Part 9

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. Holland, in a letter to me the other day--"how her writing 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 discharged from prison. For working women she also held 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 beforehand, 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 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."

[Signature: A E Bayly.

'Edna Lyall.']

MRS. CROWE. MRS. ARCHER CLIVE. MRS. HENRY WOOD

_By_ ADELINE SERGEANT

MRS. CROWE. MRS. ARCHER CLIVE. MRS. HENRY WOOD

Mrs. 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 residence 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, the scenes of which are laid chiefly among homely and domestic surroundings, display alike soundness of judgment 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 generation. It is evident too, that she believed herself--rightly or wrongly--to be possessed of great philosophical discrimination; 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.

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It is worth noting that Mrs. Crowe's ideas respecting 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 1847, she makes an elaborate protest against the kind of education 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 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 considerable 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.

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Her first work was a drama, "Aristodemus," published anonymously in 1838; it showed considerable ability and 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. 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-gaengers 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 phenomena 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 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: "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 L1 11s. 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 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 hopelessly 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 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 "sympathetic" 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 Lightfoot, 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 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 Lockwood" 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, without, 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 explanation 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.

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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 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 literature. 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.

Caroline Clive was the second daughter and co-heiress of Edmund Meysey-Wigley, of Shakenhurst, Worcestershire. She was born in 1801, at Brompton Green, London, and was married in 1840 to the Rev. Archer Clive, Rector of Solihull, Warwickshire. 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 childhood 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.

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"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.

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"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 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. Clive'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.

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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, 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.

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"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.