over, is one which it is nowadays somewhat difficult to understand.
Had the age been deficient in the art of fiction, or had it followed any
long level of mediocrity in that art, we could have comprehended this
more easily. But Charlotte Bronte appeared in the full flush of a period
more richly endowed than any other we know of in that special branch of
literature, so richly endowed, indeed, that the novel had taken quite
fictitious importance, and the names of Dickens and Thackeray ranked
almost higher than those of any living writers except perhaps Tennyson,
then young and on his promotion too. Anthony Trollope and Charles Reade
who, though in their day extremely popular, have never had justice from
a public which now seems almost to have forgotten them, formed a
powerful second rank to these two great names. It is a great addition to
the value of the distinction gained by the new comer that it was
acquired in an age so rich in the qualities of the imagination.

But this only increases the wonder of a triumph which had no artificial
means to heighten it, nothing but genius on the part of a writer
possessing little experience or knowledge of the world, and no sort of
social training or adventitious aid. The genius was indeed unmistakable,
and possessed in a very high degree the power of expressing itself in
the most vivid and actual pictures of life. But the life of which it had
command was seldom attractive, often narrow, local, and of a kind which
meant keen personal satire more than any broader view of human
existence. A group of commonplace clergymen, intense against their
little parochial background as only the most real art of portraiture,
intensified by individual scorn and dislike, could have made them: the
circle of limited interests, small emulations, keen little spites and
rancours, filling the atmosphere of a great boarding school, the
Brussels _Pensionnat des filles_--these were the two spheres chiefly
portrayed: but portrayed with an absolute untempered force which knew
neither charity, softness, nor even impartiality, but burned upon the
paper and made everything round dim in the contrast. I imagine it was
this extraordinary naked force which was the great cause of a success,
never perhaps like the numerical successes in literature of the present
day, when edition follows edition, and thousand thousand, of the books
which are the favourites of the public: but one which has lived and
lasted through nearly half a century, and is even now potent enough to
carry on a little literature of its own, book after book following each
other not so much to justify as to reproclaim and echo to all the winds
the fame originally won. No one else of the century, I think, has called
forth this persevering and lasting homage. Not Dickens, though perhaps
more of him than of any one else has been dealt out at intervals to an
admiring public; not Thackeray, of whom still we know but little; not
George Eliot, though her fame has more solid foundations than that of
Miss Bronte. Scarcely Scott has called forth more continual droppings of
elucidation, explanation, remark. Yet the books upon which this
tremendous reputation is founded though vivid, original, and striking in
the highest degree, are not great books. Their philosophy of life is
that of a schoolgirl, their knowledge of the world almost _nil_, their
conclusions confused by the haste and passion of a mind self-centred and
working in the narrowest orbit. It is rather, as we have said, the most
incisive and realistic art of portraiture than any exercise of the
nobler arts of fiction--imagination, combination, construction--or
humorous survey of life or deep apprehension of its problems--upon which
this fame is built.

The curious circumstance that Charlotte Bronte was, if the word may be
so used, doubled by her sisters, the elder, Emily, whose genius has been
taken for granted, carrying the wilder elements of the common
inspiration to extremity in the strange, chaotic and weird romance of
"Wuthering Heights," while Anne diluted such powers of social
observation as were in the family into two mildly disagreeable novels of
a much commoner order, has no doubt also enhanced the central figure of
the group to an amazing degree. They placed her strength in relief by
displaying its separate elements, and thus commending the higher skill
and larger spirit which took in both, understanding the moors and wild
country and rude image of man better than the one, and misunderstanding
the common course of more subdued life less than the other. The three
together are for ever inseparable; they were homely, lowly, somewhat
neglected in their lives, had few opportunities and few charms to the
careless eye: yet no group of women, undistinguished by rank, unendowed
by beauty, and known to but a limited circle of friends as unimportant
as themselves have ever, I think, in the course of history--certainly
never in this century--come to such universal recognition. The effect is
quite unique, unprecedented, and difficult to account for; but there
cannot be the least doubt that it is a matter of absolute fact which
nobody can deny.

       *       *       *       *       *

These three daughters of a poor country clergyman came into the world
early in the century, the dates of their births being 1816, 1818, 1820,
in the barest of little parsonages in the midst of the moors--a wild but
beautiful country, and a rough but highly characteristic and keen-witted
people. Yorkshire is the very heart of England; its native force, its
keen practical sense, its rough wit, and the unfailing importance in the
nation of the largest of the shires has given it a strong individual
character and position almost like that of an independent province. But
the Brontes, whose name is a softened and decorated edition of a common
Irish name, were not of that forcible race: and perhaps the strong
strain after emotion, and revolt against the monotonies of life, which
were so conspicuous in them were more easily traceable to their Celtic
origin than many other developments attributed to that cause. They were
motherless from an early age, children of a father who, after having
been depicted as a capricious tyrant, seems now to have found a fairer
representation as a man with a high spirit and peculiar temper, yet
neither unkind to his family nor uninterested in their welfare. There
was one son, once supposed to be the hero and victim of a disagreeable
romance, but apparent now as only a specimen, not alas, uncommon, of the
ordinary ne'er-do-well of a family, without force of character or
self-control to keep his place with decency in the world.

These children all scribbled from their infancy as soon as the power of
inscribing words upon paper was acquired by them, inventing imaginary
countries and compiling visionary records of them as so many imaginative
children do. The elder girl and boy made one pair, the younger girls
another, connected by the closest links of companionship. It was thought
or hoped that the son was the genius of the family, and at the earliest
possible age he began to send his effusions to editors, and to seek
admission to magazines with the mingled arrogance and humility of a
half-fledged creature. But the world knows now that it was not poor
Branwell who was the genius of the family; and this injury done him in
his cradle, and the evil report of him that everybody gives throughout
his life, awakens a certain pity in the mind for the unfortunate youth
so unable to keep any supremacy among the girls whom he must have
considered his natural inferiors and vassals. We are told by Charlotte
Bronte herself that he never knew of the successes of his sisters, the
fact of their successive publications being concealed from him out of
tenderness for his feelings; but it is scarcely to be credited that when
the parish knew the unfortunate brother did not find out. The unhappy
attempt of Mrs. Gaskell in writing the lives of the sisters to make this
melancholy young man accountable for the almost brutal element in Emily
Bronte's conception of life, and the strange views of Charlotte as to
what men were capable of, has made him far too important in their
history; where, indeed, he had no need to have appeared at all, had the
family pride consisted, as the pride of so many families does, in
veiling rather than exhibiting the faults of its members. So far as can
be made out now, he had as little as possible to do with their
development in any way.

There was nothing unnatural or out of the common in the youthful life of
the family except that strange gift of genius, which though consistent
with every genial quality of being, in such a nature as that of Scott,
seems in other developments of character to turn all the elements into
chaos. Its effect upon the parson's three daughters was, indeed, not of
a very wholesome kind. It awakened in them an uneasy sense of
superiority which gave double force to every one of the little
hardships which a girl in a great school of a charitable kind, and a
governess in a middle-class house, has to support: and made life harder
instead of sweeter to them in many ways, since it was full of the biting
experience of conditions less favourable than those of many persons
round them whom they could not but feel inferior to themselves.

The great school, which it was Charlotte Bronte's first act when she
began her literary career to invest with an almost tragic character of
misery, privation, and wrong, was her first step from home. Yorkshire
schools did not at that period enjoy a very good reputation in the
world, and Nicholas Nickleby was forming his acquaintance with the
squalid cruelty of Dotheboys Hall just about the same time when
Charlotte Bronte's mind was being filled with the privations and
discontents of Lowood. In such a case there is generally some fire where
there is so much smoke, and probably Lowood was under no very heavenly
_regime_: but at the same time its drawbacks were sharply accentuated by
that keen criticism which is suggested by the constant sense of injured
worth and consciousness of a superiority not acknowledged. The same
feeling pursued her into the situations as governess which she occupied
one after another, and in which her indignation at being expected to
feel affection for the children put under her charge, forms a curious
addition to the other grievances with which fate pursues her life. No
doubt there are many temptations in the life of a governess; the
position of a silent observer in a household, looking on at all its
mistakes, and seeing the imperfection of its management with double
force because of the effect they have on herself--especially if she
feels herself competent, had she but the power, to set things
right--must always be a difficult one. It was not continued long enough,
however, to involve very much suffering; though no doubt it helped to
mature the habit of sharp personal criticism and war with the world.

At the same time Charlotte Bronte made some very warm personal
friendships, and wrote a great many letters to the school friends who
pleased her, in which a somewhat stilted tone and demure seriousness is
occasionally invaded by the usual chatter of girlhood, to the great
improvement of the atmosphere if not of the mind. Ellen Nussey, Mary
Taylor, women not manifestly intellectual but sensible and independent
without either exaggeration of sentiment or hint of tragic story,
remained her close friends as long as she lived, and her letters to
them, though always a little demure, give us a gentler idea of her than
anything else she has written. Not that there is much charm either of
style or subject in them: but there is no sort of bitterness or sense
of insufficient appreciation. Nothing can be more usual and commonplace,
indeed, than this portion of her life. As in so many cases, the
artificial lights thrown upon it by theories formed afterwards, clear
away when we examine its actual records, and it is apparent that there
was neither exceptional harshness of circumstance nor internal struggle
in the existence of the girl who, though more or less in arms against
everybody outside--especially when holding a position superior to her
own, more especially still when exercising authority over her in any
way--was yet quite an easy-minded, not unhappy, young woman at home,
with friends to whom she could pour out long pages of what is, on the
whole, quite moderate and temperate criticism of life, not without
cheerful allusion to now and then a chance curate or other young person
of the opposite sex, suspected of "paying attention" to one or other of
the little coterie. These allusions are not more lofty or dignified than
are similar notes of girls of less exalted pretensions, but there is not
a touch in them of the keen pointed pen which afterwards put up the
Haworth curates in all their imperfections before the world.

The other sisters at this time in the background, two figures always
clinging together, looking almost like one, have no great share in this
softer part of Charlotte's life. They were, though so different in
character, completely devoted to each other, apparently forming no other
friendships, each content with the one other partaker of her every
thought. A little literature seems to have been created between them,
little chapters of recollection and commentary upon their life, sealed
up and put away for three years in each case, to be opened on Emily's or
on Anne's birthday alternately, as a pathetic sign of their close unity,
though the little papers were in themselves simple in the extreme. Anne
too became a governess with something of the same experience as
Charlotte, and uttering very hard judgments of unconscious people who
were not the least unkind to her. But Emily had no such trials. She
remained at home perhaps because she was too uncompromising to be
allowed to make the experiment of putting up with other people, perhaps
because one daughter at home was indispensable. The family seems to have
had kind and trusted old servants, so that the cares of housekeeping did
not weigh heavily upon the daughter in charge, and there is no evidence
of exceptional hardness or roughness in their circumstances in any way.

In 1842, Charlotte and Emily, aged respectively twenty-six and
twenty-four, went to Brussels. Their design was "to acquire a thorough
familiarity with French," also some insight into other languages, with
the view of setting up a school on their own account. The means were
supplied by the aunt, who had lived in their house and taken more or
less care of them since their mother's death. The two sisters were
nearly a year in the Pensionnat Heger, now so perfectly known in every
detail of its existence to all who have read "Villette." They were
recalled by the death of the kind aunt who had procured them this
advantage, and afterwards Charlotte, no one quite knows why, went back
to Brussels for a second year, in which all her impressions were
probably strengthened and intensified. Certainly a more clear and
lifelike picture, scathing in its cold yet fierce light, was never made
than that of the white tall Brussels house, its class rooms, its
gardens, its hum of unamiable girls, its sharp display of rancorous and
shrill teachers, its one inimitable professor. It startles the reader to
find--a fact which we had forgotten--that M. Paul Emmanuel was M. Heger,
the husband of Madame Heger and legitimate head of the house: and that
this daring and extraordinary girl did not hesitate to encounter gossip
or slander by making him so completely the hero of her romance. Slander
in its commonplace form had nothing to do with such a fiery spirit as
that of Charlotte Bronte: but it shows her perfect independence of mind
and scorn of comment that she should have done this. In the end of '43
she returned home, and the episode was over. It was really the only
episode of possible practical significance in her life until we come to
the records of her brief literary career and her marriage, both towards
its end.

       *       *       *       *       *

The prospect of the school which the three sisters were to set up
together was abandoned; there was no more talk of governessing. We are
not told if it was the small inheritance of the aunt--only, Mr. Clement
Shorter informs us, L1500--which enabled the sisters henceforward to
remain at home without thought of further effort: but certainly this was
what happened. And the lives of the two younger were drawing so near the
end that it is a comfort to think that they enjoyed this moment of
comparative grace together. Their life was extremely silent, secluded,
and apart. There was the melancholy figure of Branwell to distract the
house with the spectacle of heavy idleness, drink, and disorder; but
this can scarcely have been so great an affliction as if he had been a
more beloved brother. He was not, however, veiled by any tender attempt
to cover his follies or wickedness, but openly complained of to all
their friends, which mitigates the affliction: and they seem to have
kept very separate from him, living in a world of their own.

In 1846 a volume of poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, was
published at their own cost. It had not the faintest success; they were
informed by the publisher that two copies only had been sold, and the
only satisfaction that remained to them was to send a few copies to some
of the owners of those great names which the enthusiastic young women
had worshipped from afar as stars in the firmament. These poems were
re-published after Charlotte Bronte had attained her first triumph, and
people had begun to cry out and wonder over "Wuthering Heights." The
history of "Jane Eyre," on the other hand, is that of most works which
have been the beginning of a career. It fell into the hands of the right
man, the "reader" of Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., Mr. Williams, a man
of great intelligence and literary insight. The first story written by
Charlotte Bronte, which was called "The Professor," and was the original
of "Villette," written at a time when her mind was very full of the
emotions raised by that singular portion of her life, had been rejected
by a number of publishers, and was also rejected by Mr. Williams, who
found it at once too crude and too _short_ for the risks of
publication, three volumes at that period being your only possible form
for fiction. But he saw the power in it, and begged the author to try
again at greater length. She did so; not on the basis of the "Professor"
as might have seemed natural--probably the materials were still too much
at fever-heat in her mind to be returned to at that moment--but by the
story of "Jane Eyre," which at once placed Charlotte Bronte amid the
most popular and powerful writers of her time.

I remember well the extraordinary thrill of interest which in the midst
of all the Mrs. Gores, Mrs. Marshs, &c.--the latter name is mentioned
along with those of Thackeray and Dickens even by Mr. Williams--came
upon the reader who, in the calm of ignorance, took up the first volume
of "Jane Eyre." The period of the heroine in white muslin, the
immaculate creature who was of sweetness and goodness all compact, had
lasted in the common lines of fiction up to that time. Miss Austen
indeed might well have put an end to that abstract and empty fiction,
yet it continued, as it always does continue more or less, the primitive
ideal. But "Jane Eyre" gave her, for the moment, the _coup de grace_.
That the book should be the story of a governess was perhaps necessary
to the circumstances of the writer: and the governess was already a
favourite figure in fiction. But generally she was of the beautiful,
universally fascinating, all-enduring kind, the amiable blameless
creature whose secret merits were never so hidden but that they might be
perceived by a keen sighted hero. I am not sure, indeed, that anybody
believed Miss Bronte when she said her heroine was plain. It is very
clear from the story that Jane was never unnoticed, never failed to
please, except among the women, whom it is the instinctive art of the
novelist to rouse in arms against the central figure, thus demonstrating
the jealousy, spite, and rancour native to their minds in respect to the
women who please men. No male cynic was ever stronger on that subject
than this typical woman. She cannot have believed it, I presume, since
her closest friends were women, and she seems to have had perfect faith
in their kindness: but this is a matter of conventional belief which has
nothing to do with individual experience. It is one of the doctrines
unassailable of the art of fiction; a thirty-ninth article in which
every writer of novels is bound to believe.

Miss Bronte did not know fine ladies, and therefore, in spite of herself
and a mind the reverse of vulgar, she made the competitors for Mr.
Rochester's favour rather brutal and essentially vulgar persons, an
error, curiously enough, which seems to have been followed by George
Eliot in the corresponding scenes in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," where
Captain Wybrow's _fiancee_ treats poor Tiny very much as the beauty in
Mr. Rochester's house treats Jane Eyre. Both were imaginary pictures,
which perhaps more or less excuses their untruthfulness in writers both
so sincere and lifelike in treating things they knew. It is amusing to
remember that Jane Eyre's ignorance of dress gave a clinching argument
to Miss Rigby in the _Quarterly_ to decide that the writer was not and
could not possibly be a woman. The much larger and more significant fact
that no man (until in quite recent days when there have been instances
of such effeminate art) ever made a woman so entirely the subject and
inspiration of his book, the only interest in it, was entirely
overlooked in what was, notwithstanding, the very shrewd and telling
argument about the dress.

The chief thing, however, that distressed the candid and as yet
unaccustomed reader in "Jane Eyre," and made him hope that it might be a
man who had written it, was the character of Rochester's confidences to
the girl whom he loved--not the character of Rochester, which was
completely a woman's view, but that he should have talked to a girl so
evidently innocent of his amours and his mistresses. This, however, I
think, though, as we should have thought, a subject so abhorrent to a
young woman such as Charlotte Bronte was, was also emphatically a
woman's view. A man might have credited another man of Rochester's kind
with impulses practically more heinous and designs of the worst kind:
but he would not have made him err in that way.

In this was a point of honour which the woman did not understand. It
marks a curious and subtle difference between the sexes. The woman less
enlightened in practical evil considers less the risks of actual vice;
but her imagination is free in other ways, and she innocently permits
her hero to do and say things so completely against the code which is
binding on gentlemen whether vicious or otherwise that her want of
perception becomes conspicuous. The fact that the writer of the review
in the _Quarterly_ was herself a woman accounts for her mistake in
supposing that the book was written if not by a man, by "a woman
unsexed;" "a woman who had forfeited the society of her sex." And
afterwards, when Mrs. Gaskell made her disastrous statements about
Branwell Bronte and other associates of Charlotte's youth, it was with
the hope of proving that the speech and manners of the men to whom she
had been accustomed were of a nature to justify her in any such
misapprehension of the usual manners of gentlemen. It was on the
contrary, as I think, only the bold and unfettered imagination of a
woman quite ignorant on all such subjects which could have suggested
this special error. The mind of such a woman, casting about for
something to make her wicked but delightful hero do by way of
demonstrating his wickedness, yet preserving the fascination which she
meant him to retain, probably hit upon this as the very wickedest thing
she could think of, yet still attractive: for is there not a thrill of
curiosity in searching out what such a strange being might think or say,
which is of itself a strong sensation? Miss Bronte was, I think, the
first to give utterance to that curiosity of the woman in respect to the
man, and fascination of interest in him--not the ideal man, not Sir
Kenneth, too reverent for anything but silent worship--which has since
risen to such heights of speculation, and imprints now a tone upon
modern fiction at which probably she would have been horrified.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were numberless stories in those days of guilty love and betrayal,
of how "lovely woman stoops to folly," and all the varieties of that
endless subject; but it was, except in the comic vein, or with grotesque
treatment, the pursuit of the woman by the man, the desire of the lover
for the beloved which was the aim of fiction. A true lady of romance
walked superior: she accepted (or not) the devotion: she stooped from
her white height to reward her adorer: but that she herself should
condescend to seek him (except under the circumstances of fashionable
life, where everybody is in quest of a coronet), or call out for him to
heaven and earth when he tarried in his coming, was unknown to the
situations of romantic art. When the second of Charlotte Bronte's books
appeared, there was accordingly quite a new sensation in store for the
public. The young women in "Shirley" were all wild for this lover who,
though promised by all the laws of nature and romance, did not appear.
They leaned out of their windows, they stretched forth their hands,
calling for him--appealing to heaven and earth. Why were they left to
wear out their bloom, to lose their freshness, to spend their days in
sewing and dreaming, when he, it was certain, was about somewhere, and
by sheer perversity of fate could not find the way to them? Nothing was
thought of the extra half-million of women in those days; perhaps it had
not begun to exist; but that "nobody was coming to marry us, nobody
coming to woo" was apparent.

Young ladies like Miss Charlotte Bronte and Miss Ellen Nussey her
friend, would have died rather than give vent to such sentiments; but
when the one of them to whom that gift was given found that her pen had
become a powerful instrument in her hand, the current of the restrained
feeling burst all boundaries, and she poured forth the cry which nobody
had suspected before. It had been a thing to be denied, to be
indignantly contradicted as impossible, if ever a lovesick girl put
herself forth to the shame of her fellows and the laugh of the world.
When such a phenomenon appeared, she was condemned as either bad or
foolish by every law: and the idea that she was capable of "running
after" a man was the most dreadful accusation that could be brought
against a woman. Miss Bronte's heroines, however, did not precisely do
this. Shirley and Caroline Helstone were not in love so much as longing
for love, clamouring for it, feeling it to be their right of which they
were somehow defrauded. There is a good deal to be said for such a view.
If it is the most virtuous thing in the world for a man to desire to
marry, to found a family, to be the father of children, it should be no
shameful thing for a woman to own the same desire. But it is somehow
against the instinct of primitive humanity, which has decided that the
woman should be no more than responsive, maintaining a reserve in
respect to her feelings, subduing the expression, unless in the "once,
and only once, and to One only" of the poet.

Charlotte Bronte was the first to overthrow this superstition.
Personally I am disposed to stand for the superstition, and dislike all
transgression of it. But that was not the view of the most reticent and
self-controlled of maidens, the little governess, clad in all the strict
proprieties of the period, the parson's daughter despising curates, and
unacquainted with other men. In her secret heart, she demanded of fate
night and day why she, so full of life and capability, should be left
there to dry up and wither; and why Providence refused her the
completion of her being. Her heart was not set on a special love; still
less was there anything fleshly or sensual in her imagination. It is a
shame to use such words in speaking of her, even though to cast them
forth as wholly inapplicable. The woman's grievance--that she should be
left there unwooed, unloved, out of reach of the natural openings of
life: without hope of motherhood: with the great instinct of her being
unfulfilled--was almost a philosophical, and entirely an abstract,
grievance, felt by her for her kind: for every woman dropped out of
sight and unable to attain the manner of existence for which she was
created. And I think it was the first time this cry had been heard out
of the mouth of a perfectly modest and pure-minded woman, nay, out of
the mouth of any woman; for it had nothing to do with the shriek of the
Sapphos for love. It was more startling, more confusing to the general
mind, than the wail of the lovelorn. The gentle victim of "a
disappointment," or even the soured and angered victim, was a thing
quite understood and familiar: but not the woman calling upon heaven and
earth to witness that all the fates were conspiring against her to cheat
her of her natural career.

So far as I can see this was the great point which gave force to
Charlotte Bronte's genius and conferred upon her the curious
pre-eminence she possesses among the romancers of her time. In this view
"Shirley," though I suppose the least popular, is the most
characteristic of her works. It is dominated throughout with this
complaint. Curates? Yes, there they are, a group of them. Is that the
thing you expect us women to marry? Yet it is our right to bear
children, to guide the house. And we are half of the world, and where is
the provision for us?

This cry disturbed the critic, the reader, the general public in the
most curious way; they did not know what to make of it. Was it a
shameless woman who was so crying out? It is always the easiest way, and
one which avoids all complications, to say so, and thus crush every
question. But it was scarcely easy to believe this in face of other
circumstances. Mrs. Gaskell, as much puzzled as any one, when Charlotte
Bronte's short life was over, tried hard to account for it by
"environment" as the superior persons say, that is by the wicked folly
of her brother, and the coarseness of all the Yorkshiremen round; and
thus originated in her bewilderment, let us hope without other
intention, a new kind of biography, as the subject of it inaugurated an
entirely new kind of social revolution. The cry of the women indeed
almost distressed as well as puzzled the world. The vivid genius still
held it, but the ideas were alarming, distracting beyond measure. The
_Times_ blew a trumpet of dismay; the book was revolution as well as
revelation. It was an outrage upon good taste, it was a betrayal of
sentiments too widespread to be comfortable. It was indelicate if not
immodest. We have outgrown now the very use of this word, but it was a
potent one at that period. And it was quite a just reproach. That cry
shattered indeed altogether the "delicacy" which was supposed to be the
most exquisite characteristic of womankind. The softening veil is blown
away, when such exhibitions of feeling are given to the world.

From that period to this is a long step. We have travelled through many
years and many gradations of sentiment: and we have now arrived at a
standard of opinion by which the "sex-problem" has become the most
interesting of questions, the chief occupation of fiction, to be
discussed by men and women alike with growing warmth and openness, the
immodest and the indelicate being equally and scornfully dismissed as
barriers with which Art has nothing to do. My impression is that
Charlotte Bronte was the pioneer and founder of this school of romance,
though it would probably have shocked and distressed her as much as any
other woman of her age.

       *       *       *       *       *

The novels of Emily and Anne Bronte were published shortly after "Jane
Eyre," in three volumes, of which "Wuthering Heights" occupied the first
two. I am obliged to confess that I have never shared the common
sentiment of enthusiasm for that, to me, unlovely book. The absence of
almost every element of sympathy in it, the brutality and misery,
tempered only by an occasional gleam of the heather, the freshness of an
occasional blast over the moors, have prevented me from appreciating a
force which I do not deny but cannot admire. The figure of Heathcliffe,
which perhaps has called forth more praise than any other single figure
in the literature of the time, does not touch me. I can understand how
in the jumble which the reader unconsciously makes, explaining him more
or less by Rochester and other of Charlotte Bronte's heroes, he may take
his place in a sort of system, and thus have humanities read into him,
so to speak, which he does not himself possess. But though the horror
and isolation of the house is powerful I have never been able to
reconcile myself either to the story or treatment, or to the estimate of
Emily Bronte's genius held so strongly by so many people. There is
perhaps the less harm in refraining from much comment on this singular
book, of which I gladly admit the unique character, since it has been
the occasion of so many and such enthusiastic comments. To me Emily
Bronte is chiefly interesting as the double of her sister, exaggerating
at once and softening her character and genius as showing those limits
of superior sense and judgment which restrained her, and the softer
lights which a better developed humanity threw over the landscape common
to them both. We perceive better the tempering sense of possibility by
which Charlotte made her rude and almost brutal hero still attractive,
even in his masterful ferocity, when we see Emily's incapacity to
express anything in _her_ hero except perhaps a touch of that tragic
pathos, prompting to fiercer harshness still, which is in the soul of a
man who never more, whatever he does, can set himself right. This is the
one strain of poetry to my mind in the wild conception. There was no
measure in the younger sister's thoughts, nor temperance in her methods.

The youngest of all, the gentle Anne, would have no right to be
considered at all as a writer but for her association with these
imperative spirits. An ordinary little novelette and a moral story,
working out the disastrous knowledge gained by acquaintance with the
unfortunate Branwell's ruinous habits, were her sole productions. She
was the element wanting in Emily's rugged work and nature. Instead of
being two sisters constantly entwined with each other, never separate
when they could help it, had Anne been by some fantastic power swamped
altogether and amalgamated with her best beloved, we may believe that
Emily might then have shown herself the foremost of the three. But the
group as it stands is more interesting than any single individual could
be. And had Charlotte Bronte lived a long and triumphant life, a
fanciful writer might have imagined that the throwing off of those other
threads of being so closely attached to her own had poured greater force
and charity into her veins. But we are baffled in all our suggestions
for the amendment of the ways of Providence.

       *       *       *       *       *

The melancholy and tragic year, or rather six months, which swept from
Haworth Parsonage three of its inmates, and left Charlotte and her
father alone to face life as they might, was now approaching; and it
seems so completely an episode in the story of the elder sister's
genius as well as her life, that its history is like that of an
unwritten tragedy, hers as much as her actual work. Branwell was the
first to die, unwept yet not without leaving a pathetic note in the
record. Then came the extraordinary passion and agony of Emily, which
has affected the imagination so much, and which, had it been for any
noble purpose, would have been a true martyrdom. But to die the death of
a Stoic, in fierce resistance yet subjection to Nature, regardless of
the feelings of all around, for the sake of pride and self-will alone,
is not an act to be looked upon with the reverential sympathy which,
however, it has secured from many. The strange creature with her shoes
on her feet and her staff in her hand, refusing till the last to
acknowledge herself to be ill or to receive any help in her weakness,
gives thus a kind of climax to her strange and painful work. Her death
took place in December of the same year (1848) in which Branwell died.
Anne, already delicate, would never seem to have held up her head after
her sister's death, and in May 1849 she followed, but in all sweetness
and calmness, to her early grave. She was twenty-eight; Emily
twenty-nine. So soon had the fever of life worn itself out and peace
come. Charlotte was left alone. There had not been to her in either of
them the close companion which they had found in each other. But yet
life ebbed away from her with their deaths, which occurred in such a
startling and quick succession as always makes bereavement more
terrible.

This occurred at the height of her mental activity. "Shirley" had been
published, and had been received with the divided feeling we have
referred to; and when she was thus left alone she found, no doubt, the
solace which of all mortal things work gives best, by resuming her
natural occupation in the now more than ever sombre seclusion of the
Parsonage, to which, however, her favourite friend, Ellen Nussey, came
from time to time. One or two visits to London occurred after the two
first publications in which, a demure little person, silent and shy, yet
capable of expressing herself very distinctly by times, and by no means
unconscious of the claim she now had upon other people's respect and
admiration, Charlotte Bronte made a little sensation in the society
which was opened to her, not always of a very successful kind. Everybody
will remember the delightfully entertaining chapter in literary history
in which Mrs. Ritchie, with charming humour and truth, recounts the
visit of this odd little lion to her father's house, and Thackeray's
abrupt and clandestine flight to his club when it was found that nothing
more was to be made of her than an absorbed conversation with the
governess in the back drawing-room, a situation like one in a novel, and
so very like the act of modest greatness, singling out the least
important person as the object of her attentions.

She is described by all her friends as plain, even ugly--a small woman
with a big nose, and no other notable feature, not even the bright eyes
which are generally attributed to genius--which was probably, however,
better than the lackadaisical portrait prefixed to her biography, after
a picture by Richmond, which is the typical portrait of a governess of
the old style, a gentle creature deprecating and wistful. Her letters
are very good letters, well expressed in something of the old-fashioned
way, but without any of the charm of a born letter-writer. Indeed, charm
does not seem to have been hers in any way. But she had a few very
staunch friends who held fast by her all her life, notwithstanding the
uncomfortable experience of being "put in a book," which few people
like. It is a gift by itself to put other living people in books. The
novelist does not always possess it; to many the realms of imagination
are far more easy than the arid realms of fact, and to frame an image of
a man much more natural than to take his portrait. I am not sure that it
is not a mark of greater strength to be able to put a living and
recognisable person on the canvas than it is to invent one. Anyhow, Miss
Bronte possessed it in great perfection. Impossible to doubt that the
characters of "Shirley" were real men; still more impossible to doubt
for a moment the existence of M. Paul Emmanuel. The pursuit of such a
system requires other faculties than those of the mere romancist. It
demands a very clear-cut opinion, a keen judgment not disturbed by any
strong sense of the complexities of nature, nor troubled by any
possibility of doing injustice to its victim.

       *       *       *       *       *

One thing strikes us very strongly in the description of the school,
Lowood, which was her very first step in literature, and in which there
can now be no doubt, from her own remarks on the manner in which it was
received, she had a vindictive purpose. I scarcely know why, for, of
course, the dates are all there to prove the difference--but my own
conclusion had always been that she was a girl of fourteen or fifteen,
old enough to form an opinion when she left the school. I find, with
much consternation, that she was only nine; and that so far as such a
strenuous opinion was her own at all, it must have been formed at that
early and not very judicious age. That the picture should be so vivid
with only a little girl's recollection to go upon is wonderful; but it
is not particularly valuable as a verdict against a great institution,
its founder and all its ways. Nevertheless, it had its scathing and
wounding effect as much as if the little observer, whose small judgment
worked so precociously, had been capable of understanding the things
which she condemned. It would be rash to trust nineteen in such a
report, but nine!

It was at a different age and in other circumstances that Charlotte
Bronte made her deep and extraordinary study of the Brussels Pensionnat.
She was twenty-seven; she had already gone through a number of those
years of self-repression during which, by dint of keeping silence, the
heart burns. She was, if we may accept the freedom of her utterances in
fiction as more descriptive of her mind than the measured sentences of
her letters, angry with fate and the world which denied her a brighter
career, and bound her to the cold tasks of dependence and the company of
despised and almost hated inferiors during the best of her life. Her
tremendous gift of sight--not second sight or any visionary way of
regarding the object before her, but that vivid and immediate vision
which took in every detail, and was decisive on every act as if it had
been the vision of the gods--was now fully matured. She saw all that was
about her with this extraordinary clearness without any shadow upon the
object or possibility of doubt as to her power of seeing it all round
and through and through. She makes us also see and know the big white
house, with every room distinct: the garden, with its great trees and
alleys: the class-rooms, each with its tribune: the girls, fat and round
and phlegmatic in characteristic foreignism, and herself as spectator,
looking on with contemptuous indifference, not caring to discriminate
between them. The few English figures, which concern her more, are drawn
keen upon the canvas, though with as little friendliness; the teachers
sharply accentuated, Mdlle. Sophie, for instance, who, when she is in a
rage, has no lips, and all the sharp contentions and false civilities of
those banded Free Lances, enemies to everybody and to each other; the
image of watchful suspicion in the head of the house--all these are set
forth in glittering lines of steel. There is not a morsel of compunction
in the picture. Everybody is bad, worthless, a hater of the whole race.
The mistress of the establishment moves about stealthily, watching, her
eyes showing through a mist in every corner, going and coming without a
sound. What a picture it is! There is not a good meaning in the whole
place--not even that beneficent absence of meaning which softens the
view. They are all bent on their own aims, on gaining an advantage great
or small over their neighbours; nobody is spared, nobody is worth a
revision of judgment--except one.

The little Englishwoman herself, who is the centre of all this, is not
represented as more lovable than the rest. She is the hungry little
epicure, looking on while others feast, and envying every one of them,
even while she snarls at their fare as apples of Gomorrah. She cannot
abide that they should be better off than she, even though she scorns
their satisfaction in what they possess. Her wild and despairing rush
through Brussels when the town is _en fete_, cold, impassioned,
fever-hot with rancour and loneliness, produces the most amazing effect
on the mind. She is the banished spirit for whom there is no place, the
little half-tamed wild beast, wild with desire to tear and rend
everything that is happy. One feels that she has a certain justification
and realises the full force of being left out in the cold, of having no
part or lot in the matter when other people are amused and rejoice. Many
other writers have endeavoured to produce a similar effect with milder
means, but I suppose because of a feeble-minded desire to preserve the
reputation of their forlorn heroine and give the reader an amiable view
of her, no one has succeeded like the author of "Villette," who is in no
way concerned for the amiability of Lucy Snowe.

For the impartiality of this picture is as extraordinary as its power.
Lucy Snowe is her own historian; it is the hot blood of the
autobiographist that rushes through her veins, yet no attempt is made to
recommend her to the reader or gain his sympathy. She is much too real
to think of these outside things, or of how people will judge her, or
how to make her proceedings acceptable to their eyes. We do not know
whether Charlotte Bronte ever darted out of the white still house,
standing dead in the moonlight, and rushed through the streets and, like
a ghost, into the very heart of the gaslights and festivities; but it
would be difficult to persuade any reader that some one had not done so,
imprinting that phantasmagoria of light and darkness upon a living
brain. Whether it was Charlotte Bronte or Lucy Snowe, the effect is the
same. We are not even asked to feel for her or pity her, much less to
approve her. Nothing is demanded from us on her account but merely to
behold the soul in revolt and the strange workings of her despair. It
was chiefly because of the indifference to her of Dr. John that Lucy was
thus driven into a momentary madness; and with the usual regardless
indiscretion of all Charlotte Bronte's amateur biographers, Mr. Shorter
intimates to us who was the living man who was Dr. John and occasioned
all the commotion. The tragedy, however it appears, was unnecessary, for
the victim got over it with no great difficulty, and soon began the much
more engrossing interest which still remained behind.

Nothing up to this point has attracted us in "Villette," except, indeed,
the tremendous vitality and reality of the whole, the sensation of the
actual which is in every line, and which forbids us to believe for a
moment that what we are reading is fiction. But a very different
sentiment comes into being as we become acquainted with the black
bullet-head and vivacious irascible countenance of M. Paul Emmanuel. He
is the one only character in Miss Bronte's little world who has a real
charm, whose entrance upon the stage warms all our feelings and awakens
in us not interest alone, but lively liking, amusement and sympathy. The
quick-witted, quick-tempered Frenchman, with all the foibles of his
vanity displayed, as susceptible to any little slight as a girl, as
easily pleased with a sign of kindness, as far from the English ideal as
it is possible to imagine, dancing with excitement, raging with
displeasure, committing himself by every step he takes, cruel,
delightful, barbarous and kind, is set before us in the fullest light,
intolerable but always enchanting. He is as full of variety as Rosalind,
as devoid of dignity as Pierrot, contradictory, inconsistent, vain, yet
conquering all our prejudices and enchanting us while he performs every
antic that, according to our usual code, a man ought not to be capable
of. How was it that for this once the artist got the better of all her
restrictions and overcame all her misconceptions, and gave us a man to
be heartily loved, laughed at, and taken into our hearts?

I cannot answer that question. I am sorry that he was M. Heger, and the
master of the establishment, and not the clever tutor who had so much of
Madame Beck's confidence. But anyhow, he is the best that Miss Bronte
ever did for us, the most attractive individual, the most perfect
picture. The Rochesters were all more or less fictitious,
notwithstanding the unconscious inalienable force of realism which gives
them, in spite of themselves and us, a kind of overbearing life; but
Miss Bronte never did understand what she did not know. She had to see a
thing before it impressed itself upon her, and when she did see it, with
what force she saw! She knew M. Paul Emmanuel, watching him day by day,
seeing all his littlenesses and childishness, his vanity, his big warm
heart, his clever brain, the manifold nature of the man. He stands out,
as the curates stood out, absolutely real men about whom we could
entertain no doubt, recognisable anywhere. The others were either a
woman's men, like the Moors of Shirley, whose roughness was bluster (she
could not imagine an Englishman who was not rough and rude), and their
strength more or less made up; or an artificial composition like St.
John, an ideal bully like Rochester. The ideal was not her forte--she
had few gifts that way: but she saw with overwhelming lucidity and
keenness, and what she saw, without a doubt, without a scruple, she
could put upon the canvas in lines of fire. Seldom, very seldom, did an
object appear within reach of that penetrating light, which could be
drawn lovingly or made to appear as a being to be loved. Was not the
sole model of that species M. Paul? It would seem that in the piteous
poverty of her life, which was so rich in natural power, she had never
met before a human creature in whom she could completely trust, or one
who commended himself to her entirely, with all his foibles and
weaknesses increasing, not diminishing, the charm.

It is, in my opinion, a most impertinent inquiry to endeavour to search
out what were the sentiments of Charlotte Bronte for M. Heger. Any one
whom it would be more impossible to imagine as breaking the very first
rule of English decorum, and letting her thoughts stray towards another
woman's husband, I cannot imagine. Her fancy was wild and her utterance
free, and she liked to think that men were quite untrammelled by those
proprieties which bound herself like bonds of iron in her private
person, and that she might pluck a fearful joy by listening to their
dreadful experiences: but she herself was as prim and Puritan as any
little blameless governess that ever went out of an English parish. But
while believing this I cannot but feel it was an intolerable spite of
fortune that the one man whom she knew in her life, whom her story
could make others love, the only man whom she saw with that real
illumination which does justice to humanity, was not M. Paul Emmanuel
but M. Heger. This was why we were left trembling at the end of Lucy
Snowe's story, not knowing whether he ever came back to her out of the
wilds, fearing almost as keenly that nothing but loss could fitly end
the tale, yet struggling in our imaginations against the doom--as if it
had concerned our own happiness.

Was this new-born power in her, the power of representing a man at his
best, she who by nature saw both men and women from their worst side, a
sign of the development of genius in herself, the softening of that
scorn with which she had hitherto regarded a world chiefly made up of
inferior beings, the mellowing influence of maturity? So we might have
said, had it not been that after this climax of production she never
spake word more in the medium of fiction. Had she told the world
everything she had to say? Could she indeed say nothing but what she had
seen and known in her limited experience--the trials of school and
governessing, the longing of women, the pangs of solitude? That strange
form of imagination which can deal only with fact, and depict nothing
but what is under its eyes, is in its way perhaps the most impressive of
all--especially when inspired by the remorseless lights of that keen
outward vision which is unmitigated by any softening of love for the
race, any embarrassing toleration as to feelings and motives. It is
unfortunately true in human affairs that those who expect a bad ending
to everything, and suspect a motive at least dubious to every action,
prove right in a great number of cases, and that the qualities of truth
and realism have been appropriated to their works by almost universal
consent. Indeed there are some critics who think this the only true form
of art. But it is at the same time a power with many limitations. The
artist who labours, as M. Zola does, searching into every dust-heap, as
if he could find out human nature, the only thing worth depicting, with
all its closely hidden secrets, all its flying indistinguishable tones,
all its infinite gradations of feeling, by that nauseous process, or by
a roaring progress through the winds, upon a railway brake, or the visit
of a superficial month to the most complicated, the most subtle of
cities--must lay up for himself and for his reader many disappointments
and deceptions: but the science of artistic study, as exemplified in
him, had not been invented in Charlotte Bronte's day.

She did not attempt to go and see things with the intention of
representing them; she was therefore limited to the representation of
those things which naturally in the course of life came under her eyes.
She knew, though only as a child, the management and atmosphere of a
great school, and set it forth, branding a great institution with an
insufferable stigma, justly or unjustly, who knows? She went to another
school and turned out every figure in it for our inspection--a community
all jealous, spiteful, suspicious, clandestine: even the chance pupil
with no particular relation to her story or herself, painted with all
her frivolities for the edification of the world did not escape. "She
was Miss So-and-So," say the army of commentators who have followed Miss
Bronte, picking up all the threads, so that the grand-daughter of the
girl who had the misfortune to be in the Brussels Pensionnat along with
that remorseless artist may be able to study the character of her
ancestress. The public we fear loves this kind of art, however,
notwithstanding all its drawbacks.

On the other hand probably no higher inspiration could have set before
us so powerfully the image of M. Paul. Thus we are made acquainted with
the best and the worst which can be effected by this method--the base in
all their baseness, the excellent all the dearer for their
characteristic faults: but the one representation scarcely less
offensive than the other to the victim. Would it be less trying to the
individual to be thus caught, identified, written out large in the light
of love and glowing adoration, than in the more natural light of scorn?
I know not indeed which would be the worst ordeal to go through, to be
drawn like Madame Beck, suspicious, stealthy, with watchful eyes
appearing out of every corner, surprising every incautious word, than to
be put upon the scene in the other manner, with all your peccadilloes
exposed in the light of admiration and fondness, and yourself put to
play the part of hero and lover. The point of view of the public is one
thing, that of the victim quite another. We are told that Miss Bronte,
perhaps with a momentary compunction for what she had done, believed
herself to have prevented all injurious effects by securing that
"Villette" should not be published in Brussels, or translated into the
French tongue, both of them of course perfectly futile hopes since the
very desire to hinder its appearance was a proof that this appearance
would be of unusual interest. The fury of the lady exposed in all her
stealthy ways could scarcely have been less than the confusion of her
spouse when he found himself held up to the admiration of his town as
Lucy Snowe's captivating lover. To be sure it may be said the public has
nothing to do with this. These individuals are dead and gone, and no
exposure can hurt them any longer, whereas the gentle reader lives for
ever, and goes on through the generations, handing on to posterity his
delight in M. Paul. But all the same it is a cruel and in reality an
immoral art; and it has this great disadvantage, that its area is
extremely circumscribed, especially when the artist lives most of her
life in a Yorkshire parsonage amid the moors, where so few notable
persons come in her way.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was however one subject of less absolute realism which Charlotte
Bronte had at her command, having experienced in her own person and seen
her nearest friends under the experience, of that solitude and longing
of women, of which she has made so remarkable an exposition. The long
silence of life without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out
at windows which never show any one coming who can rouse the slightest
interest in the mind, the endless years and days which pass and pass,
carrying away the bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a
dreary middle age before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the
sufferer feels how strong is the current of life in her own veins, and
how capable she is of all the active duties of existence--this was the
essence and soul of the existence she knew best. Was there no help for
it? Must the women wait and long and see their lives thrown away, and
have no power to save themselves?

The position in itself so tragic is one which can scarcely be expressed
without calling forth an inevitable ridicule, a laugh at the best, more
often a sneer at the women whose desire for a husband is thus betrayed.
Shirley and Caroline Helston both cried out for that husband with an
indignation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong and injury, which
stopped the laugh for the moment. It might be ludicrous but it was
horribly genuine and true. Note there was nothing sensual about these
young women. It was life they wanted; they knew nothing of the grosser
thoughts which the world with its jeers attributes to them: of such
thoughts they were unconscious in a primitive innocence which perhaps
only women understand. They wanted their life, their place in the world,
the rightful share of women in the scheme of nature. Why did not it come
to them? The old patience in which women have lived for all the
centuries fails now and again in a keen moment of energy when some one
arises who sees no reason why she should endure this forced inaction, or
why she should invent for herself inferior ways of working and give up
her birthright, which is to carry on the world.

The reader was horrified with these sentiments from the lips of young
women. The women were half ashamed, yet more than half stirred and
excited by the outcry, which was true enough if indelicate. All very
well to talk of women working for their living, finding new channels for
themselves, establishing their independence. How much have we said of
all that, endeavouring to persuade ourselves! Charlotte Bronte had the
courage of her opinions. It was not education nor a trade that her women
wanted. It was not a living but their share in life, a much more
legitimate object had that been the way to secure it, or had there been
any way to secure it in England. Miss Bronte herself said correct things
about the protection which a trade is to a woman, keeping her from a
mercenary marriage; but this was not in the least the way of her
heroines. They wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all things they
wanted their share in life--to have their position by the side of men,
which alone confers a natural equality, to have their shoulder to the
wheel, their hands on the reins of common life, to build up the world,
and link the generations each to each. In her philosophy marriage was
the only state which procured this, and if she did not recommend a
mercenary marriage she was at least very tolerant about its conditions,
insisting less upon love than was to be expected and with a covert
conviction in her mind that if not one man then another was better than
any complete abandonment of the larger path. Lucy Snowe for a long time
had her heart very much set on Dr. John and his placid breadth of
Englishism: but when she finally found out that to be impossible her
tears were soon dried by the prospect of Paul Emmanuel, so unlike him,
coming into his place.

Poor Charlotte Bronte! She has not been as other women, protected by the
grave from all betrayal of the episodes in her own life. Everybody has
betrayed her, and all she thought about this one and that, and every
name that was ever associated with hers. There was a Mr. Taylor from
London about whom she wrote with great freedom to her friend Miss
Nussey, telling how the little man had come, how he had gone away
without any advance in the affairs, how a chill came over her when he
appeared and she found him much less attractive than when at a distance,
yet how she liked it as little when he went away and was somewhat
excited about his first letter, and even went so far as to imagine with
a laugh that there might be possibly a dozen little Joe Taylors before
all was over. She was hard upon Miss Austen for having no comprehension
of passion, but no one could have been cooler and less impassioned than
she as she considered the question of Mr. Taylor, reluctant to come to
any decision yet disappointed when it came to nothing. There was no
longing in her mind for Mr. Taylor, but there was for life and action
and the larger paths and the little Joes.

This longing which she expressed with so much vehemence and some poetic
fervour as the burden of the lives of Shirley and her friends has been
the keynote of a great deal that has followed--the revolts and
rebellions, the wild notions about marriage, the "Sex Problem," and a
great deal more. From that first point to the prevailing discussion of
all the questions involved is a long way; but it is a matter of logical
progression, and when once the primary matter is opened, every
enlargement of the subject may be taken as a thing to be expected.
Charlotte Bronte was in herself the embodiment of all old-fashioned
restrictions. She was proper, she was prim, her life was hedged in by
all the little rules which bind the primitive woman. But when she left
her little recluse behind and rushed into the world of imagination her
exposure of the bondage in which she sat with all her sisters was far
more daring than if she had been a woman of many experiences and knew
what she was speaking of. She did know the longing, the discontent, the
universal contradiction and contrariety which is involved in that
condition of unfulfilment to which so many grey and undeveloped lives
are condemned. For her and her class, which did not speak of it,
everything depended upon whether the woman married or did not marry.
Their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to one point in the horizon,
but their ambition was neither ignoble nor unclean. It was bold, indeed,
in proportion to its almost ridiculous innocence, and want of perception
of any grosser side. Their share in life, their part in the mutual
building of the house, was what they sought. But the seed she thus sowed
has come to many growths which would have appalled Charlotte Bronte.
Those who took their first inspiration from this cry of hers, have quite
forgotten what it was she wanted, which was not emancipation but an
extended duty. But while it would be very unjust to blame her for the
vagaries that have followed and to which nothing could be less desirable
than any building of the house or growth of the race, any responsibility
or service--we must still believe that it was she who drew the curtain
first aside and opened the gates to imps of evil meaning, polluting and
profaning the domestic hearth.

The marriage which--after all these wild embodiments of the longing and
solitary heart which could not consent to abandon its share in life,
after Shirley and Lucy Snowe, and that complex unity of three female
souls all unfulfilled, which had now been broken by death--she accepted
in the end of her life, is the strangest commentary upon all that went
before, or rather, upon all the literary and spiritual part of her
history, though it was a quite appropriate ending to Mr. Bronte's
daughter, and even to the writer of those sober letters which discussed
Mr. Taylor, whether he should or should not be encouraged, and how it
was a little disappointing after all to see him go away. Her final
suitor was one of the class which she had criticised so scathingly, one
who, it might have been thought, would scarcely have ventured to enter
the presence or brave the glance of so penetrating an eye, but who would
seem to have brought all the urgency of a _grand passion_ to the sombre
parlour of the parsonage, to the afternoon stillness of the lonely woman
who would not seem to have suspected anything of the kind till it was
poured out before her without warning. She was startled and confused by
his declaration and appeal, never apparently having contemplated the
possibility of any such occurrence; and in the interval which followed
the father raged and resisted, and the lover did not conceal his
heartbroken condition but suffered without complaining while the lady
looked on wistful, touched and attracted by the unlooked-for love, and
gradually melting towards that, though indifferent to the man who
offered it. Mr. Bronte evidently thought that if this now distinguished
daughter who had been worshipped among the great people in London, and
talked of in all the newspapers, married at all in her mature age, it
should be some one distinguished like herself, and not the mere curate
who was the natural fate of every clergyman's daughter, the simplest and
least known.

Charlotte meanwhile said no word, but saw the curate enact various
tragic follies of love for her sake with a sort of awe and wonder,
astonished to find herself thus possessed still of the charm which none
are so sure as women that only youth and beauty can be expected to
possess. And she had never had any beauty, and, though she was not old,
was no longer young. It is a conventional fiction that a woman still in
the thirties is beyond the exercise of that power. Indeed, it would be
hard to fix the age at which the spell departs. Certainly the demeanour
of Mr. Nicholls gave her full reason to believe that it had not departed
from her. He faltered in the midst of the service, grew pale, almost
lost his self-possession when he suddenly saw her among the kneeling
figures round the altar; and no doubt this rather shocking and startling
exhibition of his feelings was more pardonable to the object of so much
emotion than it was likely to have been to any other spectator. The
romance is a little strange, but yet it is a romance in its quaint
ecclesiastical way. And soon Charlotte was drawn still more upon her
lover's side by the violence of her father. It was decided that the
curate was to go, and that this late gleam of love-making was to be
extinguished and the old dim atmosphere to settle down again for ever.
Finally, however, the mere love of love, which had always been more to
her than any personal inclination, and the horror of that permanent
return to the twilight of dreamy living against which she had struggled
all her life, overcame her, and gave her courage; but she married
characteristically, not as women marry who are carried to a new home and
make a new beginning in life, but retaining all the circumstances of the
old and receiving her husband into her father's house where she had
already passed through so many fluctuations and dreamed so many dreams,
and which was full to overflowing with the associations of the past.

We have no reason to suppose that it did not add to the happiness of her
life; indeed, every indication is to the contrary, and the husband seems
to have been kind, considerate and affectionate. Still this thing upon
which so many of her thoughts had been fixed during her whole life,
which she had felt to be the necessary condition of full development,
and for which the little impassioned female circle of which she was the
expositor had sighed and cried to heaven and earth, came to her at last
very much in the form of a catastrophe. No doubt the circumstances of
her quickly failing health and shortened life promote this feeling. But
without really taking these into consideration the sensation remains the
same. The strange little keen soul with its sharply fixed restrictions,
yet intense force of perception within its limits, dropped out of the
world into which it had made an irruption so brilliant and so brief and
sank out of sight altogether, sank into the humdrum house between the
old father and the sober husband, into the clerical atmosphere with
which she had no sympathy, into the absolute quiet of domestic life to
which no Prince Charming could now come gaily round the corner, out of
the mists and moors, and change with a touch of his wand the grey
mornings and evenings into golden days. Well! was not this that which
she had longed for, the natural end of life towards which her Shirley,
her Caroline, her Lucy had angrily stretched forth their hands,
indignant to be kept waiting, clamouring for instant entrance? And so it
was, but how different! Lucy Snowe's little housekeeping, all the
preparations which M. Paul made for her comfort and which seemed better
to her than any palace, would not they too have taken the colour of
perpetual dulness if everything had settled down and the Professor
assumed his slippers by the domestic hearth? Ah no, for Lucy Snowe loved
the man, and Charlotte Bronte, as appears, loved only the love. It is a
parable. She said a little later that she began to see that this was the
fate which she would wish for those she loved best, for her friend
Ellen, perhaps for her Emily if she had lived--the good man very
faithful, very steady, worth his weight in gold--yet flatter than the
flattest days of old, _solidement nourri_, a good substantial husband,
managing all the parish business, full of talk about the Archdeacon's
charge, and the diocesan meetings, and the other clergy of the moorland
parishes. We can conceive that she got to fetching his slippers for him
and taking great care that he was comfortable, and perhaps had it been
so ordained might have grown into a contented matron and forgotten the
glories and miseries, so inseparably twined and linked together, of her
youth. But she only had a year in which to do all that, and this is how
her marriage seems to turn into a catastrophe, the caging of a wild
creature that had never borne captivity before, and which now could no
longer rush forth into the heart of any shining _fete_, or to the window
of a strange confessional, anywhere, to throw off the burden of the
perennial contradiction, the ceaseless unrest of the soul, the boilings
of the volcano under the snow.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have said it was difficult to account for the extreme interest still
attaching to everything connected with Charlotte Bronte; not only the
story of her peculiar genius, but also of everybody connected with her,
though the circle was in reality quite a respectable, humdrum, and
uninteresting one, containing nobody of any importance except the
sister, who was her own wilder and fiercer part. One way, however, in
which these sisters have won some part of their long-lasting interest is
due to the treatment to which they have been subjected. They are the
first victims of that ruthless art of biography which is one of the
features of our time; and that not only by Mrs. Gaskell, who took up her
work in something of an apologetic vein, and was so anxious to explain
how it was that her heroine expressed certain ideas not usual in the
mouths of women, that she was compelled to take away the reputation of a
number of other people in order to excuse the peculiarities of these two
remarkable women. But everybody who has touched their history since, and
there have been many--for it would seem that gossip, when restrained by
no bonds of decorum or human feeling, possesses a certain interest
whether it is concerned with the household of a cardinal or that of a
parish priest--has followed the same vicious way without any
remonstrance or appeal for mercy. We have all taken it for granted that
no mercy was to be shown to the Brontes. Let every rag be torn from
Charlotte, of whom there is the most to say. Emily had the good luck to
be no correspondent, and so has escaped to some degree the complete
exposure of every confidence and every thought which has happened to
her sister. Is it because she has nobody to defend her that she has been
treated thus barbarously? I cannot conceive a situation more painful,
more lacerating to every feeling, than that of the father and the
husband dwelling silent together in that sombre parsonage, from which
every ray of light seems to depart with the lost woman, whose presence
had kept a little savour in life, and looking on in silence to see their
life taken to pieces, and every decent veil dragged from the inner being
of their dearest and nearest. They complained as much as two voiceless
persons could, or at least the father complained: and the very servants
came hot from their kitchen to demand a vindication of their character:
but nobody noted the protest of the old man amid the silence of the
moors: and the husband was more patient and spoke no word. Even he,
however, after nearly half a century, when that far-off episode of life
must have become dim to him, has thrown his relics open for a little
more revelation, a little more interference with the helpless ashes of
the dead.

No dot is now omitted upon i, no t left uncrossed. We know, or at least
are told, who Charlotte meant by every character she ever portrayed,
even while the model still lives. We know her opinion of her friends, or
rather acquaintances, the people whom she saw cursorily and formed a
hasty judgment upon, as we all do in the supposed safety of common life.
Protests have been offered in other places against a similar treatment
of other persons; but scarcely any protest has been attempted in respect
to Charlotte Bronte. The resurrection people have been permitted to make
their researches as they pleased. It throws a curious pathos, a not
unsuitably tragic light upon a life always so solitary, that this should
all have passed in silence because there was actually no one to
interfere, no one to put a ban upon the dusty heaps and demand that no
mere should be said. When one looks into the matter a little more
closely, one finds it is so with almost all those who have specially
suffered at the hands of the biographer. The Carlyles had no child, no
brother to rise up in their defence. It gives the last touch of
melancholy to the conclusion of a lonely life. Mrs. Gaskell, wise woman,
defended herself from a similar treatment by will, and left children
behind her to protect her memory. But the Brontes are at the mercy of
every one who cares to give another raking to the diminished heap of
_debris_. The last writer who has done so, Mr. Clement Shorter, had some
real new light to throw upon a story which surely has now been
sufficiently turned inside out, and has done his work with perfect good
feeling, and, curiously enough after so many exploitations, in a way
which shows that interest has not yet departed from the subject. But we
trust that now the memory of Charlotte Bronte will be allowed to rest.

  [Signature: Mrs. M. Oliphant]




GEORGE ELIOT

_By_ MRS. LYNN LINTON




GEORGE ELIOT


In this essay it is not intended to go into the vexed question of George
Eliot's private life and character. Death has resolved her individuality
into nothingness, and the discrepancy between her lofty thoughts and
doubtful action no longer troubles us. But her work still remains as
common property for all men to appraise at its true value--to admire for
its beauty, to reverence for its teaching, to honour for its grandeur,
yet at the same time to determine its weaknesses and to confess where it
falls short of the absolute perfection claimed for it in her lifetime.

For that matter indeed, no one has suffered from unmeasured adulation
more than has George Eliot. As a philosopher, once bracketed with Plato
and Kant; as a novelist, ranked the highest the world has seen; as a
woman, set above the law and, while living in open and admired
adultery, visited by bishops and judges as well as by the best of the
laity; her faults of style and method praised as genius--since her death
she has been treated with some of that reactionary neglect which always
follows on extravagant esteem. The mud-born ephemeridae of literature
have dispossessed her. For her profound learning, which ran like a
golden thread through all she wrote till it became tarnished by
pedantry, we have the ignorance which misquotes Lempriere and thinks
itself classic. For her outspoken language and forcible diction,
wherein, however, she always preserved so much modesty, and for her
realism which described things and feelings as they are, but without
going into revolting details, we have those lusciously suggestive
epithets and those unveiled presentations of the sexual instinct which
seem to make the world one large lupanar. For her accurate science and
profound philosophy, we have those claptrap phrases which have passed
into common speech and are glibly reproduced by facile parrots who do
not understand and never could have created; and for her scholarly
diction we have the tawdriness of a verbal ragbag where grammar is as
defective as taste. Yet our modern tinselled dunces have taken the place
of the one who, in her lifetime, was made almost oppressively
great--almost too colossal in her supremacy.

But when all this rubbish has been thrown into the abyss of oblivion,
George Eliot's works will remain solid and alive, together with
Thackeray's, Scott's and Fielding's. Our Immortals will include in their
company, as one of the "choir invisible" whose voice will never be
stilled for man, the author of "Adam Bede" and "Romola," of the "Mill on
the Floss" and "Middlemarch."

       *       *       *       *       *

Her first essays in fiction, her "Scenes of Clerical Life," show the
germs of her future greatness as well as the persistency of her aim. In
"Janet's Repentance," which to our mind is the best of the three, those
germs are already shaped to beauty. Nothing can be more delicately
touched than the nascent love between Janet and Mr. Tryon. No more
subtle sign of Janet's besetting sin could be given than by that
candlestick held "aslant;" while her character, compounded of pride,
timidity, affectionateness, spiritual aspiration and moral degradation,
is as true to life as it was difficult to portray. It would be
impossible to note all the gems in these three stories. We can indicate
only one or two. That splendid paragraph in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story,"
beginning: "While this poor heart was being bruised"--the sharp summing
up of Mr. Amos Barton's "middling" character--Lady Cheverel's silent
criticisms contrasted with her husband's iridescent optimism--the almost
Shakesperean humour of the men, the author's keen appraisement of the
commonplace women; such aphorisms as Mrs. Linnet's "It's right enough to
be speritial--I'm no enemy to that--but I like my potatoes
meally;"--these and a thousand more, eloquent, tender, witty, deep, make
these three stories masterpieces in their way, despite the improbability
of the Czerlaski episode in "Amos Barton" and the inherent weakness of
the Gilfil plot. We, who can remember the enthusiasm they excited when
they first appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_, on re-reading them in
cooler blood can understand that enthusiasm, though we no longer share
its pristine intensity. It was emphatically a new departure in
literature, and the noble note of that religious feeling which is
independent of creed and which touches all hearts alike, woke an echo
that even to this day reverberates though in but a poor, feeble and
attenuated manner.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Adam Bede," the first novel proper of the long series, shows George
Eliot at her best in her three most noteworthy qualities--lofty
principles, lifelike delineation of character, and fine humour, both
broad and subtle. The faults of the story are the all-pervading
anachronism of thought and circumstance; the dragging of the plot in the
earlier half of the book; and the occasional ugliness of style, where,
as in that futile opening sentence the author as I directly addresses
the reader as You. The scene is laid in the year 1799--before the Trades
Unions had fixed a man's hours of work so accurately as to make him
leave off with a screw half driven in, so soon as the clock begins to
strike--before too the hour of leaving off was fixed at six. We older
people can remember when workmen wrought up to eight and were never too
exact even then. Precision of the kind practised at the present day was
not known then; and why were there no apprentices in Adam's shop?
Apprentices were a salient feature in all the working community, and no
shop could have existed without them. Nor would the seduction by the
young squire of a farmer's niece or daughter have been the heinous crime
George Eliot has made it. If women of the lower class held a somewhat
better position than they did in King Arthur's time, when, to be the
mother of a knight's bastard, raised a churl's wife or daughter far
above her compeers and was assumed to honour not degrade her, they still
retained some of the old sense of inferiority. Does any one remember
that famous answer in the Yelverton trial not much more than a
generation ago? In 1799 Hetty's mishap would have been condoned by all
concerned, save perhaps by Adam himself; and Arthur Donnithorne would
have suffered no more for his escapade than did our well-known Tom Jones
for his little diversions. And--were there any night schools for
illiterate men in 1799? And how was that reprieve got so quickly at a
time when there were neither railroads nor telegraphs?--indeed, would it
have been got at all in days when concealment of birth alone was felony
and felony was death? Also, would Hetty have been alone in her cell? In
1799 all prisoners were herded together, young and old, untried and
condemned; and the separate system was not in existence. Save for
Hetty's weary journey on foot and in chance carts, the story might have
been made as of present time with more _vraisemblance_ and
harmoniousness.

These objections apart, how supreme the whole book is! The characters
stand out fresh, firm and living. As in some paintings you feel as if
you could put your hand round the body, so in George Eliot's writings
you feel that you have met those people in the flesh, and talked to
them, holding them by the hand and looking into their eyes. There is not
a line of loose drawing anywhere. From the four Bedes, with that
inverted kind of heredity which Zola has so powerfully shown, to the
stately egoism of Mrs. Irwine--from the marvellous portraiture of Hetty
Sorrel with her soft, caressing, lusciously-loving outside, and her
heart "as hard as a cherry-stone" according to Mrs. Poyser--from the
weak-willed yet not conscienceless Arthur Donnithorne to the exquisite
purity of Dinah, the character-drawing is simply perfect. Many were
people personally known to George Eliot, and those who were at all
behind the scenes recognised the portraits. Down at Wirksworth they knew
the Bedes, Dinah, the Poysers, and some others. In London, among the
intimates of George Lewes, Hetty needed no label. Mrs. Poyser's good
things were common property in the neighbourhood long before George
Eliot crystallised them for all time, and embellished them by her
matchless setting; and Dinah's sermon was not all imaginary. But though
in some sense her work was portraiture, it was portraiture passed
through the alembic of her brilliant genius, from commonplace material
distilled into the finest essence.

It is impossible here again to give adequate extracts of the wise,
witty, tender and high-minded things scattered broadcast over this
book--as, indeed, over all that George Eliot ever wrote. That paragraph
beginning--"Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it"; the
description of Hetty's flower-like beauty, which fascinated even her
sharp-tongued aunt; phrases like "John considered a young master as the
natural enemy of an old servant," and "young people in general as a poor
contrivance for carrying on the world"; that sharp little bit of moral
and intellectual antithesis, with the learned man "meekly rocking the
twins in the cradle with his left hand, while with his right he
inflicted the most lacerating sarcasms on an opponent who had betrayed a
brutal ignorance of Hebrew"--forgiving human weaknesses and moral errors
as is a Christian's bounden duty, but treating as "the enemy of his
race, the man who takes the wrong side on the momentous subject of the
Hebrew points"; how masterly, how fine are these and a dozen other
unnoted passages!

Hetty in her bedroom, parading in her concealed finery, reminds one too
closely of Gretchen with her fatal jewels to be quite favourable to the
English version; and we question the truth of Adam Bede's hypothetical
content with such a Dorothy Doolittle as his wife. Writers of love
stories among the working classes in bygone days forget that notableness
was then part of a woman's virtue--part of her claims to love and
consideration--and that mere flower-like kittenish prettiness did not
count to her honour any more than graceful movements and aesthetic taste
would count to the honour of a Tommy in the trenches who could neither
handle a spade nor load a rifle. Blackmore made the same mistake in his
"Lorna Doone," and George Eliot has repeated it in Adam's love for Hetty
solely for her beauty and without "faculty" as her dower. In his own way
Bartle Massey, misogynist, is as smart as Mrs. Poyser herself, as
amusing and as trenchant; but the coming-of-age dance is fifty years
and more too modern, and the long dissertation at the beginning of the
second book is a blot, because it is a clog and an interruption. Not so
that glorious description of nature in August when "the sun was hidden
for a moment and then shone out warm again like a recovered joy;"--nor
that deep and tender bit of introspection, setting forth the spiritual
good got from sorrow as well as its indestructible impress.

Yet for all the beauty of these philosophic passages there are too many
of them in this as in all George Eliot's works. They hamper the action
and lend an air of pedantry and preaching with which a novel proper has
nothing to do. It is bad style as well as bad art, and irritating to a
critical, while depressing to a sympathetic reader. But summing up all
the faults together, and giving full weight to each, we gladly own the
masterly residuum that is left. The dawning love between Adam and Dinah
alone is enough to claim for "Adam Bede" one of the highest places in
literature, had not that place been already taken by the marvellous
truth, diversity and power of the character-drawing. Mrs. Poyser's
epigrams, too, generally made when she was "knitting with fierce
rapidity, as if her movements were a necessary function like the
twittering of a crab's antennae," both too numerous and too well known
to quote, would have redeemed the flimsiest framework and the silliest
padding extant.

The light that seemed to flash on the world when this glorious book was
published will never be forgotten by those who were old enough at the
time to read and appreciate. By the way, is that would-be famous Liggins
still alive? When he sums it all up, how much did he get out of his bold
attempt to don the giant's robe?

       *       *       *       *       *

If "Adam Bede" was partly reminiscent, "The Mill on the Floss" was
partly autobiographical. There is no question that in the sensitive,
turbulent, loving nature of Maggie Tulliver Marian Evans painted
herself. Those who knew her when she first came to London knew her as a
pronounced insurgent. Never noisy and never coarse, always quiet in
manner, sensitive, diffident and shrinking from unpleasantness, she yet
had not put on that "made" and artificial pose which was her
distinguishing characteristic in later years. She was still Maggie
Tulliver, with a conscience and temperament at war together, and with a
spiritual ideal in no way attained by her practical realisation. For
indeed, the union between Marian Evans and George Lewes was far more
incongruous in some of its details than was Maggie's love for Philip or
her passion for Stephen. Philip appealed to her affection of old time,
her pity and her love of art--Stephen to her hot blood and her sensuous
love of beauty. But George Lewes's total want of all religiousness of
feeling, his brilliancy of wit, which was now coarse now mere
_persiflage_, his cleverness, which was more quickness of assimilation
than the originality of genius, were all traits of character unlike the
deeper, truer and more ponderous qualities of the woman who braved the
world for his sake when first she linked her fate with his--the woman
who did not, like Maggie, turn back when she came to the brink but who
boldly crossed the Rubicon--and who, in her after efforts to cover up
the conditions, showed that she smarted from the consequences.

Read in youth by the light of sympathy with insurgency, Maggie is
adorable, and her brother Tom is but a better-looking Jonas Chuzzlewit.
Read in age by the light of respect for conformity and self-control,
much of Maggie's charm vanishes, while most of Tom's hardness becomes
both respectable and inevitable. Maggie was truly a thorn in the side of
a proud country family, not accustomed to its little daughters running
off to join the gipsies, nor to its grown girls eloping with their
cousin's lover. Tom was right when he said no reliance could be placed
on her; for where there is this unlucky divergence between principle and
temperament, the will can never be firm nor the walk steady. Sweet
little Lucy had more of the true heroism of a woman in her patient
acceptance of sorrow and her generous forgiveness of the cause thereof,
than could be found in all Maggie's struggles between passion and
principle. The great duties of life lying at our feet and about our path
cannot be done away with by the romantic picturesqueness of one
character contrasted with the more prosaic because conventional
limitations of the other; nor is it right to give all our sympathy to
the one who spoilt so many lives and brought so much disgrace on her
family name, merely because she did not mean, and did not wish, and had
bitter remorse after terrible conflicts, which never ended in real
self-control or steadfast pursuance of the right.

There is something in "The Mill on the Floss" akin to the gloomy
fatalism of a Greek tragedy. In "Adam Bede" is more spontaneity of
action, more liberty of choice; but, given the natures by which events
were worked out to their final issues in "The Mill on the Floss," it
seems as if everything must have happened precisely as it did. An
obstinate, litigious and irascible man like Mr. Tulliver was bound to
come to grief in the end. Fighting against long odds as he did, he could
not win. Blind anger and as blind precipitancy, against cool tenacity
and clear perceptions, must go under; and Mr. Tulliver was no match
against the laws of life as interpreted by Mr. Wakem and the decisions
of the law courts. His choice of a fool for his wife--was not Mrs.
Tulliver well known at Coventry?--was another step in the terrible March
of Fate. She was of no help to him as a wife--with woman's wit to assist
his masculine decisions--nor as a mother was she capable of ruling her
daughter or influencing her son. She was as a passive instrument in the
hands of the gods--one of those unnoted and unsuspected agents by whose
unconscious action such tremendous results are produced. George Eliot
never did anything more remarkable than in the union she makes in this
book between the most commonplace characters and the most majestic
conception of tragic fate. There is not a stage hero among them all--not
a pair of buskins for the whole company; but the conception is
AEschylean, though the stage is no bigger than a doll's house.

The humour in "The Mill on the Floss" is almost as rich as that of "Adam
Bede," though the special qualities of the four sisters are perhaps
unduly exaggerated. Sister Pullet's eternal tears become wearisome, and
lose their effect by causeless and ceaseless repetition; and surely
sister Grigg could not have been always such an unmitigated Gorgon! Mrs.
Tulliver's helpless foolishness and tactless interference, moving with
her soft white hands the lever which set the whole crushing machinery
in motion, are after George Eliot's best manner; and the whole comedy
circling round sister Pullet's wonderful bonnet and the linen and the
chaney--comedy at last linked on to tragedy--is of inimitable richness.
The girlish bond of sympathy between sister Pullet and sister Tulliver,
in that they both liked spots for their patterned linen, while sister
Grigg--allays contrairy to Sophy Pullet, would have striped things--is
repeated in that serio-comic scene of the ruin, when the Tullivers are
sold up and the stalwart cause of their disaster is in bed, paralysed.
By the way, would he have recovered so quickly and so thoroughly as he
did from such a severe attack? Setting that aside, for novelists are not
expected to be very accurate pathologists, the humour of this part of
the book is all the more striking for the pathos mingled with it.

"The head miller, a tall broad-shouldered man of forty, black-eyed and
black-haired, subdued by a general mealiness like an auricula":--
"They're nash things, them lop-eared rabbits--they'd happen ha' died if
they'd been fed. Things out o' natur never thrive. God Almighty doesn't
like 'em. He made the rabbit's ears to lie back, and it's nothing but
contrariness to make 'em lie down like a mastiff dog's":--"Maggie's
tears began to subside, and she put out her mouth for the cake and bit
a piece; and then Tom bit a piece, just for company, and they ate
together and rubbed each other's cheeks and brows and noses together,
while they ate, with a humiliating resemblance to two friendly
ponies":--Is there anything better than these in Mrs. Poyser's
repertory?

Of acute psychological vision is that fine bit on "plotting contrivance
and deliberate covetousness"; and the summing up of the religious and
moral life of the Dodsons and Tullivers, beginning "Certainly the
religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers," is as good as
anything in our language. No one theoretically knew human nature better
than George Eliot. Practically, she was too thin-skinned to bear the
slightest abrasion, such as necessarily comes to us from extended
intercourse or the give and take of equality. But theoretically she
sounded the depths and shallows, and knew where the bitter springs rose
and where the healing waters flowed; and when she translated what she
knew into the conduct and analysis of her fictitious characters, she
gave them a life and substance peculiarly her own.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hitherto George Eliot has dealt with her own experiences, her
reminiscences of old friends and well-known places, of familiar
acquaintances, and, in Maggie Tulliver, of her own childish frowardness
and affectionateness--her girlish desire to do right and facile slipping
into wrong. In "Silas Marner" she ventures into a more completely
creative region; and, for all the exquisite beauty and poetry of the
central idea, she has failed her former excellence. The story is one of
the not quite impossible but highly improbable kind, with a _Deus ex
machina_ as the ultimate setter-to-rights of all things wrong. As with
"Adam Bede," the date is thrown back a generation or two, without the
smallest savour of the time indicated, save in the fashion of the
dresses of the sisters Lammeter--a joseph substituted for a cloak, and
riding on a pillion for a drive in a fly. Else there is not the least
attempt to synchronise time, circumstances and sentiment, while the
story is artificial in its plot and unlikely in its treatment. Yet it is
both pretty and pathetic; and the little introduction of fairyland in
the golden-haired child asleep by the fire, as the substitute for the
stolen hoard, is as lovely as fairy stories generally are. But we
altogether question the probability of a marriage between the young
squire and his drunken wife. Such a woman would not have been too
rigorous, and was not; and such a man as Godfrey Cass would not have
married a low-born mistress from "a movement of compunction." As we
said before, in the story of Hetty and Arthur, young squires a century
ago were not so tender-hearted towards the honour of a peasant girl. It
was a pity, of course, when things went wrong; but then young men will
be young men, and it behoved the lasses to keep themselves to
themselves! If the young squire did the handsome thing in money, that
was all that could be expected of him. The girl would be none the worse
thought of for her slip; and the money got by her fault would help in
her plenishing with some honest fellow who understood things. This is
the sentiment still to be found in villages, where the love-children of
the daughters out in service are to be found comfortably housed in the
grandmother's cottage, and where no one thinks any the worse of the
unmarried mother; and certainly, a century ago, it was the universal
rule of moral measurement. George Eliot undoubtedly made a chronological
mistake in both stories by the amount of conscientious remorse felt by
her young men, and the depth of social degradation implied in this slip
of her young women.

The beginning of "Silas Marner" is much finer than that of either of her
former books. It strikes the true note of a harmonious introduction, and
is free from the irritating trivialities of the former openings. In
those early days of which "Silas Marner" treats, a man from the next
parish was held as a "stranger"; and even now a Scotch, Irish or Welsh
man would be considered as much a foreigner as a "Frenchy" himself, were
he to take up his abode in any of the more remote hamlets of the north
or west. The state of isolation in which Silas Marner lived was true on
all these counts--his being a "foreigner" to the autochthonous shepherds
and farmers of Ravaloe--his half mazed, half broken-hearted state owing
to the false accusation brought against him and the criminal neglect of
Providence to show his innocence--and his strange and uncongenial trade.
Yet, for this last, were not the women of that time familiar with the
weaving industry?--else what could they have done with the thread which
they themselves had spun? If it were disposed of to a travelling agent
for the hand-loom weavers, why not have indicated the fact? It would
have been one touch more to the good of local colour and conditional
accuracy. To be sure, the paints are laid on rather thickly throughout;
but eccentricities and folks with bees in their bonnets were always to
be found in remote places before the broom of steam and electricity came
to sweep them into a more common conformity; and that line between
oddity and insanity, always narrow, was then almost invisible.

The loss of the hoarded treasure and the poor dazed weaver's terrified
flight to the Rainbow introduces us to one of George Eliot's most
masterly of her many scenes of rustic humour.

"The more important customers, who drank spirits and sat nearest the
fire, staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the first man
who winked; while the beer drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and
smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across
their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funereal duty attended
with embarrassing sadness"--these, as well as Mr. Snell, the landlord,
"a man of a neutral disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human
differences, as those of beings who were all alike in need of
liquor"--do their fooling admirably. From the cautious discussion on the
red Durham with a star on her forehead, to the authoritative dictum of
Mr. Macey, tailor and parish clerk (were men of his social stamp called
_Mr._ in those days?) when he asserts that "there's allays two 'pinions;
there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other
folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the
bell could hear itself"--from the gossip about the Lammeter land to the
ghos'es in the Lammeter stables, it is all excellent--rich, racy and to
the manner born. And the sudden appearance of poor, scared, weazen-faced
Silas in the midst of the discussion on ghos'es, gives occasion for
another fytte of humour quite as good as what has gone before.

Worthy of Mrs. Poyser, too, was sweet and patient Dolly Winthrop's
estimate of men. "It seemed surprising that Ben Winthrop, who loved his
quart-pot and his joke, got along so well with Dolly; but she took her
husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else,
considering that 'men _would_ be so' and viewing the stronger sex in the
light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally
troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks." Good, too, when speaking of
his wife, is Mr. Macey's version of the "mum" and "budget" of the
fairies' dance. "Before I said 'sniff' I took care to know as she'd say
'snaff,' and pretty quick too. I wasn't a-going to open _my_ mouth like
a dog at a fly, and snap it to again, wi' nothing to swaller."

But in spite of all this literary value of "Silas Marner" we come back
to our first opinion of its being unreal and almost impossible in plot.
The marriage of Godfrey to an opium-eating(?) drab, and the robbery of
Silas Marner's hoard by the squire's son were pretty hard nuts to crack
in the way of probability; but the timely death of the wife just at the
right moment and in the right place--the adoption of a little girl of
two by an old man as nearly "nesh" as was consistent with his power of
living free from the restraint of care--the discovery of Dunsay's body
and the restoration to the weaver of his long-lost gold--the _impasse_
of Eppie, the squire's lawfully born daughter and his only legal
inheritor, married to a peasant and living as a peasant at her father's
gates: all these things make "Silas Marner" a beautiful unreality,
taking it out of the ranks of human history and placing it in those of
fairy tale and romance.

       *       *       *       *       *

In "Felix Holt" we come back to a more actual kind of life, such as it
was in the early thirties when the "democratic wave," which has swept
away so much of the old parcelling out of things social and political,
was first beginning to make itself felt. But here again George Eliot
gives us the sense of anachronism in dealing too familiarly with those
new conditions of the Reform Bill which gave Treby Magna for the first
time a member, and which also for the first time created the Revising
Barrister--while Trades Unions were still unrecognised by the law, and
did their work mainly by rattening and violence. Any one who was an
intelligent and wide-awake child at that time, and who can remember the
talk of the excited elders, must remember things somewhat differently
from what George Eliot has set down. Radical was in those days a term of
reproach, carrying with it moral obloquy and condemnation. The Tories
might call the Whigs Radicals when they wanted to overwhelm them with
shame, as we might now say Anarchists and Dynamiters. But the most
advanced Gentleman would never have stood for Parliament as a Radical.
Felix Holt himself, and the upper fringe of the working class, as also
the lower sediment, might be Radicals, but scarcely such a man as Harold
Transome, who would have been a Whig of a broad pattern. And as for the
Revising Barrister, he was looked on as something akin to Frankenstein's
Monster. No one knew where his power began nor where it ended; and on
each side alike he was dreaded as an unknown piece of machinery which,
once set a-going, no one could say what it would do or where it would
stop.

In its construction "Felix Holt" is perhaps the most unsatisfactory of
all George Eliot's books. The ins and outs of Transome and Durfey and
Scaddon and Bycliffe were all too intricate in the weaving and too
confused in the telling to be either intelligible or interesting. In
trying on the garment of Miss Braddon the author of "Felix Holt" showed
both want of perception and a deplorable misfit. Also she repeats the
situation of Eppie and her adopted father Silas in that of Esther and
Rufus Lyon. But where it was natural enough for the contentedly rustic
Eppie to refuse to leave her beloved old father for one new and
unknown--her old habits of cottage simplicity, including a suitable
lover, for the unwelcome luxuries of an unfamiliar state--natural in her
though eminently unnatural in the drama of life--it was altogether
inharmonious with Esther's character and tastes to prefer poverty to
luxury, Felix to Harold, Malhouse Yard to Transome Court. George Eliot's
usually firm grip on character wavers into strange self-contradiction in
her delineations of Esther Lyon. Even the situation of which she is so
fond--the evolution of a soul from spiritual deadness to keen spiritual
intensity, and the conversion of a mind from folly to seriousness--even
in this we miss the masterly drawing of her better manner. The humour
too is thinner. Mrs. Holt is a bad Mrs. Nickleby; and the comic chorus
of rustic clowns, which George Eliot always introduces where she can, is
comparatively poor. She is guilty of one distinct coarseness, in her own
character as the author, when she speaks of the cook at Treby Manor--"a
much grander person than her ladyship"--"as wearing gold and jewelry to
a vast amount of suet."

When Esther has been taken up by the Transomes, George Eliot misses what
would have been absolutely certain--these fine little points of
difference between the high-bred lady of Transome Court and the
half-bred Esther of Malhouse Yard; and yet, quite unintentionally, she
makes Esther as vulgar as a barmaid in her conversations and flirtatious
coquetries with Harold Transome. Nor, we venture to think, as going too
far on the other side, would a girl of Esther's upbringing and
surroundings have used such a delightfully literary phrase as
"importunate scents." On the whole we do not think it can be denied
that, so far as she had gone in her literary career when she wrote
"Felix Holt," it is undeniably her least successful work.

And yet, how many and how beautiful are the good things in it! If Homer
nods at times, when he is awake who can come near him? The opening of
the book is beyond measure fine, and abounds in felicitous phrases. "His
sheep-dog following with heedless unofficial air as of a beadle in
undress:"--"The higher pains of a dim political consciousness:"--"The
younger farmers who had almost a sense of dissipation in talking to a
man of his questionable station and unknown experience:"--"Her life
would be exalted into something quite new--into a sort of difficult
blessedness such as one may imagine in beings who are conscious of
painfully growing into the possession of higher powers" (true for George
Eliot herself but not for such a girl as Esther Lyon):--These are
instances of literary supremacy taken at random, with many more behind.

Then how exquisite is that first love-scene between Felix and Esther! It
is in these grave and tender indications of love that George Eliot is at
her best. Gentle as "sleeping flowers"--delicately wrought, like the
most perfect cameos--graceful and suggestive, subtle and yet
strong--they are always the very gems of her work. And in "Felix Holt"
especially they stand out with more perfectness because of the inferior
quality of so much that surrounds them.

Felix himself is one of George Eliot's masterpieces in the way of
nobleness of ideal and firmness of drawing. Whether he would have won
such a girl as Esther, or have allowed himself to be won by her, may be
doubtful; but for all the rugged and disagreeable honesty of his
nature--for all his high ideals of life and hideous taste in
costume--for all his intrinsic tendency and external bearishness, he is
supreme. And with one of George Eliot's best aphorisms, made in his
intention, we close the book with that kind of mingled disappointment
and delight which must needs be produced by the inferior work of a great
master. "Blows are sarcasms turned stupid; wit is a form of force that
leaves the limbs at rest."

The last three books of the series are the most ponderous. Still
beautiful and ever noble, they are like over-cultivated fruits and
flowers of which the girth is inconvenient; and in one, at least,
certain defects already discernible in the earlier issues attain a
prominence fatal to perfect work.

Never spontaneous, as time went on George Eliot became painfully
laboured. Her scholarship degenerated into pedantry, and what had been
stately and dignified accuracy in her terms grew to be harsh and
inartistic technicality. The artificial pose she had adopted in her life
and bearing reacted on her work; and the contradiction between her
social circumstances and literary position coloured more than her
manners. All her teaching went to the side of self-sacrifice for the
general good, of conformity with established moral standards, while her
life was in direct opposition to her words; for though she did no other
woman personal injustice, she did set an example of disobedience to the
public law which wrought more mischief than was counteracted by even the
noblest of her exhortations to submit to the restraints of
righteousness, however irksome they might be. And it was this endeavour
to co-ordinate insurgency and conformity, self-will and self-sacrifice,
that made the discord of which every candid student of her work, who
knew her history, was conscious from the beginning. Nowhere do we find
this contradiction more markedly shown than in "Romola," the first of
the ponderous last three.

Her noblest work, "Romola" is yet one of George Eliot's most defective
in what we may call the scaffolding of the building. The loftiness of
sentiment, the masterly delineation of character, the grand grasp of the
political and religious movement of the time, the evidences of deep
study and conscientious painstaking visible on every page, are combined
with what seems to us to be the most extraordinary indifference to--for
it cannot be ignorance of--the social and domestic conditions of the
time. The whole story is surely impossible in view of the long arm of
the Church--the personal restraints necessarily imposed on women during
the turbulent unrest of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--the proud
exclusiveness of the well-born citizens of any state.

Take the last first. Grant all the honour paid by Cosmo and Lorenzo to
the learned men of all nations, especially to Greek scholars who, in the
first fervour of the Renaissance, were as sons of the gods to those
thirsting for the waters of the divine spring. Grant, too, the example
set by Bartolommeo Scala, who had given his beautiful daughter
Alessandra in marriage to the "soldier-poet" Marullo; was it likely that
even an eccentric old scholar like the blind Bardo de' Bardi should
have so unreservedly adopted a nameless Greek adventurer, flung up like
a second Ulysses from the waves, unvouched for by any sponsor and
unidentified by any document? We allow that Bardo might have taken Tito
as his scribe and secretary, seeing that the Cennini had already
employed him, waif and stray as he was; but that he should have
consented to his daughter's marriage with this stranger, and that her
more conservative and more suspicious godfather, Bernado del Nero,
should have consented, even if reluctantly, was just about as likely as
that an English country gentleman should allow his daughter to marry a
handsome gipsy.

If we think for a moment of what citizenship meant in olden times, the
improbability of the whole of Tito's career becomes still more striking.
As, in Athens, the Sojourner never stood on the same plane with the
autochthon, so in Rome the Peregrinus was ineligible for public office
or the higher kind of marriage; and though the stricter part of the law
was subsequently relaxed in favour of a wider civic hospitality, the
sentiment of exclusiveness remained, and indeed does yet remain in
Italy. It seems more than improbable that Tito, a Greek adventurer,
should have been employed in any political service, save perhaps as a
base kind of scout and unhonoured spy. That he should ever have taken
the position of an accredited public orator was so contrary to all the
old traditions and habits of thought as to be of the same substance as a
fairy tale.

The character of Bardo, too, is non-Italian; and his modes of life and
thought were as impossible as are some other things to be hereafter
spoken of. The Church had a long arm, as we said, and a firm grip; and
while it blinked indulgently enough at certain aberrations, it demanded
the show of conformity in essentials. Lorenzo was a pagan, but he died
receiving the Sacraments. The Borgias were criminals, but their
professions of faith were loud-voiced and in true earnest. Men might
inveigh against the evil lives of the clergy and the excesses of monks
and nuns, but they had to confess God and the Church; and their
diatribes had to be carefully worded--as witness Rabelais--or a plea
would certainly be found for the fire and faggot--as with Fra Dolcino
and Savonarola. So with conformity to the usages of life which, then and
now, are considered integral to morality. It could not have been
possible for Bardo to bring up his daughter "aloof from the debasing
influence" of her own sex, and in a household with only one old man for
a servant. The times did not allow it; no more than we should allow it
now in this freer day. This womanless home for an Italian girl at any
time, more especially in the Middle Ages, when even young wives were
bound to have their companions and duennas, is a serious blot in
workmanship. So, indeed, is the whole of Romola's life, being
anachronism and simply nineteenth-century English from start to finish.

The things which both she and Tessa did, and were allowed to do, are on
a par with "Gulliver's Travels" and "Peter Wilkins." It was as
impossible for Tessa, a pretty young unmarried girl, contadina as she
was, to come into Florence alone, as for a peasant child of three years
old to be sent with a message on business into the City of London alone.
To this day well-conducted women of any class do not wander about the
streets of Italian cities unaccompanied; and maidenhood is, as it always
was, sacredly and jealously guarded. Nor could Romola have gone out and
come in at her desire, as she is allowed by the author. With streets
filled by the turbulent factions of the Bianchi and Neri, always ready
for a fight or for a love-adventure, what would have happened to, and
been thought of, a beautiful young woman slipping about within the city
and outside the gates at all hours of the day and night? She is said to
be either quite alone (!), as when she goes to Tessa's house, or merely
accompanied by Monna Brigida, as when she goes to the convent to see
her dying brother--which also, by the way, was impossible--or attended,
at a distance, by old Maso when she attempts her flight as a solitary
nun. She would have lost name and state had she committed these
eccentricities; and had she persisted in them, she would have been sent
to a convent--that refuge for sorrow, that shelter from danger, that
prison for contumacy--and her godfather would have been the first to
consign her to what was then the only safe asylum for women. The scene
she has with Tito before Nello's shop is ludicrously impossible--as is
their English-like return home together, without retinue or lights, just
like a man and wife of to-day when she has been to fetch him from the
public-house, or, if she be of the better class, from his club. English,
too, is Romola's sitting up for her husband in her queer womanless
establishment, and opening the door to him when he comes home late at
night. For the matter of that, indeed, Tito's solitary rambles are as
much out of line with the time, and the circumstances of that time, as
is Romola's strange daring. No man of any note whatever appeared alone
in the streets when out on a midnight expedition, either to commit
murder or break the seventh commandment. He took some one with him,
friend or servant, armed; and to this day you will not find Italians
willingly walk alone at night. The whole of this kind of life, if
necessary for the story, is dead against truth and probability. So is
Romola's flight, disguised as a nun. Splendid as is the scene between
her and Savonarola, the _vraisemblance_ is spoilt by this impossibility
of condition. Nor could any woman of that time, brought up in a city,
have felt a sense of freedom when fairly outside the walls by herself on
a strange road, going to meet an unknown fate and bound to an unknown
bourne. She would have felt as a purdah woman of India suddenly turned
loose in the streets and environs of Delhi--as felt all those women
whose evidence we read of in matters of crime and murder, when they came
face to face with the desolation of unprotectedness. Modern women call
it freedom, but in the Middle Ages such a feeling did not exist. All
these things are anachronisms; as much so as if a novelist of the
twentieth century, writing of English life in the eighteenth, should
clothe his women in knickerbockers, mount them on bicycles, and turn
them into the football field and cricket-ground.

These exceptions taken to the scaffolding of the book, we are free to
admire its glorious nobility of sentiment, its lofty purpose, its
perfection of character-drawing, and the dramatic power of its various
scenes. Nothing can excel the power with which Tito's character is shown
in its gradual slipping from simple selfishness to positive
criminality. The whole action may be summed up in George Eliot's own
words.

"When, the next morning, Tito put this determination into act, he had
chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his
wishes. He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth
desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he
should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of
his conduct should not remain for ever concealed. Under every guilty
secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome
infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of
deeds often lies less in the commission than in the consequent
adjustment of our desires--the enlistment of our self-interest on the
side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the purifying influence of
public confession springs from the fact that by it the hope in lies is
for ever swept away, and the soul recovers its noble attitude of
sincerity."

But, giving every weight to the natural weakness, sweetness and
affectionateness, as well as to the latent falsity of Tito's character,
we cannot accept the Tessa episode as true to life in general, while it
is eminently untrue to Italian life, especially of those times. Tessa
herself, too, is wearisome with her tears and her kisses, her blue eyes
and baby face, so incessantly repeated and harped on. She is as
nauseating as she is impossible; and the whole story from first to last
is an ugly blot on the book.

In Romola and in Savonarola we touch the heights. The "tall lily" is an
exquisite conception and is supreme in human loveliness. Her two
interviews with Savonarola are superbly done, and the gradual crushing
down of her proud self-will under the passionate fervour of the priest
is beyond praise both for style and psychology. So, too, are the changes
in the great preacher himself--the first, when his simple earnestness of
belief in his mission degenerates into self-consciousness and personal
assumption, as is the way with all reformers--the second, when he
abandons his later attitude, and the dross is burnt away as the hour of
trial comes on him, and the World no longer stands between God and his
soul. The final scenes of the Frate's public life are powerfully
wrought, with all George Eliot's mastery and eloquence and deep
religious fervour; but it is in scenes and circumstances of this kind
that she is ever at her best. In humour and psychologic insight she is
greater than any English woman writer we have had; in aphorisms she is
unrivalled; but in playfulness she is clumsy, and in catching the moral,
intellectual and social tone of the times of which she writes, she is
nowhere.

Contrast Romola's character and manner of life--above all those two
thoroughly English letters of hers--with all that we know of Vittoria
Colonna, the purest and noblest woman of her day--which was
Romola's--and at once we see the difference between them--the difference
wrought by four centuries--Vittoria being essentially a woman of the
time, though a head and shoulders above the ruck; while Romola is as
essentially a product of the nineteenth century. In spite of the local
colour--which, after all, is only a wash--given by the descriptions of
pageants and processions, and by the history of which George Eliot so
ably mastered the details, the whole book is nineteenth century, from
Monna Brigida's characteristically English speech about Tessa's place in
the house and the children's sweets, to Romola's as characteristically
English attitude and hygienic objections--from a little maiden, without
a caretaker, carrying eggs to Piero, to Romola's solitary visit to the
studio and night perambulations about the city.

All these shortcomings notwithstanding, "Romola" will ever remain one of
the noblest works of our noblest author; and, after all, did not
Shakspere make Hector quote Aristotle, and show all his Greeks and
Romans and outlandish nondescripts from countries unknown to himself, as
nothing but sturdy Englishmen, such as lived and loved in the times of
the great Eliza? Where we have so much to admire--nay, to venerate--we
may let the smaller mistakes pass. Yet they must be spoken of by those
who would be candid and not fulsome--just and not flattering. By the
way, did George Eliot know that "Baldassare" is the name of one of the
devils invoked to this day by Sicilian witches?

       *       *       *       *       *

The longest of all the novels, "Middlemarch," is the most interesting in
its characters, its isolated scenes, its moral meaning and philosophic
extension; but it is also the most inartistic and the most encumbered
with subordinate interests and personages. The canvas is as crowded as
one of George Cruikshank's etchings; and the work would have gained by
what George Eliot would have called fission--a division into two. The
stories of Dorothea and Casaubon and of Rosamond and Lydgate are
essentially separate entities; and though they are brought together at
the last by an intermingled interest, the result is no more true
unification than the Siamese twins or the Double-headed Nightingale
represented one true human being. The contrast between the two beautiful
young wives is well preserved, and the nicer shades of difference are as
clearly marked as are the more essential; for George Eliot was far too
good a workman to scamp in any direction, and the backs of her stories
are as well wrought as the fronts. But if one-third of the book had been
cut out--failing that fission, which would have been still better--the
work would have gained in proportion to its compression.

The character of Dorothea marks the last stage in the development of the
personality which begins with Maggie Tulliver, and is in reality Marian
Evans's own self. Maggie, Romola and Dorothea are the same person in
progressive stages of moral evolution. All are at cross corners with
life and fate--all are rebellious against things as they find them.
Maggie's state of insurgency is the crudest and simplest; Romola's is
the most passionate in its moral reprobation of accepted unworthiness;
Dorothea's is the widest in its mental horizon, and the most womanly in
the whole-hearted indifference to aught but love, which ends the story
and gives the conclusive echo. In its own way, her action in taking Will
Ladislaw is like Esther's in marrying Felix Holt; but it has not the
unlikelihood of Esther's choice. It is all for love, if one will, but it
runs more harmoniously with the broad lines of her character, and gives
us no sense of that dislocation which we get from Esther's decision. And
in its own way it is at once a parallel and an apology.

The most masterly bits of work in "Middlemarch" are the characters of
Rosamond and Casaubon. Rosamond's unconscious selfishness, her moral
thinness, and the superficial quality of her love are all portrayed
without a flaw in the drawing; while Casaubon's dryness, his literary
indecision following on his indefatigable research, and his total
inability to adjust himself to his new conditions, together with his
scrupulous formality of politeness combined with real cruelty of temper,
make a picture of supreme psychologic merit. They who think that
Casaubon was meant for the late Rector of Lincoln know nothing about
George Eliot's early life. They who do know some of those obscurer
details, are well aware of the origin whence she drew her masterly
portrait, as they know who was Mrs. Poyser, who Tom Tulliver, and who
Hetty Sorrel. Hetty, indeed, is somewhat repeated in that amazingly
idiotic Tessa, who is neither English nor Italian, nor, indeed, quite
human in her molluscous silliness; but there are lines of relation which
show themselves to experts, and the absence of the "cherry stone" does
not count for more than the dissimilarity always to be found between two
copies.

No finer bit of work was ever done than the deep and subtle but true and
most pathetic tragedy of Lydgate's married life. The character of
Rosamond was a difficult one to paint, and one false touch could have
been fatal. To show her intense selfishness and shallowness and yet not
to make her revolting, was what only such a consummate psychologist as
George Eliot could have done. And to show how Lydgate, strong man as he
was and full of noble ambition and splendid aims, was necessarily
subdued, mastered and ruined by the tenacious weakness and moral
unworthiness of such a wife, yet not to make him contemptible, was also
a task beyond the power of any but the few Masters of our literature.
All the scenes between this ill-assorted pair are in George Eliot's best
manner and up to her highest mark; and the gradual declination of
Rosamond's love, together with Lydgate's gradual awakening to the truth
of things as they were, are portrayed with a touch as firm as it is
tender.

That scene on the receipt of Sir Godwin's letter is as tragic in its own
way as Othello or a Greek drama. It has in it the same sense of human
helplessness in the presence of an overmastering fate. Rosamond was
Lydgate's Fate. Her weakness, tenacity and duplicity--his stronger
manhood, which could not crush the weaker woman--his love, which could
not coerce, nor punish, nor yet control the thing he loved--all made the
threads of that terrible net in which he was entangled, and by which the
whole worth of his life was destroyed. It is a story that goes home to
the consciousness of many men, who know, as Lydgate knew, that they have
been mastered by the one who to them is "as an animal of another and
feebler species"--who know, as Lydgate knew, that their energies have
been stunted, their ambition has been frustrated, and their horizon
narrowed and darkened because of that tyranny which the weaker woman so
well knows how to exercise over the stronger man.

Casaubon is as masterly in drawing as is Rosamond or Lydgate. We confess
to a sadly imperfect sympathy with Dorothea in her queer enthusiasm for
this dry stick of a man. Learned or not, he was scarcely one to whom a
young woman, full of life's strong and sweet emotions, would care to
give herself as a wife. One can understand the more impersonal impulse
which threw Marian Evans into an attitude of adoration before the
original of her dry stick; but when it comes to the question of
marriage, the thing is simply revolting as done by the girl, not only of
her own free-will but against the advice and prayers of her friends. Tom
was to be excused for his harshness and irritation against Maggie; and
Celia's commonplaces of wisdom for the benefit of that self-willed and
recalcitrant Dodo, if not very profound nor very stimulating, nor yet
sympathetic, were worth more in the daily life and ordering of sane folk
than Dorothea's blind and obstinate determination. Beautiful and
high-minded as she is, she is also one of those irritating saints whose
virtues one cannot but revere, whose personal charms one loves and
acknowledges, and whose wrongheadedness makes one long to punish
them--or at least restrain them by main force from social suicide. And
to think that to her first mistake she adds that second of marrying Will
Ladislaw--the utter snob that he is! Where were George Eliot's
perceptions? Or was it that in Ladislaw she had a model near at hand,
whom she saw through coloured glasses, which also shed their rosy light
on her reproduction, so that her copy was to her as idealised as the
original, and she was ignorant of the effect produced on the
clear-sighted? Yet over all the mistakes made by her through defective
taste and obstinate unwisdom, the beauty of Dorothea's character stands
out as did Romola's--like a "white lily" in the garden. She is a superb
creature in her own way, and her disillusionment is of the nature of a
tragedy. But what could any woman expect from a man who could write such
a love-letter as that of Mr. Casaubon's?

The canvas of "Middlemarch" is overcrowded, as we said; yet how good
some of the characters are! The sturdy uprightness, tempered with such
loving sweetness, of Cabel Garth; the commonplace negation of all great
and all unworthy qualities of the Vincys--Celia and Sir James--Mr.
Farebrother and Mr. and Mrs. Cadwallader--all are supreme. We confess we
do not care much for the portraiture of Mr. Bulstrode and his spiteful
delator Raffles--George Eliot is not good at melodrama; also the whole
episode of Mr. Featherstone's illness, with his watching family and Mary
Garth, too vividly recalls old Anthony Chuzzlewit and all that took
place round his death-bed and about his will, to give a sense of truth
or novelty. George Eliot's power did not lie in the same direction as
that of Charles Dickens, and the contrast is not to her advantage. Great
humorists as both were, their humour was essentially different, and will
not bear comparison.

No book that George Eliot ever wrote is without its wise and pithy
aphorisms, its brilliant flashes of wit, its innumerable good things.
Space will not permit our quoting one-tenth part of the good things
scattered about these fascinating pages. Celia's feeling, which she
stifled in the depths of her heart, that "her sister was too religious
for family comfort. Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making
one afraid of treading or sitting down, or even eating:"--(But, farther
on, what an unnecessary bit of pedantry!--"In short, woman was a problem
which, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly
less complicated than the _revolutions of an irregular solid_.")--Mrs.
Cadwallader's sense of birth, so that a "De Bracy reduced to take his
dinner in a basin would have seemed to her an example of pathos worth
exaggerating; and I fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified
her. But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious
hatred:"--"Indeed, she (Mrs. Waule) herself was accustomed to think that
entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in
the Almighty's intentions about families:"--"Strangers, whether wrecked
and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by
portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the
virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in
vain:"--"Ladislaw, a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley:"--"But it
is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its
consequences"--an observation wrung out of her own disturbed and
inharmonious experience:--"That controlled self-consciousness of manner
which is the expensive substitute for simplicity:"--These are a few
picked out at random, but the wealth that remains behind is but
inadequately represented by stray nuggets.

Before we close the volume we would like to note the one redeeming
little flash of human tenderness in Mr. Casaubon when he had received
his death-warrant from Lydgate, and Dorothea waits for him to come up to
bed. It is the only tender and spontaneous moment in his life as George
Eliot has painted it, and its strangeness makes its pathos as well as
its truth.

       *       *       *       *       *

The last of the lengthy three, and the last novel she wrote, "Daniel
Deronda" is the most wearisome, the least artistic, and the most
unnatural of all George Eliot's books. Of course it has the masterly
touch, and, for all its comparative inferiority, has also its supreme
excellence. But in plot, treatment and character it is far below its
predecessors. Some of the characters are strangely unnatural.
Grandcourt, for instance, is more like the French caricature of an
English milord than like a possible English gentleman depicted by a
compatriot. Deronda himself is a prig of the first water; while
Gwendolen is self-contradictory all through--like a tangled skein of
which you cannot find the end, and therefore cannot bring it into order
and intelligibility. Begun on apparently clear lines of self-will,
pride, worldly ambition and personal self-indulgence--without either
conscience or deep affections--self-contained and self-controlled--she
wavers off into a condition of moral weakness, of vagrant impulses and
humiliating self-abandonment for which nothing that went before has
prepared us.

That she should ever have loved, or even fancied she loved, such a
frozen fish as Grandcourt was impossible to a girl so full of energy as
Gwendolen is shown to be. Clear in her desires of what she wanted, she
would have accepted him, as she did, to escape from the hateful life to
which else she would have been condemned. But she would have accepted
him without even that amount of self-deception which is portrayed in the
decisive interview. She knew his cruel secret, and she deliberately
chose to ignore it. So far good. It is what she would have done. But
where is the logic of making her "carry on" as she did when she received
the diamonds on her wedding-day? It was a painful thing, sure enough,
and the mad letter that came with them was disagreeable enough; but it
could not have been the shock it is described, nor could it have made
Gwendolen turn against her husband in such sudden hatred, seeing that
she already knew the whole shameful story. These are faults in
psychology; and the conduct of the plot is also imperfect. George
Eliot's plots are always bad when she attempts intricacy, attaining
instead confusion and unintelligibility; but surely nothing can be much
sillier than the whole story of Deronda's birth and upbringing, nor can
anything be more unnatural than the character and conduct of his
mother. What English gentleman would have brought up a legitimately-born
Jewish child under conditions which made the whole world believe him to
be his own illegitimate son? And what young man, brought up in the
belief that he was an English gentleman by birth--leaving out on which
side of the blanket--would have rejoiced to find himself a Jew instead?
The whole story is improbable and far-fetched; as also is Deronda's
rescue of Mirah and her unquestioning adoption by the Meyricks. It is
all distortion, and in no wise like real life; and some of the
characters are as much twisted out of shape as is the story. Sir Hugo
Mallinger and Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne are the most natural of the whole
gallery--the defect of exaggeration or caricature spoiling most of the
others.

Of these others, Gwendolen herself is far and away the most
unsatisfactory. Her sudden hatred of her husband is strained; so is her
love for Deronda; so is her repentance for her constructive act of
murder. That she should have failed to throw the rope to Grandcourt,
drowning in the sea, was perhaps natural enough. That she should have
felt such abject remorse and have betrayed herself in such humiliating
unreserve to Deronda was not. All through the story her action with
regard to Deronda is dead against the base lines of her character, and
is compatible only with such an overwhelming amount of physical passion
as does sometimes make women mad. We have no hint of this. On the
contrary, all that Gwendolen says is founded on spiritual longing for
spiritual improvement--spiritual direction with no hint of sexual
impulse. Yet she acts as one overpowered by that impulse--throwing to
the winds pride, reserve, womanly dignity and common sense. Esther was
not harmonious with herself in her choice of Felix Holt over Harold
Transome, but Esther was naturalness incarnate compared with Gwendolen
as towards Daniel Deronda. And the evolution of Esther's soul, and the
glimpse given of Rosamond's tardy sense of some kind of morality,
difficult to be believed as each was, were easy sums in moral arithmetic
contrasted with the birth and sudden growth of what had been Gwendolen's
very rudimentary soul--springing into maturity in a moment, like a
fully-armed Athene, without the need of the more gradual process. Add to
all these defects, an amount of disquisition and mental dissection which
impedes the story till it drags on as slowly as a heavily laden
wain--add the fatal blunder of making long scenes which do not help on
the action nor elucidate the plot, and the yet more fatal blunder of
causeless pedantry, and we have to confess that our great master's last
novel is also her worst. But then the one immediately preceding was
incomparably her best.

We come now to the beauties of the work--to the inimitable force of some
phrases--to the noble aim and meaning of the story--to the lofty spirit
informing all those interrupting disquisitions, which are really
interpolated moral essays, and must not be confounded with padding. Take
this little shaft aimed at that _Graeculus esuriens_ Lush, that
"half-caste among gentlemen" and the _ame damnee_ of Grandcourt. "Lush's
love of ease was well satisfied at present, and if his puddings were
rolled towards him in the dust he took the inside bits and found them
relishing." Again: "We sit up at night to read about Cakya-Mouni, Saint
Francis and Oliver Cromwell, but whether we should be glad for any one
at all like them to call on us the next morning, still more to reveal
himself as a new relation, is quite another matter:"--"A man of refined
pride shrinks from making a lover's approaches to a woman whose wealth
or rank might make them appear presumptuous or low-motived; but Deronda
was finding a more delicate difficulty in a position which,
superficially taken, was the reverse of that--though, to an ardent
reverential love, the loved woman has always a kind of wealth which
makes a man keenly susceptible about the aspect of his addresses." (We
extract this sentence as an instance of George Eliot's fine feeling and
delicate perception expressed in her worst and clumsiest manner.) "A
blush is no language, only a dubious flag-signal, which may mean either
of two contradictions."

"Grandcourt held that the Jamaican negro was a beastly sort of baptist
Caliban; Deronda said he had always felt a little with Caliban, who
naturally had his own point of view and could sing a good song;" "Mrs.
Davilow observed that her father had an estate in Barbadoes, but that
she herself had never been in the West Indies; Mrs. Torrington was sure
she should never sleep in her bed if she lived among blacks; her husband
corrected her by saying that the blacks would be manageable enough if it
were not for the half-breeds; and Deronda remarked that the whites had
to thank themselves for the half-breeds."

It is in such "polite pea-shooting" as this that George Eliot shows her
inimitable humour--the quick give-and-take of her conversations being
always in harmony with her characters. But, indeed, unsatisfactory as a
novel though "Daniel Deronda" is, it is full of beauties of all kinds,
from verbal wit to the grandly colossal sublimity of Mordecai, and
Deronda's outburst of passionate desire to weld the scattered Jews into
one nation of which he should be the heart and brain.

       *       *       *       *       *

Whatever George Eliot did bears this impress of massive sincerity--of
deep and earnest feeling--of lofty purpose and noble teaching. She was
not a fine artist, and she spoilt her later work by pedantry and
overlay, but she stands out as the finest woman writer we have had or
probably shall have--stands a head and shoulders above the best of the
rest. She touched the darker parts of life and passion, but she touched
them with clean hands and a pure mind, and with that spirit of
philosophic truth which can touch pitch and not be defiled. Yet prolific
as she was, and the creator of more than one living character, she was
not a flexible writer and her range was limited. She repeated situations
and motives with a curious narrowness of scope, and in almost all her
heroines, save Dinah and Dorothea, who are evoluted from the beginning,
paints the gradual evolution of a soul by the ennobling influence of a
higher mind and a religious love.

We come now to a curious little crop of errors. Though so profound a
scholar--being indeed too learned for perfect artistry--she makes
strange mistakes for a master of the language such as she was. She
spells "insistence" with an "a," and she gives a superfluous "c" to
"Machiavelli." She sometimes permits herself to slip into the literary
misdemeanour of no nominative to her sentence, and into the graver sin
of making a singular verb govern the plural noun of a series. She says
"frightened at" and "under circumstances"; "by the sly" and "down upon";
and she follows "neither" with "or," as also "never" and "not." She is
"averse to"; she has even been known to split her infinitive, and to say
"and which" without remorse. Once she condescends to the iniquity of
"proceeding to take," than which "commencing" is only one stage lower in
literary vulgarity; and many of her sentences are as clumsy as a clown's
dancing-steps. As no one can accuse her of either ignorance or
indifference, still less of haste and slap-dash, these small flaws in
the great jewel of her genius are instructive instances of the clinging
effect of our carelessness in daily speech; so that grammatical
inaccuracy becomes as a second nature to us, and has to be unlearned by
all who write.

Nevertheless, with all her faults fully acknowledged and honestly shown,
we ever return as to an inexhaustible fountain, to her greatness of
thought, her supreme power, her nobility of aim, her matchless humour,
her magnificent drawing, her wise philosophy, her accurate learning--as
profound as it was accurate. Though we do not bracket her with Plato and
Kant, as did one of her panegyrists, nor hold her equal to Fielding for
naturalness, nor to Scott for picturesqueness, nor as able as was
Thackeray to project herself into the conditions of thought and society
of times other than her own, we do hold her as the sceptred queen of our
English Victorian authoresses--superior even to Charlotte Bronte, to
Mrs. Gaskell, to Harriet Martineau--formidable rivals as these are to
all others, living or dead.

If she had not crossed that Rubicon, or, having crossed it, had been
content with more complete insurgency than she was, she would have been
a happier woman and a yet more finished novelist. As things were, her
life and principles were at cross-corners; and when her literary success
had roused up her social ambition, and fame had lifted her far above the
place where her birth had set her, she realised the mistake she had
made. Then the sense of inharmoniousness between what she was and what
she would have been did, to some degree, react on her work, to the
extent at least of killing in it all passion and spontaneity. Her whole
life and being were moulded to an artificial pose, and the "made" woman
could not possibly be the spontaneous artist. Her yet more fatal blunder
of marrying an obscure individual many years younger than herself, and
so destroying the poetry of her first union by destroying its sense of
continuity and constancy, would have still more disastrously reacted on
her work had she lived. She died in time, for anything below
"Theophrastus Such" would have seriously endangered her fame and
lessened her greatness--culminating as this did in "Middlemarch," the
best and grandest of her novels, from the zenith of which "Daniel
Deronda," her last, is a sensible decline.

  [Signature: E. Lynn Linton.]




MRS. GASKELL

_By_ EDNA LYALL




MRS. GASKELL


Of all the novelists of Queen Victoria's reign there is not one to whom
the present writer turns with such a sense of love and gratitude as to
Mrs. Gaskell. This feeling is undoubtedly shared by thousands of men and
women, for about all the novels there is that wonderful sense of
sympathy, that broad human interest which appeals to readers of every
description. The hard-worked little girl in the schoolroom can forget
the sorrows of arithmetic or the vexations of French verbs as she pores
over "Wives and Daughters" on a Saturday half-holiday, and, as George
Sand remarked to Lord Houghton, this same book, "Wives and Daughters,"
"would rivet the attention of the most _blase_ man of the world."

With the exception of her powerful "Life of Charlotte Bronte," Mrs.
Gaskell wrote only novels or short stories. The enormous difficulties
which attended the writing of a biography of the author of "Jane Eyre"
would, we venture to think, have baffled any other writer of that time.
It is easy now, years after Charlotte Bronte's death, to criticise the
wisdom of this or that page, to hunt up slight mistakes, to maintain
that in some details Mrs. Gaskell was wrong. To be wise too late is an
easy and, to some apparently, a most grateful task; but it would,
nevertheless, be hard to find a biography of more fascinating interest,
or one which more successfully grappled with the great difficulty of the
undertaking.

As Mr. Clement Shorter remarks, the "Life of Charlotte Bronte" "ranks
with Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' and Lockhart's 'Life of Scott.'" It is
pleasant, too, to read Charlotte Bronte's own words in a letter to Mr.
Williams, where she mentions her first letter from her future friend and
biographer:

"The letter you forwarded this morning was from Mrs. Gaskell, authoress
of 'Mary Barton.' She said I was not to answer it, but I cannot help
doing so. The note brought the tears to my eyes. She is a good, she is a
great woman. Proud am I that I can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so
noble. In Mrs. Gaskell's nature it mournfully pleases me to fancy a
remote affinity to my sister Emily. In Miss Martineau's mind I have
always felt the same, though there are wide differences. Both these
ladies are above me--certainly far my superiors in attainments and
experience. I think I could look up to them if I knew them."

For lovers of the author of "Mary Barton" it is hard, however, not to
feel a grudge against the "Life of Charlotte Bronte"--or, rather, the
reception accorded to it. Owing to the violent attacks to which it gave
rise, to a threatened action for libel on the part of some of those
mentioned in the book, and to the manifold annoyances to which the
publication of the Biography subjected the writer, Mrs. Gaskell
determined that no record of her own life should be written.

It is pleasant to find that there were gleams of light mixed with the
many vexations. Charles Kingsley writes to Mrs. Gaskell in warm
appreciation of the "Life":

"Be sure," he says, "that the book will do good. It will shame literary
people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical
home-life is consistent with high imaginative genius; and it will shame,
too, the prudery of a not over-cleanly, though carefully whitewashed,
age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite
compatible with the knowledge of evil. I confess that the book has made
me ashamed of myself. 'Jane Eyre' I hardly looked into, very seldom
reading a work of fiction--yours, indeed, and Thackeray's are the only
ones I care to open. 'Shirley' disgusted me at the opening, and I gave
up the writer and her books with the notion that she was a person who
liked coarseness. How I misjudged her! and how thankful I am that I
never put a word of my misconceptions into print, or recorded my
misjudgments of one who is a whole heaven above me. Well have you done
your work, and given us a picture of a valiant woman made perfect by
sufferings. I shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has
written."

Mrs. Gaskell's wish regarding her own biography has, of course, been
respected by her family; but the world is the poorer, and it is
impossible not to regret that the life of so dearly loved a writer must
never be attempted.

The books reveal a mind as delicately pure as a child's, wedded to that
true mother's heart which is wide enough to take in all the needy.
Looking, moreover, at that goodly row of novels--whether in the dear old
shabby volumes that have been read and re-read for years, or in that
dainty little set recently published in a case, which the rising
generation can enjoy--one cannot help reflecting that here is "A Little
Child's Monument," surely the most beautiful memorial of a great love
and a great grief that could be imagined. It was not until the death of
her little child--the only son of the family--that Mrs. Gaskell,
completely broken down by grief, began, at her husband's suggestion, to
write. And thus a great sorrow brought forth a rich and wonderful
harvest, as grief borne with strength and courage always may do; and the
world has good reason to remember that little ten months' child whose
short life brought about such great results.

A question naturally suggests itself at this point as to Mrs. Gaskell's
birth and education. How far had she inherited her literary gifts? And
in what way had her mind been influenced by the surroundings of her
childhood and girlhood? Her mother, Mrs. Stevenson, was a Miss Holland,
of Sandlebridge, in Cheshire; her father--William Stevenson--was at
first classical tutor in the Manchester Academy, and later on, during
his residence in Edinburgh, was editor of the _Scots Magazine_ and a
frequent contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_. He was next appointed
Keeper of the Records to the Treasury, an appointment which caused his
removal from Edinburgh to Chelsea; and it was there, in Cheyne Row, that
Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson, the future novelist, was born.

Owing to the death of her mother, she was adopted when only a month old
by her aunt, Mrs. Lumb, and taken to Knutsford, in Cheshire, the little
town so wonderfully described in "Cranford." For two years in her
girlhood she was educated at Stratford-on-Avon, walking in the flowery
meadows where Shakspere once walked, worshipping in the stately old
church where he worshipped, and where he willed that his body should be
left at rest; nor is it possible to help imagining that the associations
of that ideal place had an influence on the mind of the future writer,
doing something to give that essentially English tone which
characterises all her books.

After her father's second marriage she went to live with him, and her
education was superintended by him until his death in 1829, when she
once more returned to Knutsford. Here, at the age of twenty-two, she was
married to the Rev. William Gaskell, M.A., of Cross Street Chapel,
Manchester; and Manchester remained her home ever after.

Such are the brief outlines of a life story which was to have such a
wide and lasting influence for good. For nothing is more striking than
this when we think over the well-known novels--they are not only
consummate works of art, full of literary charm, perfect in style and
rich with the most delightful humour and pathos--they are books from
which that morbid lingering over the loathsome details of vice, those
sensuous descriptions of sin too rife in the novels of the present day,
are altogether excluded.

Not that the stories are namby-pamby, or unreal in any sense; they are
wholly free from the horrid prudery, the Pharisaical temper, which makes
a merit of walking through life in blinkers and refuses to know of
anything that can shock the respectable. Mrs. Gaskell was too genuine an
artist to fall either into this error or into the error of bad taste and
want of reserve. She drew life with utter reverence; she held the
highest of all ideals, and she dared to be true.

How tender and womanly and noble, for instance, is her treatment of the
difficult subject which forms the _motif_ of "Ruth"! How sorrowfully
true to life is the story of the dressmaker's apprentice with no place
in which to spend her Sunday afternoons! We seem ourselves to breathe
the dreadful "stuffy" atmosphere of the workroom, to feel the dreary
monotony of the long day's work. It is so natural that the girl's fancy
should be caught by Henry Bellingham, who was courteous to her when she
mended the torn dress of his partner at the ball; so inevitable that she
should lose her heart to him when she witnessed his gallant rescue of
the drowning child. But her fall was not inevitable, and one of the
finest bits in the whole novel is the description of Ruth's hesitation
in the inn parlour when, finding herself most cruelly and unjustly cast
off by her employer, she has just accepted her lover's suggestion that
she shall go with him to London, little guessing what the promise
involved, yet intuitively feeling that her consent had been unwise.

"Ruth became as hot as she had previously been cold, and went and opened
the window, and leant out into the still, sweet evening air. The bush of
sweetbriar underneath the window scented the place, and the delicious
fragrance reminded her of her old home. I think scents affect and
quicken the memory even more than either sights or sounds; for Ruth had
instantly before her eyes the little garden beneath the window of her
mother's room, with the old man leaning on his stick watching her, just
as he had done not three hours before on that very afternoon." She
remembers the faithful love of the old labouring man and his wife who
had served her parents in their lifetime, and for their sake would help
and advise her now. Would it not be better to go to them?

"She put on her bonnet and opened the parlour door; but then she saw the
square figure of the landlord standing at the open house door, smoking
his evening pipe, and looming large and distinct against the dark air
and landscape beyond. Ruth remembered the cup of tea that she had drunk;
it must be paid for, and she had no money with her. She feared that he
would not let her leave the house without paying. She thought that she
would leave a note for Mr. Bellingham saying where she was gone, and how
she had left the house in debt, for (like a child) all dilemmas appeared
of equal magnitude to her; and the difficulty of passing the landlord
while he stood there, and of giving him an explanation of the
circumstances, appeared insuperable, and as awkward and fraught with
inconvenience as far more serious situations. She kept peeping out of
her room after she had written her little pencil note, to see if the
outer door was still obstructed. There he stood motionless, enjoying his
pipe, and looking out into the darkness which gathered thick with the
coming night. The fumes of the tobacco were carried into the house and
brought back Ruth's sick headache. Her energy left her; she became
stupid and languid, and incapable of spirited exertion; she modified her
plan of action to the determination of asking Mr. Bellingham to take her
to Milham Grange, to the care of her humble friends, instead of to
London. And she thought in her simplicity that he would instantly
consent when he had heard her reasons."

The selfishness of the man who took advantage of her weakness and
ignorance is finely drawn because it is not at all exaggerated. Henry
Bellingham is no monster of wickedness, but a man with many fine
qualities spoilt by an over-indulgent and unprincipled mother, and
yielding too easily to her worldly-wise arguments.

Ruth first sees a faint trace of his selfishness--she calls it
"unfairness"--when, on their arrival in Wales, he persuades the landlady
to give them rooms in the hotel and to turn out on a false pretext some
other guests into the _dependance_ across the road. She understands his
selfish littleness of soul only too well when, years after, she talks to
him during that wonderfully described interview in the chapter called
"The Meeting on the Sands." He cannot in the least understand her. "The
deep sense of penitence she expressed he took for earthly shame, which
he imagined he could soon soothe away." He actually has the audacity to
tempt her a second time; then, after her indignant refusal, he offers
her marriage. To his great amazement she refuses this too. "Why, what on
earth makes you say that?" asked he....

"I do not love you. I did once. Don't say I did not love you then; but I
do not now. I could never love you again. All you have said and done
since you came to Abermouth has only made me wonder how I ever could
have loved you. We are very far apart; the time that has pressed down my
life like brands of hot iron, and scarred me for ever, has been nothing
to you. You have talked of it with no sound of moaning in your voice,
no shadow over the brightness of your face; it has left no sense of sin
on your conscience, while me it haunts and haunts; and yet I might plead
that I was an ignorant child; only I will not plead anything, for God
knows all. But this is only one piece of our great difference."

"You mean that I am no saint," he said, impatient at her speech.
"Granted. But people who are no saints have made very good husbands
before now. Come, don't let any morbid, overstrained conscientiousness
interfere with substantial happiness--happiness both to you and to
me--for I am sure I can make you happy--ay! and make you love me too, in
spite of your pretty defiance.... And here are advantages for Leonard,
to be gained by you quite in a holy and legitimate way."

She stood very erect.

"If there was one thing needed to confirm me, you have named it. You
shall have nothing to do with my boy by my consent, much less by my
agency. I would rather see him working on the roadside than leading such
a life--being such a one as you are.... If at last I have spoken out too
harshly and too much in a spirit of judgment, the fault is yours. If
there were no other reason to prevent our marriage but the one fact that
it would bring Leonard into contact with you, that would be enough."

Later on, a fever visits the town, and Ruth becomes a nurse. When she
hears that the father of her child is ill and untended she volunteers to
nurse him, and, being already worn out with work, she dies in
consequence. The man's smallness of mind, his contemptible selfishness,
are finely indicated in the scene where he goes to look at Ruth as she
lies dead.

He was "disturbed" by the distress of the old servant Sally, and saying,
"Come, my good woman! we must all die," _tries to console her with a
sovereign_!!

The old servant turns upon him indignantly, then "bent down and kissed
the lips from whose marble, unyielding touch he recoiled even in
thought." At that moment the old minister, who had sheltered Ruth in her
trouble, enters. Henry makes many offers to him as to providing for
Ruth's child, Leonard, and says, "I cannot tell you how I regret that
she should have died in consequence of her love to me." But from gentle
old Mr. Benson he receives only an icy refusal, and the stern words,
"Men may call such actions as yours youthful follies. There is another
name for them with God."

The sadness of the book is relieved by the delightful humour of Sally,
the servant. The account of the wooing of Jeremiah Dixon is a
masterpiece; and Sally's hesitation when, having found her proof against
the attractions of "a four-roomed house, furniture conformable, and
eighty pounds a year," her lover mentions the pig that will be ready for
killing by Christmas, is a delicious bit of comedy.

"Well, now! would you believe it? the pig were a temptation. I'd a
receipt for curing hams.... However, I resisted. Says I, very stern,
because I felt I'd been wavering, 'Master Dixon, once for all, pig or no
pig, I'll not marry you.'"

The description of the minister's home is very beautiful. Here are a few
lines which show in what its charm consisted:

"In the Bensons' house there was the same unconsciousness of individual
merit, the same absence of introspection and analysis of motive, as
there had been in her mother; but it seemed that their lives were pure
and good not merely from a lovely and beautiful nature, but from some
law the obedience to which was of itself harmonious peace, and which
governed them.... This household had many failings; they were but human,
and, with all their loving desire to bring their lives into harmony with
the will of God, they often erred and fell short. But somehow the very
errors and faults of one individual served to call out higher
excellences in another; and so they reacted upon each other, and the
result of short discords was exceeding harmony and peace."

The publication of "Ruth," with its brave, outspoken words, its fearless
demand for one standard of morality for men and women, subjected the
author to many attacks, as we may gather from the following warm-hearted
letter by Charles Kingsley:

                                                     "_July 25, 1853._

    "I am sure that you will excuse my writing to you thus abruptly
    when you read the cause of my writing. I am told, to my great
    astonishment, that you had heard painful speeches on account of
    'Ruth'; what was told me raised all my indignation and disgust....
    Among all my large acquaintance I never heard, or have heard, but
    one unanimous opinion of the beauty and righteousness of the book,
    and that above all from really good women. If you could have heard
    the things which I heard spoken of it this evening by a thorough
    High Church, fine lady of the world, and by her daughter, too, as
    pure and pious a soul as one need see, you would have no more
    doubt than I have, that, whatsoever the 'snobs' and the bigots may
    think, English people, in general, have but one opinion of 'Ruth,'
    and that is, one of utter satisfaction. I doubt not you have had
    this said to you already often. Believe me, you may have it said
    to you as often as you will by the purest and most refined of
    English women. May God bless you, and help you to write many more
    such books as you have already written, is the fervent wish of
    your very faithful servant,

                                                        "C. KINGSLEY."

"Mary Barton," which was the first of the novels, was published in 1848,
and this powerful and fascinating story at once set Mrs. Gaskell in the
first rank of English novelists. People differed as to the views set
forth in the book, but all were agreed as to its literary force and its
great merits. Like "Alton Locke," it has done much to break down class
barriers and make the rich try to understand the poor; and when we see
the great advance in this direction which has been made since the date
of its publication, we are able partly to realise how startling the
first appearance of such a book must have been. The secret of the
extraordinary power which the book exercises on its readers is,
probably, that the writer takes one into the very heart of the life she
is describing.

Most books of the sort fail to arrest our attention. Why? Because they
are written either as mere "goody" books for parish libraries, and are
carefully watered down lest they should prove too sensational and
enthralling; or because they are written by people who have only a
surface knowledge of the characters they describe and the life they
would fain depict. "David Copperfield" is probably the most popular book
Dickens ever wrote, and is likely to outlive his other works, just
because he himself knew so thoroughly well all that his hero had to pass
through, and could draw from real knowledge the characters in the
background. And at the present time we are all able to understand the
Indian Mutiny in a way that has never been possible before, because Mrs.
Steel in her wonderful novel, "On the Face of the Waters," has, through
her knowledge of native life, given us a real insight into the heart of
a great nation.

Brilliant trash may succeed for two or three seasons, but unless there
is in it some germ of real truth which appeals to the heart and
conscience it will not live. Sensationalism alone will not hold its
ground. There must be in the writer a real deep inner knowledge of his
subject if the book is to do its true work. And we venture to think that
"Mary Barton," which for nearly half a century has been influencing
people all over the world, owes its vitality very largely to the fact
that Mrs. Gaskell knew the working people of Manchester, not as a
professional doler out of tracts or charitable relief, not in any
detestable, patronising way, but knew them as _friends_.

This surely is the reason why the characters in the novel are so
intensely real. What could be finer than the portrait of Mary herself,
from the time when we are first introduced to her as the young
apprentice to a milliner and dressmaker, to the end of the book, when
she has passed through her great agony? How entirely the reader learns
to live with her in her brave struggle to prove her lover's innocence!
One of the most powerful parts of the book is the description of her
plucky pursuit of the good ship _John Cropper_, on board of which was
the only man who could save her lover's life by proving an alibi.

But it is not only the leading characters that are so genuine and so
true to life. Old Ben Sturgis, the boat-man, rough of speech but with
more heart than many a smooth-tongued talker; his wife, who sheltered
Mary when she had no notion what manner of woman she was; Job Legh, who
proved such a good friend to both hero and heroine in their trouble, and
whose well-meaning deception of old Mrs. Wilson is so humorously
described; John Barton, the father, with the mournful failure at the
close of his upright life; old Mr. Carson, the rich father of the
murdered man, with his thirst for vengeance, and his tardy but real
forgiveness, when he let himself be led by a little child--all these are
living men and women, not puppets; while in the character and the tragic
story of poor Esther we see the fruits of the writer's deep knowledge of
the life of those she helped when released from gaol.

But Mrs. Gaskell looked on both sides of the question. In "North and
South," published in 1855, she deals with the labour question from the
master's standpoint, and in Mr. Thornton draws a most striking picture
of a manufacturer who is just and well-meaning--one who really respects
and cares for the men he employs. The main interest of this book lies,
however, in the character of the heroine, Margaret, who is placed in a
most cruel dilemma by a ne'er-do-well brother whom she shields. By far
the most dramatic scene is that in which, to enable Frederick to escape,
Margaret tells a deliberate falsehood to the detective who is in search
of him. The torture of mind she suffers afterwards for having uttered
this intentional lie, and the difficult question whether under any
circumstances a lie is warrantable, are dealt with in the writer's most
powerful way.

In 1853--the same year in which "Ruth" was published--the greatest of
all Mrs. Gaskell's works appeared, the inimitable "Cranford." For humour
and for pathos we have nothing like this in all the Victorian
literature. It is a book of which one can never tire: yet it can
scarcely be said to have a plot at all, being just the most delicate
miniature painting of a small old-fashioned country town and its
inhabitants. What English man or woman is there, however, who will not
read and re-read its pages with laughter and tears?

Cranford is said to be in many respects the Knutsford of Mrs. Gaskell's
childhood and youth, and there is something so wonderfully lifelike in
the descriptions of the manners and customs of the very select little
community that one is inclined to believe that there is truth in the
assertion. They were gently bred, those old Cranford folk, with their
"elegant economy," their hatred of all display, and their considerate
tact. There is pathos as well as fun in the description of Mrs.
Forrester pretending not to know what cakes were sent up "at a party in
her baby-house of a dwelling ... though she knew, and we knew, and she
knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been
busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes!"

There is an air of leisure and peacefulness in every page of the book,
for there was no hurrying life among those dignified old people. "I had
often occasion to notice the use that was made of fragments and small
opportunities in Cranford: the rose-leaves that were gathered ere they
fell to make into a pot-pourri for some one who had no garden; the
little bundles of lavender-flowers sent to some town-dweller. Things
that many would despise, and actions which it seemed scarcely worth
while to perform, were all attended to in Cranford."

Who has not laughed over Miss Betsy Barker's Alderney cow "meekly going
to her pasture, clad in dark grey flannel" after her disaster in the
lime-pit! or over the masterly description of Miss Jenkyns, who "wore a
cravat, and a little bonnet like a jockey-cap, and altogether had the
appearance of a strong-minded woman; although she would have despised
the modern idea of women being equal to men. Equal, indeed! she knew
they were superior."

Dear old Miss Matty, however, with her reverence for the stronger
sister, and her love affair of long ago, has a closer hold on the heart
of the reader. The description of the meeting of the former lovers is
idyllic; and when Thomas Holbrook dies unexpectedly, soon after, the
woman whose love-story had been spoilt by the home authorities reverses
her own ordinance against "followers" in the case of Martha, the
maid-servant, but otherwise makes no sign.

"Miss Matty made a strong effort to conceal her feelings--a concealment
she practised even with me, for she has never alluded to Mr. Holbrook
again, though the book he gave her lies with her Bible on the little
table by her bedside. She did not think I heard her when she asked the
little milliner of Cranford to make her caps something like the
Honourable Mrs. Jamieson's, or that I noticed the reply:

"'But she wears widows' caps, ma'am!'

"'Oh? I only meant something in that style; not widows', of course, but
rather like Mrs. Jamieson's.'"

In the whole book there is not a character that we cannot vividly
realise: the Honourable (but sleepy) Mrs. Jamieson; brisk, cheerful Lady
Glenmire, who married the sensible country doctor and sacrificed her
title to become plain Mrs. Hoggins; Miss Pole, who always with withering
scorn called ghosts "indigestion," until the night they heard of the
headless lady who had been seen wringing her hands in Darkness Lane,
when, to avoid "the woebegone trunk," she with tremulous dignity offered
the sedan chairman an extra shilling to go round another way! Captain
Brown with his devotion to the writings of Mr. Boz and his feud with
Miss Jenkyns as to the superior merits of Dr. Johnson; and Peter, the
long-lost brother, who from first to last remains an inveterate
practical joker. One and all they become our life-long friends, while
the book stands alone as a perfect picture of English country town
society fifty years ago.

Mrs. Gaskell's shorter stories are scarcely equal to the novels, yet
some of them are very beautiful. "Cousin Phillis," for example, gives
one more of the real atmosphere of country life than any other writer
except Wordsworth. We seem actually to smell the new-mown hay as we read
the story.

Charming, too, is "My Lady Ludlow" with her genteel horror of dissenters
subdued in the end by her genuine good feeling. How often one has longed
for that comfortable square pew of hers in the parish church, in which,
if she did not like the sermon, she would pull up a glass window as
though she had been in her coach, and shut out the sound of the
obnoxious preacher! But, with all her peculiarities, she was the most
courteous of women--a lady in the true sense of the word--and when
people smiled at a shy and untaught visitor who spread out her
handkerchief on the front of her dress as the footman handed her coffee,
my Lady Ludlow with infinite tact and grace promptly spread _her_
handkerchief exactly in the same fashion which the tradesman's wife had
adopted.

Among the short tragic stories, the most striking is one called "The
Crooked Branch," in which the scene at the assizes has almost unrivalled
power; while among the lighter short stories, "My French Master," with
its delicate portraiture of the old refugee, and "Mr. Harrison's
Confessions," the delightfully written love-story of a young country
doctor, are perhaps the most enjoyable.

In 1863 the novel "Sylvia's Lovers" was published, and although, by its
fine description of old Whitby and the pathos of the story, it has won
many admirers, we infinitely prefer its successor, "Wives and
Daughters." There is something very sad in the thought that this last
and best of the writer's stories was left unfinished; but happily very
little remained to be told, and that little was tenderly touched in to
the almost perfect picture of English home life by the daughter who had
been not only Mrs. Gaskell's child but her friend. "Wives and Daughters"
will always remain as a true and vivid and powerful study of life and
character; while Molly Gibson, with her loyal heart and sweet sunshiny
nature, will, we venture to think, better represent the majority of
English girls than the happily abnormal Dodos and Millicent Chynes of
present-day fashion.

In Mr. Gibson's second wife the author has given us a most subtle study
of a thoroughly selfish and false-hearted woman, and she is made all the
more repulsive because of her outward charms, her soft seductive voice
and her lavish employment of terms of endearment. Wonderfully clever,
too, is the study of poor little Cynthia, her daughter, whose relations
to Molly are most charmingly drawn.

The story was just approaching its happy and wholesome ending, and the
difficulties which had parted Roger Hamley and Molly had just
disappeared, when death summoned the writer from a world she had done so
much to brighten and to raise. On Sunday evening, November 12, 1865,
Mrs. Gaskell died quite suddenly at Holybourne, Alton, Hampshire, a
house which she had recently bought as a surprise for her husband. Sad
as such a death must always be for those who are left behind, one can
imagine nothing happier than "death in harness" for a worker who loves
his work.

  ".... There's rest above.
  Below let work be death, if work be love!"

Her "last days," wrote one of those who knew her best, "had been full of
loving thought and tender help for others. She was so sweet and dear and
noble beyond words." That is the summing-up of the whole; and, after
all, what better could a long biography give us? The motto of all of us
should surely be the words of Mme. Viardot Garcia: "First I am a
woman ... then I am an artist." And assuredly Mrs. Gaskell's life was
ruled on those lines.

"It was wonderful"--wrote her daughter, Mrs. Holland, in a letter to me
the other day--"how her writing never interfered with her social or
domestic duties. I think she was the best and most practical housekeeper
I ever came across, and the brightest, most agreeable hostess, to say
nothing of being everything as a mother and friend. She combined both,
being my mother and greatest friend in a way you do not often, I think,
find between mother and daughter."

Some people are fond of rashly asserting that the ideal wife and mother
cares little and knows less about the world beyond the little world of
home. Mrs. Gaskell, however, took a keen interest in the questions of
the day, and was a Liberal in politics; while it is quite evident that
neither these wider interests nor her philanthropic work tended to
interfere with the home life, which was clearly of the noblest type.

The friend as well as the mother of her children, the sharer of all her
husband's interests, she yet found time to use to the utmost the great
literary gift that had been entrusted to her; while her sympathy for
those in trouble was shown not only in the powerful pleading of her
novels, but in quiet, practical work in connection with prisoners. She
was one of the fellow labourers of Thomas Wright, the well-known prison
philanthropist, and was able to help in finding places for young girls
who had been discharged from prison. For working women she also held
classes, and both among the poor and the rich had many close
friendships.

How far the characters in the novels were studied from life is a
question which naturally suggests itself; and Mrs. Holland replies to it
as follows: "I do not think my mother ever _consciously_ took her
characters from special individuals, but we who knew often thought we
recognised people, and would tell her, 'Oh, so and so is just like Mr.
Blank,' or something of that kind; and she would say, 'So it is, but I
never meant it for him.' And really many of the characters are from
originals, or rather are like originals, but they were not consciously
meant to be like."

For another detail which will interest Mrs. Gaskell's fellow workers I
am indebted to the same source:

"Sometimes she planned her novels more or less beforehand, but in many
cases, certainly in that of 'Wives and Daughters,' she had very little
plot made beforehand, but planned her story as she wrote. She generally
wrote in the morning, but sometimes late at night, when the house was
quiet."

Few writers, we think, have exercised a more thoroughly wholesome
influence over their readers than Mrs. Gaskell. Her books, with their
wide human sympathies, their tender comprehension of human frailty,
their bright flashes of humour and their infinite pathos, seem to plead
with us to love one another. Through them all we seem to hear the
author's voice imploring us to "seize the day" and to "make friends," as
she does in actual words at the close of one of her Christmas stories,
adding pathetically: "I ask it of you for the sake of that old angelic
song, heard so many years ago by the shepherds, keeping watch by night
on Bethlehem Heights."

  [Signature: A E Bayly.

           'Edna Lyall.']




MRS. CROWE. MRS. ARCHER CLIVE. MRS. HENRY WOOD

_By_ ADELINE SERGEANT




MRS. CROWE. MRS. ARCHER CLIVE. MRS. HENRY WOOD


Mrs. Catherine Crowe, whose maiden name was Stevens, was born at Borough
Green, in Kent, about 1800, and died in 1876. She married Colonel Crowe
in 1822, and took up her residence with him in Edinburgh. Her books were
written chiefly between the years 1838 and 1859, and she is best known
by her novel, "Susan Hopley," and her collection of ghost stories, "The
Night Side of Nature." She was a woman of considerable ability, which
appears, however, to have run into rather obscure and sombre channels,
such as showed a somewhat morbid bent of mind, with a tendency towards
depression, which culminated at last in a short but violent attack of
insanity. But love of the unseen and supernatural does not seem to have
blunted her keenness of observation in ordinary life, for her novels,
the scenes of which are laid chiefly among homely and domestic
surroundings, display alike soundness of judgment and considerable
dramatic power. As a writer, indeed, Mrs. Crowe was extremely versatile;
she wrote plays, children's stories, short historical tales, romantic
novels, as well as the ghost stories with which her name seems chiefly
to be associated in the minds of this generation. It is evident too,
that she believed herself--rightly or wrongly--to be possessed of great
philosophical discrimination; but it must be acknowledged that her
philosophical and metaphysical studies often led her into curious byways
of speculation, into which the reader does not willingly wander.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is worth noting that Mrs. Crowe's ideas respecting the status and
education of women were, for the days in which she lived, exceedingly
"advanced." In "Lilly Dawson," for instance, a story published in 1847,
she makes an elaborate protest against the kind of education which women
were then receiving. "It is true," she says, "that there is little real
culture amongst men; there are few strong minds and fewer honest ones,
but they have still more advantages. If their education has been bad, it
has at least been a trifle better than ours. Six hours a day at Latin
and Greek are better than six hours a day at worsted work and
embroidery; and time is better spent in acquiring a smattering of
mathematics than in strumming Hook's lessons on a bad pianoforte."

Her views of women in general are well expressed in the following words
from the same work of fiction. "If, as we believe, under no system of
training, the intellect of woman would be found as strong as that of a
man, she is compensated by her intuitions being stronger. If her reason
be less majestic, her insight is clearer; where man reasons she sees.
Nature, in short, gave her all that was needful to enable her to play a
noble part in the world's history, if man would but let her play it out,
and not treat her like a full-grown baby, to be flattered and spoilt on
the one hand, and coerced and restricted on the other, vibrating between
royal rule and slavish serfdom." Surely we hear the voice of Nora Helmer
herself, the very quintessence of Ibsenism! It must have required
considerable courage to write in this way in the year 1847, and Mrs.
Crowe should certainly be numbered among the lovers of educational
reform. In many ways she seems to have been a woman of strong
individuality and decided opinions.

       *       *       *       *       *

Her first work was a drama, "Aristodemus," published anonymously in
1838; it showed considerable ability and was well regarded by the
critics. She then wrote a novel, "Men and Women, or Manorial Rights," in
1839; and in 1841 published her most successful work of fiction: "Susan
Hopley, or the Adventures of a Maid-servant." This story was more
generally popular than any other from her pen, but it is to be doubted
whether it possesses more literary ability or points of greater interest
than the rest.

Mrs. Crowe then embarked upon a translation of "The Seeress of
Provorst," by Justinus Kerner, a book of revelations concerning the
inner life of man; and in 1848 she published a book called "The Night
Side of Nature," a collection of supernatural tales gathered from many
sources, probably the best storehouse of ghost stories in the English
language. Its interest is a little marred by the credulity of the
author. She seems never to disbelieve any ghost story of any kind that
comes in her way. From the humble apologies, however, with which she
opens her dissertation on the subject, it is easy to see how great a
change has passed over people's minds in the course of the last fifty
years, with respect to the supernatural. If Mrs. Crowe had lived in
these days, she would have found herself in intimate relations with the
Society for Psychical Research, and would have had no reason to excuse
herself for the choice of her subject. She divides her book into
sections, which treat of dreams (where we get Sir Noel Paton's account
of his mother's curious vision); warnings; double-dreaming and trance,
with the stories of Colonel Townshend's voluntary trance and the
well-known legend of Lord Balcarres and the ghost of Claverhouse;
doppel-gaengers and apparitions (including the stories of Lady
Beresford's branded wrist and Lord Lyttleton's warning); and other
chapters descriptive of haunted houses, with details concerning
clairvoyance and the use of the crystal. It is interesting to find among
these the original account of "Pearlin Jean," of which Miss Sarah Tytler
has made such excellent use in one of her recent books. An account of
the phenomena of _stigmata_ and the case of Catherine Emmerich, are also
described in detail. Lovers of the supernatural will find much to
gratify their taste in a perusal of "The Night Side of Nature."

Mrs. Crowe did not exhaust the subject in this volume, for she issued a
book on ghosts and family legends, a volume for Christmas, in the year
1859; a work full of the kind of stories which became so popular in the
now almost obsolete Christmas Annual of succeeding years. It is also
curious to note, that in 1848, Mrs. Crowe produced a work of an entirely
different nature, namely, an excellent story for children, entitled
"Pippie's Warning, or Mind Your Temper"--another instance of her
versatility of mind.

"The Adventures of a Beauty" and "Light and Darkness" appeared in 1852.
The latter is a collection of short tales from different sources, partly
historical and partly imaginative, and certainly more in accordance with
the taste of modern days than her elaborate domestic stories. Mrs.
Crowe's taste for the horrible is distinctly perceptible in this
collection. There is an account of the celebrated poisoners, Frau
Gottfried, Madame Ursinus, and Margaret Zwanziger, whose crimes were so
numerous that they themselves forgot the number of their victims; and of
Mr. Tinius, who went about making morning calls and murdering the
persons whom he honoured with a visit. The histories of Lesurques, the
hero of the "Lyons Mail," and of Madame Louise, Princess of France, who
became a nun, are well narrated; but nearly all the stories are
concerned with horrors such as suggest the productions of Mr. Wilkie
Collins. "The Priest of St. Quentin" and "The Lycanthropist" are two of
the most powerful.

Her next novel, a more purely domestic one, was "Linny Lockwood," issued
in 1854. A sentence from the preface to this book anticipates--rather
early, as we may think--the approaching death of the three-volume
novel: "Messrs. Routledge and Co. have been for some time soliciting me
to write them an original novel for their cheap series; and being
convinced that the period for publishing at L1 11s. 6d., books of a kind
that people generally read but once, is gone by, I have resolved to make
the experiment."

She wrote another tragedy, "The Cruel Kindness," in 1853, and abridged
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" for children. In 1859 a pamphlet on "Spiritualism
and the Age we Live in," constituted the last of her more important
works, although she continued, for some time after recovery from the
attack of insanity which we have mentioned, to write papers and stories
for periodicals.

In spite of Mrs. Crowe's love for the supernatural and the horrible, she
is one of the pioneers of the purely domestic story--that story of the
affections and the emotions peculiar to the Victorian Age. She is allied
to the schools of Richardson and Fanny Burney rather than to those of
Sir Walter Scott or Miss Austen; for although her incidents are often
romantic and even far-fetched, her characters are curiously homely and
generally of humble environment. Thus, for instance, "Susan Hopley" is a
maid-servant (though not of the Pamela kind nor with the faintest
resemblance to Esther Waters); Lilly Dawson, although proved ultimately
to be the daughter of a colonel, passes the greater part of her earlier
life as a drudge and a dependent; and Linny Lockwood, while refined and
educated, is reduced to the situation of a lady's maid. The
circumstances of her heroines are, as a rule, extremely prosaic, and
would possibly have been condemned by writers of Miss Austen's school as
hopelessly vulgar; but Mrs. Crowe's way of treating these characters and
their surroundings bears upon it no stamp of vulgarity at all. Its great
defect is its want of humour to light up the sordid side of the life
which she describes. She is almost always serious, full of exalted and
occasionally overstrained sentiment. And even when treating of
childhood, it is rarely that she relaxes so far as (in "Lilly Dawson")
to describe the naughtiness of the little girl who insisted upon praying
for the cat. This is almost the sole glimpse of a sense of fun to which
Mrs. Crowe treats us in her numerous volumes.

To the present age "Susan Hopley," although so popular at the time of
its publication, is less attractive than the stories of "Linny Lockwood"
and "Lilly Dawson." The form adopted for the recital of Susan's
narrative is extremely inartistic, for it comprises Susan's
reminiscences, interspersed at intervals with narrative, and supposed to
be told by her in mature age, when she is housekeeper to the hero of
the story. Nevertheless, the plot is ingenious, turning on the murder of
Susan's brother by a handsome and gentlemanly villain, and the
subsequent exposure of his guilt by means of Susan's energy and the
repentance of one of his victims. It has all the elements of a
sensational story, with the exception of a "sympathetic" heroine or any
other really interesting character; for Susan Hopley, the embodiment of
all homely virtues, is distinctly dull, and it is difficult to feel the
attractiveness of the "beautiful and haughty" dairymaid, Mabel
Lightfoot, whose frailty forms an important element in the discovery of
Gaveston's guilt.

"Lilly Dawson" may be said to possess something of a psychological
interest, which redeems it from the charge of dulness brought against
"Susan Hopley." The heroine is thrown as a child into the hands of a
wild and lawless family, smugglers and desperadoes, who make of her a
household slave; and the child appears at first to be utterly stupid and
apathetic. A touch of affection and sympathy is needed before her
intellect awakes. In fear of being forced to marry one of the sons of
the house in which she has been brought up, when she is only fifteen,
she escapes from her enemies, becomes the guide and adopted child of an
old blind man, takes service as a nursemaid, is employed in a milliner's
workroom, narrowly escapes being murdered by the man whom she refused
to marry, and finally acts as maid in the house of her own relations,
where she is discovered and received with the greatest affection.
Nevertheless, she cannot endure the life of "a fine lady," and goes back
ultimately to marry the humble lover whose kindness had cheered her in
the days of her childhood and poverty.

In "Linny Lockwood" there is a touch of emotion, even of passion, which
is wanting in the previous stories. It embraces scenes and situations
which are quite as moving as any which thrilled the English public in
the pages of "Jane Eyre" or "East Lynne," but, owing possibly to Mrs.
Crowe's obstinate realism and somewhat didactic homeliness of diction
and sentiment, it seems somewhat to have missed its mark. Linny Lockwood
marries a man entirely unworthy of her, whose love strays speedily from
her to another woman--a married woman with whom he elopes and whom he
afterwards abandons. Linny, being poor and destitute, looks about for
work, and takes the post of maid to her husband's deserted mistress,
without, of course, knowing what had been the connection between them.
But before the birth of Kate's child, Linny learns the truth and
nevertheless remains with her to soothe her weakness, and lessen the
pangs of remorse of which the poor woman ultimately dies. A full
explanation between the two women takes place before Kate's death; and
the child that is left behind is adopted by Linny Lockwood, who refuses
to pardon the husband, who sues to her for forgiveness, or to live with
him again.

The character of Linny Lockwood is a very beautiful one, and the story
appeals to the reader's sensibilities more strongly than the recital of
Susan Hopley's adventures or the girlish sorrows of Lilly Dawson.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Crowe's writings certainly heralded the advent of a new kind of
fiction: a kind which has been, perhaps 

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