But yet, for her own sake as a novelist alone, her untimely death is a matter for deep regret.It is clear in this novel of Wives and Daughters , in the exquisite little story that preceded it, Cousin Phillis , and in Sylvia's Lovers , that Mrs Gaskell had within these five years started upon a new career with all the freshness of youth, and with a mind which seemed to have put off its clay and to have been born again.But that 'put off its clay' must be taken in a very narrow sense.All minds are tinctured more or less with the 'muddy vesture' in which they are contained; but few minds ever showed less of base earth than Mrs Gaskell's.It was so at all times; but lately even the original slight tincture seemed to disappear.While you read any one of the last three books we have named, you feel yourself caught out of an abominable wicked world, crawling with selfishness and reeking with base passions, into one where there is much weakness, many mistakes, sufferings long and bitter, but where it is possible for people to live calm and wholesome lives.and, what is more, you feel that this is at least as real a world as the other.The kindly spirit which thinks no ill looks out of her pages irradiate; and while we read them, we breathe the purer intelligence which prefers to deal with emotions and passions which have a living root in minds within the pale of salvation, and not with those which rot without it.This spirit is more especially declared in Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters - their author's latest works; they seem to show that for her the end of life was not descent amongst the clods of the valley, but ascent into the purer air of the heaven-aspiring hills.
We are saying nothing now of the merely intellectual qualities displayed in these later works.Twenty years to come, that may be thought the more important question of the two; in the presence of her grave we cannot think so; but it is true, all the same, that as mere works of art and observation, these later novels of Mrs Gaskell's are among the finest of our time.There is a scene in Cousin Phillis - where Holman, ****** hay with his men, ends the day with a psalm - which is not excelled as a picture in all modern fiction; and the same may be said of that chapter of this last story in which Roger smokes a pipe with the Squire after the quarrel with Osborne.There is little in either of these scenes, or in a score of others which succeed each other like gems in a cabinet, which the ordinary novel-maker could 'seize.' There is no 'material' for him in half-a-dozen farming men singing hymns in a field, or a discontented old gentleman smoking tobacco with his son.Still less could he avail himself of the miseries of a little girl sent to be happy in a fine house full of fine people: but it is just in such things as these that true genius appears brightest and most unapproachable.
It is the same with the personages.in Mrs Gaskell's works.Cynthia is one of the most difficult characters which have ever been attempted in our time.Perfect art always obscures the difficulties it overcomes; and it is not till we try to follow the processes by which such a character as the Tito of Romola is created, for instance, that we begin to understand what a marvellous piece of work it is.To be sure, Cynthia was not so difficult, nor is it nearly so great a creation as that splendid achievement of art and thought - of the rarest art, of the profoundest thought.But she also belongs to the kind of characters which are conceived only in minds large, clear, harmonious and just, and which can be portrayed fully and without flaw only by hands obedient to the finest motions of the mind.Viewed in this light, Cynthia is a more important piece of work even than Molly, delicately as she is drawn, and true and harmonious as that picture is also.And what we have said of Cynthia may be said with equal truth of Osborne Hamley.The true delineation of a character like that is as fine a test of art as the painting of a foot or a hand, which also seems so easy, and in which perfection is most rare.In this case the work is perfect.Mrs Gaskell had drawn a dozen characters more striking than Osborne since she wrote Mary Barton but not one which shows more exquisite finish.
Another thing we may be permitted to notice, because it has a great and general significance.It may be true that this is not exactly the place for criticism, but since we are writing of Osborne Hamley, we cannot resist pointing out a peculiar instance of the subtler conceptions which underlie all really considerable works.Here are Osborne and Roger, two men who, in every particular that can be seized for description , are totally different creatures.Body and mind they are quite unlike.They have different tastes; they take different ways: they are men of two sorts which, in the society sense, never 'know' each other; and yet, never did brotherly blood run more manifest than in the veins of those two.To make that manifest without allowing the effort to peep out for a single moment, would be a triumph of art; but it is a 'touch beyond the reach of art' to make their likeness in unlikeness so natural a thing that we no more wonder about it than we wonder at seeing the fruit and the bloom on the same bramble:
we have always seen them there together in blackberry season, and do not wonder about it nor think about it at all.Inferior writers, even some writers who are highly accounted, would have revelled in the 'contrast.'
persuaded that they were doing a fine anatomical dramatic thing by bringing it out at every opportunity.To the author of Wives and Daughters this sort of anatomy was mere dislocation.She began by having the people of her story born in the usual way, and not built up like the Frankenstein monster; and thus when Squire Hamley took a wife, it was then provided that his two boys should be as naturally one and diverse as the fruit and the bloom on the bramble.'It goes without speaking.' These differences are precisely what might have been expected from the union of Squire Hamley with the town-bred, refined, delicate-minded woman whom he married; and the affection of the young men, their kind-ness (to use the word in its old and new meanings at once) is nothing but a reproduction of those impalpable threads of love which bound the equally diverse father and mother in bonds faster than the ties of blood.
But we will not permit ourselves to write any more in this vein.It is unnecessary to demonstrate to those who know what is and what is not true literature that Mrs Gaskell was gifted with some of the choicest faculties bestowed upon mankind; that these grew into greater strength and ripened into greater beauty in the decline of her days; and that she has gifted us with some the truest, purest works of fiction in the language.And she was herself what her works show her to have been - a wise, good woman.
- [ED., C.M.]
Edited by Frederick Greenwood.