Mrs. Gaskell

Mrs. Gaskell : Her Life and Work. By A. Stanton Whitfield. (Routledge. 7s. 6d.) THERE are many writers whose books are greater than them- selves. There are less numerous writers who themselves are greater than their books. But Mrs. Gaskell, writer and woman, was unalloyed gold. One has only to look at. her portrait to realize that here is not merely a remarkable, but a very true lady. The face has striking physical beauty ; but the spiritual grace that illuminates the eyes has subdued all vanity. There is a - mance without self-assurance, and a perfect balance between the practical and the ideal, as also between strength and gentleness. So faultless, indeed, is the classical harmony of this face that it would be statuesque were it not vitalized by some deep experience. It is ironical that this lady, who suggests thoughts of the Acropolis, should have been the daughter of a Unitarian minister. Moreover, in 1832, at the age of twenty-two, she married a Unitarian minister, and went to live in Manchester. A Unitarian manse in the Manchester of the hungry 'forties might seem a queer setting for this gentle Hellenic. woman. But circumstance, in her case, was a discriminating godparent. The intellectual discipline of Unitarianism, which sometimes fosters aridity, was just what her impulsive warm-heartedness required ; while her intimate contact with life, amid some of the worst scenes and during one of the worst periods produced by the Industrial Revolution, quickened gifts that might otherwise have remained static.

lYfrs. Gaskell has not lacked ardent appreciators. But she has had few biographers, mainly because, like Thackeray, she charged her family not to let her life be written—a com- mand that her daughters obeyed. In any case, there are no mysteries or foibles in Mrs. Gaskell that lend themselves to pic- turesque treatment. She does not constitute an easy peg for theories and generalizations ; and she offers little sport to critics who like to caricature a whole age. Victorian, in certain superficial respects, she was. She shared, for example, the conventional Victorian delight in death-bed scenes. She allowed the spirit of her time, again, to impose upon her occa- sionally, as in Ruth, limitations that were alien to her funda- mental frankness. Even so, Ruth, in which Mr. Whitfield finds an unconscious note that was later to be echoed in Hardy's Tess, was banned by the libraries. Every period, indeed, produces rebels against itself, and Mrs. Gaskell was essentially opposed to complacency.

' She was, however, too sound and far-seeing a rebel to be bitter, sentimental, or doctrinaire. Living in the very heart of the industrial conflict so poignantly reflected in her first novel, she took no sides. Through the real flesh and blood characters of her creation, she presented the facts impartially, and allowed the facts to speak for themselves. Not even Dickens glowed with more passionate pity for the poor. But she had a firmer hold upon herself, and a truer grasp of the social problem than Dickens—or, again, than Disraeli. Dickens effectively destroyed specific abuses ; but a vague charity was his only constructive note. Disraeli, on the other hand, although his Sybil breathed genuine concern for the oppressed, abandoned himself to theory and advocated -a benevolent autocracy. Mrs. Gaskell lost herself neither in sentimentality nor in political panaceas. Second to none in her sympathy for them, she realized that the poor, if more unfortunate, were not necessarily better or worse than the

rich. She saw the mingled good and evil in employee and employer alike, and she dismissed both vague charity and cut-and-dried programmes of reform. She recognized that

the transformation of social systems can only come through the transformation of human character ; and in Mary Barton and North and South she showed how that latter transforma-

tion might work. To good will she added understanding— careful, thorough understanding, not of abstract "problems," but of men by one another. Such was her implied remedy for social ills. And who shall say that over half a century of

political and economic philosophizing has invalidated her outlook ?

It seems a far jump to Cranford. Yet, as Mr. Whitfield points out, that work of perfect and apparently effortless art owed everything to the period which preceded it. Its exquisite refinement of feeling and humour are the flower of a plant that had its roots deep in the soil of experience, suffering, and bereavement. Mr. Whitfield does not challenge the popular verdict of Cranford. But he regrets that for too many readers Mrs. Gaskell means Cranford and nothing more., His admirable analyses of Sylvia's Lovers and Wives and Daughters remind us of the wide, but always vital, range of Mrs. Gaskell's imagination and sympathy, and of the spon- taneous, tmaffected style that solved its own problems of technique. But, like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, he reserves his greatest enthusiasm for Cousin Phillis, that faultless Theocrit,an idyll in modern English.

Mrs. Gaskell was a great writer primarily because she was a great woman, who lived life, for its own sake, to the full. She was, to begin with, an ideal wife and mother, and it was only upon the death of one of her children in 1845 that, at her husband's suggestion, she first seriously turned to writing as a distraction from her grief. We can only dimly imagine the effort which this withdrawal from her sorrow cost her. All her great courage was needed, again, for undertaking the Life of Charlotte Brontë. It is easy to appreciate the perfectly balanced literary qualities that make this Life among the four greatest biographies in our language. But what fortitude it represents as well ! Mrs. Gaskell never spared herself, while her friend was still living, in taking what brightness she could into the tragic Haworth parsonage. The actual visiting of the BrontO household called for pluck in so sensitive a woman. The recreation of it upon paper, after Charlotte's death, must have demanded something akin to heroism. Yet no task was ever carried out more conscientiously or with a firmer grasp

of detail. Of Mrs. Gaskell's thoroughness, and of her mastery of many matters Ordinarily beyond feminine purview, Mr.

Whitfield gives us some new and striking examples. If, however, she took life seriously, she could also take it gaily. If she not merely voiced but personally alleviated the woes of the poor, she did not disdain the rich or undervalue the many friendships with her literary compeers. She was, too, an indefatigable traveller. It is not surprising that her delicate constitution failed under heavy and varied demands, and that, like the unexpected "ceasing of exquisite music," her life ended suddenly in her fifty-sixth year.

Mr. VVhitfield's book is not all that could be desired. We should have welcomed a fuller and more leisurely treatment.

But, within the rather small compass which he has chosen,

he has ably condensed the salient facts and characteristics and has deftly sketched in the background ; while his very full bibliographies and appendices atone in some measure for his own brevity. Why, however, is his style so flippantly at variance sometimes with his spirit ? Is it that he fedi that all modern biography must be clever and epigrammatic ?

Or is it that his very reverence for his subject has put him on guard against the possible charge of adoration ? Hero-

worship may be momentarily out of fashion. Yet who, even in these days, need be ashamed of worshipping Mrs. Gaskell ?

GILBERT THOMAS.