No More Learning

To Kingsley's sermons at this period of his life we need not
specially return. But, unlike most of his fellow-workers, Kingsley
possessed, besides the gifts of an orator and a moralist, the strong
imaginative faculty which made him a poet. This faculty, like
most of his other gifts, he kept under restraint; and, while he
rarely cared to use it without a definite purpose-moral or practical,
or, more frequently, both-neither pleasure nor profit induced
him to wear it out. This showed itself even with regard to the
form of imaginative composition which he now came to essay.
The first of his novels to be planned and begun was Yeast,
a Problem; so that, though Alton Locke was published a year
sooner as a whole, Yeast has an undoubted right of precedence.
Both works sprang—not, indeed, in full panoply, for the one was
hardly more than half-finished, and the other bears many marks of
haste-from a brain overwrought by the interests and labours
which it had shared; both were contributions to the solution of
England's pressing social problems, in country and in town, by
a writer to whom they came directly home, and who, while able to
sympathise with those oppressed whether by material or by spiritual
difficulties, could not, in either case, accept any answers irrecon-
cilable with the religious convictions which formed the anchorage
of his own mind.
a


## p. 360 (#376) ############################################

360
[ch.
The Political and Social Novel
Yeast began to appear in Fraser's Magazine in the fateful
year of revolutions, 1848 ; but the proprietors of that journal,
though generous friends both to Kingsley and to his ideas, took
fright, and, while they induced him to cut this novel short, declined
to publish its successor. Moreover, Kingsley had overstrained his
powers of work, and had been obliged to take refuge in his beloved
north Devon in the midst of the production of Yeast. It did not
appear as a book till 1851, without the new conclusion which he
seems, at one time, to have intended to supply in a second part,
called 'The Artists’and not absolutely alien in conception, perhaps,
to the second part of Faust! . As it stands, the story, if judged
by literary canons, must be allowed to exhibit some glaring
defects. One of these is the weakness of its plot, which not only,
as in a novel of the twentieth century, leaves everything unsettled
at the end, but really hinges on the pusillanimous laches of a quite
secondary personage. Yeast is far less successful than Alton
Locke in adjusting the intermixture of narrative and declamation,
and does not even scorn a boisterous transition such as: 'Perhaps,
reader, you are getting tired of all this. . . . So we will have a bit of
action again. ' The opening 'bit of action,' however—the run with
the hounds—is so superlatively fresh and free that the reader may
be excused for desiring more of the same kind. Yet, the centre
of gravity of the book lies in the dialogues between Launcelot and
the personages who exercise a varied influence upon his manly
and noble, but roving and ungoverned, nature—the man of the
world, Bracebridge, Launcelot's proud love, Argemone, and, above
all, the philosophically observant keeper, Tregarva ; and it is
through the last named that Launcelot is brought to take cognis-
ance of the question of the relation of classes in England and to
seek to understand the real wants of the labouring poor. The
treatment of this theme naturally suggests a comparison, from this
point of view, of Yeast with Disraeli’s Coningsby (published only
four years before Kingsley's story was begun) and its successors
by the same hand. Although written from totally diverse stand-
points, the earlier having an unconcealed party purpose to which
the later was altogether a stranger, they came to much the same
conclusion, well formulated by Leslie Stephen, as the acceptance of
the same ideal of society: the few for the many, not the many for
1
i Kingsley was a great reader of Goethe, without entering very profoundly into the
spirit of his genius.
? The similarity between the characters of Sidonia and Barnakill is too obvious to have
escaped notice, though Kingsley had not read Disraeli's book when he wrote his own.


## p. 361 (#377) ############################################

xi]
Alton Locke
361
the few. Kingsley's utilitarian millionaire is not a caricature, nor
is his great remedy of sanitary reform a mere item in a party
programme. Contrariwise, his high-church curate on the way to
Rome stands almost alone among his types of clergymen in its
blank ugliness. The background of the degenerate weakness of
the rustic labouring class, its desperate acquiescence in its miserable
lot and its dogged blindness to the necessity of self-help (“Why
save the farmers' rates ? ') is painted with genuine power. As for
Launcelot, the process by which he has to work out his own
salvation ends, so far as the story goes, in a half-mystical, half-
ironical prognostic of the destiny of its chief personages; but for
Tregarva there remains a process of purification by faith as well
as by love.
Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, was published in 1850, in the
midst of great social unrest, and a strong strain upon its author due
to his exertions towards meeting some of the causes of this wide-
spread popular perturbation. Carlyle, to whose goodwill there lay
a strong appeal in the convinced impetuosity of the book, relieved,
in the character of Saunders Mackaye, by a humour which his
brother Scot pronounced 'nearly perfect,' nevertheless judged it
'definable as crude,' and averred that the impression made by it
upon him was that of ‘a fervid creation still left half chaotic'; yet,
though Alton Locke ends in dreamland as Yeast dissolved itself
into a Utopia, it has attracted two generations of readers as a true
picture of the travails of a fellow-man. The hero is a poet as well
as a tailor, but a poet who, instead of wandering about like
Contarini Fleming (or, for that matter, Elsley Vavasour) in search
of themes and experiences worthy of his powers, finds them in
daily life and common things—a democratic poet, if you will, who
suffers severely when, after recognising that he has genius but has
been left without its rights, he swerves from the straight line
prescribed to him by his task in life. The direct bearing of the
attack upon the abuses of a typical town trade, from a picture of
whose conditions the narrative starts, was attested by its effects,
more especially in the partial adoption of the system of association
-on behalf of which, as Kingsley emphasised in 1854, working
men themselves failed to take sufficient trouble. The story,
throughout, exhibits a direct reference to facts: the dependence
of working men on the charter, the dubious ways of demagogy in
the matter of journalism and at meetings and so forth. On the
other hand, the picture of Cambridge--even of Cambridge as it
might strike a working-tailor on a casual visit-seemed, to the


## p. 362 (#378) ############################################

362 The Political and Social Novel [CH.
novelist, at a subsequent date, to call for revision. Apart from
those touches in Saunders Mackaye which came home to Carlyle,
there is little humour in the book; for this, the writer was too
fully absorbed in his theme and incensed by the grimness and
cruelty of some of its aspects. Conceived, as it was, in a white
heat, it was met, on both sides, with an unmitigated condemnation,
showing that its earnestness of purpose was wholly misunderstood;
and it remains, of all its author's books, that which shares with
Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton the credit of having come straight
from the heart of a witness of the conflict who could not, when
the fire blazed, remain a bystander.
When, in 1851, Kingsley began the publication, once more in
Fraser's Magazine, of Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face,
which did not appear in book form till 1853, he may be said to
have written, with full consciousness of his literary powers, the
only novel from his hand which, he believed, might endure. In
his case, this consciousness came at a time when the ardour of
youth still urged him on from venture to venture. Thus, when he
turned from the social to the historical novel, the transition was
made with extraordinary self-confidence by means of a work
dealing, as its sub-title indicates, with spiritual and intellectual
questions which had stirred bygone ages as they were stirring his
own, and intended to convey lessons to the living with the aid of
the experience of the past. The period in the history of the world
chosen by him to show how wisdom without faith is as salt which
has lost its savour was one to which he was long attracted by the
greatness of the issues determined in it—the period of the downfall
of the western empire, of which Africa was claimed as part, and
the transformation of the western world by Teutonic immigra-
tion. The only course of his Cambridge professorial lectures
published by him deals with the main aspects of this general
theme, and, in a short series of lectures which he delivered at
Edinburgh in the year of the publication of Hypatia, he sought to
trace the history of civilisation, thought and religion at Alexandria,
the chief theatre of the action of his novell. Its special end is to
depict the antagonism between an aggressive church and a decrepit
empire, and, at the same time, to draw the lessons to be found in
the struggles of a school of philosophy devoid of regenerative
power. One of the new foes with an old face who reappear here is
1 The lectures on Alexandria and her Schools (1854) reach down to the conquering
advent of Mohammedanism, for whose founder and early leaders sympathy is expressed.
The preface rushes patriotically into the eastern question of the day.


## p. 363 (#379) ############################################

xi]
Hypatia
363
scepticism—an attitude of mind which Kingsley treated briefly,
but with considerable skill as well as effect, in an essay, centring
in a 'Platonic' dialogue, published about this time (1852), under
the title Phaethon, or Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers. It is
one of the freshest and brightest of Kingsley's lesser productions,
and imbeds in the familiar surroundings of English country life
and scenery a perfectly lucid and self-consistent argument against
the complacent scepticism of a class of thinkers who were after-
wards to form part of the large army of agnostics. In the novel,
even the man of the world Raphael, saturated with intellectual
experience, who forms a contrast to Philammon, the simple monk
of the Laura, is led by the grace of divine love to a better mind.
The learning brought to bear upon the course of the narrative
of which Hypatia, historical in the outline of the portrait, is the
central figure, is ample enough to warrant the high praise bestowed
upon ‘Kingsley's masterpiece' by Bunsen', who had himself drunk
deeply from the sources of the narrative. For the rest, Hypatia
was, as Yeast had been before it, denounced as 'immoral'; but, in
the present case, the charge was, manifestly, the invention of
sheer perversity. The book has its flaws: the noble self-reliance
-
of Hypatia is belied by her blind submission to Orestes; and
Bunsen was probably right in complaining of the Goths being
presented too exclusively ‘in the drunken mood in which they
appear as lawless and blood-sucking barbarians, and chronic
berserkers. ' But the brilliancy and glow of the whole picture, as
it changes from quay and market to lecture-hall and amphitheatre,
till, at last, it subsides into the solitude of the remote temple
whence it took its start, is almost as notable as is the lifelike truth
of the characters, taken from nearly every class and sect of the
seething world-city.
The winter of the Crimean campaign (1854—5) and the following
spring were spent by Kingsley, who was profoundly moved by the
events of the war, in Devonshire; and the twofold influences of
time and place, as well as the leisure imposed upon him by his
wife's illness, account for the main result of his literary activity?
In 1855 was published the most successful of all his novels,
Westward Ho! or the Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas
Leigh, Knight of Burrough, in the County of Devon, in the
1 Memoir of Baron Bunsen by his Widow (1868), vol. II, p. 309.
» Besides this, he found full opportunity for his natural history studies. Glaucus,
the Wonders of the Sea Shore, which appeared in 1855, was developed out of an article
in The North British Review.


## p. 364 (#380) ############################################

364 The Political and Social Novel [CH.
reign of Her Most Glorious Majesty Queen Elizabeth, with a
characteristic double dedication to rajah Brooke and the bishop
of New Zealand (George Augustus Selwyn). The book breathes
the spirit of martial heroism and naval enterprise typified by the
Elizabethan age and the county of Devon ; but it is also animated
by a, more or less, aggressive patriotism, of which Kingsley found
no difficulty in ‘rendering the supposed autobiographical expression
‘into modern English. ' The novelist had a special gift of opening
his stories in a vivid and stimulating way; but, in the present
instance, there follows a second opening, where Amyas, whom, in
the first pages, we met, as a boy, vainly intent upon sailing with
the luckless John Oxenham, reappears on his return from a voyage
round the world with Drake. And so we are launched into the
story, which is carried through with inexhaustible verve, but, also,
with something beyond mere vigour and high spirits. The book is
written by an Englishman for Englishmen—and by a protestant
for protestants. Such Elizabethan stumbling-blocks as the penal
laws are got out of the way without much trouble, and we are not
allowed time to criticise the antithesis between the man who does
right according to prescript and the man who does right by the
spirit of God that is in him. Amyas, whose heart never quailed,
whether before armada or before inquisition, deemed Parsons
and Campion fair game, and the massacre of Limerick a painful
necessity; and, if his editor is almost visited by a feeling of
compunction as to the whole quarrel with Ireland, he is able to
suppress this qualm by means of an honourable mention (in a
note) of the gallant conduct of Irish officers and soldiers in the
Crimean war. The whole story, however, is too good, and the end,
when Amyas, after throwing his sword, whose the vengeance was
not to be, into the waters, returns home blind, is too tragic, to
invite criticism of details. If not as notable a literary performance
as Hypatia, Westward Ho! , too, is a masterpiece after its kind,
and will live as such in the literature of English fiction.
In Two Years Ago (1857), Kingsley once more returned to
contemporary life, dealing with such of its moral difficulties and of
its material evils as more particularly came under his cognisance.
The main teaching of the book may, perhaps, be said to be that the
processes of Providence are to be read by him who runs in both
the happiness and the unhappiness of which the world around us
is full—in the beauty of nature, and in the power granted to
human action to set right much of the wrong wrought by human
sloth and self-indulgence, and that, consequently, man is called


## p. 365 (#381) ############################################

] XI
Two Years Ago
365
a
upon for faith and hope and the self-devotion of love, thus receiving
the one answer for which pure and honest spirits are, consciously
or unconsciously, in search. Had it not been for the force of some
of the character-drawing in this novel, especially for the figure of
the hero of the tale, Tom Thurnall, and for the vivid picturesqueness
of the writing, both in passages of pure description and in the
highly wrought episode of the storm, Two Years Ago would
probably not have excited much interest as a story. The main
plot, on the whole, is too transparent, and the advent of the cholera
has been too fully prepared to tell strongly when it actually breaks
out? . The Crimean war has no real bearing on the narrative,
though Tom's imprisonment forms the turning-point of his inner
life. The by-plot of Marie's (Cordifiamma's) love adventures has,
as Kingsley confessed, no organic connection with the story; and
the introduction, which dates two years after the action itself,
throws no new light upon it. Nor are the lesser characters as
interesting as is usual with Kingsley. The poet, Elsley Vavasour,
who seems to be intended as a contrast to the downright Tom, is
a mere caricature of what is most contemptible in a self-conscious
and effeminate man of the pen. The moraliser of the argument,
major Campbell, is not the less a shadowy figure because Kingsley
drew him from life, and because he shares with at least two other
characters in the story that passionate love for nature and the
study of nature without which, to its author, life was colourless.
Claude and Sabina are, as he told his critic George Brimley? , only
‘two dolls' with whom he had been playing, "setting them to say
and do all the pretty naïve things anyone else is too respectable
to be set about, till I know them as well as I know you. '
Kingsley's belief that the true task of the age was self-sacrifice
in the cause of suffering humanity-not talk but work, albeit not
to be brought home to the national conscience without a great
deal of talk—and his conviction that sanitary reform and what it
implied was the most pressing of its needs, were in harmony with
some of the noblest impulses of the era of Florence Nightingale
and her contemporaries. But, of the vehemence of his earlier
denunciations of existing social evils there is not much to be
found in Two Years Ago. He has a kindly eye for helpless
guardsmen, and even something more than this for well-meaning
1 So far back as 1849, Kingsley had preached at Eversley three remarkable sermons
on the cholera, which were published in the same year under the title Who causes
Pestilence ?
Memories and Letters, vol. II, p. 44.


## p. 366 (#382) ############################################

366
The Political and Social Novel [CH.
high-church curates ; and the general note of his social philosophy
is optimism. To Christianity, he steadfastly looks as to the crowning
grace of all, and, in a corner of his heart, there lurks the belief
that, in the crises as well as in the general conduct of life, a
gentleman is not a gentleman for nothing.
After Two Years Ago, Kingsley but once returned to the novel;
for the project which he entertained of writing a story on the
subject of the Pilgrimage of Grace was abandoned by him in 1858,
after part of the book had been written? . His last completed
novel, Hereward the Wake, was not published till 1866, with a
dedication to Thomas Wright, to whose researches the author
warmly acknowledged his indebtedness. It is one of the least read
of his historical romances, and there is no reference to it in his
biographical memorial. But it is a work of much vigour and
freshness, and hardly inferior to Westward Ho! in the picturesque
vividness of its setting; for the homeliness of much of the scenery
(the fens are not all sunsets) finds a compensation in the truthfulness
of the picture, familiar to Kingsley in his childhood and in his later
days? . Nor is the characterisation less forcible, to whatever extent
the reader may feel further removed from the followers of William
and Harold than from the lieges of queen Elizabeth. On the other
hand, the earlier of the two novels more successfully unites the
personal with the historical interest called forth by it, and less
encumbers itself by critical references to its sources. Thus, it comes
about that the earlier part of the book, which tells of Hereward's
strange adventures by flood and field as an outlaw before the
landing of William, is more attractive than the later, in which the
story becomes involved in that of the conquest itself and deals not
only with the climax of the hero's career, the defence of Ely, but,
also, with his rather inglorious exit. In Torfrida, the author of
Hereward draws a fine and impressive female character such as
is wanting in Westward Ho! and the figure of Martin, faithful to
her even more than to her wayward hero, is, likewise, admirable.
‘But as with Napoleon and Josephine, so it was with Hereward
and Torfrida. ' This analogy, like the less dignified remark that
‘if tobacco had been known then, Hereward would have smoked
all the way' to Crowland, fails to impair the historical veracity of
1 See Memories and Letters, vol. III, pp. 59–62. The effort could not but have
been interesting, since the heroes of the story, Robert and Christopher Aske, were
both good Romanists,' though, as Kingsley points out, they knew nothing of the
Jesuits.
? One of Kingsley's Prose Idylls (1873), treating of the fens, was a reproduction of
his article on the subject in Good Words, 1 May 1867.


## p. 367 (#383) ############################################

XI
a
]
Kingsley's Popularity 367
the romance; the danger of a professor of history indulging in
'imaginative literature lay in a different direction.
The causes of the great popularity of Kingsley's novels as a
whole, and of the attraction which they exercised upon a very large
and diversely composed body of readers, are not far to seek.
The
strength of his imagination could throw its brilliant light both
upon material taken from his own age and scenery with which
he was familiar, and upon past periods of history known to him
only from books, and lands and seas seen by him only with the
mind's eye, while his descriptive power enabled him to repro-
duce them not so much with abundance of detail as with graphic
distinctness of touch. These gifts made his fiction real to all who,
like himself, were interested in the world and its inhabitants, in
the life of nature with all its secrets and in human life with all
its longings. But he wrote, as he made no secret that he wrote,
for other ends than that of giving pleasure, or of stimulating
sympathy with the things with which he sympathised himself ; he
also meant, not only in those apaßáoels, as he calls them, which go
direct from author to reader, but by the whole current of his stories,
to enforce certain ideas and principles, or the meaning of certain
spiritual tendencies and movements of which those ideas formed
part. In the correspondence with George Brimley to which refer-
ence has already been made, he observes that, in the modern novel,
if it is to be a picture of actual life—and this was an end which,
with his hatred of unreality, he always kept in view—'you must
have people talk, as people do in real life, about all manner of
irrelevant things, but you must
take care that each man's speech shall show more of his character, and that
the general tone shall be such as never to make the reader forget the main
purpose of the book.
There could be no better description of the novel with a purpose
the Tendenzroman—which artistically conceals its moral, religious,
political, or social aims, and gives pleasure without losing sight
of its didactic object. It remains not the less a hybrid, even when
the artist's satisfaction in his work from time to time overpowers
the sense of his commission as a teacher. To Kingsley, this com-
mission, as he believed, came from the same authority as that
which he obeyed as a minister of religion and which he followed in
taking upon himself what he held to be part of his ministerial duty,
the task of social reform. All the manifold activities of his life-
his work as a parson, professor, writer, poet-he sought to fuse in
these works of fiction, together with his memories of the Berkshire
>
-


## p. 368 (#384) ############################################

368
[ch.
The Political and Social Novel
chalkstreams and the Devonshire coast,' and of the town alleys
where he 'preached his Gospel of godliness and cleanliness, while
smoking his pipe with soldiers and navvies? '
Apart from his novels and his solitary tragedy, Kingsley's con-
tributions to pure literature were by no means numerous.
He
wrote a considerable amount of miscellaneous verse2_some of
it so excellent as to make it intelligible that he should, at times,
have thought poetry the branch of composition for which his genius
preeminently qualified him. Of the larger poems, Andromeda
tells the familiar myth, with, perhaps, excessive elaboration, in not
unharmonious hexameters--a metre to the English form of which
he gave much consideration; the poet would not have been him-
self had he not made his poem a tribute to the sea and even to the
Silvery fish, wreathed shell, and the strange lithe things of the water.
His own favourite poem seems to have been St Maura, which had
satisfied Maurice. There are other legends, sagas and ballad-
romances of slighter pretensions ; but the best of all are the quite
short ballad-songs, some of them imbedded in his novels, which
reveal their depth of feeling in a few words, of which the cadence
persistently haunts the ear-such as The Sands of Dee, The
Three Fishers and maybe one or two more.
In 1860, Kingsley was appointed regius professor of modern
history in the university of Cambridge, an office which he held
during nine years. He was as deeply gratified by the circumstances
of his appointment as he was afterwards depressed by the respon-
sibilities of a chair to which, from first to last, he never failed to
devote the best of his powers. But they were not suited to many
sides of the work, and could not be made to suit them. That, with
many other things, he quickened, among his hearers, the interest
in historical studies is indisputable. The publications connected
with his tenure of the professorship are few. Besides the modest
inaugural discourse on the human interests of history, printed
(1860) under the title The Limits of Exact Science as applied to
History, he published, in 1864, a course of lectures entitled The
Roman and the Teuton. The subject, always particularly attrac-
tive to him, called for a close examination of evidence, in such
enquiries, for instance, as that into the character of later imperial
administration. The modest disclaimer 'I am not here to teach
history-no man can do that ; but to teach you to teach it will
See Max Müller's preface to the 1875 edition of The Roman and the Teuton.
? Collected in vol. xvi of the 19 vol. edition of his Life and Works.


## p. 369 (#385) ############################################

XI] Kingsley's Miscellaneous Writings 369
not prevent the conclusion that, as a historian, he was not equal
to his task, and this, not because of inaccuracies, partly disproved,
partly shown to be exaggerated, but, chiefly, by reason of his want
of insight into historic method. His historical essays published in
1873', of course, lay less open to this objection. In the last of these,
Kingsley was found ready to accept without hesitation the authority
of Froude; and it was a second review of the same History that
drew him into the controversy with Newman, which, inasmuch as
it gave rise to Apologia, belongs, rather, to an estimate of the works
of that writer. Kingsley's breakdown in the fray was due to his
original blunder of basing on evidence in part unfortunately chosen
and in part left vague the statement of a general conclusion on a
question not admitting of debate from two totally different points
of view. He was by nature neither dogmatical nor obstinate, as,
indeed, a candid examination of this controversy will itself suffice
to show. His lectures entitled The Ancien Régime, delivered at the
Royal Institution in 1867, have been left behind by later research.
During the last six years of Kingsley's life (1869–75), in which,
after resigning his Cambridge chair, he successively held canonries
at Chester and at Westminster (the latter from 1873), he was more
or less relieved from the necessity of work with his pen ; but it
was never idle. Nothing further, however, need be said here of
his sermons, of which there are many volumes, from the Village
Sermons of Eversley to those delivered in Westminster abbey :
most of them are distinguished not only by an incisive brevity, but,
also, by a skilful, as well as courageous, choice of social or ethical
topics, and all of them breathe a spirit of generous humanity? ,
as well as of true piety. Among the writings which testify to his
love of natural scenery and its associations, the Prose Idylls, vary-
ing in theme from the home counties to the fens and the Pyrenees,
are, perhaps, the most delightful ; and the same appreciative spirit
accompanied him across the sea on a three months' visit in 1869, to
the West Indies, recorded in At Last (1871)--a happily chosen title
-which tells the story of a life's longing satisfied. He paid another
visit to the new world, in the year before he died; but its literary
memorial deals with monuments and lessons of the old. To an
earlier year (1863) belongs The Water-Babies, a Fairy Tale for a
Land-Baby, written in a happy vein of humorous fancy, while
a
6
1 Plays and Puritans, Sir Walter Raleigh, review of Froude's History.
2 See, by way of example, the sermons on David, whom he once playfully declared
his favourite hero. '
3 Lectures delivered in America in 1874 (1875).
E. L. XIII.
24
CH, XI.


## p. 370 (#386) ############################################

370
The Political and Social Novel [ch.
the didactic element introduces itself without insistence, as it
should in a story meant for children and not for the grown-up
people in the back seats.
Kingsley's life and literary career reflect and represent a
restless age. He belonged to a band of courageous and clear-
sighted men who, with Maurice at their head, tried to understand
their countrymen and to lead them to a better time. Kingsley
was gifted, like few of them, with a strong imagination and the
power of direct and striking, as well as fervent and sympathetic,
expression; and, thus, he, more than any one of his companions,
imparted to the most popular literary form of his times that
quality of earnestness which associated it indelibly with the great
social endeavours of the age.
Of Maurice's followers in the efforts for social reforms which
marked the middle years of the century, Thomas Hughes was the
only writer besides Kingsley who gained for himself an enduring
name in the literature of fiction. And this, virtually, by a single
work, Tom Brown's School Days; for its continuation from no
point of view equalled it in merit, and most of the author's other
works were biographical. Hughes, like Kingsley, made no secret
of the didactic purpose of his extraordinarily successful story,
which was first published, anonymously, in 1857. 'He wrote,' he
said, 'to get the chance of preaching, and not for any other
object'; and the keynote of the story was the defence of earnestness
in schoolboys as a brighter renewal of what, in former days, used
to be called seriousness. The value of this quality, as the master
quality of a boy's character and life, and of those of the man into
whom he is growing, is set forth not only in the experience of the
commonplace hero (for this commonplaceness is indispensable in
an exemplar), but, also, in the personality of the man in whom he
recognises his ideal. Rarely, if ever, has a great school been so
identified with a great man as Arnold has become identified with
Rugby; and, since Hughes's tale contributed to this result not less
unmistakably than Stanley’s Life, the one has as good a title to his
statue by the playing-fields as the other has to his in the chapel
of the school. Though there are passages in the book which
may be fitter for men than for boys, that charge can, certainly,
not be brought home to it as a whole; and its close (written
by the author in circumstances of deep personal distress) gives
solemnity as well as unity to the story, though it begins with
scenes of admirable humour and is, what few school histories


## p. 371 (#387) ############################################

XI]
Mrs Gaskell
371
succeed in being, a true picture of school life and of boys'
nature.
The present seems the most appropriate place for speaking
of the chief contributions to British fiction of Elizabeth Cleghorn
Gaskell, a writer of rare charm and, though no one knew better
than herself the limits prescribed to her creations, possessed of
true powers of both pathos and humour. For, although she pre-
ferred to exercise those powers chiefly in tracing the interplay
of personal affections and passions, the influence of character
upon character, the genial impulses of the soul and the shy sorrows
of the heart, and the all-healing love which rises above self, they
were, it is certain, first set in motion when her mind was brought to
bear upon the social problems and troubles around her. In these,
her loving nature was drawn, by personal affliction of its own,
to take a sympathetic interest; and Mary Barton, written to
beguile a mother's grief for the loss of her infant son, her first
book and that by which her literary reputation was at once
established, may justly claim to rank among the most notable of
the social novels of the age.
Mrs Gaskell was described by one of the most faithful and
gifted of her and her daughters' friends ? as
like the best things in her books; full of gracious and tender sympathies, of
thoughtful kindness, of pleasant humour, of quick appreciation, of utmost
simplicity and truthfulness, and uniting with peculiar delicacy and refinement
a strength of principle and purpose and straightforwardness in action such
as few women possess.
But her life was led in conditions of great tranquillity and almost
unbroken happiness, and, after her death, the remembrance of her
was preserved by the perfect love of those whom she had left
behind her and to whom her wishes were law. She desired that
no set biography of her should be attempted ; and it is thus from
her writings only that later generations are likely to gather much
beyond the outward facts of her existence. Those who knew her or
hers may indulge the belief that in those writings are to be found
more than one experience that came very near home to her, trans-
muted into kindly lessons of resignation and of charity to all men”.
Mrs Gaskell was born on 29 September 1810, in what is now
&
· Eliot Norton, in a letter to J. Russell Lowell, written in 1857. See his Letters of
Charles Eliot Norton (2 vols. 1913), vol. 1, pp. 171—2.
• A remembrance of the loss of her boy, already noticed, is traceable in Mary Barton,
Lizzie Leigh, Ruth, Cranford, Mr Harrison's Confessions, Cousin Phillis and, doubtless,
in other of her stories.
24_2


## p. 372 (#388) ############################################

372
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
known as 93 Cheyne walk and was then called Lindsay row,
Chelsea.
Her father, member of a Berwick-on-Tweed family in
which ran a strong love of the sea,' was a man of original ability,
in turn unitarian minister and (after an interval of schoolmastering
and farming) keeper of the treasury records; her maternal
grandfather was a descendant of the wellknown Lancashire and
Cheshire family of Holland, who farmed his own land at Sandle
bridge in the latter county. William Stevenson may be fairly set
down as the original of minister Holman in Cousin Phillis, and
the intimate and enduring connection of the Cheshire Hollands
with Knutsford suggested an infinitude of personal and local
reminiscences of that town and its vicinity under the aliases of
Cranford, Duncombe (in Mr Harrison's Confessions) and Hol-
lingford (in Wives and Daughters). At Knutsford (which thus
became part of herself), most of Elizabeth Stevenson's girlhood
was spent; the rest was divided between London, Newcastle-on-
Tyne (where she resided in the house of a unitarian minister,
William Turner, who is said to have suggested some features in
the beautiful character of Thurston Benson in Ruth) and at
Edinburgh, (as humorously recorded in the introduction to Round
the Sofa). In 1832, she married William Gaskell, then and to the
end of his life, minister of the Cross street unitarian chapel in
Manchester and an accomplished scholar, with whom all the rest
of her life flowed on in perfect unison. The circle of friends of
which she now became part and of which, in time, her house,
84 Plymouth grove, was to be looked upon as a chosen centre,
was one of social as well as intellectual distinction; yet it was as
a 'greater Manchester,' in more than the local sense of the phrase,
that she learnt to love the place, till, even on her holidays in Wales,
and, afterwards, on the Neckar, in Italy and in her favourite France,
she could look back, like Mary Barton on the railway to Liverpool,
'towards the factory-chimneys, and the cloud of smoke which
hovers over the place, with a feeling akin to Heimweh. ' And it is
not too much to say that what, from the first, helped to bind her
to the city which, for more than fourscore years, was to be her
home and that of her daughters, was the care for the poor of
which she and they never lost sight. Several years before she
began Mary Barton, she and her husband printed the first (and,
as it proved, the only) one of a projected series of versified Sketches
1 His mother, Mrs Gaskell's paternal grandmother, was cousin, once removed, of
the author of The Seasons.
2 In Blackwood's Magazine for January 1837 (vol. XLI, no. 255).


## p. 373 (#389) ############################################

>
XI]
Mary Barton
373
among the Poor, 'rather' as she confidentially put it to her friend
Mrs Howitt, in the manner of Crabbe, but in a more seeing-beauty
spirit. ' The influence of Crabbe, tempered in the fashion which
this passage indicates, is, as will be seen, traceable in some of her
published writings.
Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life, was written in
1845–71, when there was still great distress in the manufacturing
districts, and when the abolition of the corn laws was only be-
ginning to exercise its remedial effects; and it was published in
1848, when the political and social fabric of this country stood
unshaken, though not unmoved, by the convulsions of the continent.
When, or just before, Mrs Gaskell was beginning her story,
Disraeli had published Coningsby and was preparing to follow
it by Sybil; but Mrs Gaskell was unacquainted with either of
these works, though she might have given them at least as
friendly a reception as was accorded to the later of them by her
contemporary George Eliot? . It is, however, clear that Mrs
Gaskell's story was concerned with a rather earlier period of
British social history—the years 1842—3; and this was recog-
nised by the most powerful, though not by the most violent,
among its critics: The troubles of these years really dated from
the series of bad harvests which had begun so far back as 1837,
and which had led, in 1838, to the great chartist meeting on Kersal
moor, Manchester, and, in the following year, amidst continued
distress, to the rejection, by a large parliamentary majority, of
a monster chartist petition, agreed upon by a national convention
of working men’s delegates. It cannot be said that (though, as
John Barton and other less prejudiced observers noted, royal
drawing-rooms and other social functions were not suspended)
these occurrences made no impression even in London ; but, at
Manchester and elsewhere in the manufacturing districts, there
ensued much agitation and violence, and, when, in 1840 and 1841, the
distress among the working classes continued and, in the following
year, reached its height, a great part of Lancashire fell into a
condition approaching to riot, though the queen's speech stated
1 The conjecture that the short and powerful story Lizzie Leigh, of which the
first portion appeared on 30 March 1850, in the first number of Household Words, was
written, in part at least, before Mary Barton, is plausible, but unproved. Probably,
the reproduction in it, with a different relation, of the Esther episode was unconscious.
George Eliot's Life, by Cross, J. W. , vol. I, p. 104.
3 Greg, W. R. , speaks of such periods as 1842'; The Manchester Guardian of
28 February 1849 refers to this morbid sensibility to the condition of factory
operatives, which has become so fashionable of late among the gentry and landed
aristocracy. '
.
6


## p. 374 (#390) ############################################

374
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
that the sufferings and privations of the manufacturing districts
had been borne 'with exemplary patience and fortitude. ' After
another petition—this time bearing more than three million sig-
natures—had been rejected by a sweeping majority of the house
of commons, a wild riot broke out at Manchester, and a general
strike was for a few days enforced.
It was the impression of these events, and of the efforts which
followed to allay the almost unprecedented sufferings, as well as
the perilous excitement, of the working classes, especially in the
manufacturing districts, which was upon Mrs Gaskell when she
wrote her tale of Manchester life. For it should not be over-
looked that, if the preceding years had brought with them sore
suffering and savage wrath, 1842 and the years immediately
following, at all events, were full, not only of charitable effort, but
of legislative endeavour to find remedies for the existing condition
of things; that, in a word, the conscience of the country was
awake, and the system by which things (including wages) were left
to right themselves had been definitely put on its defence. This
is the point of view from which the authoress of Mary Barton
addressed herself to the problem of the early forties, which she
did not so much as profess to understand in all its economical
bearings; and this is what the eminent political and economical
thinker who was the sternest critic of the book failed to see when
he tried to shift the chief blame for the patent evils of the situation
from the masters to the workmen, and, more especially, to the
ex-workmen who form the acting staff of trades' unions and
delegations! ' Mrs Gaskell's panacea—the bringing-about of a
good understanding (in every sense of the term) between masters
and men-had only begun to be put into operation in the period
with which Mary Barton deals; and even to these beginnings she
pays a tribute, though not in a particularly decisive form? .
Still, it is obvious enough that, in Mary Barton, there is no
very manifest intention of holding a careful balance between the
two sides, and that, as was inevitable, the sympathies of the
2
6
i Greg, W. R. , Mistaken Aims and Attainable Ideals of the Working Classes (1876),
reprinted from The Edinburgh Review, April 1849. See, also, Essays in Political
and Social Science, vol. I, 1853.
? 1. e. in that of improvements effected by, or due to the mind of, the elder Carson
which submitted to be taught by suffering. '
8 Against the quite improbably cruel behaviour of the younger Carson in caricaturing
the unhappy workmen delegates might be set the much less improbable but infinitely
more heinous fact of his murder—especially when it is borne in mind that the actual
murder which probably suggested this incident was occasioned, not by private
vengeance, but by a wish to intimidate the masters of a district near Manchester.


## p. 375 (#391) ############################################

6
XI]
North and South
375
reader are engaged on the side of those who have 'to stint in
things for life. The writer did not plead their cause as deserving,
or deprived of, particular rights; chartist, or even democratic,
dreams were far away from her mind; she and many of the
working men and women would probably even have disagreed
as to the protection which the law should give to wives and
children? But she thought that the men should be treated as
brethren and friends' by their employers, and that, so long as this
remained untried, there could be no desire for peace and, conse-
quently, no hope of better things.
It is impossible to go back here upon the controversy to which
the publication of Mary Barton gave rise ; it did not weaken the
force of her appeal for sympathy with those who needed it; but,
if unjust to the main motive, it was almost inevitably provoked by
the actual effect, of her book. That her own sense of justice and
the magnanimity inspired by it became aware of this is shown by
the novel which, six years later, she published under the title North
and South, and apart from which, in justice to the writer, Mary
Barton ought never to be judged. In 1854, the great remedial
legislation of the abolition of the corn laws had borne its full
fruits; the agitation for the charter, though not extinct, had
cooled down, and working men in the manufacturing districts
had begun to appreciate the value of association and the uses
of combination. On the other hand, the more intelligent of the
masters, too, could not but better discern the necessity, and the
more conscientious of them the duty, of establishing with their
men relations which no longer ignored their necessary dependence
upon one another. This, so far as the question of factory labour
came to be treated in it, was the general conception of North and
South, the story which, curiously enough, appeared in Household
Words immediately after Dickens's Hard Times, though written
in absolute independence of it. The critic who had condemned,
while admiring, Mary Barton blessed North and South altogether.
But Mrs Gaskell had neither wished to receive, nor intended to
make, an amende honorable. The social teaching of the two
novels is perfectly self-consistent; and, though it did not solve the
difficulties of the problem to which it addressed itself, in no later
phase of that problem has the spirit of Mrs Gaskell's message been
left aside with impunity.
Mary Barton, which, besides, as was inevitable, surpassing
i Old Alice is against the employment of married women in factories; but poor
Mrs Davenport denounces the law keeping children from factory work.


## p. 376 (#392) ############################################

376
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
all later works of its author in the spread of its popularity at
home, has been translated into many foreign tongues, reveals
more of her distinctive literary qualities than is common with
first works. But it was written in conditions and with thoughts
of its own. The working men and women who appear in it (in-
cluding both hero and heroine) are not only true Lancashire, but
living human beings. The plot is admirably clear, and rises to
a climax of dramatic power rare, but not unparalleled, in Mrs
Gaskell's later stories. Curiously enough, it is here that her
humour, more or less repressed in the earlier part of the novel,
for the first time comes freely to the front, in the old boatman and
the gamin Charley. But the story was not conceived in cheerful-
ness, and, as its scene lies in humble homes, repeated appeal to
the impressiveness of deathbeds (on which Maria Edgeworth re-
marked) seems not unfitting. On the other hand, it is full of
strong passion, and of the tenderest of pathos, and is steeped in
that feeling of neighbourly love which we are almost induced to
deem the best privilege of the poor.
The success of Mary Barton speedily brought Mrs Gaskell
into near relations with the grand masters of the branch of
literature in which she had herself taken a leading place, and
more especially with Dickens, who showed her, as a writer in
Household Words and all the Year Round, and in many other
ways, the highest consideration and regard. She wrote much for
him during the greater part of her literary life, but hardly ever,
either in her contributions to his Christmas numbers or in her
occasional papers, anything unworthy of preservation, as illustrating
her freshness of thought, power of observation and delicacy of
sympathy. Unlike many of her fellow-contributors, she cannot be
said to have fallen, except quite occasionally', under the spell of
his manner or mannerism. Her own English style was always of
singular purity; neither north nor south had marred it by 'pro-
vincialisms 2'; and it is not by chance that one of her favourite
writers: was Mme de Sévigné, whose style was wholly natural and
perfectly pure. Whatever Mrs Gaskell’s theme—a page of homely
life, a tale of adventure or even of crime, or one of those mysterious
Perhaps the most striking instance of an unconscious imitation of Dickens is to
be found in both some of the pathos and some of the fun of the delightful Mr Harrison's
Confessions. And see, post, as to Cranford.
? The best writers must have some little habitual flaw of diction; Mrs Gaskell's use
of the verb 'name' is the only one that is recurrent in hers.
8 The design of writing Mme de Sévigné's life occupied Mrs Gaskell in her last
years.


## p. 377 (#393) ############################################

.
XI]
Cranford
377
supernatural experiences which had an irresistible fascination for
her—the lucidity and delicacy of the style never fail the teller of
the story.
>
After, in The Moorland Cottage (1850), which is full of simple
charm, and has additional interest as containing the germ of not
a few characters and situations in her later works, she had
produced her second separately published story, Mrs Gaskell
contributed to Household Words (1851–3), in a series of papers
republished (1853) under the collective title Cranford, what (all
questions of preference or predilection apart) must be described
as the most original of all her works. The literary derivation of
this inimitable prose idyll, that grew out of itself into a whole
from which nothing is to be taken away and to which (as it
proved) nothing could safely be added”, is a question admitting
of discussion : but this discussion may easily be carried too far.
Crabbe and Mary Russell Mitford, Galt and Maria Edgeworth, and
even Jane Austen, influenced the choice and limitation of theme
to some extent, and Dickens was not wholly a stranger to the
method of treatments. But the interweaving of truth and fiction,
and the proportioning of the elements of pathos and tenderness
to those of humour and even of fun, were wholly the author's own.
‘Cranford,' says lady Ritchie", ‘proves the value of little things,
of the grain of mustard-seed,' and 'reveals the mighty secret of
kindness allied to gentle force. ' Thus, the intimate record of the
human lives and souls sheltered by a sequestered little Cheshire
home became a favourite of the English-speaking world ; and the
gentle and shrinking Miss Matty takes her place among the true
heroines of our domestic fiction.
In the same year as the collected Cranford, appeared a novel
of a very different type-Ruth. This book caused a controversy
in its way almost as violent as that excited by Mary Barton,
W. R. Greg, more in sorrow than in anger, censuring its 'false
a
a
1 Maggie, above all, is Molly in germ, even in her attachment to her chosen
solitary seat.
2 One attempt was, not very successfully, made; another, on a larger scale, one
may think fortunately, remained a passing fancy. Mr Harrison's Confessions and
Wives and Daughters use the same background, but each in its own fashion. One or
two passages in the latter story come rather close to Cranford, but are not, perhaps,
so good as the rest of the book.
: The reference to Pickwick was removed from one passage of the text, but left
standing in another.
• A Discourse on Modern Sibyls (read to the English Association, 1913), p. 8.
5 The name of this novel was probably (though, of course, not certainly) suggested
by one of Crabbe's Tales of the Hall.


## p. 378 (#394) ############################################

378
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
morality,' and F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley (after a more or
less a priori fashion), Florence Nightingale and others ranging
themselves on the side of the defence. Ruth treats a wholly ethical
problem, or, rather, two problems which the course of the story
almost tempts the reader to confound. The plea for Christian
forgiveness of sin following on repentance is unanswerable; but
the incident on which everything is made to turn in the progress
of the plot cannot be pronounced a happy conception. The value
of the virtue of truthfulness was always present to Mrs Gaskell's
mind, and there are few of her stories but, in one way or another,
help to illustrate it? But, in Ruth, though the lie is told for the
wronged woman rather than by her, the trouble which it brings
forth fails to strike the reader as inevitable, and the compassion
evoked by a story of the deepest pathos is, therefore, not without
reservation. Other exceptions might be taken to the working-out
of the plot (especially as to the part played in it by a very un-
attractive Lothario); but the beauty of the central figure remains,
and the pity of her fate, tenderly softened by the ministering love
of those around her.
Of North and South (first published as a complete work in
1855) we have already spoken, and can only note further that, to its
picture of the differences between masters and men, it adds, with
great constructive skill, the contrast indicated in its title, and
another contrast of wider sway and deeper import. If Margaret's
prejudice against manufacturers is, perhaps, a little stubborn for
her time of day, her virgin pride is not less true to nature than
Thornton's tenacity; and the true crisis of the story—Margaret's
farewell to her brother2_is not less dramatic than the earlier
scene of her defence of Thornton against the mob. After the
crisis, the story begins to drag—it was, like Hard Times, the
first brought out by its writer in weekly instalments. That it
should remain one of the finest, if not the finest, of her achieve-
ments, must, therefore, be allowed to show an extraordinary
mastery of the art in which she had rapidly come to excel.
Yet, at this very time, she turned aside from this to another
1 Thus, in tragic fashion, Sylvia's Lovers, and, in a more genial vein, Wives and
Daughters, where Molly's truthfulness lies at the very core of her nature, in contrast
with her stepmother's equally characteristic 'falsity in very little things. ' The rather
casuistical problem of the white lie recurs in North and South.
2 The story of Frederick is a variation of that of Peter in Cranford; Mrs Gaskell's
interest in the subject of reappearances, as well as in that of disappearances (on which
she wrote a separate paper), was, no doubt, due to the disappearance in his youth of her
brother John, a lieutenant in the merchant service.


## p. 379 (#395) ############################################

xi] Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë 379
field of composition in which she was a novice. Mrs Gaskell's
Life of Charlotte Brontë, to which she devoted the whole of
the year 1856 and which was published, in two volumes, in
the following year, is a possession for ever, and while, in the
words of Charlotte Brontë's father, the work had been done
'in such a way as no person but the writer could have done
it,' no later treatment of the same theme, critical, contro-
versial, supplementary, or retouching, will ever in any sense
supersede it. Even were the present the most appropriate place,
it would be impossible to notice here-quite apart from all
discussion of details, whether of statement or of omission-cavils
concerning the entire method and spirit of treatment adopted by
the biographer, more especially in the earlier portions of the
book? No more spontaneous honour, it has been said? , was ever
offered by one woman of genius to another than when Mrs Gaskell
wrote the life of her friend; and the time cannot be distant when
those who care most both for the fame of Charlotte Brontë and
her sisters will be the readiest to acknowledge what it owes to the
generous and truthful record that made them enduring memories.
But the strictures passed upon passages of this biography
gave much pain to its author, and for some years she published
little of importance. My Lady Ludlow, which was reprinted
with several other tales in the pleasantly introduced collection
Round the Sofa, in 1859, after appearing in Household Words
during the summer months of the previous year, cannot be
reckoned among her best stories; though some of the characters,
from the highbred châtelaine to the acute little poacher's son,
are admirably drawn, the machinery, for once, does not move
easily. Mrs Gaskell found herself and her wonderful power of
narrative again in Sylvia's Lovers (1863), a perfect story but
for a certain lengthiness and excess of ảvayvápious towards the
closeThe terrors of the press-gang, a remarkably lucid account
of which, after the time-honoured manner of Scott, introduces
the story, serves as a background to a domestic drama of extra-
ordinary power, strengthened in its hold upon the mind by the
1 Cf. Reid, Sir T. Wemyss, Charlotte Brontë (1877), and the observations on it,
of Stephen, Sir L. , Charlotte Brontë,' in Hours in a Library, 3rd series (1879),
pp. 338 ff.
2
By lady Ritchie, op. cit. A generous welcome was given to this biography at the
time of its appearance by George Eliot, who had admired Ruth, but thought it strained.
3 The motif of Philip's return to his wife reappears in Mrs Gaskell’s short tale
The Manchester Marriage (1859). Both this and Sylvia's Lovers were earlier in date
of publication than Enoch Arden (1864).


## p. 380 (#396) ############################################

380
(ch.
The Political and Social Novel
graphic art that brings the grand ‘Monkshaven' seascape and
the rough times of the great naval wars vividly before us? .
Sylvia's Lovers can certainly not be called a political novel; but
it is a historical novel in the broader sense in which The Heart of
Midlothian may be thus described, and worthy to be named with
that masterpiece as a tale of passion and anguish that goes straight
to every human heart. 'It was,' Mrs Gaskell said, 'the saddest story
I ever wrote'; and she poured into it all the infinite pity of which
her loving nature was capable. The canvas of the story is full of
figures, instinct with life and truth, including Kester, her single
male example of a class always a favourite in British fiction, but
never drawn with more affectionate humour than by Mrs Gaskell,
whom her own domestic servants adored.
It would not be easy to point to a more signal instance of the
power of genius to vary both the forms in which it presents its
creations, and the effects which these presentments produce, than
is furnished by a comparison between Sylvia's Lovers and its
successor Cousin Phillis. This short story first appeared in The
Cornhill Magazine, in 1863—4, and was printed, as a whole, in the
following year. In it, Mrs Gaskell once more tells the tale of a
broken heart-broken by abandonment. But, this time, it is no
seeming tragic destiny which has swept down upon the course of
love-only an everyday cruelty of fate which, in this instance, was
not even intended by its agent. Cousin Phillis is an idyll only, but
one of the loveliest, and, in plan and in setting, one of the most
finished, of its kind. If minister Holman, who quotes Vergil on
his way home from farm-work and evening hymn, stands forth
like one of the patriarchal figures in Hermann und Dorothea,
the sweetness and the sadness of Phillis herself remain with us
as an incomparable memory of love and loss—undisturbed by any
happy ending
One of Mrs Gaskell's novels has still to be noted here, which,
though nominally unfinished, has, by many judges, been held to be
in execution the most perfect of them all. Wives and Daughters,
an Every-day Story, was, like its predecessor, first printed in
The Cornhill Magazine, where it appeared from August 1864 to
January 1866. Most of the story had been written during a
happy holiday at Pontresina, on a visit to Mrs Gaskell's intimate
1 Crabbe's story of Ruth in Tales of the Hall, already mentioned, may have
suggested the first idea of a tale of impressment to Mrs Gaskell; but this part of the
plot of Sylvia's Lovers is based on a historical episode of Whitby life of which she had
carefully studied the facts.


## p. 381 (#397) ############################################

xi]
Wives and Daughters
381
friend Mme Mohl at Paris and at Dieppe. Before the publication
of its last, but uncompleted, portion, Mrs Gaskell died, quite
suddenly, but surrounded by many of those she loved best, at
Holybourne near Alton in Hampshire, in a country-house which
she had intended to present to her husband on the completion of
her novel. This had been all but reached when death overtook
her, while in full enjoyment of her powers, which had never been
exerted with more delightful mastery and assured effect than in
her last work. To describe Wives and Daughters as in its
author's later manner is, however, a criticism of doubtful import.
It was, rather, that some of her literary gifts-especially the
humour which she had richly displayed in so early a work as
Cranford—had now mellowed into a delicious softness, and that,
even in depicting the serious conflicts through which the souls
of men and women have to pass in this troubled existence, she
had learnt the value of the subdued . colouring—the half-tints
of real life,' which George Eliot had desiderated in Ruth? Wives
and Daughters, thus, instead of being called in Mrs Gaskell's
later manner, should be described as Mrs Gaskell’s manner itself
in perfection. Above all, its irony is inimitable. This enables
the writer to furnish in Mr Gibson a fresh type of simple manliness
—the type which women most rarely succeed in realising-quite
different from that of Thornton in North and South, yet deserving
a place by its side, and, among the female figures, to contrast with
the true-hearted Molly and the irresistible Cynthia, the wholly
original personality of Clare-second wife, stepmother, ci-devant
governess and the embodiment of unconscious shallowness. She
is certainly not a 'woman of feeling’; neither, however, is she a
woman without feelings; for 'if Mrs Gibson had ever felt anything
acutely, it was the death of Mr Kirkpatrick,' her first husband.
In Mrs Gaskell's hands, the social novel, which, in Mary Barton,
she had essayed with extraordinary success, had thus developed
into a form of fiction which she had made entirely her own. The
power of finding full expression for the human sympathy within
her, which had given force to her earliest work, had grown and
been refined as it grew, till, in her latest, she had produced one
of the most exquisite examples in English fiction of the pure
novel of character.
In far different fashion from the reflection, in the writings of
Mrs Gaskell, of her calm life, happy in itself and in the home
· Life, by Cross, J. W. (edition 1902), vol. I, p. 247.


## p. 382 (#398) ############################################

382
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
where it was led, the experiences of the woman of genius who
consistently signed her writings with the pseudonym George Eliot
send their often refracted rays across the pages of her chief prose
fictions. She was too thorough an artist to copy out into them
either her own personality or that of any of her kinsfolk, friends
or acquaintances; there is,' she wrote about Adam Bede, 'not
a single portrait in the book, nor will there be in any future book
of mine? ' Moreover, her spirit, like that of her favourite heroines,
was too lofty to allow her to complain of troubles or exult in
happiness which she was conscious of owing, in part at least, to
herself. And it was with her life's work, rather than with its
outward events, that her mind was occupied, as she looked back-
ward or forward during its course ; 'the only thing,' she told her
husband when urged by him to write her autobiography, 'I should
care much to dwell on would be the absolute despair I suffered
from of ever being able to achieve anything? '
The first twenty-one years of Mary Ann Evans's life—she was
born 22 November 1819—were spent in the commonplace sur-
roundings (on the border, though, of Shakespeare's forest of Arden)
of a rather remote half manor, half farmhouse, on a great Warwick-
shire estate of which her father was agent. He must have been
a notable man, and of his strong character some features are held
to have passed into both Adam Bede and the high-minded and
humorous Caleb Garth in Middlemarch. At Griff house, the
companion of Mary Ann's childhood, before 'school parted them? ,'
was her brother Isaac, just as Tom was Maggie's in the golden
hours which never came back till the very last. To the associations
of her early youth she steadfastly clung, true to her belief in the
formative influence of such remembrances upon the active, as well
as the contemplative, passages of life. By her elder sister's
marriage, she became, at an early age, the head of her widowed
father's house, and thus soon acquired a self-reliance which had
been fostered by her acknowledged superiority over her school-
fellows and companions. Though her reading seemed to her
4
1 See George Eliot's Life, as related in her Letters and Journals, arranged and edited
by her husband, Cross, J. W. , vol. I, p. 486. This book, though its editor disclaims the
functions of a biographer, is executed with great tact and ability. The references to it
as Life, etc. , in the present chapter, are to the reprint uniform with the Warwick
edition of George Eliot's Works.
? Life, etc. , vol. 1, p. 29.
8 See the charming Brother and Sister' in Poems (Warwick edition, vol. ix,
pp. 578589).
4 See . Looking Backward' in The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (vol. XII,
pp. 23—43)


## p. 383 (#399) ############################################

XI]
ΧΙ George Eliot's Early Years 383
fragmentary, it was already assuming proportions which, in the
end, were to make her a kind of Acton among English women of
letters. In the meantime, she passed, alone, through the phase of
absorption in religious and even ascetic ideas—which was intensified
by the example of an aunt whose self-sacrificing devotion afterwards
suggested that of Dinah Morris in Adam Bede-and then reached
a recognition of the claims of the individual intellect to freedom
of enquiry. The liberating influence, in her case, had been that of
Charles Bray, a manufacturer at Coventry, into the immediate
neighbourhood of which she had now removed with her father,
and of his wife.