Chapter VIII

I spoke, a while back, of _three_ masterpieces of Mrs. Gaskell, naming two, leaving you to guess the third. Lay by your _Cranford_, and take up and study _Cousin Phillis_.

I suppose its underlying sadness has kept it out of popular esteem--this tale of scarcely more than a hundred pages--a pale and shadowy sister of _Cranford_. It has none, or little of _Cranford’s_ pawky fun: it has not _Cranford’s_ factitious happy ending. But it beats me to guess how any true critic can pass it over and neglect a thing with all that is best in Theocritus moving in rustic English hearts. And it is not _invented_. It has in all its movements the suggestion of things actually seen--of small things that could not have occurred to any mind save that of an eye-witness--of small _recognitions_, each in its turn a little flash of light upon the steady background of rural England. It is England and yet pure Virgil--as purely Virgilian as the vignette, in the Fourth Georgic, of the old man of Corycus tilling his scanty acres:

nec fertilis ilia juvencis
Nec pecori opportuna seges nec commoda Baccho--

who yet brought home his own-grown vegetables at night and cast them on the table, in his mind equal to the wealth of kings. I shall read you two passages--the first of young Paul’s introduction, by his cousin Phillis, to her father the ex-minister and Virgilian scholar turned farmer and labouring with his hinds--

“There is father!” she exclaimed, pointing out to me a man in his
shirt-sleeves, taller by the head than the other two with whom he
was working. We only saw him through the leaves of the ash-trees
growing in the hedge, and I thought I must be confusing the
figures, or mistaken: that man still looked like a very powerful
labourer, and had none of the precise demureness of appearance
which I had always imagined was the characteristic of a minister.
It was the Reverend Ebenezer Holman, however. He gave us a nod as
we entered the stubble-field; and I think he would have come to
meet us, but that he was in the middle of giving some directions
to his men. I could see that Phillis was built more after his
type than her mother’s. He, like his daughter, was largely made,
and of a fair, ruddy complexion, whereas hers was brilliant and
delicate. His hair had been yellow or sandy, but now was grizzled.
Yet his grey hairs betokened no failure in strength. I never saw
a more powerful man--deep chest, lean flanks, well-planted head.
By this time we were nearly up to him; and he interrupted himself
and stepped forwards, holding out his hand to me, but addressing
Phillis.

“Well, my lass, this is cousin Manning, I suppose. Wait a minute,
young man, and I’ll put on my coat, and give you a decorous and
formal welcome. But--Ned Hall, there ought to be a water-furrow
across this land: it’s a nasty, stiff, clayey, dauby bit of
ground, and thou and I must fall to, come next Monday--I beg your
pardon, cousin Manning--and there’s old Jem’s cottage wants a
bit of thatch; you can do that job to-morrow, while I am busy.”
Then, suddenly changing the tone of his deep bass voice to an odd
suggestion of chapels and preachers, he added, “Now I will give
out the psalm: ‘Come all harmonious tongues,’ to be sung to ‘Mount
Ephraim’ tune.”

He lifted his spade in his hand, and began to beat time with it;
the two labourers seemed to know both words and music, though I
did not; and so did Phillis: her rich voice followed her father’s,
as he set the tune; and the men came in with more uncertainty,
but still harmoniously. Phillis looked at me once or twice, with
a little surprise at my silence; but I did not know the words.
There we five stood, bareheaded, excepting Phillis, in the tawny
stubble-field, from which all the shocks of corn had not yet been
carried--a dark wood on one side, where the wood-pigeons were
cooing; blue distance, seen through the ash-trees, on the other.
Somehow, I think that, if I had known the words, and could have
sung, my throat would have been choked up by the feeling of the
unaccustomed scene.

The hymn was ended, and the men had drawn off, before I could stir.
I saw the minister beginning to put on his coat, and looking at me
with friendly inspection in his gaze, before I could rouse myself.

And now let me read you this exquisite passage--there are many almost as lovely--of Phillis in love, walking with her cousin Paul--alas! not her beloved.

We talked about the different broods of chickens, and she showed
me the hens that were good mothers, and told me the characters of
all the poultry with the utmost good-faith; and in all good-faith I
listened, for I believe there was a great deal of truth in all she
said. And then we strolled on into the wood beyond the ash-meadow,
and both of us sought for early primroses and the fresh green
crinkled leaves. She was not afraid of being alone with me after
the first day. I never saw her so lovely, or so happy. I think she
hardly knew why she was so happy all the time. I can see her now,
standing under the budding branches of the grey trees, over which a
tinge of green seemed to be deepening day after day, her sun-bonnet
fallen back on her neck, her hands full of delicate wood-flowers,
quite unconscious of my gaze, but intent on sweet mockery of some
bird in neighbouring bush or tree. She had the art of warbling,
and replying to the notes of different birds, and knew their song,
their habits and ways, more accurately than any one else I ever
knew. She had often done it at my request the spring before; but
this year she really gurgled, and whistled, and warbled, just as
they did, out of the very fulness and joy of her heart. She was
more than ever the very apple of her father’s eye; her mother gave
her both her own share of love and that of the dead child who had
died in infancy. I have heard cousin Holman murmur, after a long
dreamy look at Phillis, and tell herself how like she was growing
to Johnnie, and soothe herself with plaintive inarticulate sounds,
and many gentle shakes of the head, for the aching sense of loss
she would never get over in this world.

My eyes, to be sure, are not what they were: but to them the prose of this shimmers with beauty. In Mrs. Gaskell, as with many another ageing writer, one can detect towards the close a certain sunset softness--a haze, we may call it--in which many hard experiences are reconciled. To take the highest, we agree that it so happened to Shakespeare. To step down to the man with whom for a study in the differences of literary genius starting from a like incentive--the woes of the poor, and operating in the same literary form, the novel--I have been--I hope, Gentlemen, not whimsically--contrasting this very noble lady, we know that in his later days, in _Endymion_, Disraeli saw his youth so, casting back to it. And you, maybe, will say that these sunset softening colours are all a mirage. Well, a great deal of it all is that. I believe that, as you grow older, you will find yourselves more and more tending to make less, and still less, account of definitions, of sharp outlines and judgments based on them; of anybody’s positive assertions, be he never so young.