If Miss Austen-Leigh does not throw much light upon that problem, she does one thing for which we are grateful to her. She prints some notes made by Jane at the age of twelve or thirteen upon the margin of Goldsmith’s History of England. They are slight and childish, useless, we should have thought, to confute the critics who hold that she was unemotional, unsentimental and passionless. ‘My dear Mr G — , I have lived long enough in the world to know that it is always so.’ She corrects her author amusingly. ‘Oh! Oh! The wretches!’ she exclaims against the Puritans. ‘Dear Balmerino I cannot express what I feel for you!’ she cries when Balmerino is executed. There is nothing more in them than that. Only to hear Jane Austen saying nothing in her natural voice when the critics have been debating whether she was a lady, whether she told the truth, whether she could read, and whether she had personal experience of hunting a fox is positively upsetting. We remember that Jane Austen wrote novels. It might be worth while for her critics to read them.
Mrs Gaskell.
From what one can gather of Mrs Gaskell’s nature, she would not have liked Mrs Chadwick’s book. A cultivated woman, for whom publicity had no glamour, with a keen sense of humour and a quick temper, she would have opened it with a shiver and dropped it with a laugh. It is delightful to see how cleverly she vanishes. There are no letters to be had; no gossip; people remember her, but they seem to have forgotten what she was like. At least, cries Mrs Chadwick, she must have lived somewhere; houses can be described. ‘There is a long, glass-covered porch, forming a conservatory, which is the main entrance... On the ground-floor, to the right, is a large drawing-room. On the left are a billiard room... a large kitchen... and a scullery... There are ten bedrooms... and a kitchen garden sufficiently large to supply vegetables for a large family.’ The ghost would feel grateful to the houses; it might give her a twinge to hear that she had ‘got into the best literary set of the day’, but on the other hand it would please her to read of how Charles Darwin was ‘the well-known naturalist’.
The surprising thing is that there should be a public who wishes to know where Mrs Gaskell lived. Curiosity about the houses, the coats, and the pens of Shelley, Peacock, Charlotte Brontë, and George Meredith seems lawful. One imagines that these people did everything in a way of their own; and in such cases a trifle will start the imagination when the whole body of their published writings fails to thrill. But Mrs Gaskell would be the last person to have that peculiarity. One can believe that she prided herself upon doing things as other women did them, only better - that she swept manuscripts off the table lest a visitor should think her odd. She was, we know, the best of housekeepers, ‘her standard of comfort”, writes Mrs Chadwick, being ‘expensive, but her tastes were always refined’; and she kept a cow in her back garden to remind her of the country.
For a moment it seems surprising that we should still be reading her books. The novels of today are so much terser, intenser, and more scientific. Compare the strike in ‘North and South’, for example, with the Strife of Mr Galsworthy. She seems a sympathetic amateur beside a professional in earnest. But this is partly due to a kind of irritation with the methods of mid-Victorian novelists. Nothing would persuade them to concentrate. Able by nature to spin sentence after sentence melodiously, they seem to have left out nothing that they knew how to say. Our ambition, on the other hand, is to put in nothing that need not be there. What we want to be there is the brain and the view of life; the autumnal woods, the history of the whale fishery, and the decline of stage coaching we omit entirely. But by means of comment, dialogues that depart from truth by their wit and not by their pomposity, descriptions fused into a metaphor, we get a world carved out arbitrarily enough by one dominant brain. Every page supplies a little heap of reflections, which, so to speak, we sweep aside from the story and keep to build a philosophy with. There is really nothing to stimulate such industry in the pages of Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, and Mrs Gaskell. A further deficiency (in modern eyes) is that they lack ‘personality’. Cut out a passage and set it apart and it lies unclaimed, unless a trick of rhythm mark it. Yet it may be a merit that personality, the effect not of depth of thought but of the manner of it, should be absent. The tuft of heather that Charlotte Brontë saw was her tuft; Mrs Gaskell’s world was a large place, but it was everybody’s world.
She waited to begin her first novel until she was thirty-four, driven to write by the death of her baby. A mother, a woman who had seen much of life, her instinct in writing was to sympathize with others. Loving men and women, she seems to have done her best, like a wise parent, to keep her own eccentricities in the background. She would devote the whole of her large mind to understanding. That is why, when one begins to read her, one is dismayed by the lack of cleverness.
Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers, while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food - of the sinking health, of the dying life of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times? I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters; but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks.
So she misses the contrast. But by adding detail after detail in this profuse impersonal way she nearly achieves what has not been achieved by all our science. Because they are strange and terrible to us, we always see the poor in stress of some kind, so that the violence of their feeling may break through conventions, and, bringing them rudely into touch with us, do away with the need of subtle understanding. But Mrs Gaskell knows how the poor enjoy themselves; how they visit and gossip and fry bacon and lend each other bits of finery and show off their sores. This is the more remarkable because she was hampered by a refined upbringing and traditions of culture. Her working men and women, her outspoken and crabbed old family domestics, are generally more vigorous than her ladies and gentlemen as though a touch of coarseness did her good. How admirable, for instance, is the scene when Mrs Boucher is told of her husband’s death.
‘Hoo mun be told because of th’ inquest. See! hoo’s coming round; shall you or I do it? Or mappen your father would be best?”
‘No; you, you,’ said Margaret.
They awaited her perfect recovery in silence. Then the neighbour woman sat down on the floor, and took Mrs Boucher’s head and shoulders on her lap.
‘‘Neighbour,’ said she, ‘your man is ded. Guess yo’ how he died?”
‘He were drowned,’ said Mrs Boucher feebly, beginning to cry for the first time at this rough probing of her sorrow.
‘He were found drowned. He were coming home very hopeless o’ aught on earth... I’m not saying he did right, and I’m not saying he did wrong. All I say is, may neither me nor mine ever have his sore heart, or we may do like things/
‘He has left me alone wi’ a’ these children!’ moaned the widow, less distressed at the manner of the death than Margaret expected; but it was of a piece with her helpless character to feel his loss as principally affecting herself and her children.
Too great a refinement gives ‘Cranford’ that prettiness which is the weakest thing about it, making it, superficially at least, the favourite copy for gentle writers who have hired rooms over the village post-office.
When she was a girl, Mrs Gaskell was famous for her ghost stories. A great story-teller she remained to the end, able always in the middle of the thickest book to make us ask ‘What happens next?’ Keeping a diary to catch the overflow of life, observing clouds and trees, moving about among numbers of very articulate men and women, high-spirited, observant, and free from bitterness and bigotry, it seems as though the art of writing came to her as easily as an instinct. She had only to let her pen run to shape a novel. When we look at her work in the mass we remember her world, not her individuals. In spite of Lady Ritchie, wh
o hails Molly Gibson ‘dearest of heroines, a born lady, unconsciously noble and generous in every thought’, in spite of the critic’s praise of her ‘psychological subtlety’, her heroes and heroines remain solid rather than interesting. With all her humour she was seldom witty, and the lack of wit in her character-drawing leaves the edges blunt. These pure heroines, having no such foibles as she loved to draw, no coarseness and no violent passions, depress one like an old acquaintance. One will never get to know them; and that is profoundly sad. One reads her most perhaps because one wishes to have the run of her world. Melt them together, and her books compose a large, bright, country town, widely paved, with a great stir of life in the streets and a decorous row of old Georgian houses standing back from the road. ‘Leaving behind your husband, children, and civilization, you must come out to barbarism, loneliness, and liberty.’ Thus Charlotte Brontë, inviting her to Haworth, compared their lives, and Mrs Gaskell’s comment was ‘Poor Miss Brontë.’ We who never saw her, with her manner ‘gay but definite’, her beautiful face, and her ‘almost perfect arm’, find something of the same delight in her books. What a pleasure it is to read them!
The Compromise.
None of the great Victorian reputations has sunk lower than that of Mrs Humphry Ward. Her novels, already strangely out of date, hang in the lumber-room of letters like the mantles of our aunts, and produce in us the same desire that they do to smash the window and let in the air, to light the fire and pile the rubbish on top. Some books fade into a gentle picturesqueness with age. But there is a quality, perhaps a lack of quality, about the novels of Mrs Ward which makes it improbable that, however much they fade, they will ever become picturesque. Their large bunches of jet, their intricate festoons of ribbon, skilfully and firmly fabricated as they are, obstinately resist the endearments of time. But Mrs Trevelyan’s life of her mother makes us consider all this from a different angle. It is an able and serious book, and like all good biographies so permeates us with the sense of the presence of a human being that by the time we have finished it we are more disposed to ask questions than to pass judgments. Let us attempt, in a few words, to hand on the dilemma to our readers.
Of Mrs Ward’s descent there is no need to speak. She had by birth and temperament all those qualities which fitted her, before she was twenty, to be the friend of Mark Pattison, and ‘the best person’, in the opinion of J. R. Green, to be asked to contribute a volume to a history of Spain. There was little, even at the age of twenty, that this ardent girl did not know about the Visigothic Invasion or the reign of Alfonso el Sabio. One of her first pieces of writing, A Morning in the Bodleian, records in priggish but burning words her scholar’s enthusiasm: ‘... let not the young man reading for his pass, the London copyist, or the British Museum illuminator,’ hope to enjoy the delights of literature; that deity will only yield her gifts to ‘the silent ardour, the thirst, the disinterestedness of the true learner’. With such an inscription above the portal, her fate seems already decided. She will marry a Don, she will rear a small family; she will circulate Plain Facts on Infant Feeding in the Oxford slums; she will help to found Somerville College; she will sit up writing learned articles for the Dictionary of Christian Biography; and at last, after a hard life of unremunerative toil, she will finish the book which fired her fancy as a girl and will go down to posterity as the author of a standard work upon the origins of modern Spain. But, as everyone knows, the career which seemed so likely, and would have been so honorable, was interrupted by the melodramatic success of Robert Elsmere. History was entirely forsaken for fiction, and the Origins of Modern Spain became transmuted into the Origins of Modern France, a phantom book which the unfortunate Robert Elsmere never succeeded in writing.
It is here that we begin to scribble in the margin of Mrs Ward’s life those endless notes of interrogation. After Robert Elsmere - which we may grant to have been inevitable - we can never cease to ask ourselves, why? Why desert the charming old house in Russell Square for the splendour and expenses of Grosvenor Place? Why wear beautiful dresses, why keep butlers and carriages, why give luncheon parties and week-end parties, why buy a house in the country and pull it down and build it up again, when all this can only be achieved by writing at breathless speed novels which filial piety calls autumnal, but the critic, unfortunately, must call bad? Mrs Ward might have replied that the compromise, if she agreed to call it so, was entirely justified. Who but a coward would refuse, when cheques for £7,000 dropped out of George Smith’s pocket before breakfast, to spend the money as the great ladies of the Renaissance would have spent it, upon society and entertainment and philanthropy? Without her novel-writing there would have been no centre for good talk in the pretty room overlooking the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Without her novel-writing thousands of poor children would have ranged the streets unsheltered. It is impossible to remain a schoolgirl in the Bodleian for ever, and, once you breast the complicated currents of modern life at their strongest, there is little time to ask questions, and none to answer them. One thing merges in another; one thing leads to another. After an exhausting At Home in Grosvenor Place, she would snatch a meal and drive off to fight the cause of play centres in Bloomsbury. Her success in that undertaking involved her, against her will, in the anti-suffrage campaign. Then, when the war came, this elderly lady of weak health was selected by the highest authorities to peer into shell-holes, and be taken over men-of-war by admirals. Sometimes, says Mrs Trevelyan, eighty letters were dispatched from Stocks in a single day; five hats were bought in the course of one drive to town - ‘on spec., darling’; and what with grandchildren and cousins and friends; what with being kind and being unmethodical and being energetic; what with caring more and more passionately for politics, and finding the meetings of liberal churchmen ‘desperately, perhaps disproportionately’ interesting, there was only one half-hour in the whole day left for reading Greek.
It is tempting to imagine what the schoolgirl in the Bodleian would have said to her famous successor, literature has no guerdon for bread-students, to quote the expressive German phrase... only to the silent ardour, the thirst, the disinterestedness of the true learner, is she prodigal of all good gifts.’ But Mrs Humphry Ward, the famous novelist, might have rounded up her critic of twenty. ‘It is all very well,’ she might have said, ‘to accuse me of having wasted my gifts; but the fault lay with you. Yours was the age for seeing visions; and you spent it in dreaming how you stopped the Princess of Wales’s runaway horses, and were rewarded by “a command” to appear at Buckingham Palace. It was you who starved my imagination and condemned it to the fatal compromise.’ And here the elder lady undoubtedly lays her finger upon the weakness of her own work. For the depressing effects of her books must be attributed to the fact that while her imagination always attempts to soar, it always agrees to perch. That is why we never wish to open them again.
In Mrs Trevelyan’s biography these startling discrepancies between youth and age, between ideal and accomplishment, are successfully welded together, as they are in life, by an infinite series of details. She makes it apparent that Mrs Ward was beloved, famous, and prosperous in the highest degree. And if to achieve all this implies some compromise, still - but here we reach the dilemma which we intend to pass on to our readers.
Wilcoxiana.
How can one begin? Where can one leave off? There never was a more difficult book to review. If one puts in the Madame de Staël of Milwaukee, there will be no room for the tea-leaves; if one concentrates upon Helen Pitkin, Raley Husted Bell must be done without. Then all the time there are at least three worlds spinning in and out, and as for Ella Wheeler Wilcox - Mrs Wilcox is indeed the chief problem. It would be easy to make fun of her; equally easy to condescend to her; but it is not at all easy to express what one does feel for her. There is a hint of this complexity in her personal appearance. We write with forty photographs of Mrs Wilcox in front of us. If you omit those with the cats in her arms and the crescent moons in her hair, those stretched on
a couch with a book, and those seated on a balustrade between Theodosia Garrison and Rhoda Hero Dunn, all primarily a tribute to the Muse, there remain a number which represent a plump, personable, determined young woman, vain, extremely vivacious, arch, but at the same time sensible, and always in splendid health. She was never a frump at any stage of her career. Rather than look like a bluestocking, she would have forsaken literature altogether. She stuck a rod between her arms to keep her back straight; she galloped over the country on an old farm horse; she defied her mother and bathed naked; at the height of her fame ‘a new stroke in swimming or a new high dive gave me more of a thrill than a new style of verse, great as my devotion to the Muses was, and ever has been’. In short, if one had the pleasure of meeting Mrs Wilcox, one would find her a very well-dressed, vivacious woman of the world. But, alas for the simplicity of the problem! there is not one world but three.
The pre-natal world is indicated rather sketchily. One is given to understand that Mrs Wilcox is appearing for by no means the first time. There have been Ella Wheeler Wilcoxes in Athens and Florence, Rome and Byzantium. She is a recurring, but an improving phenomenon. ‘Being an old soul myself,’ she says, ‘reincarnated many more times than any other member of my family, I knew the truth of spiritual things not revealed to them.’ One gift, at least, of supreme importance she brought with her from the shades - ‘I was born with unquenchable hope... I always expected wonderful things to happen to me.’ Without hope, what could she have done? Everything was against her. Her father was an unsuccessful farmer; her mother an embittered woman worn down by a life of child-bearing and hard work; the atmosphere of the home was one of ‘discontent and fatigue and irritability’. They lived far out in the country, five miles from a post office, uncomfortably remote even from the dissipations of Milwaukee. Yet Ella Wheeler never lost her belief in an amazing future before her; she was probably never dull for five minutes together. Although acutely aware that her father’s taste in hats was distressing, and that the farmhouse walls were without creepers, she had the power within her to transform everything to an object of beauty. The buttercups and daisies of the fields looked to her like rare orchids and hothouse roses. When she was galloping to the post on her farm horse, she expected to be thrown at the feet of a knight, or perhaps the miracle would be reversed and it was into her bosom that the knight would be pitched instead. After a day of domestic drudgery, she would climb a little hill and sit in the sunset and dream. Fame was to come from the East, and love and wealth. (As a matter of fact, she notes they came from the West.) At any rate something wonderful was bound to happen. ‘And I would awaken happy in spite of myself, and put all my previous melancholy into verses - and dollars.’ The young woman with the determined mouth never forgot her dollars, and one respects her for saying so. But often Miss Wheeler suggested that in return for what he called her ‘heart wails’ the editor should send her some object from his prize list - bric-à-brac, tableware, pictures - anything to make the farmhouse more like the house of her dreams. Among the rest came six silver forks, and judge of her emotion! conceive the immeasurable romance of the world! - years later she discovered that the silver forks were made by the firm in which her husband was employed.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 510
