Part 7
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 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 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 example 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 accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's intentions 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 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 spontaneous moment in his life as George Eliot has painted it, and its strangeness makes its pathos as well as its truth.
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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 comparative inferiority, has also its supreme excellence. But in plot, treatment and character it is far below its predecessors. Some of the characters are strangely unnatural. Grandcourt, for instance, is more like the French caricature 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-contradictory 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 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 confusion 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 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 improbable 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 repentance 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 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 Gwendolen'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 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 interpolated moral essays, and must not be confounded with padding. Take this little shaft aimed at that _Graeculus esuriens_ Lush, that "half-caste among gentlemen" and the _ame 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 position 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 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 contradictions."
"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. Torrington 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, unsatisfactory 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 into one nation of which he should be the heart and brain.
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Whatever George Eliot did bears this impress of massive sincerity--of deep and earnest feeling--of lofty purpose 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 probably 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 perfect 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." 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 "proceeding to take," than which "commencing" is only one stage lower in literary vulgarity; and many of her sentences 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 grammatical 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 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 marrying an obscure individual many years younger than herself, and so destroying the poetry of her first union by destroying its sense of continuity and constancy, would have 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.
[Signature: E. Lynn Linton.]
MRS. GASKELL
_By_ EDNA LYALL
MRS. GASKELL
Of 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 description. 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 _blase_ man of the world."
With the exception of her powerful "Life of Charlotte Bronte," Mrs. Gaskell wrote only novels or short stories. The enormous difficulties which attended the writing of a biography of the author of "Jane Eyre" would, we venture 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 fascinating interest, or one which more successfully grappled with the great difficulty of the undertaking.
As Mr. Clement Shorter remarks, the "Life of Charlotte 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 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 Charlotte 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 of fiction--yours, indeed, and Thackeray's are the only ones I care to open. 'Shirley' disgusted me at the opening, 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 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 childhood 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 Elizabeth 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 taken to Knutsford, in Cheshire, the little town so wonderfully 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 worshipped, 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 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.