Chapter IV: Part 4

“I do not recollect ever to have seen the sudden transition of a high-bred English beauty, who thinks she can sacrifice all for love, to an uncomfortable, solitary, Highland dwelling, among tall, red-haired sisters and grim-faced aunts. Don’t you think this would make a good opening of the piece? Suppose each of us[10] try our hands on it; the moral to be deduced from that is to warn all young ladies against runaway matches, and the character and fate of the two sisters would be _unexceptionable_. I expect it will be the first book every wise matron will put into the hand of her daughter, and even the reviewers will relax of their severity in favour of the morality of this little work. Enchanting sight! already do I behold myself arrayed in an old mouldy covering, thumbed and creased and filled with dog’s ears. I hear the enchanting sound of some sentimental miss, the shrill pipe of some antiquated spinster, or the hoarse grumbling of some incensed dowager as they severally enquire for me at the circulating library, and are assured by the master that it is in such demand that, though he has thirteen copies, they are insufficient to answer the calls upon it; but that each one of them may depend upon having the very first that comes in!!!”

The interest, in these novels, is not awakened by any subtle characterisation or by serious sympathy with the dramatis personæ. It depends rather upon caustic wit, accurate local colour, a picture of manners, and a “museum of abnormalities.”

Miss Ferrier’s nice distinctions between the “well-bred,” and her photographs of vulgarity, may claim to rival Miss Burney’s.

“Mrs. St. Clair, for example, was considerably annoyed by the manners of Lady Charles, which made her feel her own as something unwieldy and overgrown; like a long train, they were both out of the way and in the way, and she did not know very well how to dispose of them. Indeed, few things can be more irritating than for those who have hitherto piqued themselves upon the abundance of their manner, to find all at once that they have a great deal too much, and that no one is inclined to take it off their hands, and that, in short, it is dead stock.”

Mrs. Bluemit’s tea-party, again, reveals the Blue-Stockings in all their glory; while Mr. Augustus Larkins--with his “regular features, very pink eyes, very black eyebrows, and what was intended for a very smart expression”--forcibly recalls Mr. Smith of Snow Hill. His ideal of dress and manners was evidently shared by Bob and Davy Black, who were

“dressed in all the extremes of the reigning fashions--small waists, brush-heads, stiff collars, iron heels, and switches. Like many other youths they were distinctly of opinion that ‘dress makes the man.’... Perhaps, after all, that is a species of humility rather to be admired in those who, feeling themselves destitute of mental qualifications, trust to the abilities of their tailor and hairdresser for gaining them the good-will of the world.”

It must be admitted that Miss Ferrier’s obviously spontaneous delight in satire has occasionally tempted her beyond the limits of artistic realism. Her miniature of the M‘Dow, for example, has all the objectionable qualities which revive our preference for the “elegancies” of romance.

“Here Miss M‘Dow was disencumbered of her pelisse and bonnet, and exhibited a coarse, blubber-lipped, sun-burnt visage, with staring sea-green eyes, a quantity of rough sandy hair, and mulatto neck, with merely a rim of white round her shoulders.... The gloves were then taken off, and a pair of thick mulberry paws set at liberty.”

No such criticism, however applies to those full-length portraits of the inimitable Aunts in _Marriage_--the “sensible” Miss Jacky, Miss Nicky, who was “not wanting for sense either,” and Miss Grizzy, the great letter-writer. “Their life was one continued _fash_ about everything or nothing”; and if a “sensible woman” generally means “a very disagreeable, obstinate, illiberal director of all men, women, and children,” the Aunts were really “well-meaning, kind-hearted, and, upon the whole, good-tempered” old ladies, whose garrulous absurdities are a perpetual delight.

Again, Miss Pratt (of _The Inheritance_) has certain obvious affinities to the inimitable Miss Bates; as Mr. M‘Dow (in _Destiny_) recalls Collins; and the creation of that good soul, Molly Macaulay, bears solitary evidence to Miss Ferrier’s seldom-exerted powers of sympathetic subtlety.

We are tempted to wonder if there be any particular significance in the fact that, though Miss Ferrier wrote _Marriage_ almost immediately after the appearance of _Sense and Sensibility_, she did not publish it till seven years later.[11] If, during that interval, she felt compelled to study the supreme excellences of a sister-authoress, it is clear that she wisely abandoned any attempt at imitation. Her work, as we have seen, directly follows Miss Burney’s, and should be properly regarded in relation to _Evelina_ and _Cecilia_; reflecting Society--and the upstart--of a slightly later generation, then flourishing in North Britain.

* * * * *

MARY RUSSELL MITFORD (1787-1855) is the only writer on record who has deliberately declared herself a disciple.

“Of course, I shall copy as closely as I can nature and Miss Austen--keeping, like her, to genteel country life; or rather going a little lower, perhaps; and, I am afraid, with more of sentiment and less of humour. I do not _intend_ to commit these delinquencies, mind. I _mean_ to keep as playful as I can; but I am afraid they will happen in spite of me.... It will be called--at least, I mean it so to be--_Our Village_; will consist of essays, and characters, and stories, chiefly of country life, in the manner of the _Sketch Book_, connected by unity of locality and purpose. It is exceedingly playful and lively, and I think you will like it. Charles Lamb (the matchless _Elia_ of the London Magazine) says nothing so fresh and characteristic has appeared for a long time.”

It _was_ called _Our Village_; and appeared in parts between 1824 and 1832, the earlier series being the best, because afterwards she wrote for remuneration--when “I would rather scrub floors, if I could get as much by that healthier, more respectable, and more feminine employment,”--a declaration which prepares us for the criticism that, though in her own day she was accused of copying the “literal” manner of Crabbe and Teniers, she was at heart a frank sentimentalist. “Are your characters and descriptions true?” asked her friend Sir William Elford; and she replied, “Yes! yes! yes! as true as is well possible. You, as a great landscape painter, know that, in painting a favourite scene, you do a little embellish, and can’t help it, you avail yourself of happy accidents of atmosphere, and _if anything be ugly, you strike it out_, or if anything be wanting, you put it in. But still the picture is a likeness.”

Assuredly Miss Mitford was no realist, nor was her imitation servile. Once she expressed a desire that Miss Austen had shown “a little more taste, a little more perception of the graceful”; and, in such matters, as in culture, she was herself far more professional. But although she could describe, and even “compose,” with a charm of her own which almost defies analysis, Miss Mitford’s powers were strictly limited. The “country-town” atmosphere of _Belford Regis_ lacks spontaneity; and _Atherton_, her only attempt at a novel, is wanting in varied incident or motion. Readers attracted by mere simplicity, however, will feel always a peculiar affection for Miss Mitford, that would be increased by her “Letters” which she describes as “just like so many bottles of ginger-beer, bouncing and frothy, and flying in everybody’s face.”

Christopher North remarked in _Noctes Ambrosianæ_ that her writings were “pervaded by a genuine rural spirit--the spirit of Merry England. _Every line bespeaks the lady._”

And the “Shepherd” replied:

“I admire Miss Mitford just excessively. I dinna wunner at her being able to write sae weel as she does about drawing-rooms wi’ sofas and settees, and about the fine folk in them seeing themsels in lookin-glasses frae tap to tae; but what puzzles the like o’ me, is her pictures o’ poachers, and tinklers, and pottery-trampers, and ither neerdoweels, and o’ huts and hovels without riggin’ by the wayside, and the cottages o’ honest puir men, and byres, and barns, and stackyards, and merry-makins at winter ingles, and courtship aneath trees, and at the gable-end of farm houses, ’tween lads and lasses as laigh in life as the servants in her father’s ha’. That’s the puzzle, and that’s the praise. But ae word explains a’--Genius--Genius, wull a’ the metafhizzians in the warld ever expound that mysterious monosyllable.--Nov. 1826.”

* * * * *

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY (1797-1851) has no place in the development of women’s work in fiction, since her one novel, _Frankenstein_, belongs to no type that has been attempted before or since, though it is often roughly described as a throw-back to the School of Terror. The conception of a man-made Monster, with human feelings--of pathetic loneliness and brutal cruelty--was eminently characteristic of an age which hankered after the byways of Science, imagined unlimited possibilities from the extension of knowledge, and was never tired of speculation. Inevitably the daughter of William Godwin had some didactic intentions; and her “Preface” declares her “by no means indifferent to the manner in which whatever moral tendencies exist in the sentiments or characters it contains shall affect the reader; yet my chief concern in this respect has been limited to the avoiding of the enervating effects of the novels of the present day, and to the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection and the excellence of universal virtue.” Among other things, Mrs. Shelley betrays her sympathy with Rousseau’s ideal of the “Man Natural,” and with vegetarianism. In a mood of comparative reasonableness and humanity the Monster promises, under certain conditions, to abandon his revenge and bury himself in the “Wilds of South America.”

“My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries will afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food.”

The ethical struggle, with which Mrs. Shelley has here concerned herself, arises from circumstances beyond the pale of experience; but her solution is characteristic, and echoes the spirit of Shelley himself. Frankenstein, “in a fit of enthusiastic madness, has created a rational creature,” who, finding himself hated by mankind, resolves to punish his creator. He promises, however, to abstain from murdering Frankenstein’s family, if that man of science will make for him a female companion with whom he may peacefully retire to the wilderness. Obviously the temptation is great. Frankenstein’s brother has been already destroyed: it would seem his duty to protect his father and his wife. But, on the other hand,

“My duties towards my fellow-creatures had greater claims to my attention, _because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery_. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature.”

There is no professional art in the story of Frankenstein, though it has a certain gloomy and perverse power. It is told in letters from an arctic explorer “To Mrs. Saville, England”; and the monster’s own life-story, with the only revelation of his emotions, is narrated within this narrative, in a monologue to Frankenstein.

It is uncertain whether the work would ever have been remembered, or revived, apart from our natural interest in the author; although, so far as it has any similarity with other work, it belongs to a class of novels which English writers have seldom attempted, and never accomplished with any distinction.

* * * * *

FRANCES TROLLOPE (1780-1863) has been so completely overshadowed by her son Anthony--himself a distinguished practitioner in the domestic novel--that few readers to-day are aware that her fertile pen produced a “whole army of novels and books of travel, sometimes pouring into the libraries at the rate of nine volumes a year.” She began her career--curiously enough, when she was past fifty--by a severely satirical attack on the United States, entitled _Domestic Manners of the Americans_; and her first novel, _The Abbess_, did not appear till 1833. She was essentially feminine in the enthusiasm of her tirades against various practices in her generation, and has been freely criticised for want of taste. _The Vicar of Wrexhill_ (1837), indeed, is coloured by a violent prejudice which goes far to justify this objection, and may even excuse the disparaging deduction on women’s intellect drawn by a contemporary reviewer, who thus characterises her spirited defence of “oppressed Orthodoxy”:

“It is a great pity that the heroine ever set forth on such a foolish errand; she has only harmed herself and her cause (as a bad advocate always will) and had much better have remained at home pudding-making or stocking-mending, than have meddled with what she understands so ill.

“In the first place (we speak it with due respect for the sex) she is guilty of a fault which is somewhat too common among them; and having very little, except prejudice, on which to found an opinion, she makes up for want of argument by a wonderful fluency of abuse. A _woman’s religion is chiefly that of the heart, and not of the head_. She goes through, for the most part, no dreadful stages of doubt, no changes of faith: _she loves God as she loves her husband by a kind of instinctive devotion_. Faith is a passion with her, not a calculation; so that, in the faculty of believing, though they far exceed the other sex, in the power of convincing they fall far short of them.”[12]

More than one woman writer has risen, of later years, triumphantly to confute any such complacent masculine superiority; but it must be admitted that Mrs. Trollope is scarcely judicial in the venom she pours out so eloquently upon the head of her “Vicar,” his worshippers, and his accomplices. This was not quite the direction in which women could most wisely develop the domestic novel in her day; while they still--like the Brontës, but in a spirit quite alien to Jane Austen’s--upheld “that manly passion for superiority which leads _our masters_ to covet in a companion chosen for life ... that species of weakness which is often said to be the most attractive feature in the female character.” It is, again, a curious want of taste which allows her to dwell upon the pleasure experienced by a comparatively respectable young man in making a little girl of eight tipsy--though he is the Vicar’s son.

But, on the other hand, there is considerable power and much sprightly humour in the story. Mrs. Trollope’s _good_ (_i.e._ orthodox) people are really delightful, and admirably characterised. The _genuine_ piety of Rosalind, the Irish heiress, is most artistically united to graceful vivacity and natural charm: the testy Sir Gilbert is perfectly matched with Lady Harrington: and the three young Mowbrays are drawn from life. The study of Henrietta Cartwright, driven to atheism by the hypocrisy of her horrible father, has all the force of a real human tragedy; and, if the villainy of Evangelicism is exaggerated, it is painted with graphic humour. She works from nature, and finds excellent “copy” in the parish.

Mrs. Trollope, in fact, has left us proof in abundance that women had learnt to “write with ease”; if, in her case, over-production and misplaced zeal have led to an abuse of her talents.

* * * * *

HARRIET MARTINEAU (1802-1876), “Queen of philanthropists,” has left a stamp of almost passionate sincerity on everything she wrote. From earliest days she declared that her “chief subordinate object in life was the cultivation of her intellectual powers, with a view to the instruction of others by her writings.” Believing herself the servant of humanity, she sought to save souls by the diffusion of a little knowledge.

Inevitably, under such influence, her work was always didactic; whether inspired by the orthodox faith of her earlier years or the Atkinson-interpretation of Comte she afterwards espoused: whether directed towards social reform, or expressed in narrative and biography. The greater number of her publications, whether or no actually written for the press, contain those qualities which make the best journalism; and, though occasionally capricious and “superior” in private judgment, her brief critical biographies, from the _Daily News_, are masterpieces in the vignette. She knew “everybody” in her day; and contributed much to the thirst for “information,” reasonably applied, which characterised our grandfathers.

But, as a novelist, she has two special claims to notice. Her “Playfellow Series” (embracing _Feats on the Fiord_, _The Crofton Boys_, and _The Peasant and the Prince_) are living to-day among the few priceless inherited treasures of literature. Less obviously didactic than the Edgeworth “nursery classics,” they have certain similar characteristics of spontaneity, sympathetic understanding, and simple directness. Each occupied with quite different subjects, they are informed by the same spirit, excite the same kind of pleasure, and--for all their decided, but _not_ obtrusive, moralising--appeal to the same healthy taste. By those to whom their life-like young people have been among the chosen friends of childhood, the memories will never fade.

Miss Martineau’s adult narratives have less distinction; although her _Hour and the Man_ is a creditable effort in the historic form, and _Deerbrook_ has much emotional power. To our taste the tone of the latter must be criticised for its somewhat sensational religiosity, and for the priggish perfection of its “white” characters. But, on the other hand, there is subtlety in contrasts among the “undesirables”; genuine pathos in, for example, the description of Mrs. Enderby’s death; and plenty of artistic “interest” in the plot: nor can we neglect mention of the remarkable portrait of Morris, the servant and most real friend to her “young ladies.”

We cannot avoid, in conclusion, some reference to a distinction elaborated in an early chapter between the drudgery of “_teaching_” and the “sublime delights of _education_”: wherein the author quaintly remarks that a visiting governess can “do little more than stand between children and the faults of the people about them”; betraying herein the normal prejudice of the pedagogue against the parent.

Similar theories clearly inspire the eloquence--of a later chapter--upon a thorny subject on which the author achieved some pioneer work in her own life.

“‘Cannot you tell me,’ enquires the persecuted heroine, ‘of some way in which a woman may earn money?’

“‘A woman?’ is the stern reply. ‘What rate of woman? Do you mean yourself? That question is easily answered. A woman from the uneducated classes can get a subsistence by washing and cooking, by milking cows and going into service, and, in some parts of the kingdom, by working in a cotton mill, or burnishing plate, as you have no doubt seen for yourself at Birmingham. But, for an educated woman, a woman with the powers God gave her religiously improved, with a reason which lays life open before her, an understanding which surveys science as its appropriate task, and a conscience which would make every species of responsibility safe,--for such a woman there is in all England no chance of subsistence but teaching--that sort of ineffectual teaching, which can never countervail the education of circumstances--and for which not one in a thousand is fit,--or by being a superior Miss Nares--the feminine gender of the tailor and hatter.’”

* * * * *

MRS. GASKELL (1810-1865) must always be remembered as authoress of _Cranford_, which has startling similarities to the work of Jane Austen, and excels her in pathos. If Fanny Burney immortalised “sensibility,” and Jane Austen created “the lady,” Mrs. Gaskell may well be called “The Apologist of Gentility.” She taught us that it was possible to be genteel without being vulgar; and her “refined females,” if enslaved to elegance and propriety, are ladies in the best sense of the word.

“Although they know all each other’s proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other’s opinions.” They are “very independent of fashion; as they observe: ‘What does it signify how we dress here at Cranford, where everybody knows us?’ and if they go from home, their reason is equally cogent: ‘What does it signify how we dress here, where nobody knows us?’” We may smile at their ingenious devices for concealing poverty, their grotesque small conventions, their horror at any allusions to death or other causes for genuine emotion, and their love of gossip; but our superiority stands rebuked before simple Miss Matty’s sense of honour “as a shareholder,” and before the “meeting of the Cranford ladies” for the generous contribution of their “mites in a secret and concealed manner.” As Miss Pole expresses it, “We are none of us what may be called rich, though we all possess a genteel competency, sufficient for tastes that are elegant and refined, and would not, if they could, be vulgarly ostentatious”; and they fully appreciated the true charity of “showing consideration for the feelings of delicate independence existing in the mind of every refined female.”

Here, indeed, as in almost every thought or deed of their uneventful existence, our grandmothers can teach us that the eager interest in our neighbours, which we are accustomed to brand as vulgar and impertinent, was in actual fact a powerful incentive to Christian practices. There is a passage in _Cranford_ which would baffle the most elaborate statistics of ordered philanthropy, as it must silence the protest of false pride, and remain an invulnerable argument against the isolation of modern life. “I had often occasion to notice,” observes the visitor, “the use that was made of fragments and small opportunities in Cranford: the rose-leaves that were gathered ere they fell, to make a _pot-pourri_ for some one who had no garden; the little bundles of lavender-flowers sent to strew the drawers of some town-dweller, or to burn in the bedroom of some invalid. Things that many would despise, and actions which it seemed scarcely worth while to perform, were all attended to in Cranford.”

Nor were Miss Matilda Jenkyns and her friends deficient in any outward show of true breeding. Despite the most astonishing vagaries of taste in dress, language, and behaviour, they were dignified by instinct, and, on all occasions of moment, revealed a natural manner that is above reproach. Their simple-minded innocence and genuine humility never tempted them to pass over impertinence or tolerate vulgarity, and their powers of delicate reproof were unrivalled. We cannot admire the “green turban” of Miss Matty’s dream, or share her dread of the frogs in Paris not agreeing with Mr. Holbrook; we should have been ashamed, maybe, to assist her in “chasing the sunbeams” over her new carpet; and we may detect sour grapes in Miss Pole’s outcry against that “kind of attraction which she, for one, would be ashamed to have”; yet I fancy the best of us would covet admission to Cranford society, and be proud to number its leaders among our dearest friends.

In fact, the artistic achievement of _Cranford_ is the creation of an atmosphere. Like the authors of _Evelina_ and of _Emma_, Mrs. Gaskell is frankly feminine, and not superior to the smallest detail of parochial gossip; but while the ideals of refinement portrayed are more akin to Miss Burney’s (allowing for altered social conditions), her methods of portraiture more nearly resemble Miss Austen’s. She depends, even less, upon excitement, mystery, or crime, and _Cranford_, indeed, may be described as “a novel without a hero,” without a plot, and without a love-scene. Miss Brown’s death is the one event with which we are brought, as it were, face to face throughout the whole sixteen chapters. The realities of life, whether sad or joyful, are enacted behind the scenes and never used for dramatic effect, a reticence most striking in the incident of Captain Brown’s heroic death. They serve only to reveal the strong and true hearts of those whose dainty old-world mannerisms have already secured our sympathy.

Mrs. Gaskell has _left out_ even more than Jane Austen of the ordinary materials of fiction (though she is an adept at pathos), and her characters are equally living. She has less wit, but almost as much humour.

The most obvious limitation of _Cranford_, indeed, is more apparent than real. As everyone will remember, “all the holders of houses” are women. “If a married couple settles in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening tea-parties, or he is accounted for by being at his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford. What could they do there?... A man is so in the way in the house.”

Even the Rector dare not attend a public entertainment unless “guarded by troops of his own sex--the National School boys whom he had treated to the performance.” The “neat maid-servants” were never allowed “followers”; and it was Miss Matty’s chief consolation in starting her little business that “she did not think men ever bought tea.” She was afraid of men. “They had such sharp, loud ways with them, and did up accounts, and counted their change so quickly.”

Yet, in fact, the masculine element in _Cranford_ comes frequently to the front; and the men’s characters are drawn with no less firmness of outline than the women’s. Miss Matty derives much from her Reverend father--deceased, from that sturdy yeoman Thomas Holbrook, and from “Mr. Peter.” It is Captain Brown, and no other, whose misfortunes unmask the real tenderness of Miss Jenkyns herself; and the good Mr. Hoggins occasions the only serious discord narrated in the select circle of “elegant females,” to whom his uncouth surname was a perpetual affront. The unfortunate conjurer, Signor Brunoni, otherwise Mr. Brown (was it accident or design, we wonder, which gave him the same plebeian name as the gallant Captain?); his brother Thomas; the great Mr. Mulliner, “who seemed never to have forgotten his condescension in coming to live at Cranford”; honest farmer Dobson; and dear, blundering Jim Hearn, whose tactful notion of kindness was “to keep out of your way as much as he could”; each played their part in the lives of their lady-betters.

Thomas Holbrook, his quotations from Shakespeare, George Herbert, and Tennyson; his love of Nature; his two-pronged forks; and his charming “counting-house,” have no less subtle originality than any character in the whole book; and we should hesitate to name any record of perfect fidelity, without sentimentalism, to be compared with the simply chivalrous and cheerful attentions of this gentleman of seventy to the old lady who had refused, at the bidding of father and sister, “to marry below her rank.” One can only echo the pious aspiration (so touching in its unselfish abandonment of a cherished ideal), by which alone Miss Matty betrayed the emotions excited by the visit to her old lover: “‘God forbid,’ said she, in a low voice, ‘that I should grieve any young hearts.’”

Holbrook, moreover, had been no doubt largely responsible for encouraging the inherent good qualities of Miss Matty’s scapegrace brother (afterwards the popular Mr. Peter), whose thoughtless pranks form so strange, and yet so fitting, a background to those finished miniature-sketches of the stern Rector and his sweet young wife. It is, indeed, a fine instance of poetical justice by which Mr. Peter is allowed, in his old age, to bestow a richly merited peace and comfort, in addition to the diversion of masculine society, upon the very sister whose early life had been so terribly clouded by his misdeeds.

One is almost tempted to say that Mrs. Gaskell does scant justice to the first invader of the Amazons, when she refers to Captain Brown as “a tame man about the house.” Yet those of us with sufficient imagination to realise the firm exclusiveness of Miss Deborah Jenkyns, should appreciate the significance of the phrase. The military gentleman, “who was not ashamed to be poor,” only found his way to that lady’s good graces by sterling qualities of true manliness. He was “even admitted in the tabooed hours before twelve,” because no errand of kindness was beneath his dignity or beyond his patience.

Miss Matty expresses the prevailing sentiment about men, as she has done on most subjects worthy of attention, with that “love of peace and kindliness,” which “makes all of us better when we are near her.”

“I don’t mean to deny that men are troublesome in a house. I don’t judge from my own experience, for my father was neatness itself, and wiped his shoes in coming in as carefully as any woman; but still a man has a sort of knowledge of what should be done in difficulties, that it is very pleasant to have one at hand ready to lean upon. Now Lady Glenmire” (whose engagement to Mr. Hoggins was the occasion of this gentle homily), “instead of being tossed about and wondering where she is to settle, will be certain of a home among pleasant and kind people, such as our good Miss Pole and Mrs. Forrester. And Mr. Hoggins is really a very personable man; and so far as his manners--why, if they are not very polished, I have known people with very good hearts, and very clever minds too, who were not what some people reckoned refined, but who were tender and true.” Again: “Don’t be frightened by Miss Pole from being married. I can fancy it may be a very happy state, and a little credulity helps one through life very smoothly--better than always doubting and doubting, and seeing difficulties and disagreeables in everything.”

The finality of the above quotations may further remind us of an unexpected conclusion to which a careful study of _Cranford_ must compel the critic. Despite its apparent inconsequence, the desultory nature of the narrative, and its surprising innocence of plot, the work is composed with an almost perfect sense of dramatic unity. In reality every event, however trivial or serious, every shade of character, however subtle or obvious, is at once subordinate and essential to the character of the heroine. A heroine, “not far short of sixty, whose looks were against her,” may not attract the habitual novel-reader; but unless we submit to the charm of Miss Matty’s personality, we have misread _Cranford_. Deborah, the domineering, had not so much real strength of character, and serves only as a foil to her sister’s wider sympathies; the superficial quickness of Miss Pole never ultimately misled her friend’s finer judgment; the (temporary) snobbishness of the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson troubles her heart indeed, but leaves her dignity unruffled; and the other members of the circle scarcely aspire to be more than humble admirers of the “Rector’s daughter.” Miss Matty, of course, is sublimely unconscious of her own influence, and the authoress very nearly deceives us into fancying her equally innocent. But she gives away the secret in her farewell sentence; and I, for one, would not quarrel with her for pointing the moral. Miss Matty can never lose her place in the Gallery of the Immortals, and we would not neglect to honour the painter’s name.

Mrs. Gaskell, in _Cranford_, may claim to have reached perfection by one finished achievement; which embodies the ideal to which we conceive that the work in fiction peculiar to women had been, more or less consciously, directed from the beginning. Probably the art would have been less flawless, if applied--as it was by sister-novelists--to a wider range of persons and subjects. Nothing of quite this kind has been again attempted, and it is not likely that such an attempt would succeed.

We should only notice, in passing, that Mrs. Gaskell left other admirable, and quite feminine, work on more ordinary lines. _Wives and Daughters_ is a delightful love story; while _North and South_ and _Mary Barton_ are almost the first examples of that keen interest in social problems, and the life of the poor, in legitimate novels (not fiction-tracts), which we shall find so favourite a topic of women from her generation until to-day.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] She is writing, again, to Miss Clavering.

[11] When _Pride and Prejudice_, _Emma_, and _Mansfield Park_ had all been published.

[12] _Fraser’s Magazine_, Jan. 1838.

A LONELY SOUL

(CHARLOTTE BRONTË, 1816-1855)

The genius of Charlotte Brontë presents several characteristics which do not belong to the more or less orderly development of the earlier women’s work. In the first place she is primarily a romancist, depending far more on emotional analysis than on the exact portraiture of everyday life. Though her materials, like theirs, are gained entirely from personal experience, she clothes them with a passionate imagination very foreign to anything in Miss Burney or Jane Austen. She writes, in other words, because her emotions are forced into speech by that very intensity; not at all from amused observation of life. It would be difficult, indeed, to find outside her few remarkable stories so powerful an expression of passion as felt by women--who do not, as a rule, admit the power of such stormy emotions. Her work is further remarkable for being mainly inspired by memory; while the recognition of responsiveness in women leads her to paint _mutual_ passion as it has been seldom revealed elsewhere.

Much has been written of late years concerning the life of Charlotte Brontë, and we have been told that the mystery is solved at last. For despite the almost startling frankness of Mrs. Gaskell’s famous _Life_; despite the intimate character of many of her published letters; it has always been recognised that the Charlotte Brontë of the biographers was _not_ the Charlotte Brontë of _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_. Now that we have the letters to Monsieur Heger, however, it seems to be a prevailing conclusion that reconciliation, and understanding, are possible. If Charlotte Brontë, like her own Lucy Snowe, was in love with “her master”; if he was perfectly happy in his married life and, however responsive to enthusiastic admiration, found warmer feelings both embarrassing and vexatious; we have discovered the tragedy which fired her imagination, the utter loneliness which taught her to dwell so bitterly on the aching void of unreturned affection, to idealise so romantically the rapture of marriage. Personally we are disposed to accept these interpretations, but not to rely on them for everything. To begin with, it is always dangerous to dwell upon any “explanation” of genius; and, in the second place, it was not Charlotte Brontë’s experiences (which others have suffered), but the nature awakened by them, which determined their artistic expression.

Part of the difficulty arises from the two almost contradictory methods in which she “worked up” her stories. She had remarkable powers of observation and borrowed from real life as recklessly as Shakespeare borrowed plots, with very similar indifference to possible criticism. In this matter, indeed, she cannot be altogether acquitted of malice or spite; and we do not learn with unmixed pleasure how many “originals” actually existed for her dramatis personæ.

But, on the other hand, if “every person and a large proportion of the incidents were copied from life,” the emotional power of her work is entirely imaginative. As pictures of life, her stories are inadequate and unsatisfying, partly because there is so much in human nature and in life which does not interest her: so much of which she knew nothing; and she is only at home in the heart of her subject. Here again she is in no way realistic--as was Jane Austen in manners or George Eliot in emotion--but entirely romantic, however original her conception of romance. Her heroes and heroines are as far from everyday humanity, and as ideal and visionary, as Mrs. Radcliffe’s, though she does not, of course, follow the “rules” of romance: rather creating out of her own brain a new heaven and a new earth, inhabited by a people that know not God or man.

Apart from the rude awakening at Brussels, again, she exhibited in private correspondence by turns the strange contrasts between common sense and emotionalism which mark her work.

She defines the “right path” as “that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest”: she thinks, “if you can respect a person before marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense passion, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling.”

She advises her best friend that

“no young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, and the first half-year of wedded life has passed away. A woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold look cuts her to the heart, she is a fool. If she ever loves so much that her husband’s will is her law, and that she has got into the habit of watching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes, she will soon be a neglected fool.”

On the other hand, “if you knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, insipid, you would pity me and I daresay despise me.”

Her emotion on first seeing the sea is absolutely overpowering; and surely we know the woman who insisted on visiting a maidservant “attacked by a violent fever,” fearlessly entered her room in spite of every remonstrance, “threw herself on the bed beside her, and repeatedly kissed her burning brow.”

Experience with her, in fact, had never been confined to the external happenings, which can be accumulated, with more or less sympathy, by the biographer; and her own declaration of how she worked up episodes outside her own experience may be applied, without much modification, to her manipulation of that experience itself. Asked whether the description of taking opium in _Villette_ was based on knowledge,

“She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything which had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling to sleep--wondering what it was like or how it would be--till at length, sometimes after the progress of her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it word for word as it had happened.”

It is obvious that, if no less feminine than her predecessors, the nature and methods of Charlotte Brontë would produce very different work from theirs. In narrative and description she remains domestic and middle-class. She does not adopt the “high” notions of aristocracy, she does not plunge into the mysteries of crime. Her plots are laid “at home,” so to speak, and among the professional classes or small gentry with whom she was personally familiar. The only material which may be noticed as a new departure is derived from her particular experiences in schools in England and abroad, combined with her intimate knowledge of the governess and the tutor. In _Shirley_, again, she is one of the earliest women to devote any serious attention to the progress of trade and the introduction of machinery, with its effect on the social problems of the working classes.

In construction, on the other hand, she is admittedly inferior to her predecessors, since her plots are melodramatic, and her characterisation is disturbed by a somewhat morbid analysis of unusual passion. Her feminine ideal has no parallel in the “sensibility” of Fanny Burney or the sprightly “calm” of Jane Austen. Its most distinguishing characteristic is, naturally, revealed in the attitude assumed towards man. The hero, the ideal lover, is always “the Master” of the heroine. Jane Eyre being a governess and Lucy Snowe a pupil, we might perhaps miss the full significance of the phrase; but even the strong-minded Shirley refuses Sir Philip Nunnely, because, among other reasons, “he is very amiable--very excellent--truly estimable, but _not my master_; not in one point. I could not trust myself with his happiness: I would not undertake the keeping of it for thousands; I will accept no hand that cannot hold me in check.”

Jane Austen once playfully accused herself of having dared to draw a heroine who had fallen in love without first having ascertained the gentleman’s feeling. This is the normal achievement--in Charlotte Brontë--not only of heroines, but _of all women_. It is, of course, almost inevitable that since, in her work (as in those of her sister-authors) we see everything _through the minds_ of the women characters, we should learn the state of their heart _first_; but, in most cases at least, it is certain that we are in as much doubt as the heroine herself concerning the man’s feelings, and it is fairly obvious that often he has actually not made up his mind. The women in Charlotte Brontë, in fact, are what we now call “doormats.” They delight in _serving_ the Beloved; they expect him to be a superior being, with more control over his emotions; less dependent on emotion or even on domestic comfort, appropriately concerned with matters not suited to feminine intellects, and accustomed to “keep his own counsel” about the important decisions of life.

It is her achievement to have secured our enthusiastic devotion to “females” so thoroughly Early Victorian; for the heroines of Charlotte Brontë remain some of the most striking figures in fiction. They are really heroic, and, while glorying in their self-imposed limitations, become vital by their intensity and depth. Jane Austen once quietly demonstrated the natural “constancy” of women; Charlotte Brontë paints this virtue in fiery colours across all her work. Her incidental, but most marked, preference for _plain_ heroines--inspired, apparently, by passionate jealousy of popular beauty--serves to emphasise the abnormal capacity for passion and fidelity which, in her judgment, the power of easily exciting general admiration apparently tends to diminish.

A contemporary reviewer in the _Quarterly_--probably Lockhart--found this type of women disgustingly sly. The whole of _Jane Eyre_, indeed, fills him with holy horror, which is genuine enough, though expressed with most ungentlemanly virulence, and prefaced with the extraordinary suggestion that “Jane Eyre is _merely another Pamela_ (!) ... a small, plain, odd creature, who has been brought up dry upon school learning, and somewhat stunted accordingly in mind and body, and who is thrown upon the world as ignorant of its ways, and as destitute of its friendships, as a shipwrecked mariner upon a strange coast.” Rochester, on the other hand, he finds “captious and Turklike ... a strange brute, somewhat in the Squire Western style of absolute and capricious eccentricity.” The book is guilty of the “highest moral offence a novel-writer can commit, that of making an unworthy character interesting in the eyes of the reader. Mr. Rochester is a man who deliberately and secretly seeks to violate the laws both of God and man, and yet we will be bound half our lady writers are enchanted with him for a model of generosity and honour.”

We cannot, to-day, detect the “pedantry, stupidity, or gross vulgarity” of the novel; nor do we distinguish so sharply between the sly governess--“this housemaid _beau ideal_ of the arts of coquetry”--determined to catch Rochester, and the “noble, high-souled woman” who rejects his dishonourable proposals. The fact seems to be that masculine critics of those days regarded the _expression_ of emotion as indelicate in woman. Was it this criticism, or merely her knowledge of men, that inspired that bitter passage in _Shirley_:

“A lover masculine if disappointed can speak and urge explanation; a lover feminine can say nothing; if she did, the result would be shame and anguish, inward remorse for self-treachery. Nature would brand such demonstration as a rebellion against her instincts, and would vindictively repay it afterwards by the thunderbolt of self-contempt smiting suddenly in secret. Take the matter as you find it; ask no question; utter no remonstrance: it is your best wisdom. You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don’t shriek because the nerves are martyrised: do not doubt that your mental stomach--if you have such a thing--is strong as an ostrich’s: the stone will digest. You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.”

Men could not conceive that any lady who was _conscious_ of love had “really nice feelings” about it. Moreover, Jane Eyre is “a mere heathen ... no Christian grace is perceptible upon her.” She upheld women’s _rights_, which is “ungrateful” to God. “There is throughout a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, _is a murmuring against God’s appointment_.” Wherefore the “plain, odd woman, _destitute of all the conventional features of feminine attraction_,” is not made interesting, but remains “a being totally uncongenial to our feelings from beginning to end ... a decidedly vulgar-minded woman--one whom we should not care for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we should not desire for a relation, and whom we should most scrupulously avoid for a governess.”

This outspoken, and unsympathetic, criticism is yet eminently instructive. It shows us all that Charlotte Brontë accomplished for the first time; and reveals the full force of prejudice against which she was, more or less consciously, in revolt.

It remains only to note that in the matter of style her critics at once recognised her power. “It is impossible not to be spellbound with the freedom of the touch. It would be mere hackneyed courtesy to call it ‘fine writing.’ It bears no impress of being written at all, but is poured out rather in the heat and flurry of an instinct which flows ungovernably on to its object, indifferent by what means it reaches it, and unconscious too.”

Passing to modern criticism, we find one writer declaring that Rochester’s character “belongs to the realm of the railway bookstall shilling novel,” while to another it seems “of all her creations the most wonderful ... from her own inmost nobility of temper and depth of suffering she moulded a man, reversing the marvels of God’s creation.”

It is not, I think, necessary to be dogmatic in comparing the “greatness” of _Villette_ and _Jane Eyre_. The former is “more elaborated, more mature in execution, but less tragic, less simple and direct.” The influence of personal tragedy (assuming her love for Monsieur Heger) obviously permeates the work; leading to the idealisation of the pedagogue genius (revived in Louis Gerard Moore, Esq.--himself half Flemish), and to unjust hostility against the Continental feminine (partially atoned for in Hortense Moore). On the other hand, it is more in touch with real life; less melodramatic, though still sensational; more acutely varied, and equally vivid, in characterisation.

Finally, in _Shirley_, if the spirit of Charlotte Brontë is less concentrated, it burns with no less steady flame. Here, for almost the first time in a woman-writer, we find that eager questioning upon the earlier struggles between capital and labour--the risks attendant upon the introduction of machinery, the proper relations between master and men--which afterwards became part of the stock material for fiction. We find, too, much shrewd comment upon her own experience of clerical types--no less in the contrast between Helstone and Hall than in the somewhat heavily satirised curates; and some, probably inherited, injustice towards Dissenters. The characterisation is far more varied and more realistic; since we have at least two pairs of lovers, the numerous Yorke family, and a whole host of “walking ladies and gentlemen,” more or less carefully portrayed. Local colour appears in several passages of enthusiastic analysis of Yorkshire manners; and the philosophy is frequently turned on everyday life. For example:

“In English country ladies there is this point to be remarked. Whether young or old, pretty or plain, dull or sprightly, they all (or almost all) have a certain expression stamped on their features, which seems to say, ‘I know--I do not boast of it--but I _know_ that I am the standard of what is proper; let everyone therefore whom I approach, or who approaches me, keep a sharp look-out, for wherein they differ from me--be the same in dress, manner, opinion, principle, or practice--therein they are wrong.”

Yet the inspiration of _Shirley_ echoes _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_. Here, too, as we have seen,--though the heroine is a rich beauty,--Man should be Master; and “indisputably, a great, good, handsome man is the first of created things.” Yet neither Shirley nor her friend Caroline have anything in common with the “average” woman, who, “if her admirers only _told_ her that she was an angel, would let them _treat_ her like an idiot”; or with her parents, who “would have delivered her over to the Rector’s loving-kindness and his tender mercies without one scruple”; or with the second Mrs. Helstone, who “reversing the natural order of insect existence, would have fluttered through the honeymoon, a bright, admired butterfly, and crawled the rest of her days a sordid, trampled worm.”

_Jane Eyre_, 1847.
_Shirley_, 1849.
_Villette_, 1852.
_The Professor_, 1857.

“JANE EYRE” TO “SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE”

(1847-1858)

EMILY BRONTË (1818-1848) can scarcely, in character or genius, be accommodated to any ordered consideration of development. Regarded by many enthusiasts as greater than her more famous sister, she stands alone for all time. Her one novel, _Wuthering Heights_, is unique for the passionate intensity of its emotions and the wild dreariness of its atmosphere. Save for the clumsily introduced stranger, who merely exists to “hear the story,” the entire plot is woven about seven characters, all save one nearly related, and a few servants.

“Mr. Heathcliff,” said the second Catherine, “_you_ have _nobody_ to love you; and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery. You _are_ miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him? _Nobody_ loves you--_nobody_ will cry for you when you die! I wouldn’t be you!”

Charlotte calls him “child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by demon life--a Ghoul--an afreet”; and “from the time when ‘the little black-haired swarthy thing, as dark as if it came from the Devil,’ was first unrolled out of the bundle and set on its feet in the farm-house kitchen, to the hour when Nelly Dean found the grim, stalwart corpse laid on its back on the panel-enclosed bed, with wide-gazing eyes that seemed to ‘sneer at her attempt to close them, and parted lips and sharp white teeth that sneered too,’” this human monster dominates every character and event in the whole book. Men and women, Linton or Earnshaw, are but pawns in his remorseless brain; thwarting his will, daring his anger time after time; yet always submitting at last to the will of their “master”: save, indeed, at the fall of the curtain, when he had “lost the faculty of enjoying destruction.” For the passion of Heathcliff’s strange existence is gloomy revenge--against fate and his own associates. Bitterly concentrated on the few human beings--all occupying two adjacent farms--with whom his life is passed, he seems the embodiment of an eternal curse, directed to thwart every natural feeling, every hope of happiness or peace.

Emily Brontë reveals no conception of humanity save this fiendish misanthrope; churlish boors like Hindley and Hareton Earnshaw; weak good people like Edgar, Isabella, and Linton; passionate sprites like the two Catherines. Old Joseph indeed contains some elements of the comic spirit, exhibited in hypocrisy; and Nelly Dean alone has _both_ virtue and strength of character. But in making, or striving to unmake, marriages between these “opposites”; in forcing their society upon each other, and hovering around his helpless victims; the arch-fiend Heathcliff has ample scope for the indulgence of his diabolical whim. The tormenting of others and of himself; the perverse making of misery for its own sake; the ingenious exercise of brutal tyranny, are food and drink to this twisted soul. In ordinary cases we should wonder what might have happened had Catherine married him. We should set about picturing Heathcliff in happy possession of the love for which he craved so mightily: we should have murmured, “What cruel waste.” But the power of Emily Brontë’s conception denies us such idle imaginings. Heathcliff was manifestly incapable of “satisfaction” in anything, and there, as elsewhere, was Catherine his true mate. No circumstances, the most roseate or ideal, could have tamed his savage nature, quieted his stormy discontents, or lulled his passion for hurting all creatures weaker than himself. Such love as his must always have crushed and devoured what it yearned for: he could never have had enough of it: have rested in it, or rested upon it. He was, indeed, possessed by the “eighth devil.”