I
We think of her habitually—do we not?—by her married title of “Mrs. Gaskell.” Who Mr. Gaskell was this generation does not, in an ordinary way, pause to enquire: a neglect which does injustice to a gentleman of fine presence, noble manners and high culture. She was a beautiful woman: they married in 1832, and had children, and lived most happily.
So it is as “Mrs. Gaskell” that we think of her: and I dare to wager that most of you think of her as Mrs. Gaskell, authoress of Cranford. Now heaven forbid that anything I say this morning should daunt your affection for Cranford, as heaven knows how long and sincerely I have adored it. I have adored it at least long enough and well enough to understand its devotees—for Cranford has not only become popular in the sense, more or less, that Omar Khayyam has become popular—by which I mean that, at this season or thereabouts, numbers of people buy a copy in limp suède, with Hugh Thomson’s illustrations, and only hesitate over sending it to the So-and-So’s with best wishes on a chilling doubt that they sent it last year, with the identical good wishes—if indeed they are not returning the identical volume they received! Well, let us be merry and careless!—in the course of a week or two these soft bricks will be dropping on every hearth.
But seriously, one finds devotees of Cranford everywhere; and especially, in my experience, among scholarly old men. They have Cranford written on their hearts, sometimes hardly covering a cherished solution of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Cranford and the novels of Jane Austen—you never know how many delightful persons cherish them, have them by heart, pore over their text as over an Ode of Pindar’s. And they are fierce, these devotees, as the noble new edition of Jane Austen by Mr. Chapman of the Oxford Press has recently been teaching us. Here are five volumes edited with all the care that study and affection can lavish on the task. Yet from here, there and everywhere lovers start up from firesides—scattered widowers of this dear maiden—challenging over variae lectiones, feeling for the hilt on the old hip to champion (we’ll say) “screen” as the right word against “scene” as printed—
“Swerve to the left, Son Roger,” he said,
“When you catch his eyes through the helmet-slit.”
It is as serious, almost, as all that: and so it is with Cranford, and Miss Jenkyns and Captain Brown and adorable Miss Matty.
Yet, let us admit there are certain works which conquer some of us, we cannot tell why. To go a very long way from Cranford, take Tristram Shandy. No one can really criticise Tristram Shandy, and all pretence to do so is mere humbug. Either you like Tristram Shandy (as I do, for one) or you don’t, and there’s an end to it. My sole complaint against the devotees of Cranford is that, admiring it, revelling in it, they imagine themselves to have the secret of Mrs. Gaskell, stop there, and do not go on to explore her other works of which one at any rate I shall presently dare to proclaim to you as the most perfect small idyll ever written in English prose.