Part 15

You can fancy, now, the hoards of vengeance in his heart against the employers. For there are never wanting those who, either in speech or in print, find it their interest to cherish such feelings in the working classes; who know how and when to rouse the dangerous power at their command; and who use their knowledge with unrelenting purpose to either party.

Now you know from actual evidence given you in my two previous lectures that this account is not overstrained. You see how the writer makes allowances; and how, all allowances made, her thrust is as deadly as any in Disraeli’s _Sybil_.

V

But now comes in the difference. Mrs. Gaskell knew these people as Disraeli did not. She had lived among them, and to all the angry protests evoked by _Mary Barton_ she returned, of her knowledge, gentle, but gently firm answers which could not be refuted.[6] The story, at any rate, exercised at once a “commanding effect,” and the width of that effect was attested by translations into many foreign languages--French, German, Spanish, Hungarian and Finnish.

[6] I should mention here, by the way, on Sir Adolphus Ward’s authority, the virtual certainty that before writing her own novel she “had remained quite unacquainted with both _Coningsby_ and _Sybil_.”

She did not go on to exploit that success, that effect. She had said what she had to say; and having found, in the saying of it, her gift as a writer, she passed on to other things. A very beautiful necklace of novels was the result. But this serene indifference to what might with others have meant a very strong “literary” temptation implied no failing devotion to the poor whose woes the book had, once for all, championed. Some eighteen years later, in 1862–3, a time of trouble came over Manchester and South-west Lancashire in general, which

called forth one of the most notable, and certainly one of the best-organized efforts of goodwill and charity which this country has ever seen. In the long struggle between masters and men, the times of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, due to the outbreak and continuance of the American Civil War, brought about a protracted truce, in which the kindly feelings inspired by the self-sacrificing efforts of many leading employers of manufacturing labour cannot but have counted for much.

I am quoting from Sir Adolphus Ward:

Mrs. Gaskell, whose name had so good a sound among the Lancashire working classes that we hear of an Oldham man regularly bringing his children to gaze upon the house in Plymouth Grove where dwelt the authoress of _Mary Barton_, gave many proofs in these times of trouble of her readiness to help suffering in every way in her power.

The relief problem, in short, claimed her almost entirely during that long tribulation of her people. “We were really glad,” she writes to a friend, “to check one another in talking of the one absorbing topic, which was literally haunting us in our sleep, as well as being our first thoughts in wakening and the last at night.” In organising, superintending, working sewing-rooms, providing dinners, she would work for six or seven hours of her day.

The shadow of these and other industrial troubles recurs, indeed, in some of the later novels, particularly in _North and South_: but always you see that with her there is no political axe to grind, nor scarce a consciousness of there being any such thing: and this disinterested charitableness leads her, as it were, imperceptibly into regions of which Disraeli, with all his genius, never won ken. The first incentive, I have tried to show, operated on both. But whereas he went off into a life of action--great and powerful action, let all admit--to return in his old age to revisit with _Endymion_ the glimpses of the moon and his boyish dreams, this unambitious Victorian lady, having found her literary talent, went on to employ it with a serenity unmoved to worship any idols of the market. Glad of course she was to enjoy and use her gift: very modestly glad (as what true woman or man is not?) of the recognition it brought, but following the path to the end to bequeath to the world several noble novels and three shining masterpieces. Of these, of course, the _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ is one and _Cranford_ the second: and for the moment I leave you to guess at the third. For the moment I wish you to picture this woman. In her writing, as in her daily life, she had no mannerisms. She copied neither Disraeli, nor Dickens, who also championed the poor and was moreover her encourager and editor; nor the Brontës, for all the spell of their genius; nor Trollope, nor George Eliot; though all were great and flattered her with their admiration. Past them all we see her quietly keeping the tenor of her way. Now and again she seems to falter and ask herself--_herself_, mind you--Is this trouble to speak the simple truth as best I can, without heat, really worth its reward as set against the heat and acrimony it provokes? The strictures passed on her _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ gave her, for a time, a distaste for it all. But she wrote on, after a little, and on Sunday, November 12, 1865, killed of a sudden by a pang of the heart--carried away, as her epitaph at Knutsford (which is “Cranford”) says, “Without a moment’s warning”--she left her writings all just as clean and bright as the bunch of her household keys.

Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, Makes that, and the action, fine.

VI

I shall pass the catalogue of these writings very quickly in review. The authoress of _Mary Barton_ was hailed at that time, when novels were yet few and even poetry but beginning to recover its strength, by great men and by Dickens especially, who engaged her pen for the first number of his serial adventure, _Household Words_. In 1853 appeared her second important novel, _Ruth_ (which possibly influenced Dickens’ own _Hard Times_, published a year later). Then in June, 1853, came _Cranford_, made into a book from papers contributed to _Household Words_ between December, 1851, and May, 1853. _North and South_ ran in _Household Words_ from September, 1854, to January, 1855, and appeared as a book, with some slight alterations, in that year. In that year also (on March 31st) Charlotte Brontë died and Mrs. Gaskell consented, at the old father’s urgent request, to write the Biography. She gave herself up to the work and finished it in the spring of 1857. The strictures on it--truth, as Milton says, never comes into the world but as a bastard--broke her spirit for a while for all but occasional writing: and then came the cotton famine, of which I have spoken, to tax all her energies. But after the stress of this they revived. In 1863 appeared _Sylvia’s Lovers_, in 1863–4 _Cousin Phillis_ in the pages of the _Cornhill Magazine_. In this magazine (August, 1864–January, 1866) followed her last story, _Wives and Daughters_, published soon after in that year as an unfinished work. So you see the whole tale of it lies within the central years of the last century, beginning with _Mary Barton_ in 1848 and ending sharply just eighteen years after.

VII

I do not propose to discuss the toll of her work this morning. I wish that those of you who aspire to write, and are here learning to write, would study it--for two reasons. For the first, while I admit many flaws, it seems to me elementally of the best literary breeding, so urbane it is, so disposedly truthful; so much of the world, quizzing it; so well aware, all the while, of another. For my second, that here you have, refuting, an exception to all hasty generalisations about the nineteenth century, the Victorian Age, horsehair sofas, the Evangelicals, the Prince Consort, the Great Exhibition of 1851 and all that bagful of cheap rubbish. In 1851 this lady was writing _Cranford_: in 1863 she was writing _Cousin Phillis_: and considering that most lovely idyll, I am moved to ask, “Do you, at any rate, know it, this Sicilian yet most English thing of the mid-nineteenth century?” I am moved to say, “Yes, Keats is lovely, and was lovely to me alas! before ever you were born: but quit your gushing and your talk about ‘romantic revivals’--which are but figments invented by fellows who walk round and round a Grecian urn, appraising it scholastically. Quit it, and try to _make_ a Grecian urn. The horses on the frieze of the Parthenon are good horses: but you have as good to study to-day or to-morrow if you will but take a short journey out to Newmarket and study them. Which is better?--to watch a gallop between two colts on a heath, or to bend a congested nose over _Ferrex and Porrex_?”

To be classical is not to _copy_ the classics: to be classical is to learn the intelligence of the classics and apply just _that_ to this present world and particularly to this island of ours so familiar and yet so romantic.

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

I have been speaking, however, to-day of one whose measure in any light has never to my thinking been accurately taken. The crew of Odysseus were Greeks. They beached their ship (says Homer) on the isle of the Laestrygonians: and there came down to them the Queen of the Laestrygonians, “a woman as tall as a mountain,” _and they hated her_. The Victorian Age lent itself to excess; and its excessive figures are our statues for some to deface or bedaub. But I, who have purposely compared Elizabeth Gaskell with her most ornate contemporary, dare to prophesy that when criticism has sifted all out, she will come to her own, as a woman of genius, sweetly proportioned as a statue, yet breathing; one of these writers we call by that vain word--so vain, so pathetic even when used of the greatest poet--“immortal.”

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

THE BARSETSHIRE NOVELS

I

A few months ago I asked a publisher if he had ever thought of venturing on a complete edition of Trollope, and was answered that he had thought of it often, but doubted it would not pay. A few weeks ago I referred this answer to an eminent bookseller, and he praised the publisher’s judgment. I retain my belief that the pair of them are mistaken: for let the name of Trollope be mentioned in any company of novel-lovers, almost to a certainty one or two will kindle, avow a passion for him, and start a chorus of lament that there exists no complete worthy edition of him.

“All Balzac’s novels occupy one shelf”--and all Trollope’s would occupy a plaguey long one. Some of them, too, are hasty, baddish novels. None the less, I see that shelf as one of trusted and familiar resort for such a number of my fellows as would fill a respectable subscription-list: and, anyhow, it remains a scandal that certain good works of his--_The Eustace Diamonds_, for instance--are unprocurable save by advertising for second-hand copies. Mr. Humphrey Milford, of the Oxford University Press, has recently printed _The Claverings_ and _The Belton Estate_ in the World’s Classics, with the _Autobiography_, which did, as it happened, about as much harm as a perfectly honest book could do to an honest man’s fame. Messrs. Chatto & Windus--whom, as Cicero would say, “I name for the sake of honour,” as publishers who respect their moral contract to keep an author’s books alive while they can--have kept on sale some eight or nine, including _The American Senator_, _The Way We Live Now_, and _The Golden Lion of Grandpré_; and the famous Barsetshire six, of which Messrs. George Bell now offer us a cheap and pleasant reprint,[7] have always been (as they say in Barset) “come-at-able” in some form or another. But while three full editions of Stevenson have been subscribed for since his death in 1894 (the first of them fetching far more than the original price), and his sale in cheaper editions has been high and constant, Trollope, who died in 1882, has, in these forty-odd years, received no gratitude of public recognition at all answerable to his deserts.

[7] Trollope’s Barsetshire Novels: (1) _The Warden_, (2) _Barchester Towers_, (3) _Dr. Thorne_, (4) _Framley Parsonage_, (5) _The Small House at Allington_ (2 vols.), (6) _The Last Chronicle of Barset_ (2 vols.) 8 vols. 25s. the set. (Bell & Sons.)

It is a curious business in two ways. For the first, the rebirth of Trollope’s fame, with the growing readiness of an admirer to cast away apology and hail a fellow-admirer as a friend “by adoption tried,” has nothing esoteric about it. A passion for Peacock, or for Landor--as a passion for Pindar--you may share with a friend as a half-masonic, half-amorous secret. But there can be no such freemasonry over Trollope, who is as English as a cut off the joint or a volume of _Punch_. For the second curiosity, I suppose that no man ever wrote himself down at a more delicately ill-chosen time than did Trollope by the publication (posthumous) of his _Autobiography_ in 1883. It was a brave--if unconsciously brave--and candid book. But it fell on a generation of young men fired in literature by Flaubert, in painting (say) by Whistler; on a generation just beginning to be flamboyant over “art for art’s sake,” the _mot juste_, and the rest. It all seems vain enough at this distance, and the bigots of each successive iron time will always be arraigning their fathers’ harmless art, no doubt to the ultimate advancement of letters. But by young men quite honestly and frenetically devoted to chiselling out English as though (God rest them!) in obedience to a Higher Power, it may be allowed that such a confession as the following would be felt as an irritant:

All those, I think, who have lived as literary men--working daily as literary labourers--will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then he should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours--or have so tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen and gazing at the wall before him till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this time become my custom--and it still is my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient to myself--to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that my 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went.

The reader may easily imagine the maddening effect of that upon any ambitious young writer, indolent by habit yet conscientious in his craft, reminiscent of hours spent in gazing at a wall for words with which he wanted to express his ideas. How many times did Plato alter the opening sentence of _The Republic_? How many times did Gray recast the _Elegy_?