NOVELISTS
UEEN VICTORIAS -RE
/Tftook ofJTppreciations cj' ^Mrs.O
'Mrs.lynn-Linton, J/rs. JIlexanderJMrs. ^facquou
( rs. ^farshalt, Qiarlotte tM.Yong^ Adeline
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WOMEN NOVELISTS
of
QUEEN VICTORIA'S REIGN
Women Novelists
Of
Queen Victoria's Reign
A Book of Appreciations
By
C <- -**"^ S& jrVXj-W \, V ^N
Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Lynn Linton
Mrs. Alexander, Mrs. Macquoid, Mrs. Parr
Mrs. Marshall, Charlotte M. Yonge
Adeline Sergeant * Edna Lyall
o /
London
Hurst SP Blackett, Limited
13 Great Marlborough Street
K
IK
Wt
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press
CONTENTS
THE SISTERS BRONTE
'By MRS. OLIPHANT Page I
GEORGE ELIOT
'By MRS. LYNN LINTON p a ge 61
U-^MRS. GASKELL
'By EDNA LYALL p age 117
MRS. CROWE
MRS. ARCHER CLIVE
MRS. HENRY WOOD
"By ADELINE SERGEANT Page 149
LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON
MRS. STRETTON
ANNE MANNING
'By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE Page 193
(v)
CONTENTS
DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
'By MRS. PARR PW 217
JULIA KAVANAGH
AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS
'By MRS. MACQUOID p age 249
MRS. NORTON
'By MRS. ALEXANDER p age 275
"A. L. O. E." (MISS TUCKER)
MRS. EWING
T$y MRS. MARSHALL p age 291
vi)
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
TJTAVING been concerned for many years in the
publication of works of fiction by feminine
writers, it has occurred to us to offer, as our contri-
bution to the celebration of " the longest Reign" a
volume having for its subject leading Women Novelists
of the Victorian Era.
In the case of living lady fictionists, it is too early
to assess the merit or forecast the future of their works.
The present book, therefore, is restricted to Women
Novelists deceased.
It was further necessary to confine the volume within
reasonable limits, and it was decided, consequently, that
it should deal only with Women who did all their work
in Fiction after the accession of the Queen. This
decision excludes not only such writers as Lady
Morgan, Mrs. Ofie, Miss Ferrier, Miss Mitford,
Mrs. Shelley, and Miss Jane Porter, who, although
( vii ) 6
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
they died after 1837, published all their most notable
stories early in the century ; but also such writers as
Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Bray, Mrs. S. C. Hall, Mrs.
Trollope, Lady Blessington, and Mrs. Marsh, who
made their debuts as novelists between 1823 and
1834.
As regards some of the last-named, it might be
urged that the works they produced have now no
interest other than historical, and can be said to live
only so far as they embody more or less accurate
descriptions of Society early in the Reign, tfhe
" Deerbrook " and " The Hour and the Man " of
Miss Martineau are still remembered, and, perhaps,
still read; but it is as a political economist and
miscellaneous writer, rather than as a Novelist, that
their author ranks in literature ; while of the tales by
Miss Par doe, Miss Geraldine Jews bury, and others
once equally popular, scarcely the titles are now
recollected.
On the other hand, the eminence and permanence of
the Brontes, Qeorge Eliot, and Mrs. Qaskell are
universally recognised ; the popularity of Mrs. Craik
and Mrs. Henry Wood is still admittedly great ; the
personality of Mrs. Norton will always send students
to her works; Mrs. Crowe and Mrs. Clive were
( viii )
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
pioneers in domestic and " sensational " fiction ; Lady
Qeorgiana Fullerton -produced a typical religious
novel ; Miss Manning made pleasing and acceptable
the autobiographico-historical narrative ; the authors
of " The Valley of a Hundred Fires" of " 'Barbaras
History" and of " Adele," have even now their
readers and admirers ; while "A. L. 0. E." and Mrs.
Ewing were among the most successful caterers for
the young.
It has seemed to us that value as well as interest
would attach to critical estimates of, and biographical
notes upon, these representative Novelists, supplied by
living mistresses of the craft; and we are glad to
have been able to secure for the purpose, the services
of the contributors to this volume, all of whom may
claim to discourse with some authority upon the art
they cultivate. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to say
that each contributor is responsible only for the essay
to which her name is appended.
(ix )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
By MRS. OLIPHANT
THE SISTERS BRONTE
I HE effect produced upon the general mind
by the appearance of Charlotte Bronte in
literature, and afterwards by the record of
her life when that was over, is one which
it is nowadays somewhat difficult to
understand. Had the age been deficient in the art of fiction,
or had it followed any long level of mediocrity in that
art, we could have comprehended this more easily. But
Charlotte Bronte appeared in the full flush of a period
more richly endowed than any other we know of in that
special branch of literature, so richly endowed, indeed,
that the novel had taken quite fictitious importance,
and the names of Dickens and Thackeray ranked almost
higher than those of any living writers except perhaps
Tennyson, then young and on his promotion too.
Anthony Trollope and Charles Reade who, though in
their day extremely popular, have never had justice from
(3)
THE SISTERS BRONTE
a public which now seems almost to have forgotten
them, formed a powerful second rank to these two great
names. It is a great addition to the value of the
distinction gained by the new comer that it was acquired
in an age so rich in the qualities of the imagination.
But this only increases the wonder of a triumph which had
no artificial means to heighten it, nothing but genius on the
part of a writer possessing little experience or knowledge
of the world, and no sort of social training or adventitious
aid. The genius was indeed unmistakable, and possessed
in a very high degree the power of expressing itself in
the most vivid and actual pictures of life. But the life
of which it had command was seldom attractive, often
narrow, local, and of a kind which meant keen personal
satire more than any broader view of human existence.
A group of commonplace clergymen, intense against their
little parochial background as only the most real art of
portraiture, intensified by individual scorn and dislike,
could have made them : the circle of limited interests, small
emulations, keen little spites and rancours, filling the
atmosphere of a great boarding school, the Brussels
Pensionnatdesfilles these were the two spheres chiefly por-
trayed : but portrayed with an absolute untempered force
which knew neither charity, softness, nor even impartiality,
but burned upon the paper and made everything round
(4)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
dim in the contrast. I imagine it was this extraordinary
naked force which was the great cause of a success, never
perhaps like the numerical successes in literature of the
present day, when edition follows edition, and thousand
thousand, of the books which are the favourites of the
public : but one which has lived and lasted through
nearly half a century, and is even now potent enough to
carry on a little literature of its own, book after book
following each other not so much to justify as to repro-
claim and echo to all the winds the fame originally won.
No one else of the century, I think, has called forth this
persevering and lasting homage. Not Dickens, though
perhaps more of him than of any one else has been dealt
out at intervals to an admiring public ; not Thackeray, of
whom still we know but little ; not George Eliot, though
her fame has more solid foundations than that of Miss
Bronte. Scarcely Scott has called forth more continual
droppings of elucidation, explanation, remark. Yet the
books upon which this tremendous reputation is founded
though vivid, original, and striking in the highest degree,
are not great books. Their philosophy of life is that of
a schoolgirl, their knowledge of the world almost /7,
their conclusions confused by the haste and passion of a
mind self-centred and working in the narrowest orbit.
It is rather, as we have said, the most incisive and realistic
( 5 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
art of portraiture than any exercise of the nobler arts
of fiction imagination, combination, construction or
humorous survey of life or deep apprehension of its
problems upon which this fame is built.
The curious circumstance that Charlotte Bronte was, if
the word may be so used, doubled by her sisters, the elder,
Emily, whose genius has been taken for granted, carrying
the wilder elements of the common inspiration to extremity
in the strange, chaotic and weird romance of " Wuthering
Heights," while Anne diluted such powers of social obser-
vation as were in the family into two mildly disagreeable
novels of a much commoner order, has no doubt also en-
hanced the central figure of the group to an amazing degree.
They placed her strength in relief by displaying its separate
elements, and thus commending the higher skill and
larger spirit which took in both, understanding the moors
and wild country and rude image of man better than the
one, and misunderstanding the common course of more
subdued life less than the other. The three together are
for ever inseparable ; they were homely, lowly, somewhat
neglected in their lives, had few opportunities and few
charms to the careless eye : yet no group of women,
undistinguished by rank, unendowed by beauty, and known
to but a limited circle of friends as unimportant as them-
selves have ever, I think, in the course of history
( 6 )
By MRS. OLIPHANT
certainly never in this century come to such universal
recognition. The effect is quite unique, unprecedented, and
difficult to account for ; but there cannot be the least
doubt that it is a matter of absolute fact which nobody
can deny.
These three daughters of a poor country clergyman
came into the world early in the century, the dates
of their births being 1816, 1818, 1820, in the barest
of little parsonages in the midst of the moors a wild
but beautiful country, and a rough but highly charac-
teristic and keen-witted people. Yorkshire is the very
heart of England ; its native force, its keen practical
sense, its rough wit, and the unfailing importance in
the nation of the largest of the shires has given it a
strong individual character and position almost like that
of an independent province. But the Brontes, whose
name is a softened and decorated edition of a common
Irish name, were not of that forcible race : and perhaps
the strong strain after emotion, and revolt against the
monotonies of life, which were so conspicuous in them
were more easily traceable to their Celtic origin than
many other developments attributed to that cause. They
were motherless from an early age, children of a father
who, after having been depicted as a capricious tyrant,
( 7 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
seems now to have found a fairer representation as a man
with a high spirit and peculiar temper, yet neither unkind
to his family nor uninterested in their welfare. There
was one son, once supposed to be the hero and victim
of a disagreeable romance, but apparent now as only a
specimen, not alas, uncommon, of the ordinary ne'er-do-
well of a family, without force of character or self-control
to keep his place with decency in the world.
These children all scribbled from their infancy as soon as
the power of inscribing words upon paper was acquired by
them, inventing imaginary countries and compiling vision-
ary records of them as so many imaginative children do.
The elder girl and boy made one pair, the younger girls
another, connected by the closest links of companionship.
It was thought or hoped that the son was the genius of the
family, and at the earliest possible age he began to send his
effusions to editors, and to seek admission to magazines
with the mingled arrogance and humility of a half-
fledged creature. But the world knows now that it was
not poor Branwell who was the genius of the family ; and
this injury done him in his cradle, and the evil report of
him that everybody gives throughout his life, awakens a
certain pity in the mind for the unfortunate youth so
unable to keep any supremacy among the girls whom he
must have considered his natural inferiors and vassals.
( 8)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
We are told by Charlotte Bronte herself that he never
knew of the successes of his sisters, the fact of their
successive publications being concealed from him out of
tenderness for his feelings ; but it is scarcely to be credited
that when the parish knew the unfortunate brother did
not find out. The unhappy attempt of Mrs. Gaskell in
writing the lives of the sisters to make this melancholy
young man accountable for the almost brutal element in
Emily Bronte's conception of life, and the strange views
of Charlotte as to what men were capable of, has made
him far too important in their history ; where, indeed, he
had no need to have appeared at all, had the family pride
consisted, as the pride of so many families does, in veiling
rather than exhibiting the faults of its members. So far
as can be made out now, he had as little as possible to do
with their development in any way.
There was nothing unnatural or out of the common
in the youthful life of the family except that strange
gift of genius, which though consistent with every
genial quality of being, in such a nature as that of Scott,
seems in other developments of character to turn all the
elements into chaos. Its effect upon the parson's three
daughters was, indeed, not of a very wholesome kind.
It awakened in them an uneasy sense of superiority which
gave double force to every one of the little hardships
(9)
THE SISTERS BRONTE
which a girl in a great school of a charitable kind, and a
governess in a middle-class house, has to support : and
made life harder instead of sweeter to them in many
ways, since it was full of the biting experience of
conditions less favourable than those of many persons
round them whom they could not but feel inferior to
themselves.
The great school, which it was Charlotte Bronte's first
act when she began her literary career to invest with an
almost tragic character of misery, privation, and wrong,
was her first step from home. Yorkshire schools did not
at that period enjoy a very good reputation in the world,
and Nicholas Nickleby was forming his acquaintance with
the squalid cruelty of Dotheboys Hall just about the
same time when Charlotte Bronte's mind was being filled
with the privations and discontents of Lowood. In such
a case there is generally some fire where there is so much
smoke, and probably Lowood was under no very heavenly
regime : but at the same time its drawbacks were sharply
accentuated by that keen criticism which is suggested by
the constant sense of injured worth and consciousness of a
superiority not acknowledged. The same feeling pursued
her into the situations as governess which she occupied one
after another, and in which her indignation at being
expected to feel affection for the children put under her
( 10 )
By MRS. OLIPHANT
charge, forms a curious addition to the other grievances
with which fate pursues her life. No doubt there are
many temptations in the life of a governess ; the position
of a silent observer in a household, looking on at all its
mistakes, and seeing the imperfection of its management
with double force because of the effect they have on
herself especially if she feels herself competent, had
she but the power, to set things right must always be a
difficult one. It was not continued long enough, how-
ever, to involve very much suffering ; though no doubt it
helped to mature the habit of sharp personal criticism
and war with the world.
At the same time Charlotte Bronte made some
very warm personal friendships, and wrote a great
many letters to the school friends who pleased her, in
which a somewhat stilted tone and demure seriousness
is occasionally invaded by the usual chatter of girl-
hood, to the great improvement of the atmosphere if
not of the mind. Ellen Nussey, Mary Taylor, women
not manifestly intellectual but sensible and independent
without either exaggeration of sentiment or hint of tragic
story, remained her close friends as long as she lived, and
her letters to them, though always a little demure, give us
a gentler idea of her than anything else she has written.
Not that there is much charm either of style or subject
THE SISTERS BRONTE
in them : but there is no sort of bitterness or sense of
insufficient appreciation. Nothing can be more usual and
commonplace, indeed, than this portion of her life. As
in so many cases, the artificial lights thrown upon it by
theories formed afterwards, clear away when we examine
its actual records, and it is apparent that there was
neither exceptional harshness of circumstance nor in-
ternal struggle in the existence of the girl who, though
more or less in arms against everybody outside especially
when holding a position superior to her own, more
especially still when exercising authority over her in
any way was yet quite an easy-minded, not unhappy,
young woman at home, with friends to whom she could
pour out long pages of what is, on the whole, quite
moderate and temperate criticism of life, not without
cheerful allusion to now and then a chance curate or
other young person of the opposite sex, suspected of
" paying attention " to one or other of the little coterie.
These allusions are not more lofty or dignified than are
similar notes of girls of less exalted pretensions, but there
is not a touch in them of the keen pointed pen which
afterwards put up the Haworth curates in all their imper-
fections before the world.
The other sisters at this time in the background, two
figures always clinging together, looking almost like one,
By MRS. OLIPHANT
have no great share in this softer part of Charlotte's life.
They were, though so different in character, completely
devoted to each other, apparently forming no other
friendships, each content with the one other partaker of
her every thought. A little literature seems to have been
created between them, little chapters of recollection and
commentary upon their life, sealed up and put away for
three years in each case, to be opened on Emily's or on
Anne's birthday alternately, as a pathetic sign of their
close unity, though the little papers were in themselves
simple in the extreme. Anne too became a governess
with something of the same experience as Charlotte,
and uttering very hard judgments of unconscious people
who were not the least unkind to her. But Emily
had no such trials. She remained at home perhaps
because she was too uncompromising to be allowed
to make the experiment of putting up with other
people, perhaps because one daughter at home was indis-
pensable. The family seems to have had kind and
trusted old servants, so that the cares of housekeeping did
not weigh heavily upon the daughter in charge, and there
is no evidence of exceptional hardness or roughness in
their circumstances in any way.
In 1842, Charlotte and Emily, aged respectively
twenty-six and twenty-four, went to Brussels. Their
( 13 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
design was "to acquire a thorough familiarity with
French," also some insight into other languages, with
the view of setting up a school on their own account.
The means were supplied by the aunt, who had lived
in their house and taken more or less care of them
since their mother's death. The two sisters were
nearly a year in the Pensionnat Heger, now so per-
fectly known in every detail of its existence to all who
have read " Villette." They were recalled by the death
of the kind aunt who had procured them this advantage,
and afterwards Charlotte, no one quite knows why, went
back to Brussels for a second year, in which all her
impressions were probably strengthened and intensified.
Certainly a more clear and lifelike picture, scathing in
its cold yet fierce light, was never made than that of
the white tall Brussels house, its class rooms, its gardens,
its hum of unamiable girls, its sharp display of rancorous
and shrill teachers, its one inimitable professor. It
startles the reader to find a fact which we had for-
gotten that M. Paul Emmanuel was M. Heger, the
husband of Madame Heger and legitimate head of the
house : and that this daring and extraordinary girl did
not hesitate to encounter gossip or slander by making
him so completely the hero of her romance. Slander
in its commonplace form had nothing to do with such
( 14 )
By MRS. OLIPHANT
a fiery spirit as that of Charlotte Bronte : but it shows
her perfect independence of mind and scorn of comment
that she should have done this. In the end of '43 she
returned home, and the episode was over. It was really
the only episode of possible practical significance in her
life until we come to the records of her brief literary
career and her marriage, both towards its end.
The prospect of the school which the three sisters
were to set up together was abandoned ; there was no
more talk of governessing. We are not told if it was
the small inheritance of the aunt only, Mr. Clement
Shorter informs us, ^1500 which enabled the sisters
henceforward to remain at home without thought of further
effort : but certainly this was what happened. And the
lives of the two younger were drawing so near the end that
it is a comfort to think that they enjoyed this moment
of comparative grace together. Their life was extremely
silent, secluded, and apart. There was the melancholy
figure of Bran well to distract the house with the spectacle
of heavy idleness, drink, and disorder ; but this can
scarcely have been so great an affliction as if he had
been a more beloved brother. He was not, however,
veiled by any tender attempt to cover his follies or
wickedness, but openly complained of to all their friends,
( is )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
which mitigates the affliction : and they seem to have
kept very separate from him, living in a world of their
own.
In 1 846 a volume of poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell, was published at their own cost. It had not the
faintest success ; they were informed by the publisher
that two copies only had been sold, and the only satis-
faction that remained to them was to send a few copies
to some of the owners of those great names which the
enthusiastic young women had worshipped from afar as
stars in the firmament. These poems were republished
after Charlotte Bronte had attained her first triumph,
and people had begun to cry out and wonder over
"Wuthering Heights." The history of "Jane Eyre,"
on the other hand, is that of most works which
have been the beginning of a career. It fell into
the hands of the right man, the "reader" of Messrs.
Smith, Elder and Co., Mr. Williams, a man of great
intelligence and literary insight. The first story written
by Charlotte Bronte, which was called "The Pro-
fessor," and was the original of "Villette," written at
a time when her mind was very full of the emotions
raised by that singular portion of her life, had been
rejected by a number of publishers, and was also rejected
by Mr. Williams, who found it at once too crude and
( 16 )
By MRS. OLIPHANT
too short for the risks of publication, three volumes at
that period being your only possible form for fiction.
But he saw the power in it, and begged the author to
try again at greater length. She did so ; not on the
basis of the " Professor " as might have seemed natural
probably the materials were still too much at fever-heat
in her mind to be returned to at that moment but by
the story of " Jane Eyre," which at once placed Charlotte
Bronte amid the most popular and powerful writers of
her time.
I remember well the extraordinary thrill of interest
which in the midst of all the Mrs. Gores, Mrs. Marshs,
&c. the latter name is mentioned along with those
of Thackeray and Dickens even by Mr. Williams came
upon the reader who, in the calm of ignorance, took
up the first volume of " Jane Eyre." The period of the
heroine in white muslin, the immaculate creature who was
of sweetness and goodness all compact, had lasted in the
common lines of fiction up to that time. Miss Austen
indeed might well have put an end to that abstract and
empty fiction, yet it continued, as it always does continue
more or less, the primitive ideal. But " Jane Eyre " gave
her, for the moment, the coup de grace. That the book
should be the story of a governess was perhaps necessary
to the circumstances of the writer : and the governess was
(17) B
THE SISTERS BRONTE
already a favourite figure in fiction. But generally she
was of the beautiful, universally fascinating, all-enduring
kind, the amiable blameless creature whose secret merits
were never so hidden but that they might be perceived by a
keen sighted hero. I am not sure, indeed, that anybody
believed Miss Bronte when she said her heroine was plain.
It is very clear from the story that Jane was never un-
noticed, never failed to please, except among the women,
whom it is the instinctive art of the novelist to rouse in
arms against the central figure, thus demonstrating the
jealousy, spite, and rancour native to their minds in
respect to the women who please men. No male cynic
was ever stronger on that subject than this typical woman.
She cannot have believed it, I presume, since her closest
friends were women, and she seems to have had perfect
faith in their kindness : but this is a matter of conven-
tional belief which has nothing to do with individual
experience. It is one of the doctrines unassailable of
the art of fiction ; a thirty-ninth article in which every
writer of novels is bound to believe.
Miss Bronte did not know fine ladies, and there-
fore, in spite of herself and a mind the reverse of
vulgar, she made the competitors for Mr. Rochester's
favour rather brutal and essentially vulgar persons,
an error, curiously enough, which seems to have been
( 18)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
followed by George Eliot in the corresponding scenes
in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," where Captain Wybrow's
fiancee treats poor Tiny very much as the beauty in
Mr. Rochester's house treats Jane Eyre. Both were imagi-
nary pictures, which perhaps more or less excuses their
untruthfulness in writers both so sincere and life-like
in treating things they knew. It is amusing to remember
that Jane Eyre's ignorance of dress gave a clinching
argument to Miss Rigby in the Quarterly to decide that
the writer was not and could not possibly be a woman.
The much larger and more significant fact that no man
(until in quite recent days when there have been instances
of such effeminate art) ever made a woman so entirely the
subject and inspiration of his book, the only interest in
it, was entirely overlooked in what was, notwithstanding,
the very shrewd and telling argument about the dress.
The chief thing, however, that distressed the candid
and as yet unaccustomed reader in "Jane Eyre," and made
him hope that it might be a man who had written it, was
the character of Rochester's confidences to the girl whom
he loved not the character of Rochester, which was com-
pletely a woman's view, but that he should have talked
to a girl so evidently innocent of his amours and his
mistresses. This, however, I think, though, as we should
have thought, a subject so abhorrent to a young woman
( 19)
THE SISTERS BRONTE
such as Charlotte Bronte was, was also emphatically a
woman's view. A man might have credited another man
of Rochester's kind with impulses practically more heinous
and designs of the worst kind : but he would not have
made him err in that way.
In this was a point of honour which the woman did
not understand. It marks a curious and subtle differ-
ence between the sexes. The woman less enlightened in
practical evil considers less the risks of actual vice ; but
her imagination is free in other ways, and she innocently
permits her hero to do and say things so completely
against the code which is binding on gentlemen whether
vicious or otherwise that her want of perception becomes
conspicuous. The fact that the writer of the review in the
Quarterly was herself a woman accounts for her mistake
in supposing that the book was written if not by a man,
by " a woman unsexed ; " "a woman who had forfeited
the society of her sex." And afterwards, when Mrs.
Gaskell made her disastrous statements about Branwell
Bronte and other associates of Charlotte's youth, it was
with the hope of proving that the speech and manners
of the men to whom she had been accustomed were of a
nature to justify her in any such misapprehension of the
usual manners of gentlemen. It was on the contrary, as
I think, only the bold and unfettered imagination of a
(20)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
woman quite ignorant on all such subjects which could
have suggested this special error. The mind of such a
woman, casting about for something to make her
wicked but delightful hero do by way of demonstrating
his wickedness, yet preserving the fascination which she
meant him to retain, probably hit upon this as the
very wickedest thing she could think of, yet still attrac-
tive : for is there not a thrill of curiosity in searching
out what such a strange being might think or say,
which is of itself a strong sensation ? Miss Bronte was,
I think, the first to give utterance to that curiosity
of the woman in respect to the man, and fascination of
interest in him not the ideal man, not Sir Kenneth, too
reverent for anything but silent worship which has since
risen to such heights of speculation, and imprints now a
tone upon modern fiction at which probably she would
have been horrified.
There were numberless stories in those days of guilty
love and betrayal, of how " lovely woman stoops to folly,"
and all the varieties of that endless subject ; but it was,
except in the comic vein, or with grotesque treatment, the
pursuit of the woman by the man, the desire of the lover
for the beloved which was the aim of fiction. A true
lady of romance walked superior : she accepted (or not)
( 21 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
the devotion : she stooped from her white height to
reward her adorer : but that she herself should condescend
to seek him (except under the circumstances of fashion-
able life, where everybody is in quest of a coronet), or
call out for him to heaven and earth when he tarried in
his coming, was unknown to the situations of romantic
art. When the second of Charlotte Bronte's books
appeared, there was accordingly quite a new sensation
in store for the public. The young women in "' Shirley "
were all wild for this lover who, though promised by all
the laws of nature and romance, did not appear. They
leaned out of their windows, they stretched forth their
hands, calling for him appealing to heaven and earth.
Why were they left to wear out their bloom, to lose their
freshness, to spend their days in sewing and dreaming,
when he, it was certain, was about somewhere, and by
sheer perversity of fate could not find the way to them ?
Nothing was thought of the extra half-million of women
in those days ; perhaps it had not begun to exist ; but
that " nobody was coming to marry us, nobody coming to
woo " was apparent.
Young ladies like Miss Charlotte Bronte and Miss
Ellen Nussey her friend, would have died rather than
give vent to such sentiments ; but when the one of them
to whom that gift was given found that her pen had
( 22 )
By MRS. OLIPHANT
become a powerful instrument in her hand, the current
of the restrained feeling burst all boundaries, and she
poured forth the cry which nobody had suspected before.
It had been a thing to be denied, to be indignantly con-
tradicted as impossible, if ever a lovesick girl put herself
forth to the shame of her fellows and the laugh of the
world. When such a phenomenon appeared, she was con-
demned as either bad or foolish by every law : and the
idea that she was capable of " running after " a man was
the most dreadful accusation that could be brought
against a woman. Miss Bronte's heroines, however, did
not precisely do this. Shirley and Caroline Helstone
were not in love so much as longing for love, clamouring
for it, feeling it to be their right of which they were
somehow defrauded. There is a good deal to be said
for such a view. If it is the most virtuous thing in the
world for a man to desire to marry, to found a family,
to be the father of children, it should be no shameful
thing for a woman to own the same desire. But it is
somehow against the instinct of primitive humanity,
which has decided that the woman should be no more
than responsive, maintaining a reserve in respect to her
feelings, subduing the expression, unless in the "once,
and only once, and to One only " of the poet.
Charlotte Bronte was the first to overthrow this super-
(23)
THE SISTERS BRONTE
stition. Personally I am disposed to stand for the super-
stition, and dislike all transgression of it. But that was
not the view of the most reticent and self-controlled of
maidens, the little governess, clad in all the strict pro-
prieties of the period, the parson's daughter despising
curates, and unacquainted with other men. In her secret
heart, she demanded of fate night and day why she, so
full of life and capability, should be left there to dry
up and wither ; and why Providence refused her the
completion of her being. Her heart was not set on a
special love ; still less was there anything fleshly or sensual
in her imagination. It is a shame to use such words in
speaking of her, even though to cast them forth as wholly
inapplicable. The woman's grievance that she should
be left there unwooed, unloved, out of reach of the
natural openings of life : without hope of motherhood :
with the great instinct of her being unfulfilled was almost
a philosophical, and entirely an abstract, grievance, felt by
her for her kind : for every woman dropped out of sight
and unable to attain the manner of existence for which she
was created. And I think it was the first time this cry
had been heard out of the mouth of a perfectly modest
and pure-minded woman, nay, out of the mouth of any
woman ; for it had nothing to do with the shriek of the
Sapphos for love. It was more startling, more confusing
( 24 )
By MRS. OLIPHANT
to the general mind, than the wail of the lovelorn. The
gentle victim of " a disappointment," or even the soured
and angered victim, was a thing quite understood and
familiar : but not the woman calling upon heaven and
earth to witness that all the fates were conspiring against
her to cheat her of her natural career.
So far as I can see this was the great point which gave
force to Charlotte Bronte's genius and conferred upon her
the curious pre-eminence she possesses among the romancers
of her time. In this view " Shirley," though I suppose the
least popular, is the most characteristic of her works. It
is dominated throughout with this complaint. Curates ?
Yes, there they are, a group of them. Is that the thing
you expect us women to marry ? Yet it is our right to
bear children, to guide the house. And we are half of the
world, and where is the provision for us ?
This cry disturbed the critic, the reader, the general
public in the most curious way ; they did not know what
to make of it. Was it a shameless woman who was so
crying out ? It is always the easiest way, and one which
avoids all complications, to say so, and thus crush every
question. But it was scarcely easy to believe this in face
of other circumstances. Mrs. Gaskell, as much puzzled
as any one, when Charlotte Bronte's short life was over,
tried hard to account for it by " environment " as the
( 25 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
superior persons say, that is by the wicked folly of her
brother, and the coarseness of all the Yorkshiremen round ;
and thus originated in her bewilderment, let us hope with-
out other intention, a new kind of biography, as the subject
of it inaugurated an entirely new kind of social revolution.
The cry of the women indeed almost distressed as well as
puzzled the world. The vivid genius still held it, but
the ideas were alarming, distracting beyond measure. The
'Times blew a trumpet of dismay ; the book was revolu-
tion as well as revelation. It was an outrage upon good
taste, it was a betrayal of sentiments too widespread to be
comfortable. It was indelicate if not immodest. We
have outgrown now the very use of this word, but it was
a potent one at that period. And it was quite a just
reproach. That cry shattered indeed altogether the
" delicacy " which was supposed to be the most exquisite
characteristic of womankind. The softening veil is blown
away, when such exhibitions of feeling are given to the
world.
From that period to this is a long step. We have
travelled through many years and many gradations of
sentiment : and we have now arrived at a standard of
opinion by which the " sex-problem " has become the most
interesting of questions, the chief occupation of fiction,
to be discussed by men and women alike with growing
( 26)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
warmth and openness, the immodest and the indelicate
being equally and scornfully dismissed as barriers with
which Art has nothing to do. My impression is that
Charlotte Bronte was the pioneer and founder of this
school of romance, though it would probably have shocked
and distressed her as much as any other woman of her
age. :;
-'"'- "-
The novels of Emily and Anne Bronte were published
shortly after " Jane Eyre," in three volumes, of which
" Wuthering Heights " occupied the first two. I am obliged
to confess that I have never shared the common sentiment of
enthusiasm for that, to me, unlovely book. The absence
of almost every element of sympathy in it, the brutality
and misery, tempered only by an occasional gleam of the
heather, the freshness of an occasional blast over the
moors, have prevented me from appreciating a force
which I do not deny but cannot admire. The figure of
Heathcliffe, which perhaps has called forth more praise
than any other single figure in the literature of the time,
does not touch me. I can understand how in the jumble
which the reader unconsciously makes, explaining him
more or less by Rochester and other of Charlotte Bronte's
heroes, he may take his place in a sort of system, and thus
have humanities read into him, so to speak, which he does
( 27 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
not himself possess. But though the horror and isolation
of the house is powerful I have never been able to recon-
cile myself either to the story or treatment, or to the
estimate of Emily Bronte's genius held so strongly by so
many people. There is perhaps the less harm in refrain-
ing from much comment on this singular book, of which
I gladly admit the unique character, since it has been the
occasion of so many and such enthusiastic comments. To
me Emily Bronte is chiefly interesting as the double of her
sister, exaggerating at once and softening her character
and genius as showing those limits of superior sense and
judgment which restrained her, and the softer lights which
a better developed humanity threw over the landscape
common to them both. We perceive better the temper-
ing sense of possibility by which Charlotte made her rude
and almost brutal hero still attractive, even in his
masterful ferocity, when we see Emily's incapacity to
express anything in her hero except perhaps a touch of
that tragic pathos, prompting to fiercer harshness still,
which is in the soul of a man who never more, whatever
he does, can set himself right. This is the one strain of
poetry to my mind in the wild conception. There was
no measure in the younger sister's thoughts, nor temper-
ance in her methods.
The youngest of all, the gentle Anne, would have no
( 28)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
right to be considered at all as a writer but for her associa-
tion with these imperative spirits. An ordinary little
novelette and a moral story, working out the disastrous
knowledge gained by acquaintance with the unfortunate
Branwell's ruinous habits, were her sole productions. She
was the element wanting in Emily's rugged work and
nature. Instead of being two sisters constantly entwined
with each other, never separate when they could help it,
had Anne been by some fantastic power swamped altogether
and amalgamated with her best beloved, we may believe
that Emily might then have shown herself the foremost^ of
the three. But the group as it stands is more interesting
than any single individual could be. And had Charlotte
Bronte lived a long and triumphant life, a fanciful writer
might have imagined that the throwing off of those other
threads of being so closely attached to her own had poured
greater force and charity into her veins. But we are
baffled in all our suggestions for the amendment of the
ways of Providence.
The melancholy and tragic year, or rather six months,
which swept from Haworth Parsonage three of its
inmates, and left Charlotte and her father alone to face
life as they might, was now approaching ; and it seems so
completely an episode in the story of the elder sister's
( 29)
THE SISTERS BRONTE
genius as well as her life, that its history is like that of an
unwritten tragedy, hers as much as her actual work. Bran-
well was the first to die, unwept yet not without leaving a
pathetic note in the record. Then came the extraordinary
passion and agony of Emily, which has affected the
imagination so much, and which, had it been for any
noble purpose, would have been a true martyrdom. But
to die the death of a Stoic, in fierce resistance yet subjection
to Nature, regardless of the feelings of all around, for the
sake of pride and self-will alone, is not an act to be looked
upon with the reverential sympathy which, however, it has
secured from many. The strange creature with her shoes
on her feet and her staff in her hand, refusing till the last
to acknowledge herself to be ill or to receive any help in her
weakness, gives thus a kind of climax to her strange and
painful work. Her death took place in December of the
same year (1848) in which Bran well died. Anne, already
delicate, would never seem to have held up her head after
her sister's death, and in May 1 849 she followed, but in
all sweetness and calmness, to her early grave. She was
twenty- eight ; Emily twenty-nine. So soon had the fever
of life worn itself out and peace come. Charlotte was left
alone. There had not been to her in either of them the
close companion which they had found in each other. But
yet life ebbed away from her with their deaths, which
( 30)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
occurred in such a startling and quick succession as
always makes bereavement more terrible.
This occurred at the height of her mental activity.
" Shirley " had been published, and had been received with
the divided feeling we have referred to ; and when she
was thus left alone she found, no doubt, the solace which
of all mortal things work gives best, by resuming her
natural occupation in the now more than ever sombre
seclusion of the Parsonage, to which, however, her
favourite friend, Ellen Nussey, came from time to time.
One or two visits to London occurred after the two first
publications in which, a demure little person, silent and
shy, yet capable of expressing herself very distinctly by
times, and by no means unconscious of the claim she now
had upon other people's respect and admiration, Charlotte
Bronte made a little sensation in the society which was
opened to her, not always of a very successful kind.
Everybody will remember the delightfully entertaining
chapter in literary history in which Mrs. Ritchie, with
charming humour and truth, recounts the visit of this odd
little lion to her father's house, and Thackeray's abrupt
and clandestine flight to his club when it was found that
nothing more was to be made of her than an absorbed
conversation with the governess in the back drawing-room,
a situation like one in a novel, and so very like the act of
(31 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
modest greatness, singling out the least important person as
the object of her attentions.
She is described by all her friends as plain, even ugly
a small woman with a big nose, and no other notable
feature, not even the bright eyes which are generally attri-
buted to genius which was probably, however, better
than the lackadaisical portrait prefixed to her biography,
after a picture by Richmond, which is the typical portrait
of a governess of the old style, a gentle creature depre-
cating and wistful. Her letters are very good letters, well
expressed in something of the old-fashioned way, but
without any of the charm of a born letter-writer. Indeed,
charm does not seem to have been hers in any way. But
she had a few very staunch friends who held fast by her
all her life, notwithstanding the uncomfortable experience
of being " put in a book," which few people like. It is a
gift by itself to put other living people in books. The
novelist does not always possess it ; to many the realms
of imagination are far more easy than the arid realms of
fact, and to frame an image of a man much more natural
than to take his portrait. I am not sure that it is not
a mark of greater strength to be able to put a living and
recognisable person on the canvas than it is to invent one.
Anyhow, Miss Bronte possessed it in great perfection.
Impossible to doubt that the characters of " Shirley " were
(32 )
By MRS. OLIPHANT
real men ; still more impossible to doubt for a moment
the existence of M. Paul Emmanuel. The pursuit of
such a system requires other faculties than those of the
mere romancist. It demands a very clear-cut opinion, a
keen judgment not disturbed by any strong sense of the
complexities of nature, nor troubled by any possibility of
doing injustice to its victim.
One thing strikes us very strongly in the description
of the school, Lowood, which was her very first step
in literature, and in which there can now be no doubt,
from her own remarks on the manner in which it
was received, she had a vindictive purpose. I scarcely
know why, for, of course, the dates are all there
to prove the difference but my own conclusion had
always been that she was a girl of fourteen or fifteen, old
enough to form an opinion when she left the school. I
find, with much consternation, that she was only nine ; and
that so far as such a strenuous opinion was her own at all,
it must have been formed at that early and not very
judicious age. That the picture should be so vivid with
only a little girl's recollection to go upon is wonderful ; but
it is not particularly valuable as a verdict against a great
institution, its founder and all its ways. Nevertheless, it
had its scathing and wounding effect as much as if the
(33) c
THE SISTERS BRONTE
little observer, whose small judgment worked so pre-
cociously, had been capable of understanding the things
which she condemned. It would be rash to trust nineteen
in such a report, but nine !
It was at a different age and in other circumstances that
Charlotte Bronte made her deep and extraordinary study
of the Brussels Pensionnat. She was twenty-seven ; she
had already gone through a number of those years of self-
repression during which, by dint of keeping silence, the
heart burns. She was, if we may accept the freedom of
her utterances in fiction as more descriptive of her mind
than the measured sentences of her letters, angry with fate
and the world which denied her a brighter career, and
bound her to the cold tasks of dependence and the com-
pany of despised and almost hated inferiors during the
best of her life. Her tremendous gift of sight not
second sight or any visionary way of regarding the
object before her, but that vivid and immediate vision
which took in every detail, and was decisive on every
act as if it had been the vision of the gods was now
fully matured. She saw all that was about her with this
extraordinary clearness without any shadow upon the
object or possibility of doubt as to her power of seeing
it all round and through and through. She makes us
also see and know the big white house, with every room
(34)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
distinct : the garden, with its great trees and alleys : the
class-rooms, each with its tribune : the girls, fat and
round and phlegmatic in characteristic foreignism, and
herself as spectator, looking on with contemptuous in-
difference, not caring to discriminate be ween them. The
few English figures, which concern her more, are drawn
keen upon the canvas, though with as little friendliness;
the teachers sharply accentuated, Mdlle. Sophie, for in-
stance, who, when she is in a rage, has no lips, and all the
sharp contentions and false civilities of those banded Free
Lances, enemies to everybody and to each other ; the image
of watchful suspicion in the head of the house all these are
set forth in glittering lines of steel. There is not a morsel of
compunction in the picture. Everybody is bad, worthless, a
hater of the whole race. The mistress of the establishment
moves about stealthily, watching, her eyes showing through
a mist in every corner, going and coming without a sound.
What a picture it is ! There is not a good meaning in the
whole place not even that beneficent absence of meaning
which softens the view. They are all bent on their own
aims, on gaining an advantage great or small over their
neighbours ; nobody is spared, nobody is worth a revision
of judgment except one.
The little Englishwoman herself, who is the centre of
all this, is not represented as more lovable than the rest.
(35)
THE SISTERS BRONTE
She is the hungry little epicure, looking on while others
feast, and envying every one of them, even while she
snarls at their fare as apples of Gomorrah. She cannot
abide that they should be better off than she, even though
she scorns their satisfaction in what they possess. Her
wild and despairing rush through Brussels when the town
is en fete, cold, impassioned, fever-hot with rancour and
loneliness, produces the most amazing effect on the mind.
She is the banished spirit for whom there is no place,
the little half-tamed wild beast, wild with desire to tear
and rend everything that is happy. One feels that she
has a certain justification and realises the full force of
being left out in the cold, of having no part or lot in the
matter when other people are amused and rejoice. Many
other writers have endeavoured to produce a similar effect
with milder means, but I suppose because of a feeble-
minded desire to preserve the reputation of their forlorn
heroine and give the reader an amiable view of her, no
one has succeeded like the author of " Villette," who is in
no way concerned for the amiability of Lucy Snowe.
For the impartiality of this picture is as extraordinary as
its power. Lucy Snowe is her own historian ; it is the hot
blood of the autobiographist that rushes through her veins,
yet no attempt is made to recommend her to the reader or
gain his sympathy. She is much too real to think of these
( 36 )
By MRS. OLIPHANT
outside things, or of how people will judge her, or how
to make her proceedings acceptable to their eyes, We do
not know whether Charlotte Bronte ever darted out of
the white still house, standing dead in the moonlight, and
rushed through the streets and, like a ghost, into the very
heart of the gaslights and festivities ; but it would be
difficult to persuade any reader that some one had not done
so, imprinting that phantasmagoria of light and darkness
upon a living brain. Whether it was Charlotte Bronte
or Lucy Snowe, the effect is the same. We are not even
asked to feel for her or pity her, much less to approve
her. Nothing is demanded from us on her account but
merely to behold the soul in revolt and the strange
workings of her despair. It was chiefly because of the
indifference to her of Dr. John that Lucy was thus driven
into a momentary madness ; and with the usual regardless
indiscretion of all Charlotte Bronte's amateur biographers,
Mr. Shorter intimates to us who was the living man who
was Dr. John and occasioned all the commotion. The
tragedy, however it appears, was unnecessary, for the
victim got over it with no great difficulty, and soon began
the much more engrossing interest which still remained
behind.
Nothing up to this point has attracted us in " Villette,"
except, indeed, the tremendous vitality and reality of the
( 37 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
whole, the sensation of the actual which is in every line,
and which forbids us to believe for a moment that what
we are reading is fiction. But a very different sentiment
comes into being as we become acquainted with the black
bullet-head and vivacious irascible countenance of M. Paul
Emmanuel. He is the one only character in Miss
Bronte's little world who has a real charm, whose entrance
upon the stage warms all our feelings and awakens in us
not interest alone, but lively liking, amusement and sym-
pathy. The quick-witted, quick-tempered Frenchman,
with all the foibles of his vanity displayed, as susceptible
to any little slight as a girl, as easily pleased with a sign
of kindness, as far from the English ideal as it is possible
to imagine, dancing with excitement, raging with dis-
pleasure, committing himself by every step he takes, cruel,
delightful, barbarous and kind, is set before us in the
fullest light, intolerable but always enchanting. He is as
full of variety as Rosalind, as devoid of dignity as Pierrot,
contradictory, inconsistent, vain, yet conquering all our
prejudices and enchanting us while he performs every
antic that, according to our usual code, a man ought not
to be capable of. How was it that for this once the artist
got the better of all her restrictions and overcame
all her misconceptions, and gave us a man to be heartily
loved, laughed at, and taken into our hearts ?
( 38 )
By MRS. OLIPHANT
I cannot answer that question. I am sorry that he was
M. Heger, and the master of the establishment, and not the
clever tutor who had so much of Madame Beck's confidence.
But anyhow, he is the best that Miss Bronte ever did for
us, the most attractive individual, the most perfect picture.
The Rochesters were all more or less fictitious, notwith-
standing the unconscious inalienable force of realism
which gives them, in spite of themselves and us, a kind
of overbearing life ; but Miss Bronte never did under-
stand what she did not know. She had to see a thing
before it impressed itself upon her, and when she did
see it, with what force she saw ! She knew M. Paul
Emmanuel, watching him day by day, seeing all his
littlenesses and childishness, his vanity, his big warm
heart, his clever brain, the manifold nature of the man.
He stands out, as the curates stood out, absolutely real
men about whom we could entertain no doubt, recog-
nisable anywhere. The others were either a woman's men,
like the Moors of Shirley, whose roughness was bluster
(she could not imagine an Englishman who was not rough
and rude), and their strength more or less made up ; or
an artificial composition like St. John, an ideal bully
like Rochester. The ideal was not her forte she had
few gifts that way : but she saw with overwhelming
lucidity and keenness, and what she saw, without a
( 39 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
doubt, without a scruple, she could put upon the canvas
in lines of fire. Seldom, very seldom, did an object
appear within reach of that penetrating light, which
could be drawn lovingly or made to appear as a being
to be loved. Was not the sole model of that species
M. Paul ? It would seem that in the piteous poverty of
her life, which was so rich in natural power, she had never
met before a human creature in whom she could com-
pletely trust, or one who commended himself to her
entirely, with all his foibles and weaknesses increasing,
not diminishing, the charm.
It is, in my opinion, a most impertinent inquiry to endea-
vour to search out what were the sentiments of Charlotte
Bronte for M. Heger. Any one whom it would be more
impossible to imagine as breaking the very first rule of
English decorum, and letting her thoughts stray towards
another woman's husband, I cannot imagine. Her fancy was
wild and her utterance free, and she liked to think that men
were quite untrammelled by those proprieties which bound
herself like bonds of iron in her private person, and that
she might pluck a fearful joy by listening to their dreadful
experiences : but she herself was as prim and Puritan
as any little blameless governess that ever went out of an
English parish. But while believing this I cannot but feel
it was an intolerable spite of fortune that the one man
(40)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
whom she knew in her life, whom her story could make
others love, the only man whom she saw with that real
illumination which does justice to humanity, was not
M. Paul Emmanuel but M. H^ger. This was why we
were left trembling at the end of Lucy Snowe's story, not
knowing whether he ever came back to her out of the
wilds, fearing almost as keenly that nothing but loss could
fitly end the tale, yet struggling in our imaginations against
the doom as if it had concerned our own happiness.
Was this new-born power in her, the power of represent-
ing a man at his best, she who by nature saw both men and
women from their worst side, a sign of the development of
genius in herself, the softening of that scorn with which she
had hitherto regarded a world chiefly made up of inferior
beings, the mellowing influence of maturity ? So we might
have said, had it not been that after this climax of produc-
tion she never spake word more in the medium of fiction.
Had she told the world everything she had to say ? Could
she indeed say nothing but what she had seen and known
in her limited experience the trials of school and govern-
essing, the longing of women, the pangs of solitude?
That strange form of imagination which can deal only
with fact, and depict nothing but what is under its eyes, is
in its way perhaps the most impressive of all especially
when inspired by the remorseless lights of that keen out-
(41 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
ward vision which is unmitigated by any softening of love
for the race, any embarrassing toleration as to feelings and
motives. It is unfortunately true in human affairs that
those who expect a bad ending to everything, and suspect
a motive at least dubious to every action, prove right in
a great number of cases, and that the qualities of truth and
realism have been appropriated to their works by almost
universal consent. Indeed there are some critics who
think this the only true form of art. But it is at the
same time a power with many limitations. The artist
who labours, as M. Zola does, searching into every dust-
heap, as if he could find out human nature, the only thing
worth depicting, with all its closely hidden secrets, all its
flying indistinguishable tones, all its infinite gradations of
feeling, by that nauseous process, or by a roaring progress
through the winds, upon a railway brake, or the visit of a
superficial month to the most complicated, the most subtle
of cities must lay up for himself and for his reader many
disappointments and deceptions : but the science of artistic
study, as exemplified in him, had not been invented in
Charlotte Bronte's day.
She did not attempt to go and see things with the intention
of representing them ; she was therefore limited to the re-
presentation of those things which naturally in the course
of life came under her eyes. She knew, though only as a
( 42 )
By MRS. OLIPHANT
child, the management and atmosphere of a great school, and
set it forth, branding a great institution with an insufferable
stigma, justly or unjustly, who knows ? She went to
another school and turned out every figure in it for our
inspection a community all jealous, spiteful, suspicious,
clandestine : even the chance pupil with no particular
relation to her story or herself, painted with all her
frivolities for the edification of the world did not escape.
"She was Miss So-and-So," say the army of commen-
tators who have followed Miss Bronte, picking up all
the threads, so that the grand-daughter of the girl who
had the misfortune to be in the Brussels Pensionnat
along with that remorseless artist may be able to study the
character of her ancestress. The public we fear loves this
kind of art, however, notwithstanding all its drawbacks.
On the other hand probably no higher inspiration could
have set before us so powerfully the image of M. Paul. Thus
we are made acquainted with the best and the worst which
can be effected by this method the base in all their baseness,
the excellent all the dearer for their characteristic faults :
but the one representation scarcely less offensive than the
other to the victim. Would it be less trying to the in-
dividual to be thus caught, identified, written out large in
the light of love and glowing adoration, than in the more
natural light of scorn ? I know not indeed which would be
(43 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
the worst ordeal to go through, to be drawn like Madame
Beck, suspicious, stealthy, with watchful eyes appearing
out of every corner, surprising every incautious word,
than to be put upon the scene in the other manner, with
all your peccadilloes exposed in the light of admiration
and fondness, and yourself put to play the part of hero
and lover. The point of view of the public is one
thing, that of the victim quite another. We are told
that Miss Bronte, perhaps with a momentary compunction
for what she had done, believed herself to have pre-
vented all injurious effects by securing that "Villette"
should not be published in Brussels, or translated into the
French tongue, both of them of course perfectly futile
hopes since the very desire to hinder its appearance was
a proof that this appearance would be of unusual interest.
The fury of the lady exposed in all her stealthy ways
could scarcely have been less than the confusion of her
spouse when he found himself held up to the admiration
of his town as Lucy Snowe's captivating lover. To be
sure it may be said the public has nothing to do with this.
These individuals are dead and gone, and no exposure can
hurt them any longer, whereas the gentle reader lives for
ever, and goes on through the generations, handing on to
posterity his delight in M. Paul. But all the same it is a
cruel and in reality an immoral art ; and it has this great
(44)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
disadvantage, that its area is extremely circumscribed,
especially when the artist lives most of her life in a York-
shire parsonage amid the moors, where so few notable
persons come in her way.
There was however one subject of less absolute realism
which Charlotte Bronte had at her command, having ex-
perienced in her own person and seen her nearest friends
under the experience, of that solitude and longing of women,
of which she has made so remarkable an exposition. The
long silence of life without an adventure or a change, the
forlorn gaze out at windows which never show any one
coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the mind, the
endless years and days which pass and pass, carrying away
the bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing
a dreary middle age before which the very soul shrinks,
while yet the sufferer feels how strong is the current of
life in her own veins, and how capable she is of all the
active duties of existence this was the essence and soul
of the existence she knew best. Was there no help for
it? Must the women wait and long and see their lives
thrown away, and have no power to save themselves ?
The position in itself so tragic is one which can scarcely
be expressed without calling forth an inevitable ridicule, a
laugh at the best, more often a sneer at the women whose
(45 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
desire for a husband is thus betrayed. Shirley and Caroline
Helston both cried out for that husband with an indig-
nation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong and injury,
which stopped the laugh for the moment. It might be
ludicrous but it was horribly genuine and true. Note
there was nothing sensual about these young women.
It was life they wanted ; they knew nothing of the grosser
thoughts which the world with its jeers attributes to
them : of such thoughts they were unconscious in a
primitive innocence which perhaps only women understand.
They wanted their life, their place in the world, the
rightful share of women in the scheme of nature. Why
did not it come to them ? The old patience in which
women have lived for all the centuries fails now and again
in a keen moment of energy when some one arises who sees
no reason why she should endure this forced inaction, or
why she should invent for herself inferior ways of working
and give up her birthright, which is to carry on the world.
The reader was horrified with these sentiments from the
lips of young women. The women were half ashamed,
yet more than half stirred and excited by the outcry, which
was true enough if indelicate. All very well to talk of
women working for their living, finding new channels for
themselves, establishing their independence. How much
have we said of all that, endeavouring to persuade our-
(46)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
selves ! Charlotte Bronte had the courage of her opinions.
It was not education nor a trade that her women wanted.
It was not a living but their share in life, a much more
legitimate object had that been the way to secure it, or had
there been any way to secure it in England. Miss Bronte
herself said correct things about the protection which a
trade is to a woman, keeping her from a mercenary marriage;
but this was not in the least the way of her heroines.
They wanted to be happy, no doubt, but above all things
they wanted their share in life to have their position
by the side of men, which alone confers a natural equality,
to have their shoulder to the wheel, their hands on the
reins of common life, to build up the world, and link the
generations each to each. In her philosophy marriage
was the only state which procured this, and if she did
not recommend a mercenary marriage she was at least
very tolerant about its conditions, insisting less upon love
than was to be expected and with a covert conviction in her
mind that if not one man then another was better than any
complete abandonment of the larger path. Lucy Snowe
for a long time had her heart very much set on Dr. John
and his placid breadth of Englishism : but when she
finally found out that to be impossible her tears were soon
dried by the prospect of Paul Emmanuel, so unlike him,
coming into his place.
(47)
THE SISTERS BRONTE
Poor Charlotte Bronte ! She has not been as other
women, protected by the grave from all betrayal of the
esipodes in her own life. Everybody has betrayed her,
and all she thought about this one and that, and every
name that was ever associated with hers. There was a
Mr. Taylor from London about whom she wrote with
great freedom to her friend Miss Nussey, telling how the
little man had come, how he had gone away without any
advance in the affairs, how a chill came over her when he
appeared and she found him much less attractive than when
at a distance, yet how she liked it as little when he went
away and was somewhat excited about his first letter, and
even went so far as to imagine with a laugh that there might
be possibly a dozen little Joe Taylors before all was over.
She was hard upon Miss Austen for having no comprehen-
sion of passion, but no one could have been cooler and less
impassioned than she as she considered the question of
Mr. Taylor, reluctant to come to any decision yet dis-
appointed when it came to nothing. There was no longing
in her mind for Mr. Taylor, but there was for life and
action and the larger paths and the little Joes.
This longing which she expressed with so much
vehemence and some poetic fervour as the burden of
the lives of Shirley and her friends has been the key-
note of a great deal that has followed the revolts and
( 48 )
By MRS. OLIPHANT
rebellions, the wild notions about marriage, the " Sex
Problem," and a great deal more. From that first point to
the prevailing discussion of all the questions involved is
a long way ; but it is a matter of logical progression,
and when once the primary matter is opened, every
enlargement of the subject may be taken as a thing to be
expected. Charlotte Bronte was in herself the embodi-
ment of all old-fashioned restrictions. She was proper,
she was prim, her life was hedged in by all the little rules
which bind the primitive woman. But when she left
her little recluse behind and rushed into the world of
imagination her exposure of the bondage in which she sat
with all her sisters was far more daring than if she had
been a woman of many experiences and knew what she
was speaking of. She did know the longing, the dis-
content, the universal contradiction and contrariety
which is involved in that condition of unfulfilment to
which so many grey and undeveloped lives are condemned.
For her and her class, which did not speak of it, every-
thing depended upon whether the woman married or did
not marry. Their thoughts were thus artificially fixed to
one point in the horizon, but their ambition was neither
ignoble nor unclean. It was bold, indeed, in proportion
to its almost ridiculous innocence, and want of percep-
tion of any grosser side. Their share in life, their part in
( 49 ) D
THE SISTERS BRONTE
the mutual building of the house, was what they sought.
But the seed she thus sowed has come to many growths
which would have appalled Charlotte Bronte. Those
who took their first inspiration from this cry of hers, have
quite forgotten what it was she wanted, which was not
emancipation but an extended duty. But while it would
be very unjust to blame her for the vagaries that have
followed and to which nothing could be less desirable
than any building of the house or growth of the race, any
responsibility or service we must still believe that it was
she who drew the curtain first aside and opened the gates
to imps of evil meaning, polluting and profaning the
domestic hearth.
The marriage which after all these wild embodiments of
the longing and solitary heart which could not consent to
abandon its share in life, after Shirley and Lucy
Snowe, and that complex unity of three female souls all
unfulfilled, which had now been broken by death she
accepted in the end of her life, is the strangest com-
mentary upon all that went before, or rather, upon all the
literary and spiritual part of her history, though it was a
quite appropriate ending to Mr. Bronte's daughter, and even
to the writer of those sober letters which discussed Mr.
Taylor, whether he should or should not be encouraged,
and how it was a little disappointing after all to see him
(50)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
go away. Her final suitor was one of the class which
she had criticised so scathingly, one who, it might have
been thought, would scarcely have ventured to enter the
presence or brave the glance of so penetrating an eye, but
who would seem to have brought all the urgency of a,
grand passion to the sombre parlour of the parsonage, to-
the afternoon stillness of the lonely woman who would
not seem to have suspected anything of the kind till it
was poured out before her without warning. She was
startled and confused by his declaration and appeal, never
apparently having contemplated the possibility of any
such occurrence ; and in the interval which followed
the father raged and resisted, and the lover did not
conceal his heartbroken condition but suffered without
complaining while the lady looked on wistful, touched
and attracted by the unlooked-for Jove, and gradually
melting towards that, though indifferent to the man who
offered it. Mr. Bronte evidently thought that if this
now distinguished daughter who had been worshipped
among the great people in London, and talked of
in all the newspapers, married at all in her mature
age, it should be some one distinguished like herself,
and not the mere curate who was the natural fate
of every clergyman's daughter, the simplest and least
known.
THE SISTERS BRONTE
Charlotte meanwhile said no word, but saw the curate
enact various tragic follies of love for her sake with
a sort of awe and wonder, astonished to find herself
thus possessed still of the charm which none are so sure
as women that only youth and beauty can be expected
to possess. And she had never had any beauty, and,
though she was not old, was no longer young. It is
a conventional fiction that a woman still in the thirties is
beyond the exercise of that power. Indeed, it would be
hard to fix the age at which the spell departs. Certainly
the demeanour of Mr. Nicholls gave her full reason to
believe that it had not departed from her. He faltered in
the midst of the service, grew pale, almost lost his self-
possession when he suddenly saw her among the kneeling
figures round the altar ; and no doubt this rather shock-
ing and startling exhibition of his feelings was more
pardonable to the object of so much emotion than it was
likely to have been to any other spectator. The romance
is a little strange, but yet it is a romance in its quaint
ecclesiastical way. And soon Charlotte was drawn still more
upon her lover's side by the violence of her father. It was
decided that the curate was to go, and that this late gleam of
love-making was to be extinguished and the old dim at-
mosphere to settle down again for ever. Finally, however,
the mere love of love, which had always been more to her
( 5O
By MRS. OLIPHANT
than any personal inclination, and the horror of that
permanent return to the twilight of dreamy living against
which she had struggled all her life, overcame her, and
gave her courage ; but she married characteristically, not
as women marry who are carried to a new home and
make a new beginning in life, but retaining all the cir-
cumstances of the old and receiving her husband into her
father's house where she had already passed through so
many fluctuations and dreamed so many dreams, and
which was full to overflowing with the associations of the
past.
We have no reason to suppose that it did not
add to the happiness of her life ; indeed, every indi-
cation is to the contrary, and the husband seems to
have been kind, considerate and affectionate. Still this
thing upon which so many of her thoughts had been
fixed during her whole life, which she had felt to be
the necessary condition of full development, and for
which the little impassioned female circle of which she
was the expositor had sighed and cried to heaven and
earth, came to her at last very much in the form of a
catastrophe. No doubt the circumstances of her quickly
failing health and shortened life promote this feeling.
But without really taking these into consideration the
sensation remains the same. The strange little keen soul
( 53 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
with its sharply fixed restrictions, yet intense force of per-
ception within its limits, dropped out of the world into
which it had made an irruption so brilliant and so brief
and sank out of sight altogether, sank into the humdrum
house between the old father and the sober husband, into
the clerical atmosphere with which she had no sympathy,
into the absolute quiet of domestic life to which no Prince
Charming could now come gaily round the corner, out of
the mists and moors, and change with a touch of his
wand the grey mornings and evenings into golden days.
Well ! was not this that which she had longed for, the
natural end of life towards which her Shirley, her Caroline,
her Lucy had angrily stretched forth their hands, indig-
nant to be kept waiting, clamouring for instant entrance ?
And so it was, but how different ! Lucy Snowe's little
housekeeping, all the preparations which M. Paul made
for her comfort and which seemed better to her than any
palace, would not they too have taken the colour of
perpetual dulness if everything had settled down and the
Professor assumed his slippers by the domestic hearth ? Ah
no, for Lucy Snowe loved the man, and Charlotte Bronte, as
appears, loved only the love. It is a parable. She said a
little later that she began to see that this was the fate which
she would wish for those she loved best, for her friend
Ellen, perhaps for her Emily if she had lived the good
(54)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
man very faithful, very steady, worth his weight in gold
yet flatter than the flattest days of old, solidement nourri,
a good substantial husband, managing all the parish
business, full of talk about the Archdeacon's charge, and
the diocesan meetings, and the other clergy of the moorland
parishes. We can conceive that she got to fetching his
slippers for him and taking great care that he was
comfortable, and perhaps had it been so ordained might
have grown into a contented matron and forgotten the
glories and miseries, so inseparably twined and linked
together, of her youth. But she only had a year in which
to do all that, and this is how her marriage seems to turn
into a catastrophe, the caging of a wild creature that had
never borne captivity before, and which now could no
longer rush forth into the heart of any shining /<?#, or to
the window of a strange confessional, anywhere, to throw
off the burden of the perennial contradiction, the ceaseless
unrest of the soul, the boilings of the volcano under the
snow.
I have said it was difficult to account for the extreme
interest still attaching to everything connected with
Charlotte Bronte ; not only the story of her peculiar
genius, but also of everybody connected with her, though
the circle was in reality quite a respectable, humdrum, and
( 55 )
THE SISTERS BRONTE
uninteresting one, containing nobody of any importance
except the sister, who was her own wilder and fiercer
part. One way, however, in which these sisters have
won some part of their long-lasting interest is
due to the treatment to which they have been sub-
jected. They are the first victims of that ruthless art
of biography which is one of the features of our time ;
and that not only by Mrs. Gaskell, who took up her
work in something of an apologetic vein, and was so
anxious to explain how it was that her heroine expressed
certain ideas not usual in the mouths of women, that she
was compelled to take away the reputation of a number
of other people in order to excuse the peculiarities of these
two remarkable women. But everybody who has touched
their history since, and there have been many for it
would seem that gossip, when restrained by no bonds
of decorum or human feeling, possesses a certain interest
whether it is concerned with the household of a cardinal or
that of a parish priest has followed the same vicious way
without any remonstrance or appeal for mercy. We have all
taken it for granted that no mercy was to be shown to the
Brontes. Let every rag be torn from Charlotte, of whom
there is the most to say. Emily had the good luck to be
no correspondent, and so has escaped to some degree the
complete exposure of every confidence and every thought
( 56 )
By MRS. OLIPHANT
which has happened to her sister. Is it because she has
nobody to defend her that she has been treated thus
barbarously ? I cannot conceive a situation more painful,
more lacerating to every feeling, than that of the father
and the husband dwelling silent together in that sombre
parsonage, from which every ray of light seems to depart
with the lost woman, whose presence had kept a little
savour in life, and looking on in silence to see their
life taken to pieces, and every decent veil dragged from
the inner being of their dearest and nearest. They com-
plained as much as two voiceless persons could, or at
least the father complained : and the very servants came
hot from their kitchen to demand a vindication of
their character : but nobody noted the protest of the
old man amid the silence of the moors : and the
husband was more patient and spoke no word. Even
he, however, after nearly half a century, when that
far-off episode of life must have become dim to him,
has thrown his relics open for a little more revelation,
a little more interference with the helpless ashes of the
dead.
No dot is now omitted upon i, no t left uncrossed. We
know, or at least are told, who Charlotte meant by every
character she ever portrayed, even while the model still lives.
We know her opinion of her friends, or rather acquaint-
( 57)
THE SISTERS BRONTE
ances, the people whom she saw cursorily and formed a
hasty judgment upon, as we all do in the supposed safety
of common life. Protests have been offered in other
places against a similar treatment of other persons ; but
scarcely any protest has been attempted in respect to
Charlotte Bronte. The resurrection people have been
permitted to make their researches as they pleased. It
throws a curious pathos, a not unsuitably tragic light upon
a life always so solitary, that this should all have passed in
silence because there was actually no one to interfere, no
one to put a ban upon the dusty heaps and demand that no
mere should be said. When one looks into the matter
a little more closely, one finds it is so with almost all
those who have specially suffered at the hands of the
biographer. The Carlyles had no child, no brother to
rise up in their defence. It gives the last touch of
melancholy to the conclusion of a lonely life. Mrs.
Gaskell, wise woman, defended herself from a similar
treatment by will, and left children behind her to
protect her memory. But the Brontes are at the
mercy of every one who cares to give another raking
to the diminished heap of dtfbris. The last writer who
has done so, Mr. Clement Shorter, had some real new light
to throw upon a story which surely has now been suffi-
ciently turned inside out, and has done his work with
( 58)
By MRS. OLIPHANT
perfect good feeling, and, curiously enough after so
many exploitations, in a way which shows that interest
has not yet departed from the subject. But we trust that
now the memory of Charlotte Bronte will be allowed to
rest.
(59)
GEORGE ELIOT
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
GEORGE ELIOT
this essay it is not intended to go into
the vexed question of George Eliot's
private life and character. Death has re-
solved her individuality into nothingness,
and the discrepancy between her lofty
thoughts and doubtful action no longer troubles us. But
her work still remains as common property for all men to
appraise at its true value to admire for its beauty, to
reverence for its teaching, to honour for its grandeur, yet
at the same time to determine its weaknesses and to confess
where it falls short of the absolute perfection claimed for
it in her lifetime.
For that matter indeed, no one has suffered from
unmeasured adulation more than has George Eliot. As
a philosopher, once bracketed with Plato and Kant; as a
novelist, ranked the highest the world has seen; as a woman,
set above the law and, while living in open and admired
(63 )
GEORGE ELIOT
adultery, visited by bishops and judges as well as by the best
of the laity ; her faults of style and method praised as genius
since her death she has been treated with some of that
reactionary neglect which always follows on extravagant
esteem. The mud-born ephemeridas of literature have
dispossessed her. For her profound learning, which ran
like a golden thread through all she wrote till it became
tarnished by pedantry, we have the ignorance which mis-
quotes Lempriere and thinks itself classic. For her
outspoken language and forcible diction, wherein, however,
she always preserved so much modesty, and for her realism
which described things and feelings as they are, but
without going into revolting details, we have those
lusciously suggestive epithets and those unveiled presenta-
tions of the sexual instinct which seem to make the world
one large lupanar. For her accurate science and pro-
found philosophy, we have those claptrap phrases which
have passed into common speech and are glibly reproduced
by facile parrots who do not understand and never could
have created ; and for her scholarly diction we have the
tawdriness of a verbal ragbag where grammar is as defective
as taste. Yet our modern tinselled dunces have taken the
place of the one who, in her lifetime, was made almost
oppressively great almost too colossal in her supremacy.
But when all this rubbish has been thrown into the abyss
( 6 4 )
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
of oblivion, George Eliot's works will remain solid and
alive, together with Thackeray's, Scott's and Fielding's.
Our Immortals will include in their company, as one of the
" choir invisible " whose voice will never be stilled for
man, the author of " Adam Bede " and " Romola," of the
" Mill on the Floss " and " Middlemarch."
Her first essays in fiction, her " Scenes of Clerical
Life," show the germs of her future greatness as well
as the persistency of her aim. In " Janet's Repen-
tance," which to our mind is the best of the three,
those germs are already shaped to beauty. Nothing can
be more delicately touched than the nascent love between
Janet and Mr. Try on. No more subtle sign of Janet's
besetting sin could be given than by that candlestick
held "aslant;" while her character, compounded of pride,
timidity, affectionateness, spiritual aspiration and moral
degradation, is as true to life as it was difficult to portray.
It would be impossible to note all the gems in these
three stories. We can indicate only one or two. That
splendid paragraph in " Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," beginning :
" While this poor heart was being bruised " the sharp
summing up of Mr. Amos Barton's " middling " character
Lady Cheverel's silent criticisms contrasted with her
husband's iridescent optimism the almost Shakesperean
(65) E
GEORGE ELIOT
humour of the men, the author's keen appraisement of the
commonplace women ; such aphorisms as Mrs. Linnet's
41 It's right enough to be speritial I'm no enemy to that
but I like my potatoes meally ; " these and a thousand
more, eloquent, tender, witty, deep, make these three
stories masterpieces in their way, despite the improbability
of the Czerlaski episode in "Amos Barton" and the inherent
weakness of the Gilfil plot. We, who can remember the
enthusiasm they excited when they first appeared in
Blackwood's Magazine, on re-reading them in cooler blood
can understand that enthusiasm, though we no longer share
its pristine intensity. It was emphatically a new departure
in literature, and the noble note of that religious feeling
which is independent of creed and which touches all hearts
alike, woke an echo that even to this day reverberates
though in but a poor, feeble and attenuated manner.
"Adam Bede," the first novel proper of the long
series, shows George Eliot at her best in her three most
noteworthy qualities lofty principles, lifelike delineation
of character, and fine humour, both broad and subtle. The
faults of the story are the all-pervading anachronism
of thought and circumstance ; the dragging of the plot
in the earlier half of the book ; and the occasional ugliness
-of style, where, as in that futile opening sentence the
(66)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
author as I directly addresses the reader as You. The
scene is laid in the year 1799 before the Trades Unions
had fixed a man's hours of work so accurately as to make
him leave off with a screw half driven in, so soon as the
clock begins to strike before too the hour of leaving off
was fixed at six. We older people can remember when
workmen wrought up to eight and were never too exact
even then. Precision of the kind practised at the present
day was not known then ; and why were there no appren-
tices in Adam's shop ? Apprentices were a salient feature
in all the working community, and no shop could have
existed without them. Nor would the seduction by the
young squire of a farmer's niece or daughter have been
the heinous crime George Eliot has made it. If women of
the lower class held a somewhat better position than they
did in King Arthur's time, when, to be the mother of a
knight's bastard, raised a churl's wife or daughter far above
her compeers and was assumed to honour not degrade her,
they still retained some of the old sense of inferiority. Does
any one remember that famous answer in the Yelverton
trial not much more than a generation ago? In 1799
Hetty's mishap would have been condoned by all concerned,
save perhaps by Adam himself ; and Arthur Donnithorne
would have suffered no more for his escapade than did our
well-known Tom Jones for his little diversions. Arid
(67)
GEORGE ELIOT
were there any night schools for illiterate men in 1 799 ? And
how was that reprieve got so quickly at a time when there
were neither railroads nor telegraphs ? indeed, would it
have been got at all in days when concealment of birth alone
was felony and felony was death ? Also, would Hetty
have been alone in her cell? In 1799 all prisoners were
herded together, young and old, untried and condemned ;
and the separate system was not in existence. Save for
Hetty's weary journey on foot and in chance carts, the
story might have been made as of present time with
more vraisemblance and harmoniousness.
These objections apart, how supreme the whole book is !
The characters stand out fresh, firm and living. As in some
paintings you feel as if you could put your hand round the
body, so in George Eliot's writings you feel that you have
met those people in the flesh, and talked to them, holding
them by the hand and looking into their eyes. There is
not a line of loose drawing anywhere. From the four
Bedes, with that inverted kind of heredity which Zola has
so powerfully shown, to the stately egoism of Mrs. Irwine
from the marvellous portraiture of Hetty Sorrel with her
soft, caressing, lusciously-loving outside, and her heart
" as hard as a cherry-stone " according to Mrs. Poyser
from the weak-willed yet not conscienceless Arthur Don-
nithorne to the exquisite purity of Dinah, the character-
(68 )
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
drawing is simply perfect. Many were people personally
known to George Eliot, and those who were at all behind
the scenes recognised the portraits. Down at Wirksworth
they knew the Bedes, Dinah, the Poysers, and some others.
In London, among the intimates of George Lewes, Hetty
needed no label. Mrs. Peyser's good things were common
property in the neighbourhood Jong before George Eliot
crystallised them for all time, and embellished them by her
matchless setting ; and Dinah's sermon was not all imaginary.
But though in some sense her work was portraiture, it was
portraiture passed through the alembic of her brilliant
genius, from commonplace material distilled into the
finest essence.
It is impossible here again to give adequate extracts of
the wise, witty, tender and high-minded things scattered
broadcast over this book as, indeed, over all that George
Eliot ever wrote. That paragraph beginning " Family
likeness has often a deep sadness in it " ; the description
of Hetty's flower-like beauty, which fascinated even her
sharp-tongued aunt ; phrases like " John considered a
young master as the natural enemy of an old servant,"
and " young people in general as a poor contrivance for
carrying on the world " ; that sharp little bit of moral
and intellectual antithesis, with the learned man " meekly
rocking the twins in the cradle with his left hand, while
(69)
GEORGE ELIOT
with his right he inflicted the most lacerating sarcasms
on an opponent who had betrayed a brutal ignorance of
Hebrew " forgiving human weaknesses and moral errors
as is a Christian's bounden duty, but treating as " the
enemy of his race, the man who takes the wrong side on
the momentous subject of the Hebrew points " ; how
masterly, how fine are these and a dozen other unnoted
passages !
Hetty in her bedroom, parading in her concealed
finery, reminds one too closely of Gretchen with her
fatal jewels to be quite favourable to the English
version ; and we question the truth of Adam Bede's
hypothetical content with such a Dorothy Doolittle as his
wife. Writers of love stories among the working classes
in bygone days forget that notableness was then part of
of a woman's virtue part of her claims to love and consi-
deration and that mere flower-like kittenish prettiness
did not count to her honour any more than graceful
movements and aesthetic taste would count to the honour
of a Tommy in the trenches who could neither handle
a spade nor load a rifle. Blackmore made the same mis-
take in his " Lorna Doone," and George Eliot has repeated
it in Adam's love for Hetty solely for her beauty and without
" faculty " as her dower. In his own way Bartle Massey,
misogynist, is as smart as Mrs. Poyser herself, as amusing
(70)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
and as trenchant ; but the coming-of-age dance is fifty
years and more too modern, and the long dissertation
at the beginning of the second book is a blot, because it
is a clog and an interruption. Not so that glorious
description of nature in August when "the sun was
hidden for a moment and then shone out warm again like
a recovered joy ; " nor that deep and tender bit of intro-
spection, setting forth the spiritual good got from sorrow
as well as its indestructible impress.
Yet for all the beauty of these philosophic passages
there are too many of them in this as in all George
Eliot's works. They hamper the action and lend an air
of pedantry and preaching with which a novel proper has
nothing to do. It is bad style as well as bad art, and
irritating to a critical, while depressing -to a sympathetic
reader. But summing up all the faults together, and giving
full weight to each, we gladly own the masterly residuum
that is left. The dawning love between Adam and
Dinah alone is enough to claim for " Adam Bede " one of
the highest places in literature, had not that place been
already taken by the marvellous truth, diversity and
power of the character-drawing. Mrs. Peyser's epigrams,
too, generally made when she was " knitting with fierce
rapidity, as if her movements were a necessary function
like the twittering of a crab's antennae," both too numerous
(71 )
GEORGE ELIOT
and too well known to quote, would have redeemed the
flimsiest framework and the silliest padding extant.
The light that seemed to flash on the world when this
glorious book was published will never be forgotten by
those who were old enough at the time to read and appre-
ciate. By the way, is that would-be famous Liggins still
alive ? When he sums it all up, how much did he get
out of his bold attempt to don the giant's robe ?
If " Adam Bede " was partly reminiscent, " The Mill
on the Floss " was partly autobiographical. There is no
question that in the sensitive, turbulent, loving nature
of Maggie Tulliver Marian Evans painted herself. Those
who knew her when she first came to London knew her
as a pronounced insurgent. Never noisy and never
coarse, always quiet in manner, sensitive, diffident and
shrinking from unpleasantness, she yet had not put
on that " made " and artificial pose which was her dis-
tinguishing characteristic in later years. She was still
Maggie Tulliver, with a conscience and temperament at
war together, and with a spiritual ideal in no way attained
by her practical realisation. For indeed, the union
between Marian Evans and George Lewes was far more
incongruous in some of its details than was Maggie's love
for Philip or her passion for Stephen. Philip appealed to
( 72)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
her affection of old time, her pity and her love of art
Stephen to her hot blood and her sensuous love of beauty.
But George Lewes's total want of all religiousness of
feeling, his brilliancy of wit, which was now coarse now
mere "persiflage^ his cleverness, which was more quickness
of assimilation than the originality of genius, were all
traits of character unlike the deeper, truer and more
ponderous qualities of the woman who braved the world
for his sake when first she linked her fate with his the
woman who did not, like Maggie, turn back when she
came to the brink but who boldly crossed the Rubicon
and who, in her after efforts to cover up the conditions,
showed that she smarted from the consequences.
Read in youth by the light of sympathy with insurgency,
Maggie is adorable, and her brother Tom is but a better-
looking Jonas Chuzzlewit. Read in age by the light of re-
spect for conformity and self-control, much of Maggie's
charm vanishes, while most of Tom's hardness becomes both
respectable and inevitable. Maggie was truly a thorn in
the side of a proud country family, not accustomed to its
little daughters running off" to join the gipsies, nor to its
grown girls eloping with their cousin's lover. Tom was
right when he said no reliance could be placed on her ;
for where there is this unlucky divergence between prin-
ciple and temperament, the will can never be firm nor the
( 73)
GEORGE ELIOT
walk steady. Sweet little Lucy had more of the true
heroism of a woman in her patient acceptance of sorrow
and her generous forgiveness of the cause thereof, than
could be found in all Maggie's struggles between pas-
sion and principle. The great duties of life lying at
our feet and about our path cannot be done away with by
the romantic picturesqueness of one character contrasted
with the more prosaic because conventional limitations of
the other ; nor is it right to give all our sympathy to the
one who spoilt so many lives and brought so much dis-
grace on her family name, merely because she did not
mean, and did not wish, and had bitter remorse after
terrible conflicts, which never ended in real self-control or
steadfast pursuance of the right.
There is something in " The Mill on the Floss " akin
to the gloomy fatalism of a Greek tragedy. In " Adam
Bede " is more spontaneity of action, more liberty of choice ;
but, given the natures by which events were worked out
to their final issues in " The Mill on the Floss," it seems
as if everything must have happened precisely as it did.
An obstinate, litigious and irascible man like Mr. Tulliver
was bound to come to grief in the end. Fighting against
long odds as he did, he could not win. Blind anger and
as blind precipitancy, against cool tenacity and clear per-
ceptions, must go under ; and Mr. Tulliver was no match
( 74 )
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
against the laws of life as interpreted by Mr. Wakem and
the decisions of the law courts. His choice of a fool for
his wife was not Mrs. Tulliver well known at Coventry ?
was another step in the terrible March of Fate. She
was of no help to him as a wife with woman's wit to
assist his masculine decisions nor as a mother was she
capable of ruling her daughter or influencing her son.
She was as a passive instrument in the hands of the gods
one of those unnoted and unsuspected agents by whose
unconscious action such tremendous results are produced.
George Eliot never did anything more remarkable than in
the union she makes in this book between the most com-
monplace characters and the most majestic conception of
tragic fate. There is not a stage hero among them all
not a pair of buskins for the whole company ; but the
conception is ^Eschylean, though the stage is no bigger
than a doll's house.
The humour in " The Mill on the Floss " is almost as
rich as that of " Adam Bede," though the special qualities
of the four sisters are perhaps unduly exaggerated. Sister
Pullet's eternal tears become wearisome, and lose their
effect by causeless and ceaseless repetition ; and surely
sister Grigg could not have been always such an unmiti-
gated Gorgon ! Mrs. Tulliver's helpless foolishness and
tactless interference, moving with her soft white hands
( 75)
GEORGE ELIOT
the lever which set the whole crushing machinery in
motion, are after George Eliot's best manner ; and the
whole comedy circling round sister Pullet's wonderful
bonnet and the linen and the chaney comedy at last
linked on to tragedy is of inimitable richness. The
girlish bond of sympathy between sister Pullet and sister
Tulliver, in that they both liked spots for their patterned
linen, while sister Grigg allays contrairy to Sophy
Pullet, would have striped things is repeated in that
serio-comic scene of the ruin, when the Tullivers are sold
up and the stalwart cause of their disaster is in bed,
paralysed. By the way, would he have recovered so
quickly and so thoroughly as he did from such a severe
attack ? Setting that aside, for novelists are not expected
to be very accurate pathologists, the humour of this
part of the book is all the more striking for the pathos
mingled with it.
" The head miller, a tall broad-shouldered man of
forty, black-eyed and black-haired, subdued by a general
mealiness like an auricula": "They're nash things,
them lop-eared rabbits they'd happen ha' died if they'd
been fed. Things out o' natur never thrive. God
Almighty doesn't like 'em. He made the rabbit's ears
to lie back, and it's nothing but contrariness to make 'em
lie down like a mastiff dog's": "Maggie's tears began
( 76 )
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
to subside, and she put out her mouth for the cake
and bit a piece ; and then Tom bit a piece, just for com-
pany, and they ate together and rubbed each other's
cheeks and brows and noses together, while they ate, with
a humiliating resemblance to two friendly ponies": Is
there anything better than these in Mrs. Peyser's
repertory ?
Of acute psychological vision is that fine bit on
" plotting contrivance and deliberate covetousness " ; and
the summing up of the religious and moral life of the
Dodsons and Tullivers, beginning " Certainly the religious
and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers," is as good
as anything in our language. No one theoretically knew
human nature better than George Eliot. Practically,
she was too thin-skinned to bear the slightest abrasion,
such as necessarily comes to us from extended intercourse
or the give and take of equality. But theoretically she
sounded the depths and shallows, and knew where the
bitter springs rose and where the healing waters flowed ;
and when she translated what she knew into the conduct
and analysis of her fictitious characters, she gave them a
life and substance peculiarly her own.
Hitherto George Eliot has dealt with her own ex-
periences, her reminiscences of old friends and well-known
(77)
GEORGE ELIOT
places, of familiar acquaintances, and, in Maggie Tulliver,
of her own childish frowardness and affectionateness her
girlish desire to do right and facile slipping into wrong.
In " Silas Marner " she ventures into a more com-
pletely creative region ; and, for all the exquisite beauty
and poetry of the central idea, she has failed her former
excellence. The story is one of the not quite impossible
but highly improbable kind, with a Deus ex machind as
the ultimate setter-to -rights of all things wrong. As with
" Adam Bede," the date is thrown back a generation or
two, without the smallest savour of the time indicated,
save in the fashion of the dresses of the sisters Lammeter
a Joseph substituted for a cloak, and riding on a pillion
for a drive in a fly. Else there is not the least attempt to
synchronise time, circumstances and sentiment, while the
story is artificial in its plot and unlikely in its treatment.
Yet it is both pretty and pathetic ; and the little intro-
duction of fairyland in the golden-haired child asleep by
the fire, as the substitute for the stolen hoard, is as lovely
as fairy stories generally are. But we altogether question
the probability of a marriage between the young squire
and his drunken wife. Such a woman would not have
been too rigorous, and was not ; and such a man as
Godfrey Cass would not have married a low-born
mistress from " a movement of compunction." As
( 78 )
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
we said before, in the story of Hetty and Arthur,
young squires a century ago were not so tender-hearted
towards the honour of a peasant girl. It was a pity,
of course, when things went wrong ; but then young
men will be young men, and it behoved the lasses to keep
themselves to themselves ! If the young squire did the
handsome thing in money, that was all that could be
expected of him. The girl would be none the worse
thought of for her slip ; and the money got by her fault
would help in her plenishing with some honest fellow who
understood things. This is the sentiment still to be found
in villages, where the love-children of the daughters out
in service are to be found comfortably housed in the
grandmother's cottage, and where no one thinks any the
worse of the unmarried mother ; and certainly, a century
ago, it was the universal rule of moral measurement.
George Eliot undoubtedly made a chronological mistake
in both stories by the amount of conscientious remorse
felt by her young men, and the depth of social degrada-
tion implied in this slip of her young women.
The beginning of " Silas Marner " is much finer than
that of either of her former books. It strikes the true note
of a harmonious introduction, and is free from the irritating
trivialities of the former openings. In those early days
of which " Silas Marner " treats, a man from the next
(79)
GEORGE ELIOT
parish was held as a " stranger " ; and even now a Scotch,
Irish or Welsh man would be considered as much a
foreigner as a " Frenchy " himself, were he to take up his
abode in any of the more remote hamlets of the north or
west. The state of isolation in which Silas Marner lived
was true on all these counts his being a " foreigner " to
the autochthonous shepherds and farmers of Ravaloe his
half mazed, half broken-hearted state owing to the false
accusation brought against him and the criminal neglect
of Providence to show his innocence and his strange and
uncongenial trade. Yet, for this last, were not the women
of that time familiar with the weaving industry ? else
what could they have done with the thread which they
themselves had spun ? If it were disposed of to a travel-
ling agent for the hand-loom weavers, why not have
indicated the fact ? It would have been one touch more
to the good of local colour and conditional accuracy. To
be sure, the paints are laid on rather thickly throughout ;
but eccentricities and folks with bees in their bonnets were
always to be found in remote places before the broom of
steam and electricity came to sweep them into a more
common conformity ; and that line between oddity and
insanity, always narrow, was then almost invisible.
The loss of the hoarded treasure and the poor dazed
weaver's terrified flight to the Rainbow introduces us to
( 80)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
one of George Eliot's most masterly of her many scenes
of rustic humour.
" The more important customers, who drank spirits
and sat nearest the fire, staring at each other as if a bet
were depending on the first man who winked ; while the
beer drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smock-
frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands
across their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a
funereal duty attended with embarrassing sadness " these,
as well as Mr. Snell, the landlord, " a man of a neutral
disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human dif-
ferences, as those of beings who were all alike in need
of liquor " do their fooling admirably. From the
cautious discussion on the red Durham with a star on her
forehead, to the authoritative dictum of Mr. Macey,
tailor and parish clerk (were men of his social stamp
called Mr. in those days?) when he asserts that "there's
allays two 'pinions ; there's the 'pinion a man has of
himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him.
There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell
could hear itself" from the gossip about the Lammeter
land to the ghos'es in the Lammeter stables, it is all
excellent rich, racy and to the manner born. And the
sudden appearance of poor, scared, weazen-faced Silas in
the midst of the discussion on ghos'es, gives occasion for
(81 ) F
GEORGE ELIOT
another fytte of humour quite as good as what has gone
before.
Worthy of Mrs. Poyser, too, was sweet and patient
Dolly Winthrop's estimate of men. "It seemed sur-
prising that Ben Winthrop, who loved his quart-pot and
his joke, got along so well with Dolly ; but she took her
husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything
else, considering that ' men would be so ' and viewing
the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had
pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls
and turkey-cocks." Good, too, when speaking of his wife,
is Mr. Macey's version of the " mum " and " budget "
of the fairies' dance. " Before I said 'sniff' I took care
to know as she'd say ' snaff,' and pretty quick too. I
wasn't a-going to open my mouth like a dog at a fly, and
snap it to again, wi' nothing to swaller."
But in spite of all this literary value of " Silas Marner "
we come back to our first opinion of its being unreal and
almost impossible in plot. The marriage of Godfrey to
an opium-eating (?) drab, and the robbery of Silas Marner's
hoard by the squire's son were pretty hard nuts to crack
in the way of probability ; but the timely death of the
wife just at the right moment and in the right place the
adoption of a little girl of two by an old man as nearly
" nesh " as was consistent with his power of living free
(82)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
from the restraint of care the discovery of Dunsay's
body and the restoration to the weaver of his long-lost
gold the impasse of Eppie, the squire's lawfully born
daughter and his only legal inheritor, married to a peasant
and living as a peasant at her father's gates : all these
things make " Silas Marner " a beautiful unreality, taking
it out of the ranks of human history and placing it in
those of fairy tale and romance.
In " Felix Holt " we come back to a more actual kind
of life, such as it was in the early thirties when the
" democratic wave," which has swept away so much of the
old parcelling out of things social and political, was first
beginning to make itself felt. But here again George
Eliot gives us the sense of anachronism in dealing too
familiarly with those new conditions of the Reform Bill
which gave Treby Magna for the first time a member,
and which also for the first time created the Revising
Barrister while Trades Unions were still unrecognised
by the law, and did their work mainly by rattening and
violence. Any one who was an intelligent and wide-
awake child at that time, and who can remember the
talk of the excited elders, must remember things some-
what differently from what George Eliot has set down.
Radical was in those days a term of reproach, carrying
(83)
GEORGE ELIOT
with it moral obloquy and condemnation. The Tories
might call the Whigs Radicals when they wanted to
overwhelm them with shame, as we might now say
Anarchists and Dynamiters. But the most advanced
Gentleman would never have stood for Parliament as a
Radical. Felix Holt himself, and the upper fringe of
the working class, as also the lower sediment, might be
Radicals, but scarcely such a man as Harold Transome, who
would have been a Whig of a broad pattern. And as for
the Revising Barrister, he was looked on as something
akin to Frankenstein's Monster. No one knew where his
power began nor where it ended ; and on each side alike
he was dreaded as an unknown piece of machinery which,
once set a-going, no one could say what it would do or
where it would stop.
In its construction " Felix Holt " is perhaps the most
unsatisfactory of all George Eliot's books. The ins and
outs of Transome and Durfey and Scaddon and Bycliffe
were all too intricate in the weaving and too confused in the
telling to be either intelligible or interesting. In trying
on the garment of Miss Braddon the author of " Felix
Holt " showed both want of perception and a deplorable
misfit. Also she repeats the situation of Eppie and her
adopted father Silas in that of Esther and Rufus Lyon.
But where it was natural enough for the contentedly
(84)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
rustic Eppie to refuse to leave her beloved old father for
one new and unknown her old habits of cottage simplicity,
including a suitable lover, for the unwelcome luxuries of
an unfamiliar state natural in her though eminently un-
natural in the drama of life it was altogether inhar-
monious with Esther's character and tastes to prefer
poverty to luxury, Felix to Harold, Malhouse Yard to
Transome Court. George Eliot's usually firm grip on
character wavers into strange self-contradiction in her
delineations of Esther Lyon. Even the situation of which
she is so fond the evolution of a soul from spiritual
deadness to keen spiritual intensity, and the conversion of
a mind from folly to seriousness even in this we miss
the masterly drawing of her better manner. The humour
too is thinner. Mrs. Holt is a bad Mrs. Nickleby ; and
the comic chorus of rustic clowns, which George Eliot
always introduces where she can, is comparatively poor.
She is guilty of one distinct coarseness, in her own
character as the author, when she speaks of the cook at
Treby Manor "a much grander person than her lady-
ship " " as wearing gold and jewelry to a vast amount of
suet."
When Esther has been taken up by the Transomes,
George Eliot misses what would have been absolutely
certain these fine little points of difference between
(85)
GEORGE ELIOT
the high-bred lady of Transome Court and the half-bred
Esther of Malhouse Yard ; and yet, quite unintentionally,
she makes Esther as vulgar as a barmaid in her conversa-
tions and flirtatious coquetries with Harold Transome.
Nor, we venture to think, as going too far on the other
side, would a girl of Esther's upbringing and surround-
ings have used such a delightfully literary phrase as " im-
portunate scents." On the whole we do not think it can
be denied that, so far as she had gone in her literary
career when she wrote " Felix Holt," it is undeniably her
least successful work.
And yet, how many and how beautiful are the good
things in it ! If Homer nods at times, when he is awake
who can come near him ? The opening of the book is
beyond measure fine, and abounds in felicitous phrases.
" His sheep-dog following with heedless unofficial air as
of a beadle in undress : " " The higher pains of a dim
political consciousness : " " The younger farmers who had
almost a sense of dissipation in talking to a man of his
questionable station and unknown experience : " " Her
life would be exalted into something quite new into a
sort of difficult blessedness such as one may imagine in
beings who are conscious of painfully growing into the
possession of higher powers " (true for George Eliot her-
self but not for such a girl as Esther Lyon) : These are
(86)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
instances of literary supremacy taken at random, with
many more behind.
Then how exquisite is that first love-scene between
Felix and Esther ! It is in these grave and tender
indications of Jove that George Eliot is at her best.
Gentle as " sleeping flowers " delicately wrought, like the
most perfect cameos graceful and suggestive, subtle and
yet strong they are always the very gems of her work.
And in " Felix Holt " especially they stand out with more
perfectness because of the inferior quality of so much that
surrounds them.
Felix himself is one of George Eliot's masterpieces in
the way of nobleness of ideal and firmness of drawing.
Whether he would have won such a girl as Esther, or
have allowed himself to be won by her, may be doubtful ;
but for all the rugged and disagreeable honesty of his
nature for all his high ideals of life and hideous taste in
costume for all his intrinsic tendency and external
bearishness, he is supreme. And with one of George
Eliot's best aphorisms, made in his intention, we close the
book with that kind of mingled disappointment and
delight which must needs be produced by the inferior
work of a great master. " Blows are sarcasms turned
stupid ; wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at
rest."
( 87 )
GEORGE ELIOT
The last three books of the series are the most
ponderous. Still beautiful and ever noble, they are like
over-cultivated fruits and flowers of which the girth is
inconvenient ; and in one, at least, certain defects already
discernible in the earlier issues attain a prominence fatal
to perfect work.
Never spontaneous, as time went on George Eliot
became painfully laboured. Her scholarship degenerated
into pedantry, and what had been stately and dignified
accuracy in her terms grew to be harsh and inartistic techni-
cality. The artificial pose she had adopted in her life
and bearing reacted on her work; and the contradiction
between her social circumstances and literary position
coloured more than her manners. A.11 her teaching went
to the side of self-sacrifice for the general good, of con-
formity with established moral standards, while her life
was in direct opposition to her words ; for though she
did no other woman personal injustice, she did set an
example of disobedience to the public law which wrought
more mischief than was counteracted by even the noblest of
her exhortations to submit to the restraints of righteous-
ness, however irksome they might be. And it was this
endeavour to co-ordinate insurgency and conformity, self-
will and self-sacrifice, that made the discord of which
every candid student of her work, who knew her history,
(88)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
was conscious from the beginning. Nowhere do we find
this contradiction more markedly shown than in "Romola,"
the first of the ponderous last three.
Her noblest work, " Romola " is yet one of George
Eliot's most defective in what we may call the scaffolding
of the building. The loftiness of sentiment, the masterly
delineation of character, the grand grasp of the political
and religious movement of the time, the evidences of deep
study and conscientious painstaking visible on every page,
are combined with what seems to us to be the most extra-
ordinary indifference to for it cannot be ignorance of
the social and domestic conditions of the time. The
whole story is surely impossible in view of the long arm
of the Church the personal restraints necessarily imposed
on women during the turbulent unrest of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries the proud exclusiveness of the well-
born citizens of any state.
Take the last first. Grant all the honour paid by
Cosmo and Lorenzo to the learned men of all nations,
especially to Greek scholars who, in the first fervour
of the Renaissance, were as sons of the gods to those
thirsting for the waters of the divine spring. Grant,
too, the example set by Bartolommeo Scala, who had
given his beautiful daughter Alessandra in marriage to
the " soldier-poet " Marullo ; was it likely that even an
(89)
GEORGE ELIOT
eccentric old scholar like the blind Bardo de' Bardi should
have so unreservedly adopted a nameless Greek adven-
turer, flung up like a second Ulysses from the waves,
unvouched for by any sponsor and unidentified by any
document ? We allow that Bardo might have taken Tito
as his scribe and secretary, seeing that the Cennini had
already employed him, waif and stray as he was ; but that
he should have consented to his daughter's marriage with
this stranger, and that her more conservative and more
suspicious godfather, Bernado del Nero, should have con-
sented, even if reluctantly, was just about as likely as that
an English country gentleman should allow his daughter
to marry a handsome gipsy.
If we think for a moment of what citizenship meant
in olden times, the improbability of the whole of Tito's
career becomes still more striking. As, in Athens, the
Sojourner never stood on the same plane with the autoch-
thon, so in Rome the Peregrinus was ineligible for public
office or the higher kind of marriage ; and though the
stricter part of the law was subsequently relaxed in favour
of a wider civic hospitality, the sentiment of exclusiveness
remained, and indeed does yet remain in Italy. It seems
more than improbable that Tito, a Greek adventurer,
should have been employed in any political service, save
perhaps as a base kind of scout and unhonoured spy.
( 90)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
That he should ever have taken the position of an
accredited public orator was so contrary to all the old
traditions and habits of thought as to be of the same sub-
stance as a fairy tale.
The character of Bardo, too, is non-Italian ; and his
modes of life and thought were as impossible as are some
other things to be hereafter spoken of. The Church had
a long arm, as we said, and a firm grip ; and while it
blinked indulgently enough at certain aberrations, it
demanded the show of conformity in essentials. Lorenzo
was a pagan, but he died receiving the Sacraments. The
Borgias were criminals, but their professions of faith were
loud-voiced and in true earnest. Men might inveigh
against the evil lives of the clergy and the excesses of
monks and nuns, but they had to confess God and the
Church ; and their diatribes had to be carefully worded as
witness Rabelais or a plea would certainly be found for the
fire and faggot as with Fra Dolcino and Savonarola.
So with conformity to the usages of life which, then and
now, are considered integral to morality. It could not
have been possible for Bardo to bring up his daughter
" aloof from the debasing influence " of her own sex, and
in a household with only one old man for a servant. The
times did not allow it ; no more than we should allow it
now in this freer day. This womanless home for an
( 91 )
GEORGE ELIOT
Italian girl at any time, more especially in the Middle
Ages, when even young wives were bound to have their
companions and duennas, is a serious blot in workmanship.
So, indeed, is the whole of Romola's life, being ana-
chronism and simply nineteenth-century English from start
to finish.
The things which both she and Tessa did, and were
allowed to do, are on a par with " Gulliver's Travels " and
" Peter Wilkins." It was as impossible for Tessa, a pretty
young unmarried girl, contadina as she was, to come into
Florence alone, as for a peasant child of three years old to
be sent with a message on business into the City of
London alone. To this day well-conducted women of
any class do not wander about the streets of Italian cities
unaccompanied ; and maidenhood is, as it always was,
sacredly and jealously guarded. Nor could Romola have
gone out and come in at her desire, as she is allowed by
the author. With streets filled by the turbulent factions
of the Bianchi and Neri, always ready for a fight or for a
love-adventure, what would have happened to, and been
thought of, a beautiful young woman slipping about within
the city and outside the gates at all hours of the day and
night ? She is said to be either quite alone (!), as when
she goes to Tessa's house, or merely accompanied by
Monna Brigida, as when she goes to the convent to see
(92 )
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
her dying brother which also, by the way, was im-
possible or attended, at a distance, by old Maso when
she attempts her flight as a solitary nun. She would
have lost name and state had she committed these eccen-
tricities ; and had she persisted in them, she would have
been sent to a convent that refuge for sorrow, that
shelter from danger, that prison for contumacy and her
godfather would have been the first to consign her to
what was then the only safe asylum for women. The
scene she has with Tito before Nello's shop is ludicrously
impossible as is their English-like return home together,
without retinue or lights, just like a man and wife of
to-day when she has been to fetch him from the public-
house, or, if she be of the better class, from his club.
English, too, is Romola's sitting up for her husband in
her queer womanless establishment, and opening the door
to him when he comes home late at night. For the
matter of that, indeed, Tito's solitary rambles are as much
out of line with the time, and the circumstances of that
time, as is Romola's strange daring. No man of any note
whatever appeared alone in the streets when out on a mid-
night expedition, either to commit murder or break the
seventh commandment. He took some one with him,
friend or servant, armed ; and to this day you will not
find Italians willingly walk alone at night. The whole of
(93)
GEORGE ELIOT
this kind of life, if necessary for the story, is dead against
truth and probability. So is Romola's flight, disguised
as a nun. Splendid as is the scene between her and
Savonarola, the vrai semblance is spoilt by this impossibility
of condition. Nor could any woman of that time,
brought up in a city, have felt a sense of freedom when
fairly outside the walls by herself on a strange road, going
to meet an unknown fate and bound to an unknown
bourne. She would have felt as a purdah woman of
India suddenly turned loose in the streets and environs of
Delhi as felt all those women whose evidence we read of
in matters of crime and murder, when they came face to
face with the desolation of unprotectedness. Modern
women call it freedom, but in the Middle Ages such a
feeling did not exist. All these things are anachronisms ;
as much so as if a novelist of the twentieth century,
writing of English life in the eighteenth, should clothe
his women in knickerbockers, mount them on bicycles,
and turn them into the football field and cricket-ground.
These exceptions taken to the scaffolding of the book,
we are free to admire its glorious nobility of sentiment, its
lofty purpose, its perfection of character-drawing, and the
dramatic power of its various scenes. Nothing can excel
the power with which Tito's character is shown in its
gradual slipping from simple selfishness to positive crimi-
(94)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
nality. The whole action may be summed up in George
Eliot's own words.
" When, the next morning, Tito put this determination
into act, he had chosen his colour in the game, and had
given an inevitable bent to his wishes. He had made it
impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to
be the truth that his father was dead ; impossible that he
should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the
precise facts of his conduct should not remain for ever
concealed. Under every guilty secret there is hidden a
brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life
is cherished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of
deeds often lies less in the commission than in the conse-
quent adjustment of our desires the enlistment of our
self-interest on the side of falsity ; as, on the other hand,
the purifying influence of public confession springs from
the fact that by it the hope in lies is for ever swept away,
and the soul recovers its noble attitude of sincerity."
But, giving every weight to the natural weakness,
sweetness and afFectionateness, as well as to the latent
falsity of Tito's character, we cannot accept the Tessa
episode as true to life in general, while it is eminently
untrue to Italian life, especially of those times. Tessa
herself, too, is wearisome with her tears and her kisses,
her blue eyes and baby face, so incessantly repeated and
(95 )
GEORGE ELIOT
harped on. She is as nauseating as she is impossible ; and
the whole story from first to last is an ugly blot on the
book.
In Romola and in .Savonarola we touch the
heights. The " tall lily " is an exquisite conception and is
supreme in human loveliness. Her two interviews with
Savonarola are superbly done, and the gradual crushing
down of her proud self-will under the passionate fervour
of the priest is beyond praise both for style and psycho-
logy. So, too, are the changes in the great preacher
himself the first, when his simple earnestness of belief in
his mission degenerates into self-consciousness and personal
assumption, as is the way with all reformers the second,
when he abandons his later attitude, and the dross is
burnt away as the hour of trial comes on him, and the
World no longer stands between God and his soul. The
final scenes of the Prate's public life are powerfully
wrought, with all George Eliot's mastery and eloquence
and deep religious fervour ; but it is in scenes and cir-
cumstances of this kind that she is ever at her best. In
humour and psychologic insight she is greater than any
English woman writer we have had ; in aphorisms she is
unrivalled ; but in playfulness she is clumsy, and in
catching the moral, intellectual and social tone of the times
of which she writes, she is nowhere.
(96)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
Contrast Romola's character and manner of life above
all those two thoroughly English letters of hers with all
that we know of Vittoria Colonna, the purest and noblest
woman of her day which was Romola's and at once we
see the difference between them the difference wrought by
four centuries Vittoria being essentially a woman of the
time, though a head and shoulders above the ruck ; while
Romola is as essentially a product of the nineteenth century,
In spite of the local colour which, after all, is only a
wash given by the descriptions of pageants and proces-
sions, and by the history of which George Eliot so ably
mastered the details, the whole book is nineteenth century,
from Monna Brigida's characteristically English speech
about Tessa's place in the house and the children's sweets,,
to Romola's as characteristically English attitude and
hygienic objections from a little maiden, without a
caretaker, carrying eggs to Piero, to Romola's solitary
visit to the studio and night perambulations about the
city.
All these shortcomings notwithstanding, " Romola "
will ever remain one of the noblest works of our noblest
author ; and, after all, did not Shakespeare make Hector
quote Aristotle, and show all his Greeks and Romans and
outlandish nondescripts from countries unknown to
himself, as nothing but sturdy Englishmen, such as lived
( 97 ) G
GEORGE ELIOT
and loved in the times of the great Eliza ? Where we
have so much to admire nay, to venerate we may let
the smaller mistakes pass. Yet they must be spoken of
by those who would be candid and not fulsome -just and
not flattering. By the way, did George Eliot know that
" Baldassare " is the name of one of the devils invoked
to this day by Sicilian witches ?
The longest of all the novels, " Middlemarch," is the
most interesting in its characters, its isolated scenes, its
moral meaning and philosophic extension ; but it is also
the most inartistic and the most encumbered with subordi-
nate interests and personages. The canvas is as crowded
as one of George Cruikshank's etchings ; and the work
would have gained by what George Eliot would have
called fission a division into two. The stories of
Dorothea and Casaubon and of Rosamond and Lydgate
are essentially separate entities ; and though they are
brought together at the last by an intermingled interest,
the result is no more true unification than the Siamese twins
or the Double-headed Nightingale represented one true
human being. The contrast between the two beautiful
young wives is well preserved, and the nicer shades of
difference are as clearly marked as are the more essential ;
for George Eliot was far too good a workman to scamp
( 98)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
in any direction, and the backs of her stories are as well
wrought as the fronts. But if one-third of the book
had been cut out failing that fission, which would have
been still better the work would have gained in propor-
tion to its compression.
The character of Dorothea marks the last stage in the
development of the personality which begins with Maggie
Tulliver, and is in reality Marian Evans's own self.
Maggie, Romola and Dorothea are the same person in
progressive stages of moral evolution. All are at cross
corners with life and fate all are rebellious against things
as they find them. Maggie's state of insurgency is the
crudest and simplest ; Romola's is the most passionate in
its moral reprobation of accepted un worthiness ; Dorothea's
is the widest in its mental horizon, and the most womanly
in the whole-hearted indifference to aught but love, which
ends the story and gives the conclusive echo. In its own
way, her action in taking Will Ladislaw is like Esther's in
marrying Felix Holt ; but it has not the unlikelihood of
Esther's choice. It is all for love, if one will, but it runs
more harmoniously with the broad lines of her character,
and gives us no sense of that dislocation which we get
from Esther's decision. And in its own way it is at once
a parallel and an apology.
The most masterly bits of work in " Middlemarch " are
(99)
GEORGE ELIOT
the characters of Rosamond and Casaubon. Rosamond's
unconscious selfishness, her moral thinness, and the super-
ficial quality of her love are all portrayed without a flaw
in the drawing ; while Casaubon's dryness, his literary
indecision following on his indefatigable research, and his
total inability to adjust himself to his new conditions,
together with his scrupulous formality of politeness com-
bined with real cruelty of temper, make a picture of
supreme psychologic merit. They who think that Casaubon
was meant for the late Rector of Lincoln know nothing
about George Eliot's early life. They who do know
some of those obscurer details, are well aware of the origin
whence she drew her masterly portrait, as they know
who was Mrs. Poyser, who Tom Tulliver, and who Hetty
Sorel. Hetty, indeed, is somewhat repeated in that
amazingly idiotic Tessa, who is neither English nor
Italian, nor, indeed, quite human in her molluscous silli-
ness ; but there are lines of relation which show them-
selves to experts, and the absence of the " cherry stone "
does not count for more than the dissimilarity always to
be found between two copies.
No finer bit of work was ever done than the deep and
subtle but true and most pathetic tragedy of Lydgate's
married life. The character of Rosamond was a difficult
one to paint, and one false touch could have been fatal.
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
To show her intense selfishness and shallowness and yet
not to make her revolting, was what only such a consum-
mate psychologist as George Eliot could have done.
And to show how Lydgate, strong man as he was and full
of noble ambition and splendid aims, was necessarily
subdued, mastered and ruined by the tenacious weakness
and moral unworthiness of such a wife, yet not to make
him contemptible, was also a task beyond the power of
any but the few Masters of our literature. All the scenes
between this ill-assorted pair are in George Eliot's
best manner and up to her highest mark ; and the
gradual declination of Rosamond's love, together with
Lydgate's gradual awakening to the truth of things as
they were, are portrayed with a touch as firm as it is
tender.
That scene on the receipt of Sir Godwin's letter is as
tragic in its own way as Othello or a Greek drama.
It has in it the same sense of human helplessness in
the presence of an overmastering fate. Rosamond was
Lydgate's Fate. Her weakness, tenacity and duplicity
his stronger manhood, which could not crush the weaker
woman his love, which could not coerce, nor punish, nor
yet control the thing he loved all made the threads of
that terrible net in which he was entangled, and by which the
whole worth of his life was destroyed. It is a story that
GEORGE ELIOT
goes home to the consciousness of many men, who know,
as Lydgate knew, that they have been mastered by the one
who to them is " as an animal of another and feebler
species " who know, as Lydgate knew, that their energies
have been stunted, their ambition has been frustrated, and
their horizon narrowed and darkened because of that
tyranny which the weaker woman so well knows how to
exercise over the stronger man.
Casaubon is as masterly in drawing as is Rosamond
or Lydgate. We confess to a sadly imperfect sympathy
with Dorothea in her queer enthusiasm for this dry stick of
a man. Learned or not, he was scarcely one to whom a
young woman, full of life's strong and sweet emotions,
would care to give herself as a wife. One can understand
the more impersonal impulse which threw Marian Evans
into an attitude of adoration before the original of her dry
stick ; but when it comes to the question of marriage, the
thing is simply revolting as done by the girl, not only of
her own free-will but against the advice and prayers of her
friends. Tom was to be excused for his harshness and
irritation against Maggie ; and Celia's commonplaces of
wisdom for the benefit of that self-willed and recalcitrant
Dodo, if not very profound nor very stimulating, nor yet
sympathetic, were worth more in the daily life and ordering
of sane folk than Dorothea's blind and obstinate determina-
( 102)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
tion. Beautiful and high-minded as she is, she is also one
of those irritating saints whose virtues one cannot but
revere, whose personal charms one loves and acknowledges,
and whose wrongheadedness makes one Jong to punish
them or at least restrain them by main force from social
suicide. And to think that to her first mistake she
adds that second of marrying Will Ladislaw the utter
snob that he is ! Where were George Eliot's perceptions ?
Or was it that in Ladislaw she had a model near at
hand, whom she saw through coloured glasses, which
also shed their rosy light on her reproduction, so
that her copy was to her as idealised as the original, and
she was ignorant of the effect produced on the clear-
sighted ? Yet over all the mistakes made by her through
defective taste and obstinate unwisdom, the beauty of
Dorothea's character stands out as did Romola's like a
" white lily " in the garden. She is a superb creature in
her own way, and her disillusionment is of the nature
of a tragedy. But what could any woman expect
from a man who could write such a love-letter as that of
Mr. Casaubon's ?
The canvas of " Middlemarch " is overcrowded, as we
said ; yet how good some of the characters are ! The
sturdy uprightness, tempered with such loving sweetness, of
Cabel Garth ; the commonplace negation of all great and all
( 103 )
GEORGE ELIOT
unworthy qualities of the Vincys Celia and Sir James
Mr. Farebrother and Mr. and Mrs. Cadwallader all are
supreme. We confess we do not care much for the
portraiture of Mr. Bulstrode and his spiteful delator
Raffles George Eliot is not good at melodrama ; also the
whole episode of Mr. Featherstone's illness, with his
watching family and Mary Garth, too vividly recalls old
Anthony Chuzzlewit and all that took place round his
death-bed and about his will, to give a sense of truth
or novelty. George Eliot's power did not lie in the same
direction as that of Charles Dickens, and the contrast is
not to her advantage. Great humorists as both were,
their humour was essentially different, and will not bear
comparison.
No book that George Eliot ever wrote is without
its wise and pithy aphorisms, its brilliant flashes of
wit, its innumerable good things. Space will not permit
our quoting one-tenth part of the good things scattered
about these fascinating pages. Celia's feeling, which
she stifled in the depths of her heart, that "her sister
was too religious for family comfort. Notions and
scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of
treading or sitting down, or even eating : " (But, farther
on, what an unnecessary bit of pedantry ! " In short,
woman was a problem which, since Mr. Brooke's mind
( 104 )
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
felt blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than
the revolutions of an irregular solid.'"'} Mrs. Cadwallader's
sense of birth, so that a " De Bracy reduced to take his
dinner in a basin would have seemed to her an ex-
ample of pathos worth exaggerating ; and I fear his
aristocratic vices would not have horrified her. But her
feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious
hatred : " " Indeed, she (Mrs. Waule) herself was accus-
tomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of
behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's inten-
tions about families : " " Strangers, whether wrecked and
clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by
portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination
for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged
itself in vain : " " Ladislaw, a sort of Burke with a leaven
of Shelley : " " But it is one thing to like defiance, and
another thing to like its consequences " an observation
wrung out of her own disturbed and inharmonious
experience : " That controlled self-consciousness of
manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity : "
These are a few picked out at random, but the wealth
that remains behind is but inadequately represented by
stray nuggets.
Before we close the volume we would like to note
the one redeeming little flash of human tenderness
( 105 )
GEORGE ELIOT
in Mr. Casaubon when he had received his death-
warrant from Lydgate, and Dorothea waits for him
to come up to bed. It is the only tender and spon-
taneous moment in his life as George Eliot has painted
it, and its strangeness makes its pathos as well as its
truth.
The last of the lengthy three, and the last novel she
wrote, " Daniel Deronda " is the most wearisome, the least
artistic, and the most unnatural of all George Eliot's books.
Of course it has the masterly touch, and, for all its com-
parative inferiority, has also its supreme excellence. But
in plot, treatment and character it is far below its pre-
decessors. Some of the characters are strangely unnatural.
Grandcourt, for instance, is more like the French carica-
ture of an English milord than like a possible English
gentleman depicted by a compatriot. Deronda himself is
a prig of the first water ; while Gwendolen is self-con-
tradictory all through like a tangled skein of which you
cannot find the end, and therefore cannot bring it into
order and intelligibility. Begun on apparently clear lines
of self-will, pride, worldly ambition and personal self-
indulgence without either conscience or deep affections
self-contained and self-controlled she wavers off into a
condition of moral weakness, of vagrant impulses and
( 106)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
humiliating self-abandonment for which nothing that went
before has prepared us.
That she should ever have loved, or even fancied
she loved, such a frozen fish as Grandcourt was impossible
to a girl so full of energy as Gwendolen is shown to be.
Clear in her desires of what she wanted, she would have
accepted him, as she did, to escape from the hateful
life to which else she would have been condemned. But
she would have accepted him without even that amount of
self-deception which is portrayed in the decisive interview.
She knew his cruel secret, and she deliberately chose to
ignore it. So far good. It is what she would have done.
But where is the logic of making her " carry on " as she
did when she received the diamonds on her wedding-day ?
It was a painful thing, sure enough, and the mad letter that
came with them was disagreeable enough ; but it could not
have been the shock it is described, nor could it have made
Gwendolen turn against her husband in such sudden hatred,
seeing that she already knew the whole shameful story.
These are faults in psychology ; and the conduct of the
plot is also imperfect. George Eliot's plots are always
bad when she attempts intricacy, attaining instead con-
fusion and unintelligibility ; but surely nothing can be
much sillier than the ] whole story of Deronda's birth and
upbringing, nor can anything be more unnatural than the
( 107 )
GEORGE ELIOT
character and conduct of his mother. What English
gentleman would have brought up a legitimately-born
Jewish child under conditions which made the whole
world believe him to be his own illegitimate son ?
And what young man, brought up in the belief that
he was an English gentleman by birth leaving out
on which side of the blanket would have rejoiced to
find himself a Jew instead ? The whole story is im-
probable and far-fetched ; as also is Deronda's rescue of
Mirah and her unquestioning adoption by the Meyricks.
It is all distortion, and in no wise like real life ; and
some of the characters are as much twisted out of shape
as is the story. Sir Hugo Mallinger and Mr. and
Mrs. Gascoigne are the most natural of the whole
gallery the defect of exaggeration or caricature spoiling
most of the others.
Of these others, Gwendolen herself is far and away the
most unsatisfactory. Her sudden hatred of her husband
is strained ; so is her love for Deronda ; so is her repent-
ance for her constructive act of murder. That she should
have failed to throw the rope to Grandcourt, drowning in
the sea, was perhaps natural enough. That she should
have felt such abject remorse and have betrayed herself
in such humiliating unreserve to Deronda was not. All
through the story her action with regard to Deronda is dead
( 108 )
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
against the base lines of her character, and is compatible
only with such an overwhelming amount of physical passion
as does sometimes make women mad. We have no hint
of this. On the contrary, all that Gwendolen says is
founded on spiritual longing for spiritual improvement
spiritual direction with no hint of sexual impulse. Yet
she acts as one overpowered by that impulse throwing to
the winds pride, reserve, womanly dignity and common
sense. Esther was not harmonious with herself in her
choice of Felix Holt over Harold Transome, but Esther
was naturalness incarnate compared with Gwendolen as
towards Daniel Deronda. And the evolution of Esther's
soul, and the glimpse given of Rosamond's tardy sense of
some kind of morality, difficult to be believed as each was,
were easy sums in moral arithmetic contrasted with
the birth and sudden growth of what had been Gwen-
dolen's very rudimentary soul springing into maturity
in a moment, like a fully-armed Athene, without the need
of the more gradual process. Add to all these defects,
an amount of disquisition and mental dissection which
impedes the story till it drags on as slowly as a heavily laden
wain add the fatal blunder of making long scenes which
do not help on the action nor elucidate the plot, and the
yet more fatal blunder of causeless pedantry, and we have
to confess that our great master's last novel is also her
( 109 )
GEORGE ELIOT
worst. But then the one immediately preceding was
incomparably her best.
We come now to the beauties of the work to the
inimitable force of some phrases to the noble aim and
meaning of the story to the lofty spirit informing all
those interrupting disquisitions, which are really inter-
polated moral essays, and must not be confounded with
padding. Take this little shaft aimed at that Gr<eculus
esuriens Lush, that " half-caste among gentlemen " and
the dme damnee of Grandcourt. " Lush's love of ease was
well satisfied at present, and if his puddings were rolled
towards him in the dust he took the inside bits and found
them relishing." Again : " We sit up at night to read
about Cakya-Mouni, Saint Francis and Oliver Cromwell,
but whether we should be glad for any one at all like
them to call on us the next morning, still more to reveal
himself as a new relation, is quite another matter : " " A
man of refined pride shrinks from making a lover's
approaches to a woman whose wealth or rank might
make them appear presumptuous or low-motived ; but
Deronda was finding a more delicate difficulty in a posi-
tion which, superficially taken, was the reverse of that
though, to an ardent reverential love, the loved woman
has always a kind of wealth which makes a man keenly
susceptible about the aspect of his addresses." (We
( no)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
extract this sentence as an instance of George Eliot's fine
feeling and delicate perception expressed in her worst and
clumsiest manner.) " A blush is no language, only a
dubious flag-signal, which may mean either of two con-
tradictions."
" Grandcourt held that the Jamaican negro was a beastly
sort of baptist Caliban ; Deronda said he had always felt a
little with Caliban, who naturally had his own point of view
and could sing a good song ; " " Mrs. Davilow observed
that her father had an estate in Barbadoes, but that she
herself had never been in the West Indies ; Mrs. Torring-
ton was sure she should never sleep in her bed if she
lived among blacks ; her husband corrected her by saying
that the blacks would be manageable enough if it
were not for the half-breeds ; and Deronda remarked
that the whites had to thank themselves for the half-
breeds."
It is in such " polite pea-shooting " as this that
George Eliot shows her inimitable humour the quick
give-and-take of her conversations being always in
harmony with her characters. But, indeed, unsatisfac-
tory as a novel though " Daniel Deronda " is, it is
full of beauties of all kinds, from verbal wit to the
grandly colossal sublimity of Mordecai, and Deronda's
outburst of passionate desire to weld the scattered Jews
GEORGE ELIOT
into one nation of which he should be the heart and
brain.
Whatever George Eliot did bears this impress of
massive sincerity of deep and earnest feeling of lofty pur-
pose and noble teaching. She was not a fine artist, and she
spoilt her later work by pedantry and overlay, but she
stands out as the finest woman writer we have had or pro-
bably shall have stands a head and shoulders above the
best of the rest. She touched the darker parts of life and
passion, but she touched them with clean hands and a pure
mind, and with that spirit of philosophic truth which can
touch pitch and not be defiled. Yet prolific as she was, and
the creator of more than one living character, she was not a
flexible writer and her range was limited. She repeated
situations and motives with a curious narrowness of scope,
and in almost all her heroines, save Dinah and Dorothea,
who are evoluted from the beginning, paints the gradual
evolution of a soul by the ennobling influence of a higher
mind and a religious love.
We come now to a curious little crop of errors. Though
so profound a scholar being indeed too learned for per-
fect artistry she makes strange mistakes for a master of the
language such as she was. She spells " insistence " with an
" a," and she gives a superfluous " c " to " Machiavelli."
Cm)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
She sometimes permits herself to slip into the literary
misdemeanour of no nominative to her sentence, and into
the graver sin of making a singular verb govern the plural
noun of a series. She says " frightened at " and " under
circumstances " ; " by the sly " and " down upon " ; and
she follows " neither " with " or," as also " never " and
" not." She is " averse to " ; she has even been known
to split her infinitive, and to say " and which " without
remorse. Once she condescends to the iniquity of " pro-
ceeding to take," than which " commencing " is only one
stage lower in literary vulgarity ; and many of her sen-
tences are as clumsy as a clown's dancing-steps. As no
one can accuse her of either ignorance or indifference, still
less of haste and slap-dash, these small flaws in the great
jewel of her genius are instructive instances of the clinging
effect of our carelessness in daily speech ; so that gramma-
tical inaccuracy becomes as a second nature to us, and has
to be unlearned by all who write.
Nevertheless, with all her faults fully acknowledged and
honestly shown, we ever return as to an inexhaustible
fountain, to her greatness of thought, her supreme
power, her nobility of aim, her matchless humour, her
magnificent drawing, her wise philosophy, her accurate
learning as profound as it was accurate. Though we do
not bracket her with Plato and Kant, as did one of her
( 113 ) H
GEORGE ELIOT
panegyrists, nor hold her equal to Fielding for naturalness,
nor to Scott for picturesqueness, nor as able as was
Thackeray to project herself into the conditions of
thought and society of times other than her own, we do
hold her as the sceptred queen of our English Victorian
authoresses superior even to Charlotte Bronte, to Mrs.
Gaskell, to Harriet Martineau formidable rivals as these
are to all others, living or dead.
If she had not crossed that Rubicon, or, having crossed
it, had been content with more complete insurgency than
she was, she would have been a happier woman and a yet
more finished novelist. As things were, her life and
principles were at cross-corners ; and when her literary
success had roused up her social ambition, and fame had
lifted her far above the place where her birth had set her,
she realised the mistake she had made. Then the sense of
inharmoniousness between what she was and what she would
have been did, to some degree, react on her work, to the
extent at least of killing in it all passion and spontaneity.
Her whole life and being were moulded to an artificial
pose, and the " made " woman could not possibly be the
spontaneous artist. Her yet more fatal blunder of marry-
ing an obscure individual many years younger than herself,
and so destroying the poetry of her first union by de-
stroying its sense of continuity and constancy, would have
( "4)
By MRS. LYNN LINTON
still more disastrously reacted on her work had she lived.
She died in time, for anything below " Theophrastus Such "
would have seriously endangered her fame and lessened
her greatness culminating as this did in " Middlemarch,"
the best and grandest of her novels, from the zenith of
which " Daniel Deronda," her last, is a sensible decline.
MRS. GASKELL
By EDNA LYALL
MRS. GASKELL
[F all the novelists of Queen Victoria's
reign there is not one to whom the
present writer turns with such a sense of
love and gratitude as to Mrs. Gaskell.
This feeling is undoubtedly shared by
thousands of men and women, for about all the novels
there is that wonderful sense of sympathy, that broad
human interest which appeals to readers of every descrip-
tion. The hard-worked little girl in the schoolroom can
forget the sorrows of arithmetic or the vexations of French
verbs as she pores over " Wives and Daughters " on a
Saturday half-holiday, and, as George Sand remarked to
Lord Houghton, this same book, " Wives and Daughters,"
" would rivet the attention of the most blast man of the
world."
With the exception of her powerful " Life of Charlotte
Bronte," Mrs. Gaskell wrote only novels or short stories.
( "9)
MRS. GASKELL
The enormous difficulties which attended the writing of a
biography of the author of " Jane Eyre " would, we ven-
ture to think, have baffled any other writer of that time.
It is easy now, years after Charlotte Bronte's death, to
criticise the wisdom of this or that page, to hunt up
slight mistakes, to maintain that in some details Mrs.
Gaskell was wrong. To be wise too late is an easy and,
to some apparently, a most grateful task ; but it would,
nevertheless, be hard to find a biography of more fasci-
nating interest, or one which more successfully grappled
with the great difficulty of the undertaking.
As Mr. Clement Shorter remarks, the " Life of Char-
lotte Bronte " " ranks with Boswell's ' Life of Johnson ' and
Lockhart's * Life of Scott.' ' It is pleasant, too, to read
Charlotte Bronte's own words in a letter to Mr. Williams,
where she mentions her first letter from her future friend
and biographer :
"The letter you forwarded this morning was from
Mrs. Gaskell, authoress of * Mary Barton.' She said I
was not to answer it, but I cannot help doing so. The
note brought the tears to my eyes. She is a good, she is
a great woman. Proud am I that I can touch a chord of
sympathy in souls so noble. In Mrs. Gaskell's nature it
mournfully pleases me to fancy a remote affinity to my
sister Emily. In Miss Martineau's mind I have always
( 120)
By EDNA LYALL
felt the same, though there are wide differences. Both
these ladies are above me certainly far my superiors in
attainments and experience. I think I could look up to
them if I knew them."
For lovers of the author of " Mary Barton " it is hard,
however, not to feel a grudge against the " Life of Char-
lotte Bronte" or, rather, the reception accorded to it.
Owing to the violent attacks to which it gave rise, to a
threatened action for libel on the part of some of those
mentioned in the book, and to the manifold annoyances to
which the publication of the Biography subjected the
writer, Mrs. Gaskell determined that no record of her own
life should be written.
It is pleasant to find that there were gleams of light
mixed with the many vexations. Charles Kingsley writes
to Mrs. Gaskell in warm appreciation of the " Life " :
" Be sure," he says, " that the book will do good. It
will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a
simple, virtuous, practical home-life is consistent with high
imaginative genius ; and it will shame, too, the prudery
of a not over-cleanly, though carefully whitewashed, age,
into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now)
quite compatible with the knowledge of evil. I confess
that the book has made me ashamed of myself. * Jane
Eyre ' I hardly looked into, very seldom reading a work
MRS. GASKELL
of fiction yours, indeed, and Thackeray's are the only
ones I care to open. * Shirley ' disgusted me at the open-
ing, and I gave up the writer and her books with the
notion that she was a person who liked coarseness.
How I misjudged her ! and how thankful I am that I
never put a word of my misconceptions into print, or
recorded my misjudgments of one who is a whole heaven
above me. Well have you done your work, and given us
a picture of a valiant woman made perfect by sufferings.
I shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has
written."
Mrs. Gaskell's wish regarding her own biography
has, of course, been respected by her family ; but the
world is the poorer, and it is impossible not to regret
that the life of so dearly loved a writer must never
be attempted.
The books reveal a mind as delicately pure as a child's,
wedded to that true mother's heart which is wide enough
to take in all the needy. Looking, moreover, at that
goodly row of novels whether in the dear old shabby
volumes that have been read and re-read for years, or
in that dainty little set recently published in a case,
which the rising generation can enjoy one cannot help
reflecting that here is " A Little Child's Monument,"
surely the most beautiful memorial of a great love and a
( 122 )
By EDNA LYALL
great grief that could be imagined. It was not until the
death of her little child the only son of the family that
Mrs. Gaskell, completely broken down by grief, began, at
her husband's suggestion, to write. And thus a great
sorrow brought forth a rich and wonderful harvest, as
grief borne with strength and courage always may do ;
and the world has good reason to remember that little ten
months' child whose short life brought about such great
results.
A question naturally suggests itself at this point as to
Mrs. Gaskell's birth and education. How far had she
inherited her literary gifts ? And in what way had her
mind been influenced by the surroundings of her child-
hood and girlhood ? Her mother, Mrs. Stevenson, was a
Miss Holland, of Sandlebridge, in Cheshire ; her father
William Stevenson was at first classical tutor in the
Manchester Academy, and later on, during his residence
in Edinburgh, was editor of the Scots Magazine and
a frequent contributor to the Edinburgh Review. He
was next appointed Keeper of the Records to the Treasury,
an appointment which caused his removal from Edinburgh
to Chelsea ; and it was there, in Cheyne Row, that Eliza-
beth Cleghorn Stevenson, the future novelist, was born.
Owing to the death of her mother, she was adopted
when only a month old by her aunt, Mrs. Lumb, and
( 123)
MRS. GASKELL
taken to Knutsford, in Cheshire, the little town so wonder-
fully described in " Cranford." For two years in her
girlhood she was educated at Stratford-on-Avon, walking
in the flowery meadows where Shakspere once walked,
worshipping in the stately old church where he wor-
shipped, and where he willed that his body should be left
at rest ; nor is it possible to help imagining that the
associations of that ideal place had an influence on the
mind of the future writer, doing something to give
that essentially English tone which characterises all her
books.
After her father's second marriage she went to live with
him, and her education was superintended by him until
his death in 1829, when she once more returned to
Knutsford. Here, at the age of twenty-two, she was
married to the Rev. William Gaskell, M.A., of Cross
Street Chapel, Manchester ; and Manchester remained her
home ever after.
Such are the brief outlines of a life story which was to
have such a wide and lasting influence for good. For
nothing is more striking than this when we think over the
well-known novels they are not only consummate works
of art, full of literary charm, perfect in style and rich with
the most delightful humour and pathos they are books
from which that morbid lingering over the loathsome
( 124)
By EDNA LYALL
details of vice, those sensuous descriptions of sin too rife
in the novels of the present day, are altogether excluded.
Not that the stories are namby-pamby, or unreal in any
sense ; they are wholly free from the horrid prudery, the
Pharisaical temper, which makes a merit of walking
through life in blinkers and refuses to know of anything
that can shock the respectable. Mrs. Gaskell was too
genuine an artist to fall either into this error or into the
error of bad taste and want of reserve. She drew life with
utter reverence ; she held the highest of all ideals, and she
dared to be true.
How tender and womanly and noble, for instance, is her
treatment of the difficult subject which forms the motif of
" Ruth " ! How sorrowfully true to life is the story of
the dressmaker's apprentice with no place in which to
spend her Sunday afternoons ! We seem ourselves to
breathe the dreadful " stuffy " atmosphere of the work-
room, to feel the dreary monotony of the long day's work.
It is so natural that the girl's fancy should be caught by
Henry Bellingham, who was courteous to her when she
mended the torn dress of his partner at the ball ; so in-
evitable that she should lose her heart to him when
she witnessed his gallant rescue of the drowning child.
But her fall was not inevitable, and one of the finest bits
in the whole novel is the description of Ruth's hesitation
( 125 )
MRS. GASKELL
in the inn parlour when, finding herself most cruelly and
unjustly cast off by her employer, she has just accepted her
lover's suggestion that she shall go with him to London,
little guessing what the promise involved, yet intuitively
feeling that her consent had been unwise.
" Ruth became as hot as she had previously been cold,
and went and opened the window, and leant out into the
still, sweet evening air. The bush of sweetbriar under-
neath the window scented the place, and the delicious frag-
rance reminded her of her old home. I think scents affect
and quicken the memory even more than either sights or
sounds ; for Ruth had instantly before her eyes the little
garden beneath the window of her mother's room, with the
old man leaning on his stick watching her, just as he had
done not three hours before on that very afternoon." She
remembers the faithful love of the old labouring man and
his wife who had served her parents in their lifetime, and
for their sake would help and advise her now. Would it
not be better to go to them ?
"She put on her bonnet and opened the parlour door;
but then she saw the square figure of the landlord standing
at the open house door, smoking his evening pipe, and
looming large and distinct against the dark air and land-
scape beyond. Ruth remembered the cup of tea that she
had drunk ; it must be paid for, and she had no money with
( 126 )
By EDNA LYALL
her. She feared that he would not let her leave the house
without paying. She thought that she would leave a note
for Mr. Bellingham saying where she was gone, and how
she had left the house in debt, for (like a child) all
dilemmas appeared of equal magnitude to her; and the
difficulty of passing the landlord while he stood there, and
of giving him an explanation of the circumstances,
appeared insuperable, and as awkward and fraught with
inconvenience as far more serious situations. She kept
peeping out of her room after she had written her little
pencil note, to see if the outer door was still obstructed.
There he stood motionless, enjoying his pipe, and looking
out into the darkness which gathered thick with the coming
night. The fumes of the tobacco were carried into the
house and brought back Ruth's sick headache. Her energy
left her ; she became stupid and languid, and incapable of
spirited exertion ; she modified her plan of action to the
determination of asking Mr. Bellingham to take her to
Milham Grange, to the care of her humble friends, instead
of to London. And she thought in her simplicity that
he would instantly consent when he had heard her
reasons."
The selfishness of the man who took advantage of her
weakness and ignorance is finely drawn because it is not at
all exaggerated. Henry Bellingham is no monster of
( 127 )
MRS. GASKELL
wickedness, but a man with many fine qualities spoilt by an
over-indulgent and unprincipled mother, and yielding too
easily to her worldly-wise arguments.
Ruth first sees a faint trace of his selfishness she calls
it " unfairness " when, on their arrival in Wales, he
persuades the landlady to give them rooms in the hotel
and to turn out on a false pretext some other guests into
the dfyendance across the road. She understands his selfish
littleness of soul only too well when, years after, she talks
to him during that wonderfully described interview in the
chapter called " The Meeting on the Sands." He cannot
in the least understand her. " The deep sense of penitence
she expressed he took for earthly shame, which he imagined
he could soon soothe away." He actually has the audacity
to tempt her a second time; then, after her indignant
refusal, he offers her marriage. To his great amazement
she refuses this too. " Why, what on earth makes you say
that ? " asked he ....
" I do not love you. I did once. Don't say I did not love
you then ; but I do not now. I could never love you
again. All you have said and done since you came to
Abermouth has only made me wonder how I ever could
have loved you. We are very far apart ; the time that has
pressed down my life like brands of hot iron, and scarred
me for ever, has been nothing to you. You have talked
( "8)
By EDNA LYALL
of it with no sound of moaning in your voice, no shadow
over the brightness of your face ; it has left no sense of sin
on your conscience, while me it haunts and haunts ;
and yet I might plead that I was an ignorant child ; only
I will not plead anything, for God knows all. But this is
only one piece of our great difference."
" You mean that I am no saint," he said, impatient at
her speech. " Granted. But people who are no saints
have made very good husbands before now. Come, don't
let any morbid, overstrained conscientiousness interfere
with substantial happiness happiness both to you and to
me for I am sure I can make you happy ay ! and make
you love me too, in spite of your pretty defiance
And here are advantages for Leonard, to be gained by you
quite in a holy and legitimate way."
She stood very erect.
" If there was one thing needed to confirm me, you
have named it. You shall have nothing to do with my
boy by my consent, much less by my agency. I would
rather see him working on the roadside than leading such
a life being such a one as you are If at last I
have spoken out too harshly and too much in a spirit of
judgment, the fault is yours. If there were no other reason
to prevent our marriage but the one fact that it would bring
Leonard into contact with you, that would be enough."
( 129 ) i
MRS. GASKELL
Later on, a fever visits the town, and Ruth becomes a
nurse. When she hears that the father of her child is ill
and untended she volunteers to nurse him, and, being
already worn out with work, she dies in consequence.
The man's smallness of mind, his contemptible selfishness,
are finely indicated in the scene where he goes to look at
Ruth as she lies dead.
He was " disturbed " by the distress of the old servant
Sally, and saying, " Come, my good woman ! we must all
die," tries to console her with a sovereign ! !
The old servant turns upon him indignantly, then
" bent down and kissed the lips from whose marble,
unyielding touch he recoiled even in thought." At that
moment the old minister, who had sheltered Ruth in her
trouble, enters. Henry makes many offers to him as to
providing for Ruth's child, Leonard, and says, " I cannot
tell you how I regret that she should have died in con-
sequence of her love to me." But from gentle old Mr.
Benson he receives only an icy refusal, and the stern
words, " Men may call such actions as yours youthful
follies. There is another name for them with God."
The sadness of the book is relieved by the delightful
humour of Sally, the servant. The account of the wooing
of Jeremiah Dixon is a masterpiece ; and Sally's hesitation
when, having found her proof against the attractions of
( 130)
By EDNA LYALL
u a four-roomed house, furniture conformable, and eighty
pounds a year," her lover mentions the pig that will be
ready for killing by Christmas, is a delicious bit of comedy.
" Well, now ! would you believe it ? the pig were a
temptation. I'd a receipt for curing hams. . . . How-
ever, I resisted. Says I, very stern, because I felt I'd been
wavering, ' Master Dixon, once for all, pig or no pig, I'll
not marry you.' '
The description of the minister's home is very beautiful.
Here are a few lines which show in what its charm
consisted :
" In the Bensons' house there was the same uncon-
sciousness of individual merit, the same absence of intro-
spection and analysis of motive, as there had been in her
mother ; but it seemed that their lives were pure and
good not merely from a lovely and beautiful nature, but
from some law the obedience to which was of itself har-
monious peace, and which governed them. . . . This
household had many failings ; they were but human, and,
with all their loving desire to bring their lives into har-
mony with the will of God, they often erred and fell
short. But somehow the very errors and faults of one
individual served to call out higher excellences in another ;
and so they reacted upon each other, and the result of
short discords was exceeding harmony and peace."
MRS. GASKELL
The publication of " Ruth," with its brave, outspoken
words, its fearless demand for one standard of morality
for men and women, subjected the author to many attacks,
as we may gather from the following warm-hearted letter
by Charles Kingsley :
7*/y25, 1853.
" I am sure that you will excuse my writing to you
thus abruptly when you read the cause of my writing.
I am told, to my great astonishment, that you had heard
painful speeches on account of 'Ruth'; what was told
me raised all my indignation and disgust. . . . Among
all my large acquaintance I never heard, or have heard,
but one unanimous opinion of the beauty and righteous-
ness of the book, and that above all from really good
women. If you could have heard the things which I
heard spoken of it this evening by a thorough High
Church, fine lady of the world, and by her daughter,
too, as pure and pious a soul as one need see, you would
have no more doubt than I have, that, whatsoever the
* snobs ' and the bigots may think, English people, in
general, have but one opinion of * Ruth,' and that is,
one of utter satisfaction. I doubt not you have had this
said to you already often. Believe me, you may have it
said to you as often as you will by the purest and most
( 132 )
By EDNA LYALL
refined of English women. May God bless you, and help
you to write many more such books as you have already
written, is the fervent wish of your very faithful servant,
"C. KlNGSLEY."
" Mary Barton," which was the first of the novels, was
published in 1848, and this powerful and fascinating story
at once set Mrs. Gaskell in the first rank of English
novelists. People differed as to the views set forth in the
book, but all were agreed as to its literary force and its
great merits. Like " Alton Locke," it has done much to
break (flnwr? r1qcc lvtf ;rc an d make the rich try to under-
stand, -the -.pox>r; and when we see the great advance in
this direction which has been made since the date of its
publication, we are able partly to realise how startling the
first appearance of such a book must have been. The
secret of the extraordinary power which the book exercises
on its readers is, probably, that the writer takes one into
the. very heart of the life she is describing.
Most books of the sort fail to arrest our attention.
Why ? Because they are written either as mere " goody "
books for parish libraries, and are carefully watered down
lest they should prove too sensational and enthralling ;
or because they are written by people who have only a
MRS. GASKELL
surface knowledge of the characters they describe and the
life they would fain depict. "David Copperfield" is
probably the most popular book Dickens ever wrote, and
is likely to outlive his other works, just because he him-
self knew so thoroughly well all that his hero had to pass
through, and could draw from real knowledge the charac-
ters in the background. And at the present time we are
all able to understand the Indian Mutiny in a way that
has never been possible before, because Mrs. Steel in her
wonderful novel, "On the Face of the Waters," has,
through her knowledge of native life, given us a real
insight into the heart of a great nation.
Brilliant trash may succeed for two or three seasons,
but unless there is in it some germ of real truth which
appeals to the heart and conscience it will not live.
Sensationalism alone will not hold its ground. There
must be in the writer a real deep inner knowledge of his
subject if the book is to do its true work. And we
venture to think that " Mary Barton," which for nearly
half a century has been influencing people all over the
world, owes its vitality very largely to the fact that Mrs.
Gaskell knew the working people of Manchester, not as a
professional doler out of tracts or charitable relief, not
in any detestable, patronising way, but knew them as
friends.
By EDNA LYALL
This surely is the reason why the characters in the
novel are so intensely real. What could be finer than the
portrait of Mary herself, from the time when we are first
introduced to her as the young apprentice to a milliner
and dressmaker, to the end of the book, when she has
passed through her great agony ? How entirely the
reader learns to live with her in her brave struggle to
prove her lover's innocence ! One of the most powerful
parts of the book is the description of her plucky pursuit
of the good ship John Cropper, on board of which was
the only man who could save her lover's life by proving
an alibi.
But it is not only the leading characters that are so
genuine and so true to life. Old Ben Sturgis, the boat-
man, rough of speech but with more heart than many a
smooth-tongued talker ; his wife, who sheltered Mary
when she had no notion what manner of woman she was ;
Job Legh, who proved such a good friend to both hero
and heroine in their trouble, and whose well-meaning
deception of old Mrs. Wilson is so humorously de-
scribed ; John Barton, the father, with the mournful
failure at the close of his upright life ; old Mr. Carson,
the rich father of the murdered man, with his thirst for
vengeance, and his tardy but real forgiveness, when he let
himself be led by a little child all these are living men
( 135 )
MRS. GASKELL
and women, not puppets ; while in the character and the
tragic story of poor Esther we see the fruits of the
writer's deep knowledge of the life of those she helped
when released from gaol.
But Mrs. Gaskell looked on both sides of the question.
In "North and South," published in 1855, she deals
with the labour question from the master's standpoint,
and in Mr. Thornton draws a most striking picture of a
manufacturer who is just and well-meaning one who
really respects and cares for the men he employs. The
main interest of this book lies, however, in the character
of the heroine, Margaret, who is placed in a most cruel
dilemma by a ne'er-do-well brother whom she shields. By
far the most dramatic scene is that in which, to enable
Frederick to escape, Margaret tells a deliberate falsehood
to the detective who is in search of him. The torture of
mind she suffers afterwards for having uttered this inten-
tional lie, and the difficult question whether under any
circumstances a lie is warrantable, are dealt with in the
writer's most powerful way.
In 1853 the same year in which "Ruth" was pub-
lished the greatest of all Mrs. Gaskell's works appeared,
the inimitable " Cranford." For humour and for pathos
we have nothing like this in all the Victorian literature.
It is a book of which one can never tire : yet it can scarcely
( 136)
By EDNA LYALL
be said to have a plot at all, being just the most delicate
miniature painting of a small old-fashioned country town
and its inhabitants. What English man or woman is
there, however, who will not read and re-read its pages
with laughter and tears ?
Cranford is said to be in many respects the Knutsford
of Mrs. Gaskell's childhood and youth, and there is some-
thing so wonderfully lifelike in the descriptions of the
manners and customs of the very select little community
that one is inclined to believe that there is truth in the
assertion. They were gently bred, those old Cranford
folk, with their " elegant economy," their hatred of all
display, and their considerate tact. There is pathos as
well as fun in the description of Mrs. Forrester pretend-
ing not to know what cakes were sent up " at a party in
her baby-house of a dwelling .... though she knew,
and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew
that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the
morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes ! "
There is an air of leisure and peacefulness in every page
of the book, for there was no hurrying life among those
dignified old people. " I had often occasion to notice the
use that was made of fragments and small opportunities in
Cranford : the rose-leaves that were gathered ere they fell
to make into a pot-pourri for some one who had no
( '37 )
MRS. GASKELL
garden ; the little bundles of lavender-flowers sent to
some town-dweller. Things that many would despise,
and actions which it seemed scarcely worth while to
perform, were all attended to in Cranford."
Who has not laughed over Miss Betsy Barker's Alderney
cow " meekly going to her pasture, clad in dark grey
flannel " after her disaster in the lime-pit ! or over the
masterly description of Miss Jenkyns, who " wore a cravat,
and a little bonnet like a jockey-cap, and altogether had
the appearance of a strong-minded woman ; although she
would have despised the modern idea of women being
equal to men. Equal, indeed ! she knew they were
superior."
Dear old Miss Matty, however, with her reverence for
the stronger sister, and her love affair of long ago, has a
closer hold on the heart of the reader. The description
of the meeting of the former lovers is idyllic ; and when
Thomas Holbrook dies unexpectedly, soon after, the
woman whose love-story had been spoilt by the home
authorities reverses her own ordinance against " followers "
in the case of Martha, the maid-servant, but otherwise
makes no sign.
" Miss Matty made a strong effort to conceal her feel-
ings a concealment she practised even with me, for she
has never alluded to Mr. Holbrook again, though the
( 138 )
By EDNA LYALL
book he gave her lies with her Bible on the little table by
her bedside. She did not think I heard her when she
asked the little milliner of Cranford to make her caps
something like the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson's, or that I
noticed the reply :
" ' But she wears widows' caps, ma'am ! '
" ' Oh ? I only meant something in that style ; not
widows', of course, but rather like Mrs. Jamieson's.' '
In the whole book there is not a character that we
cannot vividly realise : the Honourable (but sleepy) Mrs.
Jamieson ; brisk, cheerful Lady Glenmire, who married
the sensible country doctor and sacrificed her title to
become plain Mrs. Hoggins ; Miss Pole, who always with
withering scorn called ghosts " indigestion," until the night
they heard of the headless lady who had been seen wring-
ing her hands in Darkness Lane, when, to avoid " the
woebegone trunk," she with tremulous dignity offered the
sedan chairman an extra shilling to go round another
way ! Captain Brown with his devotion to the writings
of Mr. Boz and his feud with Miss Jenkyns as to the
superior merits of Dr. Johnson ; and Peter, the long-lost
brother, who from first to last remains an inveterate prac-
tical joker. One and all they become our life-long
friends, while the book stands alone as a perfect picture
of English country town society fifty years ago.
( i39)
MRS. GASKELL
Mrs. Gaskell's shorter stories are scarcely equal to the
novels, yet some of them are very beautiful. " Cousin
Phillis," for example, gives one more of the real atmo-
sphere of country life than any other writer except Words-
worth. We seem actually to smell the new-mown hay as
we read the story.
Charming, too, is " My Lady Ludlow " with her
genteel horror of dissenters subdued in the end by her
genuine good feeling. How often one has longed for
that comfortable square pew of hers in the parish church,
in which, if she did not like the sermon, she would pull
up a glass window as though she had been in her coach,
and shut out the sound of the obnoxious preacher ! But,
with all her peculiarities, she was the most courteous of
women a lady in the true sense of the word and when
people smiled at a shy and untaught visitor who spread
out her handkerchief on the front of her dress as the foot-
man handed her coffee, my Lady Ludlow with infinite
tact and grace promptly spread her handkerchief exactly in
the same fashion which the tradesman's wife had adopted.
Among the short tragic stories, the most striking is one
called " The Crooked Branch," in which the scene at the
assizes has almost unrivalled power ; while among the
lighter short stories, " My French Master," with its
delicate portraiture of the old refugee, and "-Mr. Harri-
( 140 )
By EDNA LYALL
son's Confessions," the delightfully written love-story of
a young country doctor, are perhaps the most enjoyable.
In 1863 the novel " Sylvia's Lovers " was published, and
although, by its fine description of old Whitby and the
pathos of the story, it has won many admirers, we infinitely
prefer its successor, " Wives and Daughters." There is
something very sad in the thought that this last and best
of the writer's stories was left unfinished ; but happily very
little remained to be told, and that little was tenderly
touched in to the almost perfect picture of English home
life by the daughter who had been not only Mrs. Gaskell's
child but her friend. " Wives and Daughters " will
always remain as a true and vivid and powerful study of
life and character ; while Molly Gibson, with her loyal
heart and sweet sunshiny nature, will, we venture to
think, better represent the majority of English girls than
the happily abnormal Dodos and Millicent Chynes of
present-day fashion.
In Mr. Gibson's second wife the author has given us a
most subtle study of a thoroughly selfish and false-hearted
woman, and she is made all the more repulsive because of
her outward charms, her soft seductive voice and her lavish
employment of terms of endearment. Wonderfully clever,
too, is the study of poor little Cynthia, her daughter, whose
relations to Molly are most charmingly drawn.
MRS. GASKELL
The story was just approaching its happy and whole-
some ending, and the difficulties which had parted
Roger Hamley and Molly had just disappeared, when
death summoned the writer from a world she had done so
much to brighten and to raise. On Sunday evening,
November 12, 1865, Mrs. Gaskell died quite suddenly
at Holybourne, Alton, Hampshire, a house which she had
recently bought as a surprise for her husband. Sad as
such a death must always be for those who are left behind,
one can imagine nothing happier than " death in harness "
for a worker who loves his work.
" . . . . There's rest above.
Below let work be death, if work be love ! "
Her " last days," wrote one of those who knew her best,
"had been full of loving thought and tender help for
others. She was so sweet and dear and noble beyond words."
That is the summing-up of the whole ; and, after all,
what better could a long biography give us ? The motto
of all of us should surely be the words of Mme. Viardot
Garcia : " First I am a woman .... then I am an
artist." And assuredly Mrs. Gaskell's life was ruled on
those lines.
" It was wonderful " wrote her daughter, Mrs. Hol-
land, in a letter to me the other day " how her writing
( 142)
By EDNA LYALL
never interfered with her social or domestic duties. I
think she was the best and most practical housekeeper I
ever came across, and the brightest, most agreeable hostess,
to say nothing of being everything as a mother and friend.
She combined both, being my mother and greatest friend
in a way you do not often, I think, find between mother
and daughter."
Some people are fond of rashly asserting that the ideal
wife and mother cares little and knows less about the world
beyond the little world of home. Mrs. Gaskell, however,
took a keen interest in the questions of the day, and was a
Liberal in politics ; while it is quite evident that neither
these wider interests nor her philanthropic work tended
to interfere with the home life, which was clearly of the
noblest type.
The friend as well as the mother of her children,
the sharer of all her husband's interests, she yet found
time to use to the utmost the great literary gift that had
been entrusted to her ; while her sympathy for those in
trouble was shown not only in the powerful pleading of her
novels, but in quiet, practical work in connection with
prisoners. She was one of the fellow labourers of Thomas
Wright, the well-known prison philanthropist, and was able
to help in finding places for young girls who had been dis-
charged from prison. For working women she also held
MRS. GASKELL
classes, and both among the poor and the rich had many
close friendships.
How far the characters in the novels were studied from
life is a question which naturally suggests itself ; and Mrs.
Holland replies to it as follows : " I do not think my mother
ever consciously took her characters from special individuals,
but we who knew often thought we recognised people, and
would tell her, Oh, so and so is just like Mr. Blank,' or
something of that kind ; and she would say, ' So it is, but
I never meant it for him.' And really many of the
characters are from originals, or rather are like originals,
but they were not consciously meant to be like."
For another detail which will interest Mrs. Gaskell's
fellow workers I am indebted to the same source :
" Sometimes she planned her novels more or less before-
hand, but in many cases, certainly in that of * Wives and
Daughters/ she had very little plot made beforehand, but
planned her story as she wrote. She generally wrote in the
morning, but sometimes late at night, when the house was
quiet."
Few writers, we think, have exercised a more thoroughly
wholesome influence over their readers than Mrs. Gaskell.
Her books, with their wide human sympathies, their tender
comprehension of human frailty, their bright flashes of
humour and their infinite pathos, seem to plead with us to
( 144 )
By EDNA LYALL
love one another. Through them all we seem to hear the
author's voice imploring us to " seize the day " and to
" make friends," as she does in actual words at the close of
one of her Christmas stories, adding pathetically: "I ask it
of you for the sake of that old angelic song, heard so many
years ago by the shepherds, keeping watch by night on
Bethlehem Heights."
MRS. CROWE. MRS. ARCHER
CLIVE. MRS. HENRY WOOD
By ADELINE SERGEANT
MRS. CROWE. MRS. ARCHER
CLIVE. MRS. HENRY WOOD
[RS. CATHERINE CROWE, whose
maiden name was Stevens, was born at
Borough Green, in Kent, about 1800,
and died in 1876. She married Colonel
Crowe in 1822, and took up her resi-
dence with him in Edinburgh. Her books were written
chiefly between the years 1838 and 1859, and she is best
known by her novel, " Susan Hopley," and her collection
of ghost stories, " The Night Side of Nature." She was
a woman of considerable ability, which appears, however,
to have run into rather obscure and sombre channels, such
as showed a somewhat morbid bent of mind, with a
tendency towards depression, which culminated at last in
a short but violent attack of insanity. But love of the
unseen and supernatural does not seem to have blunted
her keenness of observation in ordinary life, for her novels,
MRS. CROWE
the scenes of which are laid chiefly among homely and
domestic surroundings, display alike soundness of judg-
ment and considerable dramatic power. As a writer,
indeed, Mrs. Crowe was extremely versatile ; she wrote
plays, children's stories, short historical tales, romantic
novels, as well as the ghost stories with which her name
seems chiefly to be associated in the minds of this genera-
tion. It is evident too, that she believed herself rightly
or wrongly to be possessed of great philosophical dis-
crimination ; but it must be acknowledged that her
philosophical and metaphysical studies often led her into
curious byways of speculation, into which the reader
does not willingly wander.
It is worth noting that Mrs. Crowe's ideas respect-
ing the status and education of women were, for the
days in which she lived, exceedingly "advanced." In
" Lilly Dawson," for instance, a story published in 1 847,
she makes an elaborate protest against the kind of educa-
tion which women were then receiving. " It is true," she
says, " that there is little real culture amongst men ; there
are few strong minds and fewer honest ones, but they
have still more advantages. If their education has been
bad, it has at least been a trifle better than ours. Six
hours a day at Latin and Greek are better than six hours
( 150)
By ADELINE SERGEANT
a day at worsted work and embroidery ; and time is
better spent in acquiring a smattering of mathematics
than in strumming Hook's lessons on a bad pianoforte."
Her views of women in general are well expressed in
the following words from the same work of fiction. " If,
as we believe, under no system of training, the intellect of
woman would be found as strong as that of a man, she is
compensated by her intuitions being stronger. If her
reason be less majestic, her insight is clearer ; where man
reasons she sees. Nature, in short, gave her all that was
needful to enable her to play a noble part in the world's
history, if man would but let her play it out, and not
treat her like a full-grown baby, to be flattered and spoilt
on the one hand, and coerced and restricted on the other,
vibrating between royal rule and slavish serfdom."
Surely we hear the voice of Nora Helmer herself, the very
quintessence of Ibsenism ! It must have required con-
siderable courage to write in this way in the year 1847,
and Mrs. Crowe should certainly be numbered among the
lovers of educational reform. In many ways she seems to
have been a woman of strong individuality and decided
opinions.
Her first work was a drama, " Aristodemus," published
anonymously in 1838 ; it showed considerable ability and
MRS. CROWE
was well regarded by the critics. She then wrote a novel,
"Men and Women, or Manorial Rights," in 1839 ; and
in 1841 published her most successful work of fiction:
" Susan Hopley, or the Adventures of a Maid-servant.'*
This story was more generally popular than any other
from her pen, but it is to be doubted whether it possesses
more literary ability or points of greater interest than the
rest.
Mrs. Crowe then embarked upon a translation of
" The Seeress of Provorst," by Justinus Kerner, a book
of revelations concerning the inner life of man ; and in
1848 she published a book called "The Night Side of
Nature," a collection of supernatural tales gathered from
many sources, probably the best storehouse of ghost
stories in the English language. Its interest is a little
marred by the credulity of the author. She seems never
to disbelieve any ghost story of any kind that comes in
her way. From the humble apologies, however, with
which she opens her dissertation on the subject, it is
easy to see how great a change has passed over people's
minds in the course of the last fifty years, with respect to
the supernatural. If Mrs. Crowe had lived in these days,
she would have found herself in intimate relations with
the Society for Psychical Research, and would have had
no reason to excuse herself for the choice of her subject.
( 152 )
By ADELINE SERGEANT
She divides her book into sections, which treat of dreams
(where we get Sir Noel Paton's account of his mother's
curious vision ) ; warnings ; double-dreaming and trance,
with the stories of Colonel Townshend's voluntary trance
and the well-known legend of Lord Balcarres and the
ghost of Claverhouse ; doppel-gangers and apparitions
(including the stories of Lady Beresford's branded wrist
and Lord Lyttleton's warning) ; and other chapters
descriptive of haunted houses, with details concerning
clairvoyance and the use of the crystal. It is interesting to
find among these the original account of " Pearlin Jean,"
of which Miss Sarah Tytler has made such excellent use
in one of her recent books. An account of the phe-
nomena of stigmata^ and the case of Catherine Emmerich,
are also described in detail. Lovers of the supernatural
will find much to gratify their taste in a perusal of " The
Night Side of Nature."
Mrs. Crowe did not exhaust the subject in this volume,
for she issued a book on ghosts and family legends, a
volume for Christmas, in the year 1859 ; a work full of
the kind of stories which became so popular in the now
almost obsolete Christmas Annual of succeeding years.
It is also curious to note, that in 1848, Mrs. Crowe
produced a work of an entirely different nature, namely,
an excellent story for children, entitled " Pippie's
( i53)
MRS. CROWE
Warning, or Mind Your Temper " another instance of
her versatility of mind.
"The Adventures of a Beauty" and "Light and
Darkness" appeared in 1852. The latter is a collection
of short tales from different sources, partly historical and
partly imaginative, and certainly more in accordance with
the taste of modern days than her elaborate domestic
stories. Mrs. Crowe's taste for the horrible is distinctly
perceptible in this collection. There is an account of the
celebrated poisoners, Frau Gottfried, Madame Ursinus,
and Margaret Zwanziger, whose crimes were so numerous
that they themselves forgot the number of their victims ;
and of Mr. Tinius, who went about making morning calls
and murdering the persons whom he honoured with a
visit. The histories of Lesurques, the hero of the " Lyons
Mail," and of Madame Louise, Princess of France, who
became a nun, are well narrated ; but nearly all the stories
are concerned with horrors such as suggest the productions
of Mr. Wilkie Collins. " The Priest of St. Quentin "
and " The Lycanthropist " are two of the most
powerful.
Her next novel, a more purely domestic one, was
" Linny Lockwood," issued in 1854. A sentence from
the preface to this book anticipates rather early, as we may
think the approaching death of the three-volume novel :
( i54)
By ADELINE SERGEANT
" Messrs. Routledge and Co. have been for some time
soliciting me to write them an original novel for their
cheap series ; and being convinced that the period for
publishing at i us. 6d., books of a kind that people
generally read but once, is gone by, I have resolved to
make the experiment."
She wrote another tragedy, " The Cruel Kindness," in
1853, and abridged "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for children.
In 1859 a pamphlet on "Spiritualism and the Age we
Live in," constituted the last of her more important works,
although she continued, for some time after recovery
from the attack of insanity which we have mentioned, to
write papers and stories for periodicals.
In spite of Mrs. Crowe's love for the supernatural and
the horrible, she is one of the pioneers of the purely
domestic story that story of the affections and the
emotions peculiar to the Victorian Age. She is allied to
the schools of Richardson and Fanny Burney rather than
to those of Sir Walter Scott or Miss Austen ; for although
her incidents are often romantic and even far-fetched, her
characters are curiously homely and generally of humble
environment. Thus, for instance, " Susan Hopley " is
a maid-servant (though not of the Pamela kind nor
with the faintest resemblance to Esther Waters) ; Lilly
Dawson, although proved ultimately to be the daughter
( '55 )
MRS. CROWE
of a colonel, passes the greater part of her earlier life as a
drudge and a dependent ; and Linny Lockwood, while
refined and educated, is reduced to the situation of a
lady's maid. The circumstances of her heroines are, as
a rule, extremely prosaic, and would possibly have been
condemned by writers of Miss Austen's school as hope-
lessly vulgar ; but Mrs. Crowe's way of treating these
characters and their surroundings bears upon it no
stamp of vulgarity at all. Its great defect is its want
of humour to light up the sordid side of the life which
she describes. She is almost always serious, full of
exalted and occasionally overstrained sentiment. And
even when treating of childhood, it is rarely that she
relaxes so far as (in " Lilly Dawson ") to describe the
naughtiness of the little girl who insisted upon praying
for the cat. This is almost the sole glimpse of a sense
of fun to which Mrs. Crowe treats us in her numerous
volumes.
To the present age "Susan Hopley," although so
popular at the time of its publication, is less attractive
than the stories of " Linny Lockwood " and " Lilly
Dawson." The form adopted for the recital of Susan's
narrative is extremely inartistic, for it comprises Susan's
reminiscences, interspersed at intervals with narrative, and
supposed to be told by her in mature age, when she is
( 156)
By ADELINE SERGEANT
housekeeper to the hero of the story. Nevertheless, the
plot is ingenious, turning on the murder of Susan's brother
by a handsome and gentlemanly villain, and the subsequent
exposure of his guilt by means of Susan's energy and the
repentance of one of his victims. It has all the elements
of a sensational story, with the exception of a " sympa-
thetic " heroine or any other really interesting character ;
for Susan Hopley, the embodiment of all homely virtues,
is distinctly dull, and it is difficult to feel the attractiveness
of the " beautiful and haughty " dairymaid, Mabel Light-
foot, whose frailty forms an important element in the
discovery of Gaveston's guilt.
" Lilly Dawson " may be said to possess something of
a psychological interest, which redeems it from the charge
of dulness brought against " Susan Hopley." The heroine
is thrown as a child into the hands of a wild and lawless
family, smugglers and desperadoes, who make of her a
household slave ; and the child appears at first to be
utterly stupid and apathetic. A touch of affection and
sympathy is needed before her intellect awakes. In fear
of being forced to marry one of the sons of the house in
which she has been brought up, when she is only fifteen,
she escapes from her enemies, becomes the guide and
adopted child of an old blind man, takes service as a
nursemaid, is employed in a milliner's workroom, narrowly
MRS. CROWE
escapes being murdered by the man whom she refused to
marry, and finally acts as maid in the house of her own
relations, where she is discovered and received with the
greatest affection. Nevertheless, she cannot endure the
life of " a fine lady," and goes back ultimately to marry
the humble lover whose kindness had cheered her in the
days of her childhood and poverty.
In " Linny Lock wood " there is a touch of emotion,
even of passion, which is wanting in the previous stories.
It embraces scenes and situations which are quite as moving
as any which thrilled the English public in the pages of
"Jane Eyre" or "East Lynne," but, owing possibly to
Mrs. Crowe's obstinate realism and somewhat didactic
homeliness of diction and sentiment, it seems somewhat
to have missed its mark. Linny Lockwood marries a
man entirely unworthy of her, whose love strays speedily
from her to another woman a married woman with whom
he elopes and whom he afterwards abandons. Linny,
being poor and destitute, looks about for work, and takes
the post of maid to her husband's deserted mistress, with-
out, of course, knowing what had been the connection
between them. But before the birth of Kate's child,
Linny learns the truth and nevertheless remains with her
to soothe her weakness, and lessen the pangs of remorse
of which the poor woman ultimately dies. A full explana-
( 158)
By ADELINE SERGEANT
tion between the two women takes place before Kate's
death ; and the child that is left behind is adopted
by Linny Lockwood, who refuses to pardon the husband,
who sues to her for forgiveness, or to live with him
again.
The character of Linny Lockwood is a very beautiful
one, and the story appeals to the reader's sensibilities more
strongly than the recital of Susan Hopley's adventures or
the girlish sorrows of Lilly Dawson.
Mrs. Crowe's writings certainly heralded the advent of
a new kind of fiction : a kind which has been, perhaps
more than any other, characteristic of the early years of the
Victorian Age. It is the literature of domestic realism, of
homely unromantic characters, which no accessories of
exciting adventure can render interesting or remarkable in
themselves characters distinguished by every sort of
virtue, yet not possessed of any ideal attractiveness. She
is old-fashioned enough to insist upon a happy ending, to
punish the wicked and to reward the good. But amid
all the conventionality of her style, one is conscious of a
note of hard common sense and a power of seeing things
as they really are, which in these days would probably
have forced her (perhaps against her will) into the realistic
school. She seems, in fact, to hover between two ages of
( 159 )
MRS. CROWE
literature, and to be possessed at times of two different
spirits one the romantic and the supernatural, the other
distinctly commonplace and workaday. Perhaps it is by
the former that she will be chiefly remembered, but it is
through the latter that she takes a place in English litera-
ture. She left a mark upon the age in which she lived,
and she helped, in a quiet, undemonstrative fashion, to
mould the women of England after higher ideals than had
been possible in the early days of the century. Those
who consider the development of women to be one of the
distinguishing features of Queen Victoria's reign should
not forget that they owe deep gratitude to writers like
Mrs. Crowe, who upheld the standard of a woman's right
to education and economic independence long before these
subjects were discussed in newspapers and upon public
platforms. For, as George Eliot has said, with her usual
wisdom, it is owing to the labours of those who have lived
in comparative obscurity and lie in forgotten graves, that
things are well with us here and now.
160 )
By ADELINE SERGEANT
CAROLINE CLIVE was the second daughter and
co-heiress of Edmund Meysey-Wigley, of Shaken-
hurst, Worcestershire. She was born in 1801,
at Brompton Green, London, and was married in 1840
to the Rev. Archer Clive, Rector of Solihull, Warwick-
shire. In the latest edition of her poems, her daughter
states that " Mrs. Archer Clive, from a severe illness when
she was three years old, was lame ; and though her strong
mind and high spirit carried her happily through child-
hood and early life, as she grew up she felt sharply the
loss of all the active pleasures enjoyed by others."
Her novel, " Paul Ferroll," contains a touching poem
which shows how deeply she felt the privations consequent
on her infirmity.
" Gaeta's orange groves were there
Half circling round the sun-kissed sea ;
And all were gone and left the fair
Rich garden solitude but me.
" My feeble feet refused to tread
The rugged pathway to the bay ;
Down the steep rocky way they tread
And gain the boat and glide away.
* * * * - *
( 161 ) L
MRS. ARCHER CLIVE
" Above me hung the golden glow
Of fruit which is at one with flowers ;
Below me gleamed the ocean's flow,
Like sapphires in the midday hours.
" A passing by there was of wings,
Of silent, flower-like butterflies ;
The sudden beetle as it springs
Full of the life of southern skies.
* * * * *
" It was an hour of bliss to die,
But not to sleep, for ever came
The warm thin air, and, passing by,
Fanned sense and soul and heart to flame."
A great love of nature and a yearning to tread its
scenes breathe in every word of these lines, which possess
an essentially pathetic charm of their own.
Mrs. Clive died in July 1873, from the result of an
accident, by which her dress was set on fire when she was
writing in her boudoir at Whitfield, with her books and
papers around her. Her health was extremely delicate,
and she had been for many years a confirmed invalid.
Her first work consisted of the well-known " IX Poems
"by V." published in 1840. These poems were very
favourably received, and were much praised by Dugald
Stewart, by Lockhart, and by Mr. Gladstone, who says
of them, " They form a small book, which is the life and
( 162 )
By ADELINE SERGEANT
soul of a great book." They were also very favourably
reviewed in the Quarterly (LXVI. 408-11). Her other
poems, " I Watch the Heavens," " The Queen's Ball,"
"The Vale of the Rea," etc., have been re-published with
the original " IX " in a separate volume. " Year After
Year," published in 1858, passed into two editions ; but
Mrs. dive's reputation chiefly rests upon her story of
" Paul Ferroll," published in 1855, and its sequel, " Why
Paul Ferroll Killed his Wife." The second story was,
however, in no way equal to the first ; and a subsequent
novel, "John Greswold," which appeared in 1864, was
decidedly inferior to its predecessors, although containing
passages of considerable literary merit.
" Paul Ferroll " has passed through several editions,
and has been translated into French. It was not until
the fourth edition that the concluding chapter, which
brings the story down to the death of Paul Ferroll, was
added.
There is little difference in date between the writings
of Mrs. Crowe and those of Mrs. Archer Clive, but there
is a tremendous gap between their methods and the tone
of their novels. As a matter of fact they belong to
different generations, in spite of their similarity of age.
Mrs. Crowe belongs to the older school of fictionists,
( 163 )
MRS. ARCHER CLIVE
while Mrs. Archer Clive is curiously modern. The tone
and style are like the tone and style of the present day,
not so much in the dialogue, which is generally stilted,
after the fashion of the age in which she lived, as in the
mental attitude of the characters, in the atmosphere of
the books, and the elaborate, sometimes even artistic,
collocation of scenes and incidents.
" Paul Ferroll " is often looked upon merely as a novel
of plot, almost the first " sensational " novel, as we call it,
of the century. But it is more than that. There is a
distinct working out of character and a subordination of
mere incident to its development ; and the original ending
was of so striking and pathetic a nature that we can only
regret the subsequent addition, which probably the influence
of others made necessary, just as in " Villette " Charlotte
Bronte was obliged to soften down her own conception,
in order to satisfy the conventional requirements of her
friends.
The story of " Paul Ferroll " displays a good deal of
constructive skill, although the mystery enfolded in its
pages is more easily penetrated than would be the case in
a modern sensational novel. The fact is, we have increased
our knowledge of the intricacies both of human nature
and of criminal law in these latter days, and our novelists
( 164)
By ADELINE SERGEANT
are cleverer in concealing or half revealing their mysteries
than they were in " the forties." For a few pages,
at least, the reader may be deluded into the belief that
Paul Ferroll is a worthy and innocent man, and that his
wife has been murdered by some revengeful servant or
ruffianly vagabond. But the secret of his guilt is too
speedily fathomed ; and from that point to the end of the
book, the question turns on the possibilities of its discovery
or the likelihood and effects of his own confession.
Mrs. dive's picture of the " bold bad man " is not
so successful as that of Charlotte Bronte's Rochester.
Rochester, with all his faults, commands sympathy, but
our sympathies are alienated from Paul Ferroll when
we find (in the first chapter) that he could ride out tran-
quilly on a summer's morning, scold his gardener, joke
with the farmer's wife, and straighten out the farmer's
accounts, when he had just previously murdered his wife
in her sleep by thrusting a sharp pointed knife through
her head " below the ear." Even although he afterwards
exhibits agitation on being brought face to face with the
corpse of his wife, we cannot rid ourselves of our remem-
brance of the insensibility which he had shown. The
motive for the crime is not far to seek. He had fixed
his affections on a young girl, his marriage with whom
had been prevented by the woman who became his wife.
( 165 )
MRS. ARCHER CLIVE
Dissension and increasing bitterness grew up between the
pair ; and her death was held as a release by Paul Ferroll,
who hastened to bring home, as his second wife, the girl
whom he had formerly loved.
No suspicion attached to him, and he is careful to
provide means of defence for the labourer Franks and
his wife, who have been accused of the murder. On re-
turning home with his second wife, to whom he is
passionately attached, he devotes himself entirely to
literary pursuits, refusing to mix with any of the society
of the place. From time to time his motive is allowed to
appear ; he has determined never to accept a favour from,
nor become a friend of, the country gentlemen, with whom
he is thrown into contact, so that they shall never have to
say, supposing the truth should ever be acknowledged,
that he has made his way into their houses on false pre-
tences. But in spite of his seclusion, he lives a life of
ideal happiness with his wife, Ellinor, and their beautiful
little child, Janet, who, however, occupies quite a secondary
place in the hearts of her father and mother, who are
wrapt up in one another.
The events of the next few years are not treated in
detail, although there is at one point a most interesting
description of the state of a town in which cholera rages,
when Paul Ferroll flings himself with heroic ardour into
( 166)
By ADELINE SERGEANT
every effort to stem the tide of the disease. Owing to a
riot at the time of the Assizes, Ferroll fires on one of the
crowd and kills him, so that by a curious coincidence, he
is tried for murder, and has full experience of the horrors
accompanying the situation of a criminal. He is sentenced
to death but pardoned, and returns to his old life at home.
The widow of the labourer who had formerly been accused
of the murder of his first wife then returns to England,
and Ferroll knows that her return increases the danger of
discovery. He tries to escape it by going abroad, but
finds on his return that Martha Franks, the widow, is in
possession of some trinkets which belonged to the late
Mrs. Ferroll, that she has been accused of theft and finally
of the murder of her mistress. This is the very conjunc-
ture which had always appeared possible to Paul Ferroll ;
the moment has come when he feels himself obliged to
confess the truth, in order to save a fellow creature from
unjust condemnation. He thereupon acknowledges his
guilt, is at once conveyed to prison, and after a merely
formal trial is condemned to death the execution to
take place, apparently, in three days, according to the
inhuman custom of the time.
Ellinor dies on the day when she hears of his confession;
and Janet, his daughter, now eighteen yeacs old, and
Janet's young lover, Hugh Bartlett, are the only persons
MRS. ARCHER CLIVE
who remain faithful to him or make efforts for his safety.
Through Hugh's efforts and the treachery of the gaoler,
Paul Ferroll manages, in a somewhat improbable manner,
to escape from prison ; and he and Janet make their
way to Spain, whence they will be able to take ship for
America.
The conclusion of the story, as at first written, is par-
ticularly striking. Janet, after an illness, has come to
herself : " She did not know the place where she was.
The air was warm and perfumed, the windows shaded, the
room quite a stranger to her. An elderly woman, with a
black silk mantle on her head and over her shoulders,
spoke to her. She did not understand the meaning, but
she knew the words were Spanish. Then the tide of recol-
lection rushed back, and the black cold night came fully
before her, which was the last thing she recollected.
* My father,' she said, rising as well as she could. The
woman had gone to the window and beckoned, and in
another minute Mr. Ferroll stood by her bedside. * Can
you still love me, Janet ? ' said he. ' Love you ! oh
yes, my father.' '
It seems a pity that a concluding chapter was after-
wards added, containing a description of Janet's life with
her father in Boston, and of his dying moments and
last words, which might well have been left to the imagi-
( 168 )
By ADELINE SERGEANT
nation. The original conclusion was more impressive
without these details.
It is rather curious, too, that Mrs. Clive should have
written another volume to explain why Paul Ferroll killed
his wife ; but possibly she thought further explanation was
necessary, since she prefixed to the latter volume a quota-
tion from Froude's " Henry the Eighth " : "A man does
not murder his wife gratuitously." In this book she
changes the names of all the characters except that of
Ellinor. Paul Ferroll is Leslie, and his wife, Anne, is
Laura. Ellinor, the young and beautiful girl out of a
convent, completely enchants Leslie, whom Laura had
intended to marry ; and Laura contrives, by deliberate
malice, so completely to sever them that he makes Laura
his wife, while Ellinor returns to the convent. " Violent
were the passions of the strong but bitter man ; fierce the
hatred of the powerful but baffled intellect. Wild was the
fury of the man who believed in but one world of good,
and saw the mortal moments pass away unenjoyed and
irretrievable. Out of these hours arose a purpose. The
reader sees the man and knows the deed. From the pre-
mises laid before him, he need not indeed conclude that
even that man would do the deed, but since it was told in
1855 tnat tne husband killed his wife, so now in 1860 it is
explained why he killed her."
( 169)
MRS. ARCHER CLIVE
This second volume is decidedly inferior to the first,
but it shared in the popularity which " Paul Ferroll " had
already achieved, and the author's vigorous portraiture of
characters and events was well marked in both volumes.
With her third volume, "John Greswold," came a
sudden falling off, at any rate as regards dramatic force.
" John Greswold " is the autobiography of a young man
who has very little story to tell and does not know how
to tell it. No grip is laid on the reader's attention ; no
character claims especial interest, but the thing that is
remarkable in the book is the literary touch, which is far
more perceptible than in the more interesting story of
"Paul Ferroll." The book is somewhat inchoate, but
contains short passages of real beauty, keen shafts of
observation, and an occasional flight of emotional ex-
pression, which raise the writer to a greater literary
elevation than the merely sensational incidents of her
earlier novels. She has gained in reflective power, but
lost her dramatic instinct. Consequently " John Gres-
wold " was less successful than " Paul Ferroll."
The conclusion of the book, vague and indecisive,
shows the author to be marked out by nature as one of
the Impressionist School. It is powerful and yet indefi-
nite ; in fact it could only have been written by one with
( 170 )
By ADELINE SERGEANT
a true poetic gift. " The seven stars that never set are
going westward. The funeral car of Lazarus moves on
and the three mourners follow behind. They are above
the fir wood and that's the sign of midnight. Twenty-
three years ago I was born into this world and now the
twenty-third has run out. The time is gone. The
known things are all over and buried in the darkness
behind. Before me lies the great blank page of the
future and no writing traced upon it. But it is nothing
to me. I won't ask nor think, nor hope, nor fear about
it. The leaf of the book is turned and there's an end
the tale is told."
" Paul Ferroll " may be considered as the precursor of
the purely sensational novel, or of what may be called the
novel of mystery. Miss Bronte in " Jane Eyre " uses to
some extent the same kind of material, but her work is
far more a study of character than the story of " Paul
Ferroll " can claim to be. In " Paul Ferroll," indeed, the
analysis of motive is entirely absent. The motives that
actuated Paul Ferroll are to be gathered simply from
chance expressions or his actions. No description of
the human heart has been attempted. The picture of
the violent, revengeful, strongly passionate nature of the
man is forcible enough, but it is displayed by action and
MRS. ARCHER CLIVE
not by introspection. It is for this reason that Mrs. Clive
may be placed in the forefront of the sensational novelists
of the century. She anticipated the work of Wilkie
Collins, of Charles Reade, of Miss Braddon, and many
others of their school, in showing human nature as
expressed by its energies, neither diagnosing it like a
physician, nor analysing it like a priest. A vigorous
representation of the outside semblance of things is the
peculiar characteristic of the so-called sensational novelist ;
and it is in this respect that " Paul Ferroll" excels many of
the novels of incident written during the first half of this
century. It heralded a new departure in the ways of
fiction. It set forth the delights of a mystery, the
pleasures of suspense, together with a thrilling picture of
" the strong man in adversity," which has been beloved
of fiction-mongers from the first days of fable in the land.
But perhaps it was successful, most of all, because it
introduced its readers to a new sensation. Hitherto they
had been taught to look on the hero of a novel as necessarily
a noble and virtuous being, endowed with heroic, not to
say angelic qualities ; but this conviction was now to be
reversed. The change was undoubtedly startling. Even
Scott had not got beyond the tradition of a good young
man as hero, a tradition which the Brontes and Mrs.
Archer Clive were destined to break down. For Scott's
( 172 )
By ADELINE SERGEANT
most fascinating character, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, was
confessedly the villain of the piece ; and the splendidly
picturesque figure of Dundee was supposed to be less
attractive than the tame and scrupulous personality of
Henry Morton. It was a convention amongst writers that
vice and crime must be repulsive, and that there was some-
thing inherently attractive in virtue a wholesome doctrine,
insufficiently preached in these days, but not strictly
consistent with facts. To find, therefore, a villain
and a thorough-paced villain, the murderer of his wife
installed in the place of hero and represented as noble,
handsome, and gifted, naturally thrilled the readers'
minds with a mixture of horror and delight. The substitu-
tion of villain for hero is now too common to excite remark,
but it was a striking event in the days when "Paul
Ferroll " was published, although there had been instances
of a similar kind in the novels of the eighteenth century.
The new fashion gained ground and speedily exceeded
the limits which Mrs. Archer Clive would no doubt have
set to it ; but it is nevertheless in part to her that we owe
this curious transposition of roles, which has revolutionised
the aims and objects of fiction in the latter half of the
nineteenth century.
MRS. HENRY WOOD
THE art of the raconteur, pure and simple, is apt
to be undervalued in our days. A rage for
character-painting, for analysis, for subtle dis-
crimination, down to the minutest detail, has taken hold
upon us; and although we have lately returned to a taste for
adventure of the more stirring kind, there is still an under-
lying conviction that the highest forms of literary art deal
with mental states and degrees of emotions, instead of with
the ordinary complications of everyday life. Hence the
person who is gifted simply with a desire (and the power)
of telling a story as a story, with no ulterior motive, with
no ambition of intellectual achievement, the Scheherazade
of our quiet evenings and holiday afternoons, is apt to take
a much lower place in our estimation than she deserves.
This is especially the case with Mrs. Henry Wood. It is
impossible to claim for her any lofty literary position ; she
is emphatically un-literary and middle-class. But she never
has cause to say, " Story ? God bless you, I have none to
tell, Sir," for she always has a very distinct and convincing
story, which she handles with a skill which can perhaps
be valued only by the professional novelist, who knows
the technical difficulty of handling the numerous groups of
By ADELINE SERGEANT
characters which Mrs. Wood especially affects. There is
no book of hers which deals as so many novels deal
with merely one or two characters. She takes the whole
town into her story, wherever it may be. We not only
know the Lord-Lieutenant and the High Sheriff and the
Squire, but we are intimate (particularly intimate) with the
families of the local lawyer and doctor. We are almost
equally well acquainted with their bootmaker and green-
grocer, while their maids and their grooms are as much
living entities to us as if they had served us in our own
houses. To take a great group of dramatis person*,
widely differing in circumstances, in character, in indi-
viduality ; to keep them all perfectly clear without con-
fusion and without wavering ; to evolve from them some
central figures on which the attention of the subsidiary
characters shall be unavoidably fixed, and to weave a plot
of mystery, intrigue, treachery or passion which must be
resolved to its ultimate elements before the last page of
the book to do all this is really an achievement of which
many a writer, who values himself on his intellectual
superiority to Mrs. Henry Wood, might well be proud.
It is no more easy to marshal a multitude of characters in
the pages of your book than to dispose bodies of soldiers
in advantageous positions over an unknown country. The
eye of a general is in some respects needed for both opera-
( 175 )
MRS. HENRY WOOD
tions, and the true balance and proportion of a plot are
not matters which come by accident or can be accomplished
without skill. It may not be literary skill, but it is skill
of a kind which deserves recognition, under what name
soever it may be classed.
Mrs. Henry Wood was born in Worcestershire in 1814,
and died in London in 1887. She suffered from delicate
health and passed the greater part of her life as an invalid.
She was the daughter of Mr. Thomas Price, one of the
largest glove manufacturers in the city of Worcester.
She married Mr. Henry Wood, the head of a large
banking and shipping firm, who retired early from work
and died comparatively young. It was not until middle
life that Mrs. Wood began to write ; and her first work,
perhaps, of all her works, the most popular was " East
Lynne," which first appeared in Col burn's New Monthly
Magazine. Its success was prodigious and it is still one of
the most popular novels upon the shelves of every circu-
lating library. It has been translated into many languages
and dramatised in different forms. It was published in
1 86 1, and reached a fifth edition within the year.
Amongst her most popular works also are " The Chan-
nings" and "Mrs. Halliburton's Troubles," 1862 ; "The
Shadow of Ashlydyat," 1863; "St. Martin's Eve," 1866;
( 176)
By ADELINE SERGEANT
"A Life's Secret," 1867 ; "Roland Yorke," a sequel to
"The Channings," 1869 ; "Johnny Ludlow," stories re-
printed from the Argosy, 187410 1885 ; "Edina," 1876 ;
"Pomeroy Abbey," 1878; "Court Netherleigh," 1881;
and many other stories and novels. Mrs. Wood was for
many years the editor of the Argosy.
The reason of the popularity of " East Lynne " is not
far to seek. It is, to begin with, a very touching story ;
and its central situation, which in some respects recalls the
relation of the two women in Mrs. Crowe's " Linny Lock-
wood," is genuinely striking. It is perhaps not worth
while to argue as to its probability. It is, of course,
barely possible that a woman should come disguised into
the house where she formerly reigned as mistress, and act
as governess to her own children, without being recog-
nised. As a matter of fact, she is recognised by one
of the servants only on account of a momentary forget-
fulness of her disguise. Her own husband, her own
children, do not know her in the least ; and although he
and his kinswoman are vaguely troubled by what they
consider a chance resemblance, they dismiss it from their
minds as utterly impossible, until the day when Lady
Isabel, dying in her husband's house, begs to see him for
the last time. The changes in her personal appearance,
( 177 ) M
MRS. HENRY WOOD
her lameness, for instance, and the greyness of her hair, are
very ingeniously contrived ; but it certainly seems almost
impossible that two or three years should have so com-
pletely changed her that nobody should even guess at her
identity.
The present generation complains that the pathos of the
story is overdone ; but even if detail after detail is multi-
plied, so as to harrow the reader's feelings almost unneces-
sarily, the fact still remains that Mrs. Wood has imagined
as pitiful and tragic a situation as could possibly exist in
the domestic relations of man and woman. The erring
wife returning to find her husband married to another
woman, to nurse one of her own children through his last
illness without being recognised by him or by her husband,
and to die at last in her husband's house with the merest
shadow of consolation in the shape of his somewhat
grudging forgiveness, presents us with a figure which
cannot fail to be extremely pathetic.
The faults of Mrs. Henry Wood's style, its occasional
prolixity and commonplaceness, the iteration of the moral
reflections, as well as the triteness and feebleness sometimes
of the dialogue, very nearly disappear from view when we
resign ourselves to a consideration of this tragic situation.
It cannot be denied that there is just a touch of mawkish-
ness now and then, just a slight ring of false sentiment in the
( 178)
By ADELINE SERGEANT
pity accorded to Lady Isabel, who was certainly one of the
silliest young women that ever existed in the realms of
fiction. Nevertheless the spectacle of the mother nursing
the dying boy, who does not know her, is one that will
always appeal to the heart of the ordinary reader, and will
go far to account for the extraordinary popularity of " East
Lynne."
A novelist of more aspiring genius would perhaps have
concentrated our attention exclusively upon Lady Isabel's
feelings and tragic fate. Here Mrs. Wood's failings,
as well as her capacities, reveal themselves. She sees the
tragic side of things, but she sees also (and perhaps too
much) the pathos of small incidents, the importance of
trifles. She spares us no jot of the sordid side of life.
And in a novel of the undoubted power of " East Lynne "
there are some details which might have been spared us.
The rapacity of the creditors who seize the body of Lady
Isabel's father, the gossip of the servants, the suspicions of
Afy Hallijohn, and, in short, almost all the underplot
respecting Richard Hare these matters are superfluous.
The reader's eye ought to be kept more attentively upon
the heroine and her relations with Mr. Carlisle and Sir
Francis. The one inexplicable point in the story is
Lady Isabel's desertion of her husband for a man whom
she must despise. It is never hinted that she had for one
MRS. HENRY WOOD
moment lost her heart to Francis Levison. She left her
husband out of sheer pique and jealousy, loving him
ardently all the while, although, in her ignorance and
folly, she scarcely knew that she loved him. Here the
story is weak. We feel that Mrs. Wood sacrifices
probability in her effort to obtain a striking situation.
For the strongest part of " East Lynne " is the description
of what occurs when Lady Isabel returns as a governess to
her old home, when her husband, supposing her to be dead,
has married his old love Barbara Hare. To this situation,
everything is subordinate ; and it is in itself so strong that
we cannot wonder if the author strains a point or two in
order to achieve it.
But the curious, the characteristic, thing is that even in
this supreme crisis of the story, Mrs. Wood's essential
love of detail, and of somewhat commonplace detail, asserts
itself over and over again. The incidents she takes pains
to narrate are rational enough. There is no reason why
pathos should be marred because a dying child asks for
cheese with his tea, or because the sensible stepmother con-
demns Lucy to a diet of bread and water for some trifling
offence, or because Miss Cornelia Carlisle displays her
laughable eccentricities at Lady Isabel's bedside. The
pathos is marred now and then, not because of these
trifling yet irritating incidents, but because we get an
( 180)
By ADELINE SERGEANT
impression that the author has forced a number of utterly
prosaic people into a tragic situation for which they are
eminently unfitted. The ducking of Sir Francis Levison
in the horsepond is an example of this. The man was a
heartless villain and murderer, yet he is presented to us
in a scene of almost vulgar farce as part of his retribu-
tion. If the author had herself realised the insufficiency
of her characters to rise to the tragic height demanded
of them, she might have achieved either satire or intense
realism ; but there is a certain smugness in Mrs. Henry
Wood's acceptance of the commonplaces of life , which
makes us feel her an inadequate painter of tragedy.
We close the book with a suspicion that she preferred
the intolerable Barbara to the winsome and erring Lady
Isabel.
" East Lynne " owes half its popularity, however, to
that reaction against inane and impossible goodness which
has taken place since the middle of the century. Just as
Rochester and Paul Ferroll are protests against the conven-
tional hero, so Lady Isabel is a protest against the conven-
tional heroine and a portent of her time ! We were all
familiar with beauty and virtue in distress, from Clarissa
Harlowe downwards. It is during later years that we have
become conversant with beauty and guilt as objects of our
sympathy and commiseration.
MRS. HENRY WOOD
The moralists of the time Saturday Reviewers, and
others perceived the change from one point of view, and
were not slow to comment on it. Their opposition
to the modern novel was chiefly based upon what they
called a glorification of vice and crime. Now that the
mists of prejudice have cleared away, we can see very
well that no more praise of wrongdoing was implied
by Mrs. Wood's portrait of Lady Isabel than by
Thackeray's keen-edged delineation of Becky Sharp or
George Eliot's sorrowful sympathy with Maggie Tulliver.
What was at first set down as a new and revolutionary
kind of admiration for weakness and criminality soon
resolved itself into a manifestation of that remarkable Zeit-
Qeist which has made itself felt in every department of
human life. It is that side of the modern spirit which
leads to the comprehension of the sufferings of others,
to a new pity for their faults and weaknesses, a new
breadth of tolerance, and a generous reluctance to judge
harshly of one's fellow man. It has crept into the domain
of law, of religious thought, of philanthropic effort, and
it cannot be excluded from the realms of literature and
art. It is, in fact, the scientific spirit, which says "there's
nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so ; " which
refuses to dogmatise or hastily to condemn ; which looks
for the motives and reasons and causes of men's actions,
( 182 )
By ADELINE SERGEANT
and knows the infinite gradations between folly and wisdom,
between black and white, between right and wrong. If
science had done nothing else, it would be an enormous
gain that she should teach us to suspend our judgment, to
weigh evidence, and thus to pave the way for that
diviner spirit by which we refuse to consider any sinner
irreclaimable or any criminal beyond the reach of human
sympathy.
"East Lynne" was received with general acclamation, and
has been translated, it is said, into every known tongue,
including Parsee and Hindustanee. " Some years ago," her
son states, "one of the chief librarians in Madrid informed
Mrs. Henry Wood that the most popular book on his
shelves, original or translated, was ' East Lynne.' Not very
long ago it was translated into Welsh and brought out in
a Welsh newspaper. It has been dramatised and played so
often that had the author received a small royalty from
every representation it was long since estimated that it
would have returned to her no less than a quarter of a
million sterling, but she never received anything
In the English Colonies the sale of the various works
increased steadily year by year. In France the story has
been dramatised and is frequently played in Paris and the
Provinces." On its first appearance, an enthusiastic review
in the Times produced a tremendous effect upon the
( 183 )
MRS. HENRY WOOD
public ; the libraries were besieged for copies, and the
printers had to work night and day upon new editions.
In fact the success of "East Lynne " was one of the most
remarkable literary incidents of the century.
The most popular of Mrs. Henry Wood's books,
next to "East Lynne," seem to be "Mrs. Halliburton's
Troubles" and "The Channings." These are stories of
more entirely quiet domestic interest than " East Lynne."
The situations are less tragical and the plots less com-
plicated. Mrs. Halliburton's quiet endurance of the
privations and difficulties of her life, the pathetic life and
death of her little Janey, and the ultimate success and
achievements of her sons, linger in the memory of the
reader as a pleasant and homely picture of the vicissitudes
of English life.
There is a more humorous element in " The Channings,"
from the introduction of so many youthful characters
the boys of the Cathedral school, notably Bywater, who
is the incarnation of good-humoured impudence, giving
brightness to the tone of the story. The schoolboys
are in this, as in many other of Mrs. Wood's novels,
particularly well drawn. They are not prigs ; they are
anything but angels, in spite of their white surplices and
their beautiful voices ; and their escapades and adventures in
( 184 )
By ADELINE SERGEANT
the old cloisters were wild enough to make the old mon s
turn in their graves. No doubt many incidents of this
kind were drawn from life and owe their origin to Mrs.
Wood's acquaintance with the Choir School belonging to
Worcester Cathedral.
It was not the only occasion on which the manufac-
turer's daughter turned her knowledge of Worcester to
good account. It may be said that the majority of her
novels are coloured, more or less, by the author's lengthy
residence in a cathedral town. It was in 1874 that the
first series of short stories, supposed to be narrated
by Johnny Ludlow, began in the Argosy. Johnny
Ludlow is a young lad belonging to a Worcestershire
family, who is supposed to narrate incidents which have
come under his observation at school or at home. Some
of the stories thus produced are striking and vigorous ;
others are of less merit, but all are distinguished by the
strong individuality of the characters, and by the fidelity
with which Worcester and Worcestershire life are described.
It now seems extraordinary that there should have been the
slightest doubt as to the authorship of these stories, for Mrs.
Wood's peculiarities of style are observable on every page.
Mr. Charles W. Wood, her son, remarks that " no one
knew, or even guessed at, the authorship ; " but this is
a rather exaggerated statement, as we have reason to
( 185 )
MRS. HENRY WOOD
be aware that the author was recognised at once by
critics of discrimination. Still the general public were
for some time deceived, imagining Johnny Ludlow
to be a new author, whose stories they occasionally
contrasted with those of Mrs. Henry Wood, and were
said to prefer, probably much to the novelist's own
amusement.
The great variety of plot and incident found in the
" Johnny Ludlow " stories is their most remarkable
feature. The same characters are, of course, introduced
again and again, as Johnny Ludlow moves in a circle of
country squires, clergy, and townspeople. But it is
astonishing with how much effect the stories of different
lives can be placed in the same setting, and with what
infinite changes the life of a country district can be repro-
duced. The characters are clearly drawn and often very
well contrasted, and no doubt Mrs. Henry Wood's
memories of her earlier life in the district contributed
largely to the success of this series. The first series ran
in the Argosy and were re-printed, 1874-1880, while a
second and third series maintained their popularity in 1 8 8 1
and in 1885.
It has been computed that Mrs. Wood wrote not fewer
than from three to four hundred short stories, every one
( 186)
By ADELINE SERGEANT
of them with a distinct and carefully worked-out plot, in
addition to nearly forty long novels : a proof, if any were
wanted, of the extreme fertility of her imagination and the
facility of her pen.
It has, however, sometimes been wondered why Mrs.
Henry Wood's works should have attained so great a
circulation when they are conspicuously wanting in the
higher graces of literary style or intellectual attainment.
The reason appears to lie chiefly in certain qualities of her
writings which appeal in an entirely creditable way to the
heart and mind of the British public. Mrs. Wood's
stories, although sensational in plot, are purely domestic.
They are concerned chiefly with the great middle-class of
England, and she describes lower middle-class life with a zest
and a conviction and a sincerity which we do not find in
many modern writers, who are apt to sneer at the bourgeois
habits and modes of thought found in so many English
households. Now the bourgeoisie does not like to be
sneered at. If it eats tripe and onions, and wears bright
blue silk dresses, and rejoices in dinner-tea, it nevertheless
considers its fashions to be as well worth serious attention
as those of the Upper Ten. Mrs. Henry Wood never
satirises, she only records. It is her fidelity to truth,
to the smallest domestic detail, which has charmed and
will continue to charm, a large circle of readers,
( 187 )
MRS. HENRY WOOD
who are inclined perhaps to glory in the name of
" Philistine."
Then there is the loftier quality of a high, if somewhat
conventional, moral tone. Mrs. Wood's novels are em-
phatically on the side of purity, honesty, domestic life and
happiness. There is no book of hers which does not
breathe this spirit, or can be said to be anything but
harmless. Her character-drawing has merit ; but it is not
to be wondered at, considering the number of works she
produced, that she should repeat the same type over and
over again with a certain monotonous effect. The sweet
and gentle wife and mother, not too strong in character,
but perfectly refined and conscientious, such as Maria in
the " Shadow of Ashlydyat " ; the " perfect gentleman,'*
noble, upright, proud, generally with blue eyes and
straight features, like Oswald Cray and Mr. Carlisle
and Mr. North these are characters with which we
continually meet and of which, admirable in themselves
as they are, we sometimes weary. But although the
portraiture is not very subtle, it is on the whole faithful
to life.
Then there is that especial group of Mrs. Wood's stories
already mentioned, into which an element of freshness, then
somewhat unusual in fiction, is largely introduced. These
are the stories which have much to do with boys and
( 188 )
By ADELINE SERGEANT
boy-life notably " The Channings," " Roland Yorke,"
" Orville College," " Mrs. Halliburton's Troubles,"
" Lady Grace," and the " Johnny Ludlow " series. These
books, less sensational in plot than many of Mrs. Wood's
novels, have been peculiarly successful, perhaps because
the scenes and characters are largely drawn from real
life. Mrs. Wood's long residence at Worcester made her
familiar with the life of the college boys, who haunt the
precincts of the stately old cathedral, and. she has introduced
her knowledge of their pranks with very great effect.
Her descriptions of the old city itself, of the streets, of
the cloisters, of the outlying villages and byways, are
remarkably accurate, and remind one of the use which
Charles Dickens made, in the same way, of Rochester
and its cathedral.
It is really extraordinary to see how large a part of
Mrs. Wood's work is concerned with Worcester, and how
well she could render, when she chose, the dialogue of
the country and the customs of its people. The reason is,
of course, that these things are true ; that she gives us in
these books a part of her own experience, of her own life.
Another group of her books is interesting for a similar
reason the novels in which she deals with business life,
and the relations of employers to their men. Such are
" A Life's Secret," which is the very interesting history of
( 189)
MRS. HENRY WOOD
a strike; "The Foggy Night at OfFord," " Mrs. Halli-
burton's Troubles," and several of the "Johnny Ludlow"
stories, where incidents of the manufacturing districts of
England have been introduced with very good effect,
Mrs. Wood's own connection with glove manufacturers
in Worcester having supplied her with ample materials for
this kind of fiction. In "A Life's Secret" there is an
extremely clever picture of the lower type of workman,
and some excellent sketches of poor people and of the
misery they suffer during the strike and subsequent lock-
out.
The third class of Mrs. Wood's books consists of what
may be called works of pure imagination, with sometimes
a slight touch of the romantic and supernatural such as
" The Shadow of Ashlydyat," " St. Martin's Eve," " Lady
Adelaide's Oath," " Lord Oakburn's Daughters," " George
Canterbury's Will," etc. From the literary point of view
these books are less worthy than the others, but they are
particularly well constructed and ingenious. There are no
loose ends, and Mrs. Wood's skill in weaving a plot seems
never to have diminished to the last day of her life. But
her earlier and perhaps simpler work had more real
value than even the books which display such great con-
structive skill. Mrs. Wood would possibly have taken a
higher place amongst English novelists if she had avoided
( 190 )
By ADELINE SERGEANT
mere sensation, and confined herself to what she could do
well namely, the faithful and realistic rendering of English
middle class life. She has had, perhaps, more popularity
than any novelist of the Victorian age ; and her popularity
is justified by the wholesomeness and purity of her moral
tone, the ingenuity and sustained interest of her plots, and
the quiet truthfulness, in many cases, of her delineation of
character.
Her faults are those of the class for which she wrote,
her merits are theirs also. It is no small praise to say that
she never revelled in dangerous situations, nor justified the
wrong-doing of any of her characters. When one con-
siders the amount of work that she produced, and the
nature of that work, it is amazing to reflect on the variety
of incident and character which she managed to secure.
Her plots often turned upon sad or even tragic events,
but the sadness and the tragedy were natural and simple.
There was nothing unwholesome about her books. She
will probably be read and remembered longer than many
writers of a far higher literary standing ; and although
fashions, even in fiction, have greatly changed since the
days when " East Lynne " and " The Channings " made
their mark, there is no doubt that they hold their
place in the affections of many an English novel-reader.
They neither aim high nor fall low : their gentle mediocrity
MRS. HENRY WOOD
is soothing ; and they are not without those gleams of
insight and intensity which reveal the gift of the born
story-teller a title to which Mrs. Henry Wood may well
lay claim.
( 192
LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON
MRS. STRETTON. ANNE
MANNING
By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
N
LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON
MRS. STRETTON. ANNE
MANNING
three ladies here grouped together
are similar in the purity and principle
which breathe throughout their writings,
though different in other respects. The
first named wrote in the stress, and
later in the calm, of a religious struggle ; the second in the
peaceful, fond memory of a happy home-life ; the third
in the pleasurable realisation of historic days long gone
by. In each case, the life is reflected in the books.
GEORGIANA CHARLOTTE LEVESON
GOWER was born on September 23, 1812,
being the second daughter of one of those noble
families predestined, by their rank and condition, to a
LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON
diplomatic course. Her father became ultimately Earl
Granville, and when his little daughter was twelve years
old, he received the appointment of ambassador at Paris.
It is well known that the upper diplomatic circles form
the creme de la creme of aristocratic society, their breed-
ing, refinement, knowledge of man and manners, as well
as their tact, being almost necessarily of the highest order.
Lady Granville was noted for her admirable management
of her receptions, and her power of steering her way
through the motley crowd of visitors and residents pre-
sented to her. The charm of her manner was very
remarkable, and made a great impression on all who came
in her way. And, giving reality and absolute sincerity to
all this unfailing sweetness, Lady Granville was a deeply
religious and conscientious woman, who trained her
daughters to the highest standard of excellence, and
taught them earnest devotion.
Naturally, French was as familiar to the young ladies
as English, and they became intimate with many of the
best and purest families in France, among others, with
that of de Ferronaye, whose memoirs, as told by one of
them, Mrs. Augustus Craven, has touched many hearts. It
was a happy life, in which study and accomplishment had
their place, and gaieties did not lose the zest of youthful
enjoyment because they were part of the duty of station.
( 196)
By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
Between France and England the time of the family
was spent, and, in 1833, both sisters were married
Lady Georgiana on July 13, to Alexander Fullerton,
heir to considerable estates in Gloucestershire and in
Ireland. He had been in the Guards, but had resigned
his commission, and become an attache to the Embassy
at Paris, There the young couple continued, and
there, at the end of the year, was born their only
child, a son, whose very delicate health was a constant
anxiety.
In 1841 Lord Granville ceased to be ambassador, and
the whole family led a wandering life in the South of
France, Italy, and Germany, interspersed with visits in
England. In 1843 Mr. Fullerton, after long study of
the controversy, was received into the Church of Rome.
His wife had always greatly delighted in the deep and
beautiful rites of that communion, in its best aspects, and
many of her most intimate friends were devout and en-
lightened members of that Church ; but she had been
bred up as a faithful Anglican, and she made no change
as long as her father lived. The tale on which her chief
fame rests was the product of the heart-searchings that
she underwent, at the very time when the thoughts and
studies of good men were tending to discover neglected
truths in the Church of England.
LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON
Lady Georgiana said, in her old age, that she had never
written for her own pleasure, or to find expression of feel-
ing, but always with a view to the gains for her charities.
She would rather have written poetry, and the first impulse
was given by her publisher telling her that she would find
a novel far more profitable than verses. Yet it is hardly
possible to believe that when once embarked she did not
write from her heart. She was a long time at work on
her tale, which was written during sojourns at various
continental resorts, and finally submitted to two such
different critics as Lord Brougham and Charles Greville,
both of whom were carried away by admiration of the
wonderful pathos of the narrative, and the charm of de-
scription, as well as the character-drawing. It is, however,
curious that, while marking some lesser mistakes, neither
advised her to avoid the difficulty which makes the entire
plot an impossibility, namely, the omission of an inquest,
which must have rendered the secrecy of " Ellen Middle-
ton " out of the question.
The story opens most effectively with the appearance
of a worn and wasted worshipper in Salisbury Cathedral.
One of the canons becomes interested, and with much
difficulty induces her to confide her griefs to him in an
autobiography, which she had intended to be read only
after her death. The keynote of Ellen's misfortunes is a
( 198 )
By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
slight blow, given in a moment of temper, at fifteen years
old, to her cousin, a naughty child of eight, causing a
fatal fall into the river below. No one knows the manner
of the disaster, except two persons whose presence was
unknown to her : Henry Lovell, a relative of the family,
and his old nurse, whom he swears to silence.
This woman, however, cannot refrain from strewing
mysterious hints in Ellen's way, and Henry Lovell obtains
a power over the poor girl which is the bane of her life.
His old nurse (by very unlikely means) drives him into a
marriage with her grand-daughter, Alice, whose lovely,
innocent, devotional character, is one of the great charms
of the book. Ellen, almost at the same time, marries her
cousin, Edward Middleton, whom she loves with all her
heart ; but he is a hard man, severe in his integrity, and
his distrust is awakened by Henry's real love for Ellen,
and the machinations by which he tries to protect her
from the malice of the old nurse. The net closes nearer
and nearer round Ellen, till at last Edward finds her on
her knees before Henry, conjuring him to let her confess
her secret. Without giving her a hearing, Edward com-
mands her to quit his house. A letter from Henry,
declaring that she is his own, and that she will not escape
him, drives her to seek concealment at Salisbury, where
she is dying of consumption, caused by her broken heart,
LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON
when the good canon finds her, gives her absolution, and
brings about repentance, reconciliation, and an infinite
peace, in which we are well content to let her pass away,
tended by her husband, her mother-like aunt, and the
gentle Alice.
It is altogether a fine tragedy. The strong passions of
Henry Lovell, the enthusiastic nature of Ellen, beaten
back in every higher flight by recurring threats from her
enemies, the unbending nature of Edward, and in the
midst the exquisite sweetness of Alice, like a dove in the
midst of the tempest, won all hearts, either by the masterly
analysis of passion or by the beauty of delineation, while
the religious side of the tale was warmly welcomed by
those who did not think, like Lord Brougham, that it was
" rank Popery." The sense of the power and beauty of
the story is only enhanced by freshly reading it after the
lapse of many years.
Naturally, it was a great success, and the second book,
" Grantley Manor," which was not published till after her
father's death and her own secession to Rome, was floated
up on the same tide of popularity. It contrasted two
half-sisters, Margaret and Ginevra, one wholly English,
the other half Italian by race and entirely so by breeding.
Still, though Ginevra is the more fascinating, Margaret is
her superior in straightforward truth. For, indeed, Lady
(-200)
By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
Georgiana never fell into the too frequent evil of deprecia-
tion and contempt of the system she had quitted, and
remained open-minded and loving to the last. The
excellence of style and knowledge of character as well as
the tone of high breeding which are felt in all these writings
recommended both this and "Ladybird," published in
1852. Both are far above the level of the ordinary
novel, and some readers preferred " Ladybird " to the two
predecessors.
In the meantime, an estate in England at Midgham
had become a home, and young Granville Fullerton had
gone into the army. On the 2pth of May 1855, ne was
cut off by a sudden illness, and his parents' life was ever
after a maimed one, though full of submission and devo-
tion. Externally, indeed, Lady Georgiana still showed
her bright playfulness of manner, and keen interest in all
around her, so that the charm of her society was very
great, but her soul was the more entirely absorbed in
religion and in charity, doing the most menial offices for
the sick poor and throwing herself into the pleasures of
little children. She questioned with herself whether she
ought to spend time in writing instead of on her poor,
when the former task meant earning two hundred pounds
a year for them, but she decided on uniting the two occu-
( 201 )
LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON
pations, the more readily because she found that her
works had a good influence and helped on a religious
serial in which she took a warm interest.
But her motifs were now taken from history, not actual
life. " La Comtesse de Boneval " is a really marvellous
tour de force ', being a development from a few actual letters
written by a poor young wife, whose reluctant husband
left her, after ten days, for foreign service, and never
returned. Lady Georgiana makes clear the child's hero-
worship, the brief gleam of gladness, the brave resolve not
to interfere with duty and honour, and the dreary deserted
condition. All is written in French, not only pure and
grammatical, but giving in a wonderful manner the epi-
grammatic life and freshness of the old Parisian society.
This is really the ablest, perhaps the most pathetic, of her
books.
" Ann Sherwood " is a picture of the sufferings of the
Romanists in Elizabethan times, " A Stormy Life " is the
narrative of a companion of Margaret of Anjou both
showing too much of the author's bias. " Too Strange
not to be True " is founded on a very curious story, dis-
interred by Lord Dover, purporting that the unhappy
German wife of the ferociously insane son of Peter the
Great, at the point of death from his brutality, was
smuggled away by her servants, with the help of Countess
(202 )
By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
Konigsmark, the mother of Marshal Saxe, while a false
funeral took place. She was conveyed to the French
Settlements in Louisiana, and there, after hearing that the
Czarowitz was dead, she married a French gentleman, the
Chevalier d'Auban. Here, in these days of one-volume
tales, the story might well have ended, but Lady Georgiana
pursues the history through the latter days of the princess,
after she had returned to Europe and had been bereaved
of her husband and her daughter. She lived at Brussels,
and again met Marshal Saxe in her extreme old age. The
figures of the Chevalier, and the sweet daughter, Mina,
are very winning and graceful, and there are some most
interesting descriptions of the Jesuit missions to the Red
Indians ; but, as a whole, the book had better have closed
with the marriage with d'Auban.
There is little more to say of Lady Georgiana's life.
It was always affectionate, cheerful and unselfish, and it
became increasingly devout as she grew older. After a
long illness, she died at Bournemouth, on the ipth of
January 1885, remembered fondly by many, and honoured
by all who knew her saintly life. As to literary fame, she
may be described as having written one first-rate book
and a number fairly above the average.
( 203 )
MRS. STRETTON
ABOUT the same time as " Ellen Middleton " ap-
peared, a novel was making its way rather by
force of affectionate family portraiture than by
plot or incident. " The Valley of a Hundred Fires " is
really and truly Mrs. Stretton's picture of her father and
mother, and her home ; and her mother is altogether her
heroine, while old family habits and anecdotes are given
with only a few alterations. " The Valley of the Hundred
Fires " has been placed by her on the borders of Wales,
but it really was Gateshead, in Durham, quite as black
and quite as grimy as the more southern region, inasmuch
as no flowers would grow in the Rectory garden which,
nevertheless, the children loved so heartily as to call it
dear old Dingy. (It is Cinder Tip in the story.)
Literally, they lived so as to show that
" Love's a flower that will not die
For lack of leafy screen ;
And Christian hope may cheer the eye
That ne'er saw vernal green ; "
and that at least, in the early days of this century an
abnormally large family was no misfortune to themselves
or their parents.
( 204 )
By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
The real name was Collinson, and the deep goodness
and beneficence of the father, the Reverend John Collinson,
and the undaunted cheerfulness, motherliness, and disci-
pline of Emily, his wife, shine throughout, not at all ideal-
ised. The number of their children was fifteen, ten
daughters and five sons ; and the second daughter, Julia
Cecilia, was, as she describes herself, a tall, lank, yellow
baby who was born on the 25th of November 1812.
She became as the eldest daughter to the others, for there
had always been a promise that if there were several
girls the eldest should be adopted by her aunt, wife to a
clergyman and childless.
The two homes were a great contrast : the one kept in
absolute order and great refinement, with music and flowers
the constant delight and occupation, and the single adopted
child trained up in all the precision of the household ;
while the other was a house of joyous freedom, kept under
the needful restraints of sound religious principle, discipline
and unselfishness. The story went that when the children
were asked how many of them there were, they answered,
" One young lady and eight little girls." Mrs. Collinson
used to say, that if she ever saw any signs that her " one
young lady " was either pining for companionship, or
growing spoilt by the position, she would recall her
at once ; but the child was always happy and obedient,
( 205 )
MRS. STRETTON
and pleased to impart her accomplishments to her sisters,
who admired without jealousy. Comical adventures are
recorded in the " Valley," such as when the whole train of
little damsels, walking out under the convoy of Julia and
a young nurserymaid, encountered a bull, which had lifted
a gate on its horns. The maid thrust the baby into
Julia's arms and ran away, while her charges retired into
a ditch, the elder ones not much alarmed, because, as
they said, the bull could not hurt them with the gate on
its horns. It passed safely by them ; but the little ones
confessed to having been dreadfully frightened by a snail in
the ditch, "which put out its horns like a little Kerry
cow," and it creeped and it creeped !
One incident in their early childhood was the rioting
that pervaded the collieries in the years immediately fol-
lowing the great French war. Mr. Collinson, being a
magistrate, was called upon to accompany the dragoons in
order to read the Riot Act. He thus left his family
unprotected ; but the seven thousand pitmen never
touched the Rectory, and, according to the " Valley,"
replied courteously to two of the children, who rushed
out to the top of the Cinder Tip, begging to know
whether they had seen " our papa " and if he was safe.
There was another sadder episode, related also with
much feeling, though a little altered, for it concerned the
( 206)
By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
second son, not the eldest (then the only son) as described.
A blow from a cricket ball did irreparable mischief to his
knee, and it was suddenly decreed that amputation was
necessary, long before the days of chloroform. The father
was away from home, the mother sentenced not to be
present, and the doctors consented that Julia should hold
the patient's hand, smooth his hair, and try to tell him
stories through the operation. It was successfully and
bravely carried out, but the evil was not removed, and
a few weeks later this much-loved boy was taken away.
The circumstances, very beautiful and consoling, are given
in the story ; and there too is told how, before sunset on
that sad day, the ninth little daughter was given, and
struggled hard for the vigorous life she afterwards
attained.
The " Parson's man " said one day, when his mistress,
for once in her life, indulged in a sigh that her garden
could never rival that of her sister, " We've got the finer
flowers, ma'am."
Education was not the tyrannical care in those days
that it is at present, and the young people obtained it
partly through their parents, some at school, and some by
the help of their grandmother and their aunt, but mostly
by their own intelligence and exertions ; and the family
income was augmented by Mr. Collinson taking pupils.
( 207 )
MRS. STRETTON
He had a fair private income ; he had a curate, and was
able to give a good education to his sons, one of whom
made himself a name as Admiral Collinson, one of the
Arctic explorers. If there were anxieties, they did not
tell upon the children, whose memories reflect little save
sunshine.
At nineteen, Julia Collinson became the wife of Walter
de Winton, Esquire, of Maedlwch Castle, Radnorshire ;
but after only twelve years was left a widow, with two
sons and a daughter. Her life was devoted to making
their home as bright and joyous as her own had been ;
and it was only in the loneliness that ensued on the
children going to school that her authorship commenced,
with a child's book called " The Lonely Island."
Later she wrote " The Valley of the Hundred Fires,"
tracing the habits, characters and the destiny of the family
of Gateshead. The father was by this time dead, and
extracts from his sermons and diary appear; but "Emily,"
the mother, is the real heroine of the whole narrative, and
though there is so little plot that it hardly deserves the
name of novel, there is a wonderful charm in the delinea-
tion. There are a few descriptions of manners and of
dresses which are amusing ; nor must we omit the portrait
of the grandmother, Mrs. King (called Reine in the
(208)
By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
book), daughter to the governor of one of the colonies in
America before the separation, with the manners of her
former princess-ship and something of the despotism.
She was a friend of Hannah More, a beneficent builder
of schools, and produced a revolt by herself cutting the
hair of all the scholars !
" The Queen of the County " relates Mrs. de Winton's
experiences of elections among " the stormy hills of Wales "
in the early days of the Reform Bill. " Margaret and
her Bridesmaids" draws more upon invention. Each
of two young girls, through the injudiciousness of her
parents, has married the wrong person. Margaret acqui-
esces too much in her husband's indolence, and when
herself roused to the perception of duty tries in vain to
recover lost ground. Her friend Lottie is a high-spirited
little soul, determined to do her duty as a wife, but not to
pretend the love she does not feel, till it has been won.
She is rather provokingly and unnaturally perfect, espe-
cially as she is only seventeen, always knowing when to
obey up to the letter in a manner which must so have
" riled " her husband that his persistent love is hardly
credible, though it shows itself in attempts to isolate her,
so that she shall have no resource save himself. His
endeavours bring upon him heart complaint, whereof he
dies, under her tender care, though she never affects to be
( 209 ) o
MRS. STRETTON
grief-stricken. Only, as Margaret has lost her husband
about the same time in a yachting accident, Lottie refuses
to listen to the addresses of a former lover of Margaret's
until she is convinced both that her friend will never form
another attachment and that the original passion she had
inspired is absolutely dead. There is a good deal of
character in the story, though overdrawn, and it has sur-
vived so as to call for a new edition.
To her children, as well as to her many nephews and
nieces, Mrs. de Winton was a charming companion-
mother, always fresh, young, vigorous and as full of play-
fulness as the Julia who led the band of little sisters.
When all her children were grown up, in 1858, she
married Richard William Stretton, who had been their
guardian and an intimate friend of the family, by whom
he was much beloved. He died in 1868, and Mrs.
Stretton followed him on the lyth of July 1878, leaving
behind her one of the brightest of memories. Her books
are emphatically herself in their liveliness, their tenderness,
their fond enshrining of the past.
(210)
By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
THE third of our group had an even more eventless
life, and, instead of letting her imagination dwell
on her own past, she studied the women of past
history, and realised what they must have felt and thought
in the scenes where most of them figure only as names.
Her father belonged to the higher professional class, and
lived with his large family, of whom Anne was the eldest, at
the Paragon, Chelsea, where at eight years old Anne listened
to the crash of the carriages, when the Bourbons were on
their return to France, and witnessed the ecstasy of London
on the visit of the Allied Sovereigns after Waterloo.
With the help of masters for special accomplishments,
the daughters had the best of educations, namely, the
stimulating influence of their father, an accomplished man,
for whom they practised their music, wrote their themes,
went out star-gazing, and studied astronomy, listening
with delight to his admirable reading of Scott or
Shakspere ; they also had the absolute freedom of an
extensive library. Anne Manning was pronounced to
be no genius, but a most diligent, industrious girl; as
indeed was proved, for, becoming convinced during the
brief reign of a good governess of the duty of solid
(211 )
ANNE MANNING
reading, she voluntarily read from the age of fourteen ten
pages a day of real, if dry, history, persevering year after
year, and thus unconsciously laying in a good foundation
for her future work.
For health's sake the family went into the country,
where they became tenants of a tumble-down Cis-
tercian priory on the borders of Salisbury Plain. The
numerous girls, with their mother and governess, lived
there constantly ; the father coming down as often as
his business would allow, almost always by the Saturday
coach, to spend Sunday. Here the first literary venture
was made, when Anne was about seventeen. It was a
short dialogue on a serious subject, which a young aunt
managed to get accepted in St. Paul's Churchyard ; and,
as Miss Manning candidly avows, was so well advertised
privately by her fond grandfather that such were the
palmy days of authorship five hundred copies brought
her in a profit of 60.
The story, " Village Belles," was completed at Tenby,
the Priory having become too ruinous for habitation. It
was put into the hands of Baldwin and Cradock, and no
proofs were sent till the whole of the two first volumes
came together. It was introduced to Mr. Manning thus,
"Papa, I don't know what you will say, but I have been
writing a story."
(212 )
By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
" Ho ! ho ! ho ! " was his first answer, but he after-
wards said, " My dear, I like your story very much "
and never again referred to it.
Her own after judgment was that it was an " incurably
young, inexperienced tale which, after all top dressing,
remained but daisied meadow grass."
Sorrow came in to fill the minds of the family (to the
exclusion of mere fictitious interests) in the deaths within
short intervals of two of the sisters, and their mother's
invalidism, ending, within a few years, in her death.
After this the winters were spent by the three sisters at
the Paragon, the summers in a cottage at Penshurst, their
father coming down for the Sunday. Anne Manning,
meantime, was pursuing studies in painting and was an
excellent amateur artist. She was also a botanist, and this
has much to do with her accuracy in writing details of
country life and habits.
Dates, alas ! are wanting both in her own " Passages in
the life of an Authoress," and in the recollections of her
kind and affectionate biographer, Mrs. Batty ; but it
seems to have been in 1849 l ^ at her "Maiden and
Married Life of Mary Powell," at first written to amuse
herself and her sisters, and afterwards sent to assist a brother
in Australia, who was starting a local magazine, was given
(213)
ANNE MANNING
to the editor of " Sharpe's Magazine," then in its early
youth.
It made her fame. Nobody had particularly thought
of Milton in his domestic capacity before, except as having
advocated divorce and made his daughters read Greek to
him, and it was reserved for Miss Manning to make the
wife paint her own portrait as the lively, eager girl,
happy in country freedom with her brothers, important
with her " housewife-skep " in her mother's absence,
pleased with dress, but touched by the beautiful coun-
tenance and the sudden admiration of the strange visitor.
There proves to be a debt which makes her marriage with
him convenient to the father, and it is carried out in spite
of the mother's strong objections, alike to the suitor's age,
his politics, and his puritanism. We go along with the
country girl in her disappointment and sense of dreariness
in her unaccustomed London life, in the staid and serious
household, where she sorely misses her brothers and is
soon condemned for love of junketing. Then come her
joy in her visit to her home at Forest Hill and her
reluctance to return, fortified by her father's disapproval of
Milton's opinions. By the time that a visit to some wise
relatives has brought her to a better mind and to yearning
after her husband, Milton has taken offence and has put
forth his plea for divorce, which so angers her father
( 214 )
By CHARLOTTE M. YONGE
that he will not hear of her return ; nor does she go back
till after many months and the surrender of Oxford, when
on her own impulse she hurries to London, meets her
husband unexpectedly, and when he " looks down on
her with goodness and sweetness 'tis like the sun's gleams
shining after rain."
There Mary Powell's journal ends. It is written in
beautiful English, such as might well have been contem-
porary and could only have been acquired by familiarity
with the writers of the period, flowing along without
effort or pedantry so as to be a really successful imitation.
It crept into separate publication anonymously, and
achieved a great success, being in fact the first of many
books imitating the like style of autobiography ; nor has it
ever been allowed to drop into oblivion. It was followed
up after a time by " Deborah's Diary," being the record
supposed to be kept by Milton's one faithful and dutiful
daughter, who lived with him in his old age.
The " fascination of the old style," as she calls it, Jed
her to deal with "The Household of Sir Thomas More "
in the person of his noble daughter Margaret. There
was a good deal more genuine material here, and she has
woven in the fragments from Erasmus and others with
great ingenuity, and imitated the style of the fifteenth
century as well as she had done that of the seventeenth.
(215 )
ANNE MANNING
From that time Anne Manning's books had a ready
sale, though still her name did not appear. " Cherry and
Violet " was a tale of the plague of London ; " Edward
Osborne " told of the apprentice who leapt from the window
of a house on London Bridge to save his master's daughter
from drowning ; " The Old Chelsea Bunhouse " described
the haunts with which Miss Manning was familiar ; and
there were other stories of country life, such as the
" Ladies of Bever Hollow." All were written in the
purest style, such as could only be attained by one to
whom slipshod writing was impossible, and to whom it
was equally impossible not to write what was gentle,
charitable, and full of religious principle.
Miss Manning was a kind friend and charming letter-
writer. Her health began to fail in 1854, when she was
writing for a magazine " Some Passages in the Life of an
Authoress," never completed. She continued to be an
invalid under the care of her sisters till her death on the
1 4th of September, 1879.
216)
DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
By MRS. PARR
DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
,N the small circle of women writers who
shed literary lustre on the early years of
her present Majesty's reign was Dinah
Mulock, best known to the present
novel-reading generation as the author
of "John Halifax, Gentleman."
To appreciate fully the position that we claim for her,
it will be necessary to turn back to the period when she
began to write, and see who were her contemporaries.
Pre-eminent among these stand out three names
names immortal on the roll of fame for so long as taste
and critical judgment last ; the books of Charlotte Bronte,
Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot must be regarded
as masterpieces of fiction. We, their humble followers,
bow before their genius which time, fashion, or progress
cannot dim or take from; therefore, to have achieved
success and to have made an abiding fame while such
DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
luminaries were shining in the firmament was a distinction
to be justly proud of the result of talent, delicacy of
handling, and grasp of character that were only a little
below genius.
How vast the difference that one small step would have
made it is not our purpose to show ; our intention is
rather to take a general view of the work of a writer
who now that close upon half a century has passed,
since, in 1 849, timidly and without giving her name, she
launched on the world her first novel, " The Ogilvies "
has never lost her hold upon the reading public of Great
Britain, the Colonies, America, or wherever the English
tongue is spoken.
Dinah Mulock was born in 1826 at Stoke-upon-Trent
in Staffordshire. Her disposition towards literature seems
to have been inherited from her father, who was connected
but in no very prosperous way with letters, and
was known to Byron and to the poet Moore, whose fellow
countryman he was. At the time of his daughter's birth,
he was acting as spiritual minister to a small congregation
who were followers of what were then generally thought
to be his advanced and unorthodox opinions. Few who
forsake the established road for their own peculiar rut find
that prosperity bears them company, and the fortunes of
( 220 )
By MRS. PARR
the Mulock family during the embryo authoress's early
years were unsettled and unsatisfactory. We are all given
to rebel against the clouds which overcast our youth,
seldom realising that to this pinch of adverse circumstance
we owe much of that power to depict the sorrows, joys,
and perplexities of life in the setting forth of which Miss
Mulock became so eminently successful.
Before she had reached the age of twenty, she left her
home and came to London, " feeling conscious," we are
told, " of a vocation for authorship."
Now, in the present day, when novel writing has become
an employment, profession, distraction, I might almost say
a curse, there would be nothing remarkable in such a
conviction ; but in 1846 the mania of desiring to see their
names in print had not seized upon our sex ; therefore the
divine afflatus must have been very strong which sent a
timid attractive girl, hampered by all the prejudices of her
day, to try the fortunes of her pen in London.
That she had not been deceived in her quality is shown
by the success of "The Ogilvies," which not only was
popular with novel readers, but raised hopes that the writer
possessed great dramatic power, to be more ably used when
experience had corrected the crude faults of a first book.
The story, based on passionate first love, is written with
the enthusiasm and vigour which comes pleasantly from a
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DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
young hand, and makes us disposed to view leniently the
superabundance of sentiment which, under other circum-
stances, we should censure. The death of the boy, Leigh
Pennythorne, is rendered with a pathos which calls for
admiration, and we are not surprised to see it ranked
with the death of little Paul Dombey ; while that of
Katherine Lynedon, spoken of at the time as possessing
great dramatic force, strikes us now as melodramatic and
sensational.
Encouraged by having found favour with the public,
Miss Mulock followed up her success with " Olive "
(1850), "Agatha's Husband" (1852), "Head of the
Family" (1854). Her literary reputation was now estab-
lished ; and, though her magnum opus, " John Halifax,"
had yet to be written, it may be as well to consider some
of the merits and weaknesses of her style, her treatment
of her subjects, and her delineation of character.
In a short sketch, such as this, it is not possible to give
a synopsis of the plots of the various books, or even, in
most cases, extracts from them. We have to confine
ourselves to the endeavour to realise the effect they
produced at the time they were written the estimation
they were then held in, and to see what position they now
command among the novels of the present day.
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By MRS. PARR
Perhaps it will be only fair towards the faults we are
about to find that we should recall the forward strides
made by women in the past forty years. We who can
recall the faulty teaching and the many prejudices of that
date must often question if women now are sufficiently
sensible of the advantages they possess.
A reviewer of Miss Mulock's novels, writing in 1866,
says : " It is one of the chief misfortunes of almost every
female novelist that her own education, as a woman, has
been wretchedly defective ; " and further on he adds : " the
education of the majority of women leaves them not only
without information, but without intelligent interest in
any subject that does not immediately concern them."
He then points out that it seems impossible for women
to describe a man as he is that they see him only from
the outside. " They are ignorant of the machinery which
sets the thing going, and the principle of the machinery ;
and so they discreetly tell you what kind of case it has,
but nothing more."
Now, when the time has come that young men and
maidens have other interests in common than those which
spring out of flirtation and love-making, we may feel quite
sure that each sex will get a better insight and have a
juster knowledge of the other. The general taste for
exercise, and the development of activity and health of
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DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
body, has killed sentimentality and the heroines of the
Rosa Matilda school. Not that these were the heroines
that Miss Mulock created. Her ideals are to a certain
extent made of flesh and blood, although they are not
always living figures. Even at the period when we are
told that "In the world of letters few authors have so dis-
tinct and at the same time so eminent a position as this
iady," her judicious admirers find fault with her overflow
of feminine sentimentality, which never permitted her
ideal sufferers to conquer their griefs so far that they could
take a practical and healthy interest in the affairs of the
living world. "They live only 'for others'" says one
critic, " ' the beautiful light ' is always in their faces ; their
hands * work spasmodically ' at least once in every two or
three chapters."
Regarding the cramping influence of the prejudices
which hedged in women in Miss Mulock's day, is it not
very possible that this flaw in the portraiture of her
own sex may have been due to the narrowness of her
training rather than to any deficiency in her talent?
Nothing more plainly shows how warped her judgment
had become than many of the passages in "A Woman's
Thoughts about Women." This is a book with much
sound argument in it, and full of the desire to rectify the
feminine grievances to which she was not blind. But
( 224 )
By MRS. PARR
when we come to a passage like the following, in which she
asserts that all who " preach up lovely uselessness, fasci-
nating frivolity, delicious helplessness, not only insult
womanhood but her Creator," we ask how is this to be
reconciled with the text which comes immediately after:
" Equally blasphemous, and perhaps even more harmful, is
the outcry about the equality of the sexes ; the frantic
attempt to force women, many of whom are either ignorant
of, or unequal for, their own duties, into the position and
duties of men. A pretty state of matters would ensue !
Who that ever listened for two hours to the verbose con-
fused inanities of a ladies' committee would immediately go
and give his vote for a female House of Commons ? or
who, on receipt of a lady's letter of business I speak of
the average would henceforth desire to have our courts
of justice stocked with matronly lawyers and our colleges
thronged by * sweet girl graduates with their golden
hair ' ? As for finance, if you pause to consider the extreme
difficulty there always is in balancing Mrs. Smith's house-
keeping book, or Miss Smith's quarterly allowance, I think,
my dear Paternal Smith, you need not be much afraid lest
this loud acclaim for women's rights should ever end in
pushing you from your counting house, college, or else-
where."
On this showing, such crass ignorance is to be accepted
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DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
in women, and is to be taken as a matter of course and as
natural to them as cutting their teeth or having measles
or chicken pox. It is of little use to advocate " Self
Dependence," " Female Professions," " Female Handi-
crafts," for those who cannot write a business letter or
do a simple sum. Miss Mulock may have had, indeed I
fear had, much reason to cast these reproaches at her sex.
But that she did not feel their shame, and urge her sister
women to strive for an education more worthy of intelli-
gent beings, proves to me how deeply her mental gifts
suffered from the cramping influence of the time in which
she lived. Could she have enjoyed some of the advantages
which spring out of the greater freedom of thought and
action permitted in the present day, how greatly it would
have enlarged her mental vision ! Her male creations
would have been cast in a more vigorous man-like mould.
Her feminine ideals would no longer be incarnations of
sentiment but living vital creatures. Where the mind is
stunted the mental insight must be limited ; and strong
as were Miss Mulock's talents, they were never able to
burst the bonds which for generations had kept the greater
number of women in intellectual imprisonment.
In "Olive," the novel which immediately followed
<{ The Ogilvies," Miss Mulock ventured on a very fresh
( 226 )
By MRS. PARR
and interesting subject. Olive, the heroine of the story,
is a deformed girl, " a puir bit crippled lassie " with a
crooked spine. To make this centre-character attractive
and all-absorbing was a worthy effort on the part of an
author, and we take up the book and settle ourselves to
see how it will be done. Unfortunately, before long, the
courage which conceived the personal blemish gives way,
and, succumbing to the difficulties of making mind triumph
over beauty, Miss Mulock commits the artistic error of
trying to impress upon you that, notwithstanding the
pages of lamentations over this deformity and the attack
made on your sympathy, the disfigurement was so slight
that no person could possibly have noticed it. Naturally
this puts the heroine in a more commonplace position ;
and as several minor plots are introduced which Olive
only serves to string together, much of the interest in her
with which we started is frittered away.
Finally, Olive marries and restores the faith of a re-
ligious sceptic. And here it is curious to read the objections
raised at the time against bringing into fiction " subjects
most vital to the human soul." One critic, after describing
the hero he is willing to accept and, much to our regret,
space prevents us showing this terrible model that we have
escaped says : " But a hero whose intellectual crotchets,
or delusions, or blindness, are to be entrusted for repairs
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DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
to a fascinating heroine a mental perplexity which is to
be solved in fiction a deep-rooted scepticism which is to
lose its vis vita according to the artistic demands of a tale
of the fancy, this we cannot away with. Sceptics are not
plastic and obliging. Would to Heaven scepticism could
be cured by bright eyes, dulcet tones, and a novelist's art
of love!"
Criticisms in this tone make more plain to us the
difficulties which novelists in the fifties had to grapple
with. So many subjects were tabooed, so many natural
impulses restrained, while the bogey Propriety was flaunted
to scare the most innocent actions, so that nothing short of
genius could ride safely over such narrow-minded bigotry.
That an extreme licence should follow before the happy
mean could be arrived at, was a safe prediction ; but
many of the writers in that day must have had a hard task
while trying to clip the wings of their soaring imaginations,
so that they might not rise above the level marked out by
Mrs. Grundy.
Now, all these social dogmas must have had an immense
influence on the receptive mind of Dinah Mulock, and
readers must not lose sight of this fact should they be
inclined to call some of her books didactic, formal, or old-
fashioned. She never posed as a brilliant, impassioned
writer of stories which tell of wrongs, or crimes, or great
(228 )
By MRS. PARR
mental conflicts. In her novels there is no dissection
of character, no probing into the moral struggles of the
human creature. Her teaching holds high the standard
of duty, patience, and the unquestioning belief that all
that God wills is well.
The enormous hold which, ever since its first appear-
ance in 1857, "John Halifax" has had on a great portion
of the English-speaking public, is due to the lofty elevation
of its tone, its unsullied purity and goodness, combined
with a great freshness, which appeals to the young and
seems to put them and the book in touch with each other.
Those who read the story years ago still recollect the
charm it had for them ; and, in a degree, the same fascina-
tion exists for youthful readers at the present time. The
theme is noble, setting forth the high moral truth of " the
nobility of man as man," and into its development the
author threw all her powers.
From the opening sentence, where you are at once
introduced to the ragged, muddy boy and the sickly
helpless lad, you feel that these two will prove to be the
leading actors in the story probably made contrasts of, and
perhaps played one against the other. This idea, however,
is speedily dispelled. Possibly from a dread of failing
where it is thought so many women do fail in the
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DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
portrayal of the unseen sides of character and the infinite
subtleties it gives rise to Miss Mulock, wisely we think,
decided to place her story in the autobiographic form ; and
the gentle refined invalid, Phineas Fletcher, is made the
deus ex machina to unravel to the reader not only the
romance of his friend John Halifax's history, but also the
working of his noble chivalrous nature. Few situations
are more pathetically drawn than the attitude of these two
lads, with its exchange of dependence and hero-worship on
the one side, and of tender, helpful compassion on the
other. A true David and Jonathan we see them, full of
the trust, confidence, and sincerity young unsullied natures
are capable of. And the story of the friendship, as it
grows towards maturity, is equally well told.
His energy and his indomitable faith in himself make
a prosperous man of the penniless boy. We follow him
on from driving the skin cart to being master of the tan-
yard ; and throughout all his temptations, struggles,
success, he maintains the same honest, fearless spirit.
It seems natural that when to such an exalted nature
love comes it should come encircled with romance, and
the wooing of Ursula March, as told by sensitive,
affectionate Phineas Fletcher, is very prettily described.
For the reason that Ursula is an heiress with a host of
aristocratic relations, John believes his love for her to be
( 230 )
By MRS. PARR
hopeless. He struggles against this overwhelming passion
for some time, until the continuous strain throws him into
a fever of which his friend fears he will die. In this
agonising strait Phineas is inspired with the idea of
confessing the truth to Ursula ; and, after a touching
scene in which this is most delicately done, she determines
to go to the man who is dying of love for her. In the
interview, which is too long to be given in its entirety and
too good to be curtailed, John tells her that owing to a
great sorrow that has come to him he must leave Norton
Bury and go to America. She begs to be told the reason,
and without an actual avowal he lets her see his secret.
" John, stay ! '
" It was but a low, faint cry, like that of a little bird.
But he heard it felt it. In the silence of the dark she
crept up to him, like a young bird to its mate, and he
took her into the shelter of his Jove for evermore. At
once all was made clear between them, for whatever the
world might say they were in the sight of heaven equal,
and she received as much as she gave."
When lights are brought into the room John takes
Ursula's hand and leads her to where old Abel Fletcher is
sitting.
" His head was erect, his eyes shining, his whole aspect
that of a man who declares before all the world, 'This is
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DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
my own.' * Eh ? ' said my father, gazing at them from
over his spectacles.
" John spoke brokenly, ' We have no parents, neither
she nor I. Bless her for she has promised to be my
wife.'
" And the old man blessed her with tears."
Abel Fletcher, grave, stern, uncompromising as
members of the Society of Friends in that day were wont
to be is a clever study. He will not yield readily to the
influence of John, and when he does give way it is by slow
degrees. Yet one of the most winning traits in this
somewhat over-perfect young man, given at times to
impress his moral obligations rather brusquely, is the
deference he pays to his former master and the filial
affection he keeps for him ; and the author manages in
these scenes to put the two into excellent touch with each
other so that, through John's attitude to him, the hard
close-fisted old tanner is transfigured into a patriarch who
fitly gives his blessing to the bride, and later on, in a scene
of great pathos, bestows his last benediction on her blind
baby daughter.
It was said at the time of its publication, and it is
still said, that in " John Halifax " Miss Mulock reached
the summit of her power. That she felt this herself
seems to be shown by her adopting the title of " Author
(232)
By MRS. PARR
of ' John Halifax.' ' Its publication was in many ways a
new departure. It was the first of that numerous series
of books brought out by her (after) life-long friend,
Mr. Blackett. Those were not the days when " twenty
thousand copies were exhausted before a word of this
novel was written ; " yet the book had a remarkable and
legitimate success. Of its merits a notable critic said, " If
we could erase half a dozen sentences from this book it
would stand as one of the most beautiful stories in the
English language, conveying one of the highest moral
truths." And that these few sentences, while in no way
affecting the actual beauty of the story, are a blot and
an " artistic and intellectual blunder " the more to be
deplored in a book whose moral teaching throughout is so
excellent we must confess. " The ragged boy, with his
open, honest face, as he asks the respectable Quaker for
work, is no beggar ; the lad who drives the cart of
dangling skins is not inferior to Phineas Fletcher, who
watches for him from his father's windows and longs
for his companionship ; and the tanner the honest and
good man who marries Ursula March, a lady born is her
equal. Having shown that men in the sight of God are
equal and that therefore all good men must be equal upon
earth, what need that John should have in his keeping a
little Greek Testament which he views as a most precious
( 233 )
DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
possession because in it is written 'Guy Halifax, Gentle-
man ' ? Are we to conclude that all his moral excellence
and intellectual worth were derived from ladies and gentle-
men who had been his remote ancestors, but with whom
he had never been in personal contact at all, since at
twelve years old he was a ragged orphan, unable to read
and write ? "
Miss Mulock could not have meant this, and yet she
lays herself open to the charge, a kind of echo of which
is heard in the adding to her good plain title of " John
Halifax " the unnecessary tag, " Gentleman."
Her literary career being now fully established, Miss
Mulock decided on taking up her permanent residence in
London ; and, about this time, she went to live at
Wildwood, a cottage at North End, Hampstead. The
now ubiquitous interviewer that benefactor of those who
want to know had not then been called into being, so there
is no record at hand to tell how the rooms were furnished,
what the mistress wore, her likes, dislikes, and the various
idiosyncrasies she displayed in half an hour's conversation.
Such being the case we must be content with the simple
fact that, charming by the candid sincerity of her disposi-
tion, and the many personal attractions that when young
she possessed, Miss Mulock speedily drew around her a
(234)
By MRS. PARR
circle of friends whom, with rare fidelity, she ever after
kept.
"John Halifax" was followed in 1859 by "A Life for
a Life," a novel which, although it never obtained the
same popularity, fully maintains the position won by its
precursor. In it Miss Mulock breaks new ground both
as to plot and the manner in which she relates the story,
which is told by the hero and heroine in the form of a
journal kept by each, so that we have alternate chapters of
his story and her story. This form of construction is
peculiar and occasionally presents to the reader some
difficulties, but as a medium to convey opinions and con-
victions which the author desires to demonstrate it is
happily conceived. The motive of the book is tragedy,
the keynote murder that is murder according to the
exigencies of the story-teller. Max Urquhart, the hero
who at the time the tale opens is a staid, serious man of
forty is the perpetrator of this crime, committed at the
age of nineteen in a fit of intoxication on a man named
Johnston. Journeying from London to join a brother
who is dying of consumption at Pau, Urquhart, through
a mistake, finds that instead of being at Southampton he
is at Salisbury. On the way he has made the acquaint-
ance of the pseudo-driver of the coach, a flashy, dis-
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DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
sipated fellow, who by a tissue of lies induces the raw
Scotch lad to remain for some hours at the inn and then
be driven on by him to where they will overtake the
right coach. By this man young Urquhart is made
drunk, and when as a butt he no longer amuses the
sottish company they brutally turn him into the street.
Later on he is aroused by the cut of a whip. It is his
coach companion who pacifies him with the assurance that
if he gets into the gig he will be speedily taken by him to
Southampton. The lad consents, he is helped up and
soon falls fast asleep to be awakened in the middle of
Salisbury plain by his savage tormentor, who pushes him
out and tells him to take up his lodging at Stonehenge.
The poor youth, with just sufficient sense left in him to
feel that he is being kept from his dying brother, implores
the ruffian to take him on his way. " To the devil with
your brother," is the answer, and in spite of all entreaties,
Johnston whips up his horse, and is on the point of start-
ing, when Urquhart, maddened by rage, catches him
unawares, drags him from the gig, and, flings him
violently on the ground, where his head strikes against
one of the great stones, and he is killed.
How Urquhart manages to reach Southampton, and to
get to Pau, he never knows ; but when he does arrive at
his destination, it is to find his brother dead and buried,
(236)
By MRS. PARR
and the fit of mania which follows is set down to the
shock this gives him. At the end of a year, hear-
ing that Johnston's death is attributed to accident, and
being under the conviction that if the truth were told he
would be hanged, he resolves to lock the secret in his own
breast until the hour of his death draws near, and, in the
meanwhile, to expiate his offence by living for others,
and for the good he can do to them. He becomes an
army doctor, goes through the Crimean War, and, when
we are introduced to him, is doing duty at Aldershot,
near where, at a ball, he meets the inevitable she,
Theodora Johnston. If the hero is drawn dark, thin,
with a spare, wiry figure, and a formal, serious air, the
portrait of the heroine, with her undeniably ordinary
figure, and a face neither pretty nor young, forms a fitting
pendant to it. These two are irresistibly drawn towards
each other, and, notwithstanding that the lady bears
the fatal name of Johnston, they soon become engaged.
Dr. Urquhart's tender conscience then demands that
the tragic misdeed of his life shall be confessed to the
woman he is about to make his wife, and, in a letter,
he confides to her the sad history, adding, as post-
script, some few days later : " I have found his grave
at last." Here follows the inscription, which proves the
dead man to have been the son of Theodora's father,
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DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
her own half-brother, Henry Johnston. " Farewell,
Theodora ! "
It is impossible here to give more than this crude out-
line of the plot of a book in which, far beyond the story
she means to tell, the author has her own individual
opinions and convictions to impress on us. The temptation
to earnest writers to try, through their writings, to make
converts of their readers, is often very strong, and in this
instance Miss Mulock undoubtedly gave way to it. She
had not only a vehement abhorrence of capital punishment,
but, to quote from her book, she maintained " that any
sin, however great, being repented of and forsaken, is, by
God, and ought to be by man, altogether pardoned,
blotted out, and done away."
As was at the time said, " Her argument demands a
stronger case than she has dared to put ; " but so ably
are the incidents strung together, so touchingly are the
relative positions of these suffering souls described, that
their sorrows, affection, and fidelity become convincing ;
and, full of the pathetic tragedy of the situation, we are
oblivious of the fact that what is called a crime is nothing
greater than an accident, a misfortune, and that for
murder we must substitute manslaughter.
From the date of the appearance of " John Halifax,'*
(238)
By MRS. PARR
Miss Mulock's pen was never long idle. Composition
was not a labour to her ; and friends who knew her at that
time, describe her as walking about the room, or bending
over on a low stool, rapidly setting down her thoughts in
that small delicate writing which gave no trouble to read.
She had beautiful hands ; a tall, slim, graceful figure ;
and, with the exception of her mouth, which was too
small, and not well shaped, delicate and regular features.
These attractions, heightened by a charming frankness of
manner, made her very popular. Her poetic vein was
strong. She published several volumes of poems, and
many of her verses, when set to music, became much
admired as songs.
Following "A Life for a Life," came, in somewhat
quick succession, " Studies from Life," " Mistress and
Maid," "Christian's Mistake," "A Noble Life," "Two
Marriages." These in a period of ten years.
As may be supposed, they are not all of equal merit ;
neither does any one of them touch the higher level of
the author's earlier books. Still, there is good honest
work in each, and the same exalted purity of tone, while
much of the sentimentality complained of before is wholly
omitted or greatly toned down.
" Mistress and Maid " is one of those good, quiet
stories, full of homely truths and pleasant teaching, in
( 239 )
DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
which is shown the writer's quick sympathy with the
working class. The maid, Elizabeth, is as full of charac-
ter and of refined feelings as is Hilary Leaf, the mistress,
and her one romance of love, although not so fortu-
nate, has quite as much interest. The opening scenes, in
which these two first meet, are excellent, giving us, all
through their early association, touches of humour a
quality which, in Miss Mulock's writings, is very rare.
The picture of the rather tall, awkward, strongly
built girl of fifteen, hanging behind her anxious-eyed, sad-
voiced mother, who pushes her into notice with " I've
brought my daughter, ma'am, as you sent word you'd
take on trial. 'Tis her first place, and her'll be awk'ard
like at first. Hold up your head, Elizabeth," is drawn
with that graphic fidelity which gives interest to the most
commonplace things in life. The awkward girl proves to
be a rough diamond, capable of much polish, and by the
kindly teaching of Hilary Leaf she is turned into an
admirable, praiseworthy woman. One has to resist the
temptation to say more about Hilary Leaf, an energetic,
intelligent girl who, when she cannot make a living for
herself and her sister by school- keeping, tries, and succeeds,
by shop-keeping. The description of the struggles of
these two poor ladies to pay their way, and keep up a
respectable appearance, comes sympathetically from the
( 240 )
By MRS. PARR
pen of a woman whose heart was ever open to similar
distresses in real life. To her praise be it remembered
that to any tale of true suffering Dinah Mulock never
closed her ears or her hand.
Her next two novels, " Christian's Mistake " and " A
Noble Life," in our opinion, fall far short of any of her
previous efforts. Yet they were both received with much
popular favour, particularly the former, which called forth
warm praise from reviewers.
For us not one of the characters has a spark of vitality.
Christian is not even the shadow of a young girl made of
flesh and blood. Her forbearance and self-abnegation are
maddening. Her husband, the " Master of St. Bede's,'*
twenty-five years her senior and a widower, is nothing but
a lay figure, meant to represent a good man, but utterly
devoid of intellect and, one would think, of feeling, since
he permits his young bride, possessed of all the seraphic
virtues, to be snubbed and brow-beaten by two vulgar
shrewish sisters-in-law. There is no interest of plot or
depicting of character, and the children are as unreal and
offensive as their grown up relations. In " A Noble Life,"
also, there is nothing which stirs our sympathies. Even
the personal deformities of the unfortunate little earl fail
to touch us, and, when grown up and invested with every
( 241 ) Q
DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
meritorious attribute, he is more like the " example " of a
moral tale than a being of human nature.
As has been said, the portrayal of men is not this
author's strong point. " Her sympathy with a good man
is complete on the moral, but defective on the intellectual
side " a serious deficiency in one who has to create beings
in whom we are asked to take a sustained interest.
That she could rise superior to this defect is shown in
" The Woman's Kingdom." In this story Miss Mulock
displays all her old charm of simplicity and directness, and
is strong in her treatment of domestic life. At the outset
she announces that it will be a thorough love story, and takes
as her text that "love is the very heart of life, the pivot upon
which its whole machinery turns, without which no human
existence can be complete, and with which, however broken
and worn in part, it can still go on working somehow, and
working to a comparatively useful and cheerful end."
This question we shall not stop to argue, but proceed
with we cannot say the plot, for of plot there is none ;
it is just an every-day version of the old, old story, given
with admirable force and sweetness. It is said to appeal
principally to young women, and it is possible that this
is true, as the writer can recall the intense pleasure reading
it gave to her nearly thirty years ago.
( 242 )
By MRS. PARR
The book opens with the description of some seaside
lodgings, in which we find twin sisters as opposite in
character as in appearance. Edna is an epitome of all the
virtues in a very plain binding. Letty, vain, "spoilt, but
loving her sister dearly, is a beauty. " Such women
Nature makes rarely, very rarely ; queens of beauty who
instinctively take their places in the tournament of life,
and rain influence upon weak mortals, especially men
mortals." Two of the latter kind arrive as lodgers at
the same house, brothers, also most dissimilar Julius
Stedman, impulsive, erratic and undisciplined; William,
his elder brother, a grave, hard-working doctor, just
starting practice. The four speedily become acquaintances
friends and when they part are secretly lovers.
Letty, by reason of what she calls " her unfortunate
appearance," never doubts but that she has conquered
both brothers ; but happily it is to Edna that the young
doctor has given his heart ; and when in time Letty hears
the news, " and remembers that she had been placing
herself and Dr. Stedman in the position of the Irish ballad
couplet,
Did ye ever hear of Captain Baxter,
Whom Miss Biddy refused afore he axed her ?
her vanity was too innocent and her nature too easy to
bear offence long."
(243)
DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
" But to think that after all the offers I have had you
should be the first to get married, or anyhow, engaged !
Who would ever have expected such a thing ? " " Who
would, indeed ? " said Edna, in all simplicity, and with a
sense almost of contrition for the fact. " Well, never
mind," answered Letty consolingly, " I am sure I hope
you will be very happy ; and as for me " she paused and
sighed " I should not wonder if I were left an old maid
after all, in spite of my appearance."
But to be left an old maid is not to be Letty 's fate.
Julius, already bewitched by her beauty through being
much more thrown into her society, falls passionately in
love with her, and for lack of any one else, and because
his ardour flatters and amuses her, Letty encourages him,
permits an engagement, and promises to join him in India.
But on the voyage out she meets a rich Mr. Vander-
decken, with whom she lands at the Cape, and whom she
marries. This is the tragic note in the happy story, the one
drop of gall in the Stedmans' cup of felicity. Edna and her
husband are patterns of domestic well-being. The joys
and cares of every-day life have mellowed all that was
good in them, and the account given of their home and
their family is one we dwell upon lovingly.
Perhaps it is but natural that in our later reading we
should note some small discrepancies that had formerly
( 244 )
By MRS. PARR
escaped us. We regret that the sisters had drifted so widely
apart, and that each should seem to be so unconcerned at
the distance which divides them. It is as if happiness can
make us callous as well as luxury. And although it was
true that Letty's desertion suddenly wrecked the hopes of
her lover, it seems hardly probable that such an unstable
being as Julius would have taken her falseness so seriously.
A wiser man might have foreseen the possibility.
Still, when this and more is said, our liking for the
story remains as strong as ever. We know of few books
which give a better picture of healthful domestic happi-
ness and pure family life.
Although we have hitherto called, and shall continue to
call, our authoress by her maiden name, she had in 1864
changed it by marrying Mr. G. Lillie Craik, a partner in
the house of Macmillan & Co., and shortly after she
removed to Shortlands, near Bromley, in Kent. This
change in her state does not appear to have interfered
with her occupation, and for many years volume followed
volume in quick succession.
Unwisely, we think, for her literary reputation, she was
led, through her strong sympathy, to advocate marriage
with a deceased wife's sister in a novel, published in 1871,
called " Hannah."
(245 )
DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
The novel with a purpose is almost certain to fall into
the error of giving the argument on one side only. Its
author has rarely any toleration for the ethical aspect of
the other side of the question, and it is to be doubted if
such books ever advance the cause they desire to advocate.
In "Hannah" we are perfectly surfeited by those who wish
to marry within the forbidden degree, and we feel as little
toleration for the placid Bernard Rivers one of those men
who never believe in the pinch of a shoe until they want
to put it on their own feet as for Jim Dixon, who, after
evading the law, speedily grows tired of the deceased wife's
sister, and avails himself of his legal advantage to take
another wife.
The objections we feel to novels of this class are well
stated by a writer in the Edinburgh Review, No. clxxxix.
" We object," he says, " on principle to stories written
with the purpose of illustrating an opinion, or establishing
a doctrine. We consider this an illegitimate use of fiction.
Fiction may be rightfully employed to impress upon the
public mind an acknowledged truth, or to revive a for-
gotten woe never to prove a disputed one. Its appro-
priate aims are the delineation of life, the exhibition and
analysis of character, the portraiture of passion, the descrip-
tion of nature."
In most of these aims Miss Mulock had proved herself
(246)
By MRS. PARR
an expert. In addition to her numerous novels and
volumes of poems, she wrote a large number of tales
for children, many of which, I am told, are exceedingly
charming. One cannot read her books without being
struck by the intense affection she felt for children. She
had none of her own, but she adopted a daughter to whom
she gave a mother's love and care. From time to time there
appeared from her pen volumes of short stories, studies,
and essays ; but it is not by these that her name and fame
will be kept green. Neither will her reputation rest on
her later novels. This she must have realised herself
when writing, " Brains, even if the strongest, will only
last a certain time and do a certain quantity of work
really good work." Miss Mulock had begun to work
the rich vein of her imagination at an early age. She took
few holidays, and gave herself but little rest.
She was by no means what is termed a literary woman.
She was not a great reader ; and although much praise is
due to the efforts she made to improve herself, judged
by the present standard, her education remained very de-
fective. That she lacked the fire of genius is true, but it is
no less true that she was gifted with great imaginative ability
and the power of depicting ordinary men and women
leading upright, often noble lives.
The vast public that such books as hers appeal to is
(247)
DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)
shown in the large circulation of some of her works, the
sale of "John Halifax, Gentleman" amounting to 250,000
copies, 80,000 of which the sixpenny edition have
been sold within the last few months. This shows that
her popularity is not confined to any one class. The
gospel she wrote was for all humanity.
As a woman, she was loved best by those who knew
her best. " Dinah was far more clever than her books,"
said an old friend who had been recalling pleasant
memories to repeat to me. She died suddenly on the
1 2th of October 1887, from failure of the heart's action
the death she had described in the cases of Catherine
Ogilvie, of John Halifax, and of Ursula, his wife the
death she had always foreseen for herself.
Around her grave in Keston churchyard stood a crowd
of mourners rich, poor, old and young sorrowing for
the good loyal friend who had gone from them, whose
face they should see no more.
( 248 )
By MRS. MACQUOID
JULIA KAVANAGH. AMELIA
BLANDFORD EDWARDS
is difficult to think of two writers
more strongly contrasted, judging from
the revelation their books afford of
their natures and ways of thought.
They both strove, in their novels, to
represent individual specimens of humanity. They must
both have possessed the power of distinct vision ; but
though Miss Kavanagh was a keen observer of externals,
her types seem to have been created by imaginative
faculty rather than by insight into real men and women,
while Miss Edwards appears to have gone about the
world open-eyed, and with note-book in hand, so vivid are
some of her portraits.
In traditions, also, these writers differ. Miss Kavanagh
has complete faith in the old French motto, " le bon sang
( 251 )
JULIA KAVANAGH
ne peut pas mentir ; " while one of Miss Edwards's heroes,
an aristocrat by birth, is extremely happy as a merchant
captain, with his plebeian Italian wife.
The two writers, however, strike the same note in regard
to some of their female personages. Both Barbara Churchill
and Nathalie Montolieu are truthful to rudeness.
JULIA KAVANAGH never obtrudes her personality
on the reader, though she lifts him into the ex-
quisitely pure and peaceful atmosphere which one
fancies must have been hers. There is something so
restful in her books, that it is difficult to believe she
was born no longer ago than 1824, and that only twenty
years ago she died in middle life ; she seems to belong to
a farther-away age probably because her secluded life
kept her strongly linked to the past, out of touch with
the new generation and the new world of thought around
her.
She began to write for magazines while still very young,
and was only twenty-three when her first book, " The
Three Paths," a child's story, was published. After
( 252 )
By MRS. MACQUOID
this she wrote about fourteen novels, the best known of
which are "Madeleine," "Nathalie," and "Adele." She
wrote many short stories, some of which were reprinted in
volumes notably the collection called " Forget-me-nots,"
published after her death. She also wrote " A Summer
and Winter in the two Sicilies," " Woman in France in
the 1 8th Century," "Women of Christianity," and two
books which seem to have been highly praised
" Englishwomen of Letters " and " Frenchwomen of
Letters."
Julia Kavanagh's first novel, " Madeleine," appeared
in 1848 a charming story, its scene being in the
Auvergne. The beginning is very striking, the theme
being somewhat like that of " Bertha in the Lane " ;
but Madeleine, when she has given up her false lover,
devotes the rest of her life to founding and caring for an
orphanage.
Born in Ireland, Julia Kavanagh spent the days of her
youth in Normandy, and the scene of her second novel,
"Nathalie," is Norman, though Nathalie herself is a
handsome, warm-blooded Proven^ale. The scenery and
surroundings are very life-like, but, with one exception,
the people are less attractive than they are in "Adele."
In both books one feels a wish to eliminate much of
( 253 )
JULIA KAVANAGH
the interminable talk, which could easily be dispensed
with.
Nathalie, the country doctor's orphan daughter, teacher
to the excellently drawn schoolmistress, Mademoiselle
Dantin, is sometimes disturbingly rude and tactless, in
spite of her graceful beauty. With all this gaucherie,
and a violent temper to boot, Nathalie exercises
a singular fascination over the people of the story,
especially over the delightful Canoness, Aunt Radegonde,
who is to me the most real of Miss Kavanagh's characters.
Madame Radegonde de Sainville is a true old French
lady of fifty years ago, as charming as she is natural.
The men in Julia Kavanagh's books have led secluded
lives, or they are extremely reserved very hard nuts
indeed to crack for the ingenuous, inexperienced girls on
whom they bestow their lordly affection. One does not
pity Nathalie, who certainly brings her troubles on herself;
but in the subsequent book, sweet little Adele is too
bright a bit of sunshine to be sacrificed to such a being
as William Osborne.
The old chateau in which Adele has spent her short life
is in the north-east of France ; its luxuriant but neglected
garden, full of lovely light and shade, its limpid lake, and
the old French servants, are delightfully fresh. The
chapters which describe these are exquisite reading
(254)
By MRS. MACQUOID
a gentle idyll glowing with sunshine, and with a leisureful
charm that makes one resent the highly coloured intrusion
of the Osborne family, though the Osborne women afford
an effective contrast. Adele is scantily educated, but she
is always delightful, though we are never allowed to forget
that she is descended from the ancient family of de Cour-
celles. She is thoroughly amiable and much enduring, in
spite of an occasional waywardness.
Fresh and full of beauty as these novels are, with their
sweet pure-heartedness, their truth and restful peace,
they cannot compare with the admirable short sketches
of the quiet side of French life by the same writer.
The scenes in which the characters of these short stories
are set, show the truth of Julia Kavanagh's observa-
tion, as well as the quality of her style; they are
quite as beautiful as some of Guy de Maupassant's little
gem-like Norman stories, but they are perfectly free from
cynicism, although she truly shows the greedy grasping
nature of the Norman peasant. The gifts of this writer
are intensified, and more incisively shown, in these sketches
because they contain few superfluous words and con-
versations. Julia Kavanagh must have revelled in the
creation of such tales as " By the Well," and its com-
panions ; they are steeped in joyous brightness, toned here
(255)
JULIA KAVANAGH
and there with real pathos as in " Clement's Love " and
"Annette's Love-Story," in the collection called " Forget-
me-nots."
Such a story as "By the Well " would nowadays be
considered a lovely idyll, and, by critics able to appreciate
its breadth and finished detail, a Meissonier in point of
execution : it glows with true colour.
Fifine Delpierre is not a decked-out peasant heroine ;
she is a bare-footed, squalid, half-clothed, half-starved little
girl, when we first see her beside the well. This is the
scene that introduces her.
" It has a roof, as most wells have in Normandy, a low
thatched roof, shaggy, brown, and old, but made rich and
gorgeous when the sun shines upon it by many a tuft of
deep green fern, and many a cluster of pink sedum and
golden stonecrop. Beneath that roof, in perpetual shade
and freshness, lies the low round margin, built of heavy
ill-jointed stones, grey and discoloured with damp and age ;
and within this spreads an irregular but lovely fringe of
hart's-tongue. The long glossy leaves of a cool pale
green grow in the clefts of the inner wall, so far as the eye
can reach, stretching and vanishing into the darkness, at
the bottom of which you see a little tremulous circle of
watery light. This well is invaluable to the Lenuds, for,
( 256 )
By MRS. MACQUOID
as they pass by the farm the waters of the little river grow
brackish and unfit for use. So long ago, before they were
rich, the Lenuds having discovered this spring through the
means of a neighbouring mason, named Delpierre, got
him to sink and make the well, in exchange for what is
called a servitude in French legal phrase ; that is to say,
that he and his were to have the use of the well for ever
and ever. Bitter strife was the result of this agreement.
The feud lasted generations, during which the Lenuds
throve and grew rich, and the Delpierres got so poor,
that, at the time when this story opens, the last had just
died leaving a widow and three children in bitter destitu-
tion. Maitre Louis Lenud, for the Parisian Monsieur
had not yet reached Manneville, immediately availed him-
self of this fact to bolt and bar the postern-door through
which his enemy had daily invaded the courtyard to go to
the well.
" * It was easily done, and it cost me nothing not a
sou,' exultingly thought Maitre Louis Lenud, coming to
this conclusion for the hundredth time on a warm evening
in July. The evening was more than warm, it was sultry ;
yet Maitre Louis sat by the kitchen fire watching his old
servant, Madeleine, as she got onion soup ready for the
evening meal, utterly careless of the scorching blaze which
shot up the deep dark funnel of the chimney. Pierre, his
( 257 ) R
JULIA KAVANAGH
son, unable to bear this additional heat, stood in the open
doorway, waiting with the impatience of eighteen for his
supper, occasionally looking out On the farmyard, grey
and quiet at this hour, but oftener casting a glance within.
The firelight danced about the stone kitchen, now lighting
up the armoire in the corner, with cupids and guitars, and
shepherds' pipes and tabors, and lovers' knots carved on its
brown oak panels ; now showing the lad the bright copper
saucepans, hung in rows upon the walls ; now revealing the
stern grim figure of his father, with his heavy grey eye-
brows and his long Norman features both harsh and acute ;
and very stern could Maitre Louis look, though he wore
a faded blue blouse, an old handkerchief round his neck,
and on his head a white cotton nightcap, with a stiff tassel
to it ; now suddenly subsiding and leaving all in the dim
uncertain shadows of twilight.
During one of these grey intervals, the long-drawling
Norman voice of Maitre Louis spoke :
" ' The Delpierres have given up the well,' he said, with
grim triumph.
" * Ay, but Fifine comes and draws water every night,'
tauntingly answered Pierre.
" ' Hem ! ' the old man exclaimed with a growl.
" ' Fifine comes and draws water every night,' reiterated
Pierre."
( 258 )
By MRS. MACQUOID
He had seen the eldest child Fifine, a girl of eight
or ten, sitting on her doorstep singing her little brother to
sleep, with a wreath of hart's-tongue round her head, and
a band of it round her waist. " And a little beggar, too,
she looked," scornfully added Pierre, " with her uncombed
hair and her rags."
" * Shall we let the dog loose to-night ? ' he said."
Maitre Louis uttered his deepest growl, and promised
to break every bone in his son's body if he attempted such
a thing.
" Pierre silently gulped down his onion soup, but the 'do
it if you dare ' of the paternal wink only spurred him on.
He gave up the dog as too cruel, but not his revenge.
" The night was a lovely one and its tender subdued
meaning might have reached Pierre's heart, but did not.
He saw as he crouched in the grass near the old well that
the full round moon hung in the sky ; he saw that the
willows by the little river looked very calm and still "...
[the revengeful lad watches for the child and falls asleep,
then wakes suddenly].
" Behold there was little Fifine with her pitcher standing
in the moonlight. She stood there with her hair falling
about her face, her torn bodice, her scanty petticoats, and
her little bare feet. How the little traitress had got in,
whilst he, the careless dragon, slept, Pierre could not
(259)
JULIA KAVANAGH
imagine ; but she was evidently quite unconscious of his
presence. . . . The child set her pitcher down very softly,
shook back the hanging hair from her face, and peeped
into the well. She liked to look thus into that deep dark
Jiole, with its damp walls clothed with the long green
hart's-tongue that had betrayed her. She liked also to
look at that white circle of water below ; for you see if
there was a wrathful Adam by her, ready for revenge, she
was a daughter of Eve, and Eve-like enjoyed the flavour
of this forbidden fruit. . . . Fifine took up her pitcher
.again and walked straight on to the river. Pierre stared
amazed, then suddenly he understood it all. There was
an old forgotten gap in the hedge beyond the little stream,
and through that gap Fifine and her pitcher nightly
invaded Maitre Louis Lenud's territory. . . . Having
picked up a sharp flint which lay in the grass Pierre rose
.and bided his opportunity. Fifine went on till she had
half-crossed a bridge-like plank which spanned the stream,
then, as her ill-luck would have it, she stood still to listen
to the distant hooting of an owl in the old church tower
on the hill. Pierre saw the child's black figure in the
moonlight standing out clearly against the background of
grey willows, he saw the white plank and the dark river
tipped with light flowing on beneath it. Above all, he
saw Fifine's glazed pitcher, bright as silver ; he was an
( 260 )
By MRS. MACQUOID
unerring marksman, and he took a sure aim at this. The
flint sped swiftly through the air ; there was a crash, a
low cry, and all was suddenly still. Both Fifine and her
pitcher had tumbled into the river below and vanished
there."
Pierre rescues her, and when Fifine has been for some
years in service with the repentant Pierre's cousin her
improved looks and clothing make her unrecognisable to
the thick-headed well-meaning young farmer.
The only fault that can be found with these chronicles
of Manneville is the likeness between them. The "Miller
of Manneville," in the " Forget-me-not " collection, is-
full of charm, but it too much resembles " By the Well."
The " Story of Monique " gives, however, a happy
variety, and Monique is a thorough French girl ; so is
Mimi in the bright little story called " Mimi's Sin."
Angelique again, in " Clement's Love," is a girl one meets
with over and over again in Normandy, but these Norman
stories are all so exquisitely told that it is invidious to
single out favourites.
The stories laid in England, in which the characters are
English, are less graphic ; they lack the fresh and true
atmosphere of their fellows placed across the Channel.
(261 )
AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS
Julia Kavanagh died at Nice, where she spent the
last few years of her life. Had she lived longer she would
perhaps have given us some graphic stories from the
Riviera, for it is evident that foreign people and foreign
ways attracted her sympathies so powerfully that she was
able to reproduce them in their own atmosphere. In a
brief but touching preface to the collection called " Forget-
me-nots," published after her death, Mr. C. W. Wood
gives us a lovable glimpse of this charming writer ;
reading this interesting little sketch deepens regret that
one had not the privilege of personally knowing so sweet
a woman.
IN regard to truth of atmosphere in her foreign stories,
Julia Kavanagh certainly surpasses Amelia B.
Edwards. In "Barbara's History," in "Lord
Brackenbury," and in other stories by Miss Edwards,
there are beautiful and graphic descriptions of foreign
scenery, and we meet plenty of foreign people ; but
we feel that the latter are described by an Englishwoman
who has taken an immense amount of pains to make
(262)
By MRS. MACQUOID
herself acquainted with their ways and their speech they
somewhat lack spontaneity. In the two novels named
there are chapters so full of local history and association
that one thinks it might be well to have the books for
companions when visiting the places described ; they are
full of talent in some places near akin to genius.
" Barbara's History " contains a great deal of genuine
humour. It is a most interesting and exciting story, though
in parts stagey ; the opening chapters, indeed the whole of
Barbara's stay at her great-aunt's farm of Stoneycroft, are
so excellent that one cannot wonder the book was a great
success. Now and again passages and characters remind
one of Dickens ; the great-aunt, Mrs. Sandyshaft, is a
thorough Dickens woman, with a touch of the great
master's exaggeration ; Barbara's father is another Dickens
character. There are power and passion as well as humour
in this book, but in spite of its interest it becomes fatiguing
when Barbara leaves her aunt and the hundred pigs.
There is remarkable truth of characterisation in some
of this writer's novels. Hugh Farquhar is sometimes an
eccentric bore, but he is real. Barbara Churchill at times
is wearyingly pedantic ; then, again, she is just as delight-
fully original her first meeting with Mrs. Sandyshaft is
so inimitable that I must transcribe a part of it.
A rich old aunt has invited Barbara Churchill, a
(263)
AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS
neglected child of ten years old, to stay with her in
Suffolk. Barbara is the youngest of Mr. Churchill's
three girls, and she is not loved by either her widowed
father or her sisters, though an old servant named Goody
dotes on the child. Barbara is sent by stage-coach from
London to Ipswich :
" Dashing on between the straggling cottages, and up a
hill so closely shaded by thick trees that the dusk seems to
thicken suddenly to-night, we draw up all at once before
a great open gate, leading to a house of which I can only
see the gabled outline and the lighted windows.
"The guard jumps down; the door is thrown open;
and two persons, a man and a woman, come hurrying
down the path.
" ' One little girl and one box, as per book,' says the
guard, lifting me out and setting me down in the road, as
if I were but another box, to be delivered as directed.
" * From London ? ' asks the woman sharply.
" * From London,' replies the guard, already scrambling
back to his seat ; ' All right, ain't it ? '
"'All right.'
"Whereupon the coach plunges on again into the dusk;
the man shoulders my box as though it were a feather; and
the woman who looks strangely gaunt and grey by this
( 264)
By MRS. MACQUOID
uncertain light, seizes me by the wrist and strides away
towards the house at a pace that my cramped and weary
limbs can scarcely accomplish.
" Sick and bewildered, I am hurried into a cheerful room
where the table is spread as if for tea and supper, and a
delicious perfume of coffee and fresh flowers fills the air ;
and and, all at once even in the moment when I am first
observing them, these sights and scents grow all confused
and sink away together, and I remember nothing .... when
I recover, I find myself laid upon a sofa, with my cloak and
bonnet off, my eyes and mouth full of Eau de Cologne,
and my hands smarting under a volley of slaps, admin-
istered by a ruddy young woman on one side, and by the
same gaunt person who brought me in from the coach
on the other. Seeing me look up, they both desist ;
and the latter, drawing back a step or two, as if to observe
me to greater advantage, puts on an immense pair of
heavy gold spectacles, stares steadily for some seconds, and
and at length says:
" ' What did you mean by that now ? '
" Unprepared for so abrupt a question, I lie as if fas-
cinated by her bright grey eyes, and cannot utter a syllable.
" * Are you better ? '
" Still silent, I bow my head feebly, and keep looking at
her.
(265 )
AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS
" ' Hey now. Am I a basilisk ? Are you dumb,
child?'
" Wondering why she speaks to me thus, and being,
moreover, so very weak and tired, what can I do, but try
in vain to answer, and failing in the effort, burst into tears
again ? Hereupon she frowns, pulls off her glasses, shakes
her head angrily, and, saying : * That's done to aggravate
me, I know it is,' stalks away to the window, and stands
there grimly, looking out upon the night. The younger
woman, with a world of kindness in her rosy face ....
whispers me not to cry.
" * That child's hungry,' says the other coming suddenly
back. ' That's what's the matter with her. She's hungry,
I know she is, and I won't be contradicted. Do you hear
me, Jane ? I won't be contradicted.'
" ' Indeed, ma'am, I think she is hungry, and tired too,
poor little thing.'
" * Tired and hungry! . . . Mercy alive, then why don't
she eat ? Here's food enough for a dozen people. Child,
what will you have? Ham, cold chicken pie, bread,
butter, cheese, tea, coffee, ale ? *
". . . . Everything tastes delicious ; and not even the sight
of the gaunt housekeeper .... has power to spoil my
enjoyment.
" For she is the housekeeper, beyond a doubt. Those
( 266 )
By MRS. MACQUOID
heavy gold spectacles, that sad-coloured gown, that cap
with its plain close bordering can belong to no one but a
housekeeper. Wondering within myself that she should
be so disagreeable ; then where my aunt herself can be;
why she has not yet come to welcome me ; how she will
receive me when she does come ; and whether I shall have
presence of mind enough to remember all the curtseys I
have been drilled to make, and all the speeches I have
been taught to say, I find myself eating as though nothing
at all had been the matter with me, and even staring now
and then quite confidently at my opposite neighbour ....
Left alone now with the sleeping dogs and the housekeeper
who looks as if she never slept in her life I find the
evening wearisome. Observing too that she continues to
look at me in the same grim imperturbable way, and seeing
no books anywhere about, it occurs to me that a little con-
versation would perhaps be acceptable, and that, as I am
her mistress's niece, it is my place to speak first.
" ' If you please, ma'am,' I begin after a Jong hesitation.
'"HEY?"
" Somewhat disconcerted by the sharpness and sudden-
ness of this interruption, I pause, and take some moments
to recover myself.
" * If you please, ma'am, when am I to see my aunt ? '
"'Hey? What? Who?'
( 267 )
AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS
" * My aunt, if you please, ma'am ? '
" ' Mercy alive ! and pray who do you suppose I am ? '
" * You, ma'am,' I falter, with a vague uneasiness impos-
sible to describe ; ' are you not the housekeeper ? '
" To say that she glares vacantly at me from behind her
spectacles, loses her very power of speech, and grows all
at once quite stiff and rigid in her chair, is to convey but
a faint picture of the amazement with which she receives
this observation.
" * I, ' she gasps at length, ' I ! Gracious me, child, I am
your aunt.' I feel my countenance become an utter blank.
I am conscious of turning red and white, hot and cold, all
in one moment. My ears tingle; my heart sinks within
me; I can neither speak nor think. A dreadful silence
follows, and in the midst of this silence my aunt, without
any kind of warning, bursts into a grim laugh, and says :
" * Barbara, come and kiss me.'
" I could have kissed a kangaroo just then, in the inten-
sity of my relief ; and so getting up quite readily, touch
her gaunt cheek with my childish lips, and look the grati-
tude I dare not speak. To my surprise she draws me
closer to her knee, passes one hand idly through my hair,
looks not unkindly, into my wondering eyes, and murmurs
more to herself than me, the name of ' Barbara.'
"This gentle mood is, however, soon dismissed, and as if
(268)
By MRS. MACQUOID
ashamed of having indulged it, she pushes me away, frowns,
shakes her head, and says quite angrily :
" * Nonsense, child, nonsense. It's time you went to
bed.' "
[Next morning at breakfast.]
" ' Your name,' said my aunt, with a little off-hand nod,
* is Bab. Remember that.' "... [Mrs. Sandyshaft asks
her great niece why she took her for the housekeeper ; the
child hesitates, and at last owns that it was because of her
dress.]
. . . . " ' Too shabby ? '
" ' N no, ma'am, not shabby ; but . . . .'
" ' But what ? You must learn to speak out, Bab. I
hate people who hesitate/
" * But Papa said you were so rich, and . . . .'
" ' Ah ! He said I was rich did he ? Rich ! Oho !
And what more, Bab ? What more ? Rich indeed ! Come,
you must tell me. What else did he say when he told you
I was rich ? '
"*N nothing more, ma'am,' I replied, startled and
confused by her sudden vehemence. * Indeed nothing
more.'
" ' Bab ! ' said my aunt bringing her hand down so
heavily upon the table that the cups and saucers rang
again, * Bab, that's false. If he told you I was rich, he
(269 )
AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS
told you how to get my money by-and-by. He told
you to cringe and fawn, and worm yourself into my
favour, to profit by my death, to be a liar, a flatterer, and
a beggar, and why ? Because I am rich. Oh yes, because
I am rich.'
" I sat as if stricken into stone, but half comprehending
what she meant, and unable to answer a syllable.
" ' Rich indeed ! ' she went on, excited more and more by
her own words and stalking to and fro between the window
and the table, like one possessed. * Aha ! we shall see, we
shall see. Listen to me, child. I shall leave you nothing
not a farthing. Never expect it never hope for it.
If you are good and true, and I like you, I shall be a
friend to you while I live ; but if you are mean and false,
and tell me lies, I shall despise you. Do you hear ? I shall
despise you, send you home, never speak to you, or look
at you again. Either way, you will get nothing by my
death. Nothing nothing ! '
" My heart swelled within me I shook from head
to foot. I tried to speak and the words seemed to
choke me.
" * I don't want it,' I cried passionately. * I I am not
mean. I have told no lies not one.'
" My aunt stopped short, and looked sternly down upon
me, as if she would read my very soul.
( 270 )
By MRS. MACQUOID
" ' Bab,' said she, * do you mean to tell me that your
father said nothing to you about why I may have asked
you here, or what might come of it ? Nothing ? Not a
word ? '
" ' He said it might be for my good he told Miss
Whymper to make me curtsey and walk better, and come
into a room properly ; he said he wished me to please you.
That was all. He never spoke of money, or of dying, or
of telling lies never.'
" * Well then,' retorted my aunt, sharply, * he
meant it.'
" Flushed and trembling in my childish anger, I sprang
from my chair and stood before her, face to face.
" * He did not mean it,' I cried. ' How dare you speak
so of Papa ? How dare . . . .'
" I could say no more, but, terrified at my own im-
petuosity, faltered, covered my face with both hands, and
burst into an agony of sobs.
" * Bab,' said my aunt, in an altered voice, * little Bab,'
and took me all at once in her two arms, and kissed me
on the forehead.
" My anger was gone in a moment. Something in her
tone, in her kiss, in my own heart, called up a quick
response ; and nestling close in her embrace, I wept pas-
sionately. Then she sat down, drew me on her knee,
(271 )
AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS
smoothed my hair with her hand, and comforted me as if
I had been a little baby.
" ' So brave,' said she, ' so proud, so honest. Come,
little Bab, you and I must be friends.'
" And we were friends from that minute ; for from that
minute a mutual confidence and love sprang up between
us. Too deeply moved to answer her in words, I only
clung the closer, and tried to still my sobs. She under-
stood me.
" ' Come,' said she, after a few seconds of silence, * let's
go and see the pigs.' '
The sketch of Hilda Churchill is very good, and so is
that of the Grand Duke of Zollenstrasse. Taken as a
whole, if we leave out the concluding chapters, "Barbara's
History" is a stirring, original, and very amusing book,
full of historical and topographical information, written in
terse and excellent English, and very rich in colour the
people in it are so wonderfully alive.
" Lord Brackenbury" is very clever and full of pictures,
but it lacks the brightness and the originality of "Barbara's
History." Amelia B. Edwards wrote several other
novels "Half a Million of Money," "Miss Carew,"
"Debenham's Vow," &c. &c. She also published a
( 272 )
By MRS. MACQUOID
collection of short tales " Monsieur Maurice," etc.
and a book of ballads. Born in 1831, she began to write
at a time when sensational stories were in fashion, and
produced a number of exciting stories " The Four-fifteen
Express," " The Tragedy in the Bardello Palace," " The
Patagonian Brothers " all extremely popular ; though,
when we read them now, they seem wanting in the insight
into human nature so remarkably shown in some of her
novels.
She was a distinguished Egyptologist, and the foundation
in 1883 of the Egypt Exploration Fund was largely due
to her efforts ; she became one of the secretaries to
this enterprise, and wrote a good deal on Egyptian
subjects for European and American periodicals. She
wrote and illustrated some interesting travel books, espe-
cially her delightful " A Thousand Miles up the Nile,"
and an account of her travels in 1872 among the at
that time rarely visited Dolomites. The latter is called
" Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys : " it is
interesting, but not so bright as the Nile book.
When one considers that a large part of her output
involved constant and laborious research that for the
purposes of many of the books she had to take long and
fatiguing journeys the amount of good work she accom-
plished is very remarkable ; the more so, because she was
( 273 ) S
AMELIA BLANDFORD EDWARDS
not only a writer, but an active promoter of some of the
public movements of her time. She was a member of the
Biblical Archaeological Society a member, too, of the
Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Literature. Then
she entered into the woman's question, not so popular in
those days as it is in these, and was vice-president of a
Society for promoting Women's Suffrage.
It is difficult to understand how in so busy and varied a
life she could have found sufficient leisure for writing
fiction; but she had a very large mental grasp, and pro-
bably as large a power of concentration. Remembering
that she was an omnivorous reader, a careful student,
possessed too of an excellent memory, we need not wonder
at the fulness and richness of her books.
( 374)
MRS. NORTON
By MRS. ALEXANDER
MRS. NORTON
is hardly necessary to state that this
beautiful and charming woman was the
second daughter of Thomas Sheridan
and grand-daughter of Richard Brinsley
Sheridan, of Regency renown. She was
one of three sisters famous for beauty and brains, the
eldest of whom married Lord Dufferin, and the youngest
Lord Seymour, afterwards Duke of Somerset.
Born in the first decade of the present century, she
married at nineteen, in 1827, George Norton, brother of
the third Lord Grantley a union which proved most
unhappy. In 1836 Mr. Norton sought for a divorce, in
an action which entirely failed. Nevertheless, Norton
remained irreconcilable, and availed himself of all the
powers which the law then lent to a vindictive husband,,
claiming the proceeds of his wife's literary work, and
interfering between her and her children. But it is with.
(277 )
MRS. NORTON
Mrs. Norton as a writer rather than as a woman that we
are concerned, and it is useless now to dwell upon the
story of her wrongs and struggles.
Previous to this unfortunate suit she produced, in 1829,
<' The Story of Rosalie, with other Poems," which seems
to have been her first published work. This was well
received and much admired.
In 1830 "The Undying One," a poem on the Wander-
ing Jew, was brought out, followed in 1 840 by " The
Dream and other Poems." This was highly praised in
the Quarterly Review by Lockhart, who spoke of her as
" the Byron of poetesses." Other poems from her pen
touched on questions of social interest : " A Voice from
the Factories " and " The Child of the Islands," a poem
on the social condition of the English people. She also
printed " English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth
Century," and published much of it in pamphlets on Lord
Cranworth's Divorce Bill of this year (1853), thus assisting
in the amelioration of the laws relating to the custody of
children, and the protection of married women's earnings.
Her natural tendency was towards poetry, and the first
five books published by her were all in verse. In 1851
appeared a novel, in three volumes, called "Stuart of
Dunleath," which was succeeded by " Lost and Saved "
and " Old Sir Douglas."
(278)
By MRS. ALEXANDER
It is curious to observe the depth and width of the gulf
which yawns between the novel of 1851 and the novel of
to-day.
The latter opens with some brief sentence spoken by
one of the characters, or a short dialogue between two
or three of them, followed by a rapid sketch of their
position or an equally brief picture of the scene in which
the action of the piece is laid. The reader is plunged
at once into the drama, and left to guess the parts
allotted by the author to his puppets.
Forty-five years ago, when Mrs. Norton wrote " Stuart
of Dunleath," the reader had to pass through a wide
porch and many long passages before he reached the inner
chambers of the story. An account of the hero and
heroine's families, even to the third and fourth generation,
was indispensable, and the minutest particulars of their
respective abodes and surroundings were carefully detailed.
The tale travelled by easy stages, with many a pause
where byways brought additional wayfarers to join the
throng of those already travelling through the pages ; while
each and all, regardless of proportion, were described with
equal fulness whatever their degree of importance.
These are the characteristics of Mrs. Norton's novels,
which stretch in a leisurely fashion to something like two
( 279 )
MRS. NORTON
hundred thousand words. Nevertheless, " Stuart of Dun-
leath " shows great ability and knowledge of the world.
It is evidently written by a well-read, cultivated, and
refined woman, with warm feelings and strong religious
convictions. The descriptions are excellent, the language
is easy and graceful.
The scene of the story lies chiefly in Scotland, and the
Scotch characters are very well drawn, save one, Lady
Macfarren, who is inhumanly hard. This, too, is one of
the peculiarities of the forty or forty-five year old novel ;
its people are terribly consistent in good or evil. The
dignity, the high-mindedness, the angelic purity of the
heroine is insupportable, and the stainless honour, the
stern resistance to temptation, the defiance of tyrannical
wrongdoers, makes the hero quite as bad.
In " Stuart of Dunleath," however, the hero is decidedly
weak. He is the guardian of Eleanor Raymond, the
heroine, and, seeing a probability of making a large profit
by a speculative loan, risks her money, hoping to obtain
the means to buy back his estate without diminishing
her fortune. The speculation fails. Eleanor is reduced
to poverty, and Stuart is supposed to drown himself.
Then the impoverished heroine, who is desperately in
love with her guardian, is compelled to marry a wealthy
baronet, Sir Stephen Penrhyn. This is the beginning of
(280)
By MRS. ALEXANDER
troubles, and very bad troubles they are, continuing
steadily through two-thirds of the book.
Sir Stephen is a brutally bad husband, is shamelessly
unfaithful, personally violent, breaks his wife's arm, and
makes her life a burden. Her little twin sons are drowned
in a boating accident, and then Stuart returns from the
grave, having been stopped in his attempt to drown him-
self by a picturesque old clergyman, and started off to
America, where he manages to recover the lost fortune.
By his advice, Eleanor leaves her tyrant and takes steps
to obtain a divorce, but before the case is ready for hearing
is seized with scruples and gives up the attempt, chiefly
because she fears she is influenced by an unholy love for
Stuart. Finally she gets leave of absence from her amiable
spouse, and dies of a broken heart before it expires, Stuart
having married her dearest friend, the brilliant Lady
Margaret Fordyce, thinking that Eleanor had no real
affection for him.
The scruples are much to her credit, of course, but she
might have tried to save the remainder of her life from the
degradation which must have been the result of a reunion
with her husband, yet kept aloof from Stuart without
offending God or breaking any sacred law.
Eighteen very distinct characters figure in these pages,
and three or four children. Of these the best drawn are
( 281 )
MRS. NORTON
those most lightly sketched. The author's favourites are
too much described, their merits, their peculiarities, their
faults (if allowed to have any) are detailed as the writer
sees them. But they do not act and live and develop
themselves to the reader, and, therefore, become abstrac-
tions, not living entities.
" Lost and Saved," written some dozen of years after
ward, has much the same qualities as " Stuart of Dunleath."
The subsidiary characters are more convincing than the
leading ladies and gentlemen. The hero, if such a man
could be so termed, with his extreme selfishness, his surface
amiability, his infirmity of purpose and utter faithlessness,
is well drawn. There is a respectable hero also, but we do
not see much of him, which is not to be regretted, as he
is an intolerable prig.
In this romance the heroine elopes with Treherne, the
villainous hero. (Of course, there are the usual family
objections to their wedding.) They intend to go to
Trieste, but in the confusion of a night march they get on
board the wrong steamer, and find themselves at Alex-
andria. Here Treherne is confronted with his aunt, the
magnificent Marchioness of Updown. He is therefore
obliged to suppress Beatrice (the heroine) until the
Marchioness "moves on."
( 282 )
By MRS. ALEXANDER
They consequently set off on a voyage up the Nile,
apparently in search of a clergyman to marry them. It
seems, by the way, a curious sort of hunting-ground in
which to track an English parson. Then Beatrice falls
dangerously ill, and nothing will save her save a parson
and the marriage service. A benevolent and sympathetic
young doctor is good enough to simulate a British chaplain,
and the knot is tied to the complete satisfaction of Beatrice.
Much misery ensues.
It must be added that the magnificent Marchioness of
Updown is an extraordinary picture. Besides being a
peeress by marriage, she is the daughter of an earl, an
aristocrat born and bred. Yet her vulgarity is amazing.
Her stupid ill-nature, her ignorance, her speech and
manner, suggest the idea of a small shopkeeper in a
shabby street.
In this novel Mrs. Norton portrays the whited-
sepulchre sort of woman very clearly in Milly, Lady
Nesdale, who is admired and petted by Society, always
smiling, well tempered, well dressed, careful to observe
les bienseances, making herself pleasant even to her
husband ; while, screened by this fair seeming, she tastes of
a variety of forbidden fruit, one mouthful of which would
be enough to consign a less astute woman to social death.
This class of character figures largely in present day novels,
(283)
MRS. NORTON
but few equal, none surpass, Mrs. Norton's masterly
touch.
"Old Sir Douglas," her last novel, was published in
Macmillans Magazine, 1867. It is planned on the same
lines as her previous works of fiction the plot rather com-
plicated, the characters extremely numerous ; among these
is an almost abnormally wicked woman who works endless
mischief.
It was, however, as a poetess that Mrs. Norton was
chiefly known. Her verse was graceful and harmonious,
but more emotional than intellectual. Wrath at injustice
and cruelty stirred the depths of her soul ; her heart was
keenly alive to the social evils around her and she longed
passionately for power to redress them. The effect of her
own wrongs and sufferings was to quicken her ardour to
help her fellow women smarting under English law as it
at that time existed. What that law then permitted is
best exemplified by her own experience. When the legal
proceedings between her and her husband were over,
and her innocence of the charges brought against her was
fully established, she was allowed to see her children only
once for the space of half an hour in the presence of two
witnesses chosen by Mr. Norton, though this state of
things was afterwards ameliorated by the Infant Custody
(284)
By MRS. ALEXANDER
Act, which allowed some little further restricted inter-
course.
But these evil times are past. Indeed, it seems hard
to believe that barely fifty years separates the barbarous
injustice of that period from the decent amenities of this,
as regards the respective rights of husbands and wives.
Mrs. Norton's second poem of importance, " The Un-
dying One," is founded on the legend of the Wandering
Jew, a subject always attractive to the poetic imagination.
It contains many charming lines, and touches on an im-
mense variety of topics, wandering, like its hero, over
many lands. The sufferings of isolation are vividly de-
picted, and isolation must, of necessity, be the curse of
endless life in this world.
" Thus, thus, to shrink from every outstretched hand,
To strive in secret and alone to stand,
Or, when obliged to mingle in the crowd,
Curb the pale lip which quiveringly obeys,
Gapes wide with sudden laughter, vainly loud,
Or writhes a faint, slow smile to meet their gaze.
This, this is hell ! the soul which dares not show
The barbed sorrow which is rankling there,
Gives way at length beneath its weight of woe,
Withers unseen, and darkens to despair ! "
In these days of rapidity and concentration, poems such
as this would never emerge from the manuscript stage, in
(285)
MRS. NORTON
which they might be read by appreciative friends with
abundant leisure.
The same observation applies to " The Dream." A
mother sits watching the slumber of her beautiful young
daughter who, waking, tells her dream of an exquisite life
with the one she loves best, unshadowed by grief or pain.
The mother warns her that life will not be like this, and
draws a somewhat formidable picture of its realities.
From this the girl naturally shrinks, wondering where
Good is to be found, and is answered thus :
" He that deals blame, and yet forgets to praise,
Who sets brief storms against long summer days,
Hath a sick judgment.
And shall we all condemn, and ah distrust,
Because some men are false and some unjust ? "
Some of Mrs. Norton's best and most impassioned
verses are to be found in the dedication of this poem to
her friend, the Duchess of Sutherland.
Affection, gratitude, indignation, grief, regret these are
the sources of Mrs. Norton's inspiration ; but of any
coldly intellectual solution of life's puzzles, such as more
modern writers affect, there is little trace.
" The Lady of La Garaye " is a Breton tale (a true one)
of a beautiful and noble Chatelaine, on whom Heaven
had showered all joy and blessing. Adored by her hus-
(286)
By MRS. ALEXANDER
band, she shared every hour of his life and accompanied
him in his favourite sport of hunting. One day she dared
to follow him over too wide a leap. Her horse fell with
and on her. She was terribly injured, and crippled for
life. After much lamenting she is comforted by a good
priest, and institutes a hospital for incurables, she and her
husband devoting themselves to good works for the re-
mainder of their days. The versification is smooth, the
descriptions are graceful and picturesque ; but neither the
subject nor its treatment is enthralling.
Mrs. Norton's finest poetic efforts are to be found in
her short pieces. One entitled " Ataraxia " has a soothing
charm, which owes half its melody to the undertone of
sadness which pervades the verse.
" Come forth ! The sun hath flung on Thetis' breast
The glittering tresses of his golden hair;
All things are heavy with a noon-day rest,
And floating sea-birds cleave the stirless air.
Against the sky in outlines clear and rude
The cleft rocks stand, while sunbeams slant between
And lulling winds are murmuiing through the wood
Which skirts the bright bay, with its fringe of green.
"Come forth! all motion is so gentle now
It seems thy step alone should walk the earth,
Thy voice alone, the ' ever soft and low,'
Wake the far haunting echoes into birth.
( 287 )
MRS. NORTON
Too wild would be Love's passionate store of hope,
Unmeet the influence of his changeful power,
Ours be companionship whose gentle scope
Hath charm enough for such a tranquil hour."
From the perusal of her writings, the impression given
by her portrait, and the reminiscences of one who knew
her, we gather an idea of this charming and gifted woman,
whose nature seems to have been rich in all that makes
for the happiness of others, and of herself. We feel that
she possessed a mind abundantly stored, an imagination
stimulated and informed by sojourning in many lands ; a
heart, originally tender and compassionate, mellowed by
maternal love, a judgment trained and restrained by con-
stant intercourse with the best minds of the period, a wit
keen as a damascene blade, and a soul to feel, even to
enthusiasm, the wrongs and sufferings of others.
Add to these gifts the power of swift expression, and
we can imagine what a fascination Mrs. Norton must have
possessed for those of her contemporaries who had the
privilege of knowing her. " She was the most brilliant
woman I ever met," said the late Charles Austen, " and
her brilliancy was like summer lightning ; it dazzled, but
did not hurt." Unless, indeed, she was impelled to
denounce some wrong or injustice, when her words could
(288)
By MRS. ALEXANDER
strike home. Yet to this lovely and lovable woman, life
was a long disappointment; and through all she has
written a strain of profound rebellion against the irony of
fate colours her views, her delineations of character, her
estimate of the social world. By her relations and friends
she was warmly appreciated.
She did not succeed in obtaining the relief of divorce
until about 1853. Mr. Norton survived till 1875, and in
1877, a f W months before her death, his widow married
Sir William Stirling-Maxwell.
It is a curious instance of the change of fashion
and the transient nature of popular memory that great
difficulty is experienced in obtaining copies of Mrs. Norton's
works, especially of her poems. " The Undying One,"
"The Dream," and one or two smaller pieces, are
found only in the British Museum Library. The
novels are embedded in the deeper strata of Mudie's,
but are not mentioned in the catalogue of that all-em-
bracing collection. Yet forty years ago, Mrs. Norton
acknowledged that she made at one time about ^1400
a year by her pen, this chiefly by her contributions to the
annuals of that time.
Mrs. Norton, however, had not to contend with the
cruel competition which lowers prices while it increases
( 289 ) T
MRS. NORTON
labour. In her day, the workers were few, 'and the
employers less difficult to please. But these comparisons are
not only odious, but fruitless. The crowd, the competi-
tion, the desperate struggle for life, exists, increases, and
we cannot alter it. We can but train for the contest as
best we may, and say with the lovely and sorely tried
subject of this sketch, as she writes in her poem to her
absent boys:
" Though my lot be hard and lonely,
Yet I hope I hope through all."
("Mas. ALEXANDER")
( 290 )
u
A. L. O. E." (MISS TUCKER)
MRS. EWING
By MRS. MARSHALL
"A. L. O. E." (MISS TUCKER)
MRS. EWING
FORTY years ago, the mystic letters "A. L. O. E."
(" A Lady of England ") on the title-page of a
book ensured its welcome from the children of
those days. There was not then the host of gaily bound
volumes pouring from the press to be piled up in
tempting array in every bookseller's shop at Christmas.
The children for whom " A. L. O. E." wrote were con-
tented to read a " gift-book " more than once; and, it must
be said, her stories were deservedly popular, and bore the
crucial test of being read aloud to an attentive audience
several times.
Many of these stories still live, and the allegorical style
in which " A. L. O. E. " delighted has a charm for cer-
tain youthful minds to this day. There is a pride and
pleasure in thinking out the lessons hidden under the
( 293 )
"A. L. O. E." (MISS TUCKER)
names of the stalwart giants in the " Giant Killer," which
is one of " A. L. O. E.'s " earlier and best tales. A fight
with Giant Pride, a hard battle with Giant Sloth, has an
inspiriting effect on boys and girls, who are led to " look
at home " and see what giants hold them in bondage.
"A. L. O. E.'s" style was almost peculiar to herself.
She generally used allegory and symbol, and she was fired
with the desire to arrest the attention of her young readers
and " do them good." We may fear that she often missed
her aim by forcing the moral, and by indulging in long
and discursive " preachments," which interrupted the main
current of the story, and were impatiently skipped that it
might flow on again without vexatious hindrances.
In her early girlhood and womanhood " A. L. O. E. "
had written plays, which, we are told by her biographer,
Miss Agnes Giberne, were full of wit and fun. Although
her literary efforts took a widely different direction when
she began to write for children, still there are flashes of
humour sparkling here and there on the pages of her most
didactic stories, showing that her keen sense of the ludicrous
was present though it was kept very much in abeyance.
From the first publication of " The Claremont Tales "
her success as a writer for children was assured. The list
of her books covering the space of fifteen or twenty
years is a very long one, and she had no difficulty in
( 294 )
By MRS. MARSHALL
finding publishers ready to bring them out in an attractive
form.
" The Rambles of a Rat " is before me, as I write, in a
new edition, and is a very fair specimen of " A. L. O. E.'s "
work. Weighty sayings are put into the mouth of the
rats, and provoke a smile. The discussion about the
ancestry of Whiskerando and Ratto ends with the trite
remark which, however, was not spoken aloud that
the great weakness of one opponent was pride of birth,
and his anxiety to be thought of an ancient family ;
but the chief matter, in Ratto's opinion, was not whether
our ancestors do honour to'us, but whether by our conduct
we do not disgrace them. Probably this page of the
story was hastily turned here, that the history of the two
little waifs and strays who took shelter in the warehouse,
where the rats lived, might be followed.
Later on there is a discussion between a father and his
little boy about the advantage of ragged schools, then a
somewhat new departure in philanthropy. Imagine a boy
of nine, in our time, exclaiming, " What a glorious thing
it is to have ragged schools and reformatories, to give the
poor and the ignorant, and the wicked, a chance of becom-
ing honest and happy." Boys of Neddy's age, nowadays,
would denounce him as a little prig, who ought to be well
( 295 )
"A. L. O. E." (MISS TUCKER)
snubbed for his philanthropical ambition, when he went
on to say, " How I should like to build a ragged school
myself ! " " The Voyage of the Rats to Russia " is full
of interest and adventure, and the glimpse of Russian life
is vivid, and in " A. L. O. E.'s " best manner.
Indeed, she had a graphic pen, and her descriptions of
places and things were always true to life. In " Pride and
his Prisoners," for instance, there are stirring scenes,
drawn with that dramatic power which had characterised
the plays she wrote in her earlier days. " The Pretender,
a farce in two Acts, by Charlotte Maria Tucker," is
published in Miss Giberne's biography. In this farce there
is a curious and constantly recurring play on words, but
the allegory and the symbol with which she afterwards
clothed her stories are absent.
"A. L. O. E." did not write merely to amuse children ;
and the countless fairy tales and books of startling
adventure, in their gilded covers and with their profuse
illustrations, which are published every year, have thrown
her stories into the shade. But they are written with
verve and spirit, and in good English, which is high
praise, and cannot always be given to the work of her
successors in juvenile literature. In her books, as in
every work she undertook throughout her life, she had
(296)
By MRS. MARSHALL
the high and noble aim of doing good. Whether she
might have widened the sphere of her influence by less
of didactic teaching, and by allowing her natural gifts to
have more play, it is not for us to inquire.
It is remarkable that this long practice in allegory and
symbol fitted her for her labours in her latter years,
amongst the boys and girls of the Far East. Her style
was well adapted to the Oriental mind, and kindled
interest and awoke enthusiasm in the hearts of the chil-
dren in the Batala Schools. Here she did a great work,
which she undertook at the age of fifty-four, when she
offered her services to the Church Missionary Society as
an unpaid missionary.
"All for love, and no reward" may surely be said to
be "A. L. O. E.'s" watchword, as, with untiring energy,
she laboured amongst the children in a distant part of the
empire. Even there she was busy as an author. By
her fertile pen she could reach thousands in that part of
India who would never see her face or hear her voice.
She wrote for India as she had written for England, ever
keeping before her the good of her readers. The Hindu
boys and girls, as well as the children of this country,
have every reason to hold her name in grateful remem-
brance as one of the authors who have left a mark on
the reign of Queen Victoria.
( 297 )
MRS. EWING
THERE lingers over some people whom we know
a nameless charm. It is difficult to define it,
and yet we feel it in their presence as we feel
the subtle fragrance of flowers, borne to us on the
wings of the fresh breeze, which has wandered over gorse
and heather, beds of wild hyacinth, and cowslip fields, in
the early hours of a sunny spring day. A charm like
this breathes over the stories which Mrs. Ewing has left as
an inheritance for English children, and for their elders
also, for all time. The world must be better for her
work ; and looking back over the sometimes toilsome
paths of authorship, this surely, above all others, is the
guerdon all craftswomen of the pen should strive to win.
There is nothing morbid or melodramatic in Mrs.
Ewing's beautiful stories. They bubble over with the
joys of child-life ; they bristle with its humour ; they touch
its sorrows with a tender, sympathetic hand ; they lend a
gentle sadness of farewell to Death itself, with the sure
hope of better things to come.
It was in 1861 and 1862 that those who were looking
:hildrei
( 298 )
for healthy stories for children found, in " Melch0tr's
By MRS. MARSHALL
Dream and other Tales," precisely what they wanted.
Soon after, Aunt Judy's Magazine, edited by Mrs.
Ewing's mother, Mrs. Gatty, made a new departure in
the periodical literature for children. The numbers were
eagerly looked for month by month, and the title of the
magazine was given to commemorate the " Judy " of the
nursery, who had often kept a bevy of little brothers and
sisters happy and quiet by pouring forth into their willing
ears stories full of the prowess of giants, the freaks of
fairies, with occasional but always good-natured shafts
aimed at the little faults and frailties of the listening
children.
Aunt Judy's Magazine had no contributions from Mrs.
Ewing's pen till May 1866 and May 1867. Then the
delightful " Remembrances of Mrs. Overtheway " en-
chanted her youthful readers. Little Ida's own story
and her lonely childhood had an especial charm for them ;
and Mrs. Overtheway's remembrances of the far-off days
when she, too, was a child, were told as things that
had really happened. And so they had ! For, in the
disappointment of the imaginative child who had created
a fair vision from her grandmother's description of Mrs.
Anastasia Moss as a golden-haired beauty in rose-bud
brocade, and instead, saw an old lady with sunken black
eyes, dressed in feuilles mortes satin, many a child may
( 299 )
MRS. EWING
have found the salient parts of her own experience re-
hearsed !
" Alas ! " says Mrs. Overtheway, when little Ida,
soothed by her gentle voice, has fallen asleep. " Alas !
my grown-up friends, does the moral belong to children
only ? Have manhood and womanhood no passionate,
foolish longings, for which we blind ourselves to obvious
truth, and of which the vanity does not lessen the disap-
pointment ? Do we not all toil after rose-buds to find
feuilles mortes ? " It is in touches like this, in her stories,
that Mrs. Ewing appeals to many older hearts as well as
to those of the young dreamers, taking their first steps
in the journey of life.
In 1857, Juliana Horatia Gatty married Alexander
Ewing, A.P.D., and for some time " Mrs. Overtheway's
Remembrances " were not continued. The last of them,
" Kerguelin's Land," is considered by some critics the most
beautiful of the series, ending with the delightful surprise
of little Ida's joy in the return of her lost father.
Mrs. Ewing's stories are so rich in both humour and
pathos, that it is difficult to choose from them distinctive
specimens of her style, and of that charm which pervades
them, a charm which we think is peculiarly her own.
Mrs. Ewing gave an unconsciously faithful portrait of
( 300 )
By MRS. MARSHALL
herself in " Madam Liberality." The reader has in this
story glimpses of the author's own heroic and self-forget-
ful childhood. Perhaps this tale is not as well known
as some which followed it: so a few notes from its
pages may not be unwelcome here.
Madam Liberality, when a little girl, was accustomed
to pick out all the plums from her own slice of cake and
afterwards make a feast with them for her brothers and
sisters and the dolls. Oyster shells served for plates, and
if by any chance the plums did not go round the party,
the shell before Madam Liberality's place was always the
empty one. Her eldest brother had given her the title
of Madam Liberality ; and yet he could, with refreshing
frankness, shake his head at her and say, " You are the
most meanest and the generousest person I ever knew."
Madam Liberality wept over this accusation, and it was
the grain of truth in it that made her cry, for it was too
true that she screwed, and saved, and pinched to have the
pleasure of " giving away." " Tom, on the contrary, gave
away without pinching and saving. This sounds much
handsomer, and it was poor Tom's misfortune that he
always believed it to be so, though he gave away what
did not belong to him, and fell back for the supply of his
own pretty numerous wants upon other people, not forget-
ting Madam Liberality."
(301 )
MRS. EWING
What a clever analysis of character is this ! We have
all known the "Toms," for they are numerous, and some
of us have known and but scantily appreciated the far
rarer " Madam Liberalitys."
It is difficult to read unmoved of the brave child's
journey alone to the doctor to have a tooth taken out
which had caused her much suffering. Then when about
to claim the shilling from her mother, which was the
accustomed reward for the unpleasant operation, she
remembered the agreement was a shilling for a tooth with
fangs, sixpence for a tooth without them. She did so
want the larger sum to spend on Christmas presents ; so,
finding a fang left in her jaw, she went back to the doctor,
had it extracted, and staggered home once more, very giddy
but very happy, with the tooth and the fang safe in a pill
box !
" Moralists say a great deal about pain treading so very
closely on the heels of pleasure in this life, but they are
not always wise or grateful enough to speak of the pleasure
which springs out of pain. And yet there is a bliss which
comes just when pain has ceased, whose rapture rivals even
the high happiness of unbroken health.
" Relief is certainly one of the most delicious sensations
which poor humanity can enjoy."
Madam Liberality often suffered terrible pain from
( 302 )
By MRS. MARSHALL
quinsy. Thus we read sympathetically of her heroic
efforts one Christmastide, when nearly suffocated with
this relentless disease, to go on with her preparations to
get her little gifts ready for the family. And how we
rejoice when a cart rumbles up to the door and brings a
load of beautiful presents, sent by a benevolent lady who
has known Madam Liberality's desire to make purchases
for her brothers and sisters, and has determined to give
her this delightful surprise.
The story of Madam Liberality, from childhood to
maturity, is, we think, written in Mrs. Ewing's best
manner, though, perhaps, it has never gained the widespread
popularity of " Jackanapes," and " The Story of a Short
Life," or "A Flat Iron for a Farthing."
Of the last-named story Mrs. Bundle is almost the
central figure. In the childhood of Reginald Dacre, who
writes his own reminiscences, she played a prominent
part. Loyal and true, she held the old traditions of
faithful service ; her master's people were her people, and
she had but few interests apart from them.
The portrait of Reginald's mother hung in his father's
dressing-room, and was his resort in the early days of his
childish sorrows. Once when his dog Rubens had been
kicked by a guest in his father's house, Reginald went to
( 303 )
MRS. EWING
that picture of his golden-haired mother and wept out his
plaintive entreaties that " Mamma would come back to
Rubens and to him they were so miser-ra-ble." "Then,"
he says, " in the darkness came a sob that was purely
human, and I was clasped in a woman's arms and covered
with tender kisses and soothing caresses. For one wild
moment, in my excitement and the boundless faith of
childhood, I thought my mother had heard me and come
back. But it was only Nurse Bundle ! "
Then, passing over many years, when Reginald Dacre
brought his bride to his old home, this faithful friend,
after giving her loving welcome to the new Mrs. Dacre,
went, in the confusion and bewilderment of old age, with
its strange mingling of past and present, to the room
where the portrait of her lost lady with the golden hair
still hung ; and there, the story goes on to say, " There,
where years before she had held me in her arms with tears,
I, weeping also, held her now in mine quite dead ! "
This is one of the most pathetic incidents in all Mrs.
Ewing's works, told without the least exaggeration and
with the simplicity which is one of the characteristics of
her style.
" Lob Lie by the Fire " contains some of the author's
brightest flashes of humour, and yet it closes with a
description of Macalister's death, drawn with the tender
( 304 )
By MRS. MARSHALL
hand with which that solemn mystery is ever touched
by Mrs. Ewing, beautiful in its pathetic simplicity.
Nothing in its way can be more profoundly touching than
the few words which end this story :
"After a while Macalister repeated the last word,
* Home* And as he spoke there spread over his face a
smile so tender and so full of happiness that John Broom
held his breath as he watched him. As the light of sun-
rise creeps over the face of some rugged rock, it crept
from chin to brow, and the pale blue eyes shone, tranquil,
like water that reflects heaven. And when it had passed,
it left them still open but gems that had lost their ray."
" Jackanapes " is so well known, almost the best known
of the author's charming stories, that we will not dwell on
the pathos of that last scene, when Jackanapes, like one
in the old allegory, heard the trumpets calling for him on
the other side the gallant boy who had laid down his life
for his friend. But the character of the Gray Goose, who
slept securely with one leg tucked up under her on the
green, is so delightfully suggestive that we must give some
of her wisdom as a specimen of the author's humorous
but never unkindly hits at the weaknesses to which we
are all prone.
" The Gray Goose and the big Miss Jessamine were the
( 305 ) u
MRS. EWING
only elderly persons who kept their ages secret. Indeed,
Miss Jessamine never mentioned any one's age, or recalled
the exact year in which anything had happened. The
Gray Goose also avoided dates. She never got farther
than * last Michaelmas,' * the Michaelmas before that,' and
' the Michaelmas before the Michaelmas before that.'
After this her head, which was small, became confused,
and she said * Ga-ga ! ' and changed the subject."
Then again :
" The Gray Goose always ran away at the first approach
of the caravans, and never came back to the green till
nothing was left of the fair but footmarks and oyster-
shells. Running away was her pet principle ; the only
system, she maintained, by which you can live long and
easily, and lose nothing.
" Why in the world should any one spoil the pleasures
of life, or risk his skin, if he can help it ?
* What's the use ?
Said the goose.'
Before answering which one might have to consider what
world, which life, and whether his skin were a goose
skin. But the Gray Goose's head would never have held
all that."
Major Ewing was stationed at Aldershot in 1869, and
( 306)
By MRS. MARSHALL
during the eight years Mrs. Ewing lived there her pen
was never idle. Aunt Judy's Magazine for 1 870 was well
supplied with tales, of which " Amelia " is perhaps one of
the best.
To her life at Aldershot we owe the story which had
for its motto " Loetus sorte mea," and which is full of the
most graphic descriptions of the huts and the soldiers' life
in camp. As in the story of Madam Liberality we have
glimpses of the author's childhood with all its little cares
and joys, so in the " Story of a Short Life " we have the
actual experience of a soldier's life in camp.
O'Reilly, the useful man of all trades, with his warm
Irish heart, and his devotion to the Colonel's wife, his
erratic and haphazard way of performing his duties, his
admiration for the little gentleman in his velvet coat and
lace collar, who stood erect by his side when the funeral
passed to the music of the Dead March, imitating his
soldierlike bearing and salute, is a vivid picture touched
by the skilled hand of a word painter.
So also is the figure of the V.C., who in his first talk
with the crippled child, stands before us as the ideal of a
brave soldier, who sets but little store on his achievements,
modest as the truly great always are, and encouraging the
boy to fight a brave battle against irritable temper and im-
patience at the heavy cross of suffering laid upon him.
(307)
MRS. EWING
" ' You are a V.C.,' Leonard is saying, ' and you ought
to know. I suppose nothing not even if I could be
good always from this minute right away till I die
nothing could ever count up to the courage of a V.C. ? '
" * God knows it could, a thousand times over,' was the
V.C.'s reply.
" ' Where are you going ? Please don't go. Look at
me. They're not going to chop the Queen's head off,
are they ? '
" * Heaven forbid ! What are you thinking about ? '
" ' Why because look at me again ah! you've winked
it away ; but your eyes were full of tears, and the only
other brave man I ever heard of crying was Uncle Rupert,
and that was because he knew they were going to chop
the poor king's head off.' That was enough to make
anybody cry."
They were in the room where the picture of the young
cavalier ancestor of Leonard hung. He always called
him "Uncle Rupert," and he would meditate on the
young face with the eyes dim with tears eyes which
always seemed to follow him, and, as he fancied, watched
him sorrowfully, now no longer able to jump about and
play with the Sweep, but lying helpless on his couch,
or limping about on his crutches, often with pain and
difficulty.
(308 )
By MRS. MARSHALL
This conversation between the V.C. and Leonard was
the beginning of a strong friendship which was put to the
test one Sunday when Leonard lay dying in the hut of
his uncle, the barrack-master.
The V.C. hated anything like display or bringing him-
self into notice. Thus it cost him something to take up
his position outside the iron church in the camp, that
Leonard might hear the last verses of the tug-of-war
hymn. The V.C.'s attachment to his little friend
triumphed over his dislike to stand alone singing,
" The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain."
The melodious voice of the gallant young soldier rang
through the air and reached the dying ears of little
Leonard. The soldiers loved this hymn, and the organist
could never keep them back. The soldiers, the story
says, had begun to tug. In a moment more the organ
stopped, and the V.C. found himself with over three
hundred men at his back, singing without accompaniment
and in unison :
** A noble army, men and boys,
The matron and the maid,
Around the Saviour's throne rejoice
In robes of white arrayed."
MRS. EWING
Even now, as the men paused to take breath after their
"tug," the organ spoke again softly but seraphically.
Clearer and sweeter above the voices behind him rose the
voice of the V.C. singing to his little friend :
** They climbed the steep ascent to Heaven
Through peril, toil and pain."
The men sang on, but the V.C. stopped as if he had been
shot. For a man's hand had come to the Barrack
Master's window and pulled down the blind !
Here, again, we have an instance of this author's power
to touch her readers, even to tears, by the true pathos which
needs but few words to bring it home to many hearts.
Taken as a whole, " The Story of a Short Life " has, it
may be, some faults of construction, which arose from its
being written in detached portions. The history of
St. Martin, though it is not without its bearing on the
story of the beautiful and once active child's bruised and
broken life, and his desire to be a soldier, rather spoils the
continuity of the narrative.
" The Story of a Short Life " was not published in
book form until four days before the author's death ; but
it was not her last work, though from its appearance at that
moment the title was spoken of by some reviewers as
singularly appropriate.
(310)
By MRS. MARSHALL
Mrs. Ewing's love for animals may be seen in all her
stories Leonard's beloved "Sweep," I^jllo the red-haired
pony on which Jackanapes took his first ride, and the dog
in the blind man's story dying of grief on his grave, are
all signs of the author's affection for those who have been
well called " our silent friends." Her own pets were
indeed her friends from a pink-nosed bulldog called
Hector, to a refugee pup saved from the common hang-
man, and a collie buried with honours, his master making
a sketch of him as he lay on his bier.
Mrs. Ewing was passionately fond of flowers, and
" Mary's Meadow " was written in the last years of her
life as a serial for cAunt Judy 's Magazine. Her very last
literary work was a series of letters from a Little Garden,
and the Jove of and care for flowers is the theme.
Much of Mrs. Ewing's work cannot be noticed in a
paper which is necessarily short. But enough has been
said to show what was her peculiar gift as a writer for
children.
It is sometimes said that to write books for children
cannot be considered a high branch of literature. We
venture to think this is a mistake. There is nothing more
difficult than to arrest the attention of children. They do
not as a rule care to be written down to they can
(3" )
MRS. EWING
appreciate what is good and are pleased when their elders
can enter into and admire the story which has interested
and delighted them.
To write as Mrs. Ewing wrote is undoubtedly a great
gift which not many possess, but a ; careful study of her
works by young and old authors and readers alike cannot be
without benefit. She was a perfect mistress of the English
language ; she was never dull and never frivolous. There
is not a slip-shod sentence, or an exaggerated piling up of
adjectives to be found in her pages. She knew what she
had to say, and she said it in language at once pure,
forcible, and graceful.
We must be grateful to her for leaving for us, and for
our children's children, so much that is a model of all that
tends to make the literature of the young yes, and of the
old also attractive, healthy, and delightful.
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co.
London f Edinburgh
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