Part 11

_Salem Chapel_, indeed, reveals another side of the picture. Miss Marjoribanks and her friends were staunch church people. The sturdy deacons, their women-folk, and Mr. Vincent’s whole flock, belong to another sphere. “Greengrocers, dealers in cheese and bacon, milkmen, with some dressmakers of inferior pretensions, and teachers of day schools of similar humble character, formed the _élite_ of the congregation.” Indeed, “the young man from ’Omerton” proves to be something of a firebrand among these simple souls. His declaration of independence does not meet with their approval: “Them ain’t the sentiments for a pastor in our connection. That’s a style of thing as may do among fine folks, or in the church where there’s no freedom; but them as chooses their own pastor, and don’t spare no pains to make him comfortable, has a right to expect different.” Since the poor fellow is “getting his livin’ off them all the time,” he must go their way without question: “A minister ain’t got no right to have business of his own, leastways on Sundays. Preaching’s his business.” The most loyal of them can always recall “that period of delightful excitation when they were hearing candidates, and felt themselves the dispensers of patronage”; though, as the caustic Adelaide truthfully remarked, “even when they are asses like your Salem people, you know they like a man with brains”; and Mr. Vincent had “filled the chapel.”

Mrs. Oliphant has contrasted the limitations of Dissent with a somewhat melodramatic personal tragedy which insensibly draws Mr. Vincent under the influence of “them great ladies” who “when they’re pretty-looking” are “no better nor evil spirits,” and, alas, “a minister of our connection as was well acquainted with them sort of folks would be out of nature.” The whole atmosphere is obviously uncongenial, and we see that it makes the man totally unfit for his work.

Nevertheless, it is with two characters wholly “within the fold” that our sympathies must finally remain. It is Mrs. Vincent and Tozer the Butterman who are the real hero and heroine. Certainly the gentle widow cannot understand her clever son, and her absolute lack of common sense is quite exasperating; but everyone recognises that she is “quite the lady,” and no Roman mother of classic immortality ever revealed such perfect loyalty under such tragic difficulties. She knew “how little a thing makes mischief in a congregation,” for “she had been a minister’s wife for thirty years,” and her superb devotion to doing the right thing by everybody conquered persons of far greater intellect and assurance, under difficulties that few men could have faced for any consideration. Again and again this quiet and most provokingly fussy of women absolutely dominates the stage, conquering all adversaries. She is almost absurdly inadequate for the “realities” of life; but such a past mistress of tact and decorum, so instinctively aware of “what is expected of her,” and so courageously punctilious in manner, that she triumphs over odds the most overwhelming, proving inflexible where she knows her ground. Entirely without control over her emotions, she yet never forgets or fails in her “duty.”

The heroism of Mr. Tozer, naturally, does not depend upon such subtleties or refinements. He is of sterner stuff; but it would be hard to find, in life or fiction, a zealous deacon, so thoroughly conversant with the duties and the privileges of his position, who could rise with such broad-minded charity to circumstances so exceptional. He is genuinely kind, and really loyal to Mr. Vincent. Without the slightest knowledge, or any power to appreciate the emotional turmoil which had thrown that young minister off his balance, the worthy shopkeeper trusts his own instincts, fights like a hero for his friend, and absolutely pulverises the enemy. He has no natural gifts for eloquence, no diplomacy or tact; but he has faith, insight, and courage.

The minister’s wife and the deacon entirely remove the reproach we might otherwise level against Mrs. Oliphant of satirical contempt for Nonconformity. With Miss Marjoribanks, they establish her power in characterisation.

Finally, the crowded picture of life at Carlingford given in the two novels prepares us for that conscious and professional study of “material” for fiction which women had only recently acquired, and which bears its finest fruit in George Eliot.

* * * * *

CHARLOTTE M. YONGE (1823-1901) presents almost as many facets as Mrs. Oliphant, but her work more nearly resembles Mrs. Craik’s. Primarily a High-Churchwoman and a sentimentalist, she was more directly educational than either. Her _Cameos of English History_ are models of popular narrative, a little coloured by prejudice; but no praise can be too high for that children’s story, also historical, _The Little Duke_, or for the equally charming _The Lances of Lynwood_.

As a novelist she was chiefly concerned, as hinted already, with the _conscious_ development of the tale “for the young person,” which she defines and justifies in her

PREFACE TO “THE DAISY CHAIN; OR, ASPIRATIONS”

“No one can be more sensible than is the author that the present is an overgrown book of a nondescript class, neither the ‘tale’ for the young, nor the novel for their elders, but a mixture of both.

“Begun as a series of conversational sketches, the story outran both the original intention and the limits of the periodical in which it was commenced; and, such as it has become, it is here presented to those who have already made acquaintance with the May family, and may be willing to see more of them. It would beg to be considered merely as what it calls itself, a Family Chronicle--a domestic record of home events, large and small, during those years of early life when the character is chiefly formed, and as an endeavour to trace the effects of those aspirations which are a part of every youthful nature. That the young should take the hint, to think whether their hopes and upward breathings are truly upwards, and founded in lowliness, may be called the moral of the tale.

“For those who may deem the story too long, and the characters too numerous, the author can only beg their pardon for any tedium that they may have undergone before giving it up.

“Feb. 22nd, 1856.”

As it happens, this passage contains several points which serve to elucidate the special characteristics of its author’s work. We see at once the serious moral purpose, and its direct aim. We may notice, again, that she at least recognises, and admits, what may be called disparagingly the chief function of women novelists--the narration of “Family Chronicles,” the domesticity, the emphasis on “home” life. And, finally, we have a confession of her tendency to overcrowd the characters; her devotion for persons to whom the reader has been already introduced, now reappearing--for further development--in another tale.

Miss Yonge, in fact, had a weakness for genealogy. One novel often describes the children of persons figuring in another. We may recognise old friends in every chapter. No doubt the habit may become wearisome, and it was carried to excess. But, on the other hand, we must be conscious of exceptional familiarity with “the May family,” for example; and the process, when restrained with discretion, is a perfectly legitimate application of the realistic ideal. In real life the plots are not rounded off in one volume. Reunions that are utterly unexpected, if not unwelcome, are constantly surprising us, and the children of friends or relatives have a natural bias towards each other.

Moreover, in this matter Miss Yonge reveals extraordinary skill. Technically, we could name the heroine of _The Daisy Chain_. She has several peculiarities, recalling Maggie Tulliver. But we are nearly as intimate with the two Margarets; the “worldly” sister is drawn with subtle command of detail; the innumerable brothers are perfectly differentiated; Dr. May stands out clear in every mood; the “heiress” is absolutely alive; and there is no hesitation about the minor characters. Miss Yonge can “manage” as many people as you please. There is no faltering or hesitation about her touch anywhere.

To-day, probably, we do not quite willingly accept so much religiosity. We certainly cannot “assume” the Church. Our “aspirations” may not expend themselves upon a steeple or a Sunday school. But there can be no question about this good lady’s understanding of young people. The family picture is sound and wholesome. No member of the group offends us by his or her sanctimonious perfection. All are perfectly human, youthfully impulsive, and wholesomely eager. And the Early Victorians _were_ sentimental.

As in _John Halifax, Gentleman_, the atmosphere belongs to the dawn of life. The love-stories--of which, needless to say, we have several--are whole-hearted, without complexity. There is no juggling with right and wrong, no “questioning,” no element of sordidness.

Though we should alter a good deal, perhaps, in detail--of manner, thought, and ideal--it is difficult to see how work could be done better for the particular class of readers appealed to; who would, undoubtedly, actually prefer a crowd.

Once more, Miss Yonge is frankly feminine. She has established one more special function for women novelists, a legitimate offspring of the domestic realism which they followed from the first; a work almost impossible to man.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] As Lockhart expresses it in the _Quarterly_, “There is a decided family likeness between _Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering Heights_, yet the aspect of the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state, as Catherine and Heathcliff, is too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of novel readers. With all the unscrupulousness of the French school of novels it combines that repulsive vulgarity in the choice of its vice which supplies its own antidote.”

[14] “She did not approve of twilight walks. Why should they want to go out just then like the tradespeople, a thing which ladies never did.”

A PROFESSIONAL WOMAN

(GEORGE ELIOT, 1819-1880)

George Eliot once declared that “if art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.... The only effect I long to produce by my writings is that those who read them shall be better able to _imagine_ and to _feel_ the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves.”

It is written in _Adam Bede_:

“My strongest effort is to avoid any arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel _as much bound_ to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, _as if I were in a witness box narrating my experience on oath_....

“I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields--on the real breathing men and women who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice, who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.

“So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one’s efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....

“It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings; which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous, homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her; or I turn to that village wedding, kept between four brown walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and lips, and probably with quart-pots in their hands, but with an expression of unmistakable contentment and good-will....

“All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children--in our gardens and in our houses.... Paint us an angel if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any æsthetic rules which shall banish from the region of art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pothouse, those rounded backs and stupid, weather-worn faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world--those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions....

“There are few prophets in the world, few sublimely beautiful women, few heroes. I can’t afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my everyday fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent as your common labourer, who gets his own bread, and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely-assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers; more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent, and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist.”

Woman has found, and proclaimed, her mission. She is a moral realist, and her realism is not inspired by any idle ideal of art, but by sympathy with life. Jane Austen and Mary Mitford were compared, condescendingly, with Dutch painters. George Eliot claims the parallel with pride. It may be questioned if realism was ever defended with so much eloquence, from such high motives. Finally, if the romance of high life has no place in these pictures, neither has the romance of crime, adventure, or squalid destitution. They hold up the mirror to mediocrity. They present the parish.

And for many years George Eliot influenced thought and culture among the middle-classes more widely, and perhaps more profoundly, than any other writer. We can remember a generation for whom the moral problems involved in the relations between Dorothea and Will Ladislaw were a favourite topic for tea-table conversation in serious families; and when the novelist herself married a second time, it seemed to many that an ideal had been desecrated. Her intensity of religious feeling, combined with independence towards theological authority, expressed with truly artistic effect the whole temperament of an age whose spiritual cravings were almost exclusively ethical. Her contribution to literature, placing her in the highest rank, was the creation of many characters, instinct with humanity, struggling with fine moral earnestness towards the attainment of an ideal, halting long and stumbling often by the way. Their appeal to young readers of each generation is irresistible; while the crowded backgrounds, so truthfully and dramatically portrayed, of a day when the English middle-classes were ever eager in extending their moral and mental horizon, can never lose value as an important chapter in social history.

If we have read them rightly, it is this for which women’s work had been all along preparing the way. George Eliot certainly had not so great a genius as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë; she was not a pioneer like Fanny Burney. But she had greater breadth, more firm solidity; and she was conscious of her aim, with the professional training, the culture, _and_ the genius to achieve.

Women, we see, have been always realistic and parochial. They have avoided the glitter of wealth and the grime of sin. Tender to prodigals, they have loved the home. If the “intense and continuous note of personal conviction,” so conspicuous in George Eliot, began with Charlotte Brontë, women have always felt and thought morally.

She has been summarily dismissed as an “example of the way in which the novel--once a light and frivolous thing--had come to be taken with the utmost seriousness--had in fact ceased to be light literature at all, and began to require rigorous and elaborate training and preparation in the writer, perhaps even something of the athlete’s processes in the reader.”

But such seriousness was characteristic of her age, and everyone had then learnt to demand professionalism in art; while, on the other hand, readers of 1821 were assured that “Miss Austen had the merit of being evidently a Christian writer,” who conveyed “that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life,” and whose works may “on the whole be recommended, not only as among the most unexceptionable of their kind, but as combining, in an eminent degree, instruction with amusement.”

Charlotte Brontë, we may remember, was declared, by her contemporaries, “one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her sex”; and George Eliot herself was accused of “coarseness and immorality,” in her attempt “to familiarise the minds of our young women in the middle and higher ranks with matters on which their fathers and brothers would never venture to speak in their presence ... and to intrude on minds which ought to be guarded from impurity the unnecessary knowledge of evil.” To such critics her claim to kinship with the “honest old Dutchman” is set aside for a parallel to “the perverseness of our modern ‘pre-Raphaelites,’ with their choice of disagreeable subjects, uncomely models, and uncouth attitudes.”

Such is the natural result of women daring to think for themselves. To-day we are content rather to notice that Miss Burney first cleansed the circulating library, and Miss Austen most unobtrusively extolled the domestic virtues; while their sisters in art all contributed to the prevalence of wholesome fiction; until Miss Brontë and George Eliot stirred up the conscience of man towards woman. In reality women are born preachers, and always work for an ideal.

The period, indeed, is already approaching in which women’s work can no longer be treated _en masse_ and by itself, apart from men’s. It is no longer essentially spontaneous or unconscious, as in Miss Burney and Jane Austen. We have described the writers immediately preceding George Eliot as professional experts, careful of art; and once the world had learnt to _expect_ good work from woman and grown accustomed to her as an artist, there remained no further occasion for her to speak as a woman among aliens. George Eliot, indeed, like Charlotte Brontë, had been, by some of her contemporaries, taken for a man; but the youngest and most inexperienced reader to-day could scarcely have been momentarily deceived. There are, indeed, certain tricks, or mannerisms, of masculinity; but they are superficial, and not actually worn with much grace or skill.

No earlier woman-writer, indeed, had assumed so comprehensive a philosophy, or scarcely any attempt at ordered opinion on life in general, on character, or on faith. But, despite the enthusiasm of certain biographers, despite the influence--unquestioned--of Herbert Spencer, Strauss, George Henry Lewes, and others, we are not personally disposed to grant much weight to our author’s generalisations; while certainly the obtrusiveness of her moralising is an artistic blemish.

The fact is that George Eliot’s outlook remains thoroughly emotional and feminine. In herself, we know, she always saw life through a man-interpreter; and the didactics of her novels are derived from the study of books, not from the exercise of independent reason or thought. If she _talked_ ethics, she _felt_ faith.

But, on the other hand, her work has little external affinity with that of the women of genius preceding her (though it may be a natural development from theirs), because it is obviously the result of training and study, that is _professional_. It is, moreover, the first important contribution by women to the problem novel with a purpose. Both points can be easily illustrated by the most elementary comparison.

We have tacitly assumed, and with obvious justification in fact, that Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, for example, wrote entirely out of their own personal experience. We picture their own surroundings from the society in their novels, noting the power acquired by the limitation. Charlotte Brontë did not go beyond her own circle, save in imagination. But George Eliot, no less certainly, _studied_ mankind _for copy_. It is true that she made more direct _use of_ her own family and friends than they. Maggie Tulliver is no less autobiographical than Lucy Snowe. True also that for description and atmosphere she depended largely on memory. But even here the treatment is that of a self-conscious artist, composing and presenting from outside, studying effects, grouping types; always alive to a comparison between life and literature. And as she _uses_ the human material which has come to her in the natural order of things, she increases it by the journalist’s eye for new copy, piquant contrast, and unexpected revelation. She invokes, moreover, the assistance of every literary device--prepared humour, scholarly style, cultured allusion, local colour, analytical characterisation, and dramatic construction. We have here no longer a spontaneous revelation of woman; rather her captain in full array, armed for fight.

Nor is the message, or open discussion of problems, less novel or less deliberate. It was possible, indeed inevitable, to notice in the earlier examples of woman’s work that she held theories on life not quite in accord with what man had always expected from her. Part of her inspiration, no doubt, was the desire to express these. On certain points, recognised womanly,--such as education and the ordering of a home,--she soon learnt to speak openly; but, in the main, we studied the woman’s ideal of character and conduct from her portrait-painting; we deduced her approval from her sympathy, her budding criticism from her scorn. If she attempted direct teaching, it was mostly in support of mere conventional duty; the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, tentatively measured perhaps by a standard, not quite blindly copied from men. The greatest artists among women before Charlotte Brontë never obtruded the moral, discussed the problem.