III
Yet maybe you think it strange that I find so much of high Hellenic quality in this quiet lady—born a Stevenson, to be sure—but christened Elizabeth Cleghorn, names not to us reminiscential of Hybla or the Ilissus. Her father was a Unitarian minister, who preached in that capacity, in Dob Lane Chapel, Manchester—which again does not suggest the Acropolis. In 1832 she married a Unitarian minister, son of a prosperous manufacturer, minister to a Chapel in Cross Street, Manchester, and prominent on the Home Missionary Board. For these and some particulars that follow I go to the best sources known to me.[4]
[4] Sir Adolphus Ward’s various Introductions to the Knutsford Edition (8 volumes, published by John Murray) and the article on her in the Dictionary of National Biography, by the same writer, whose scholarship, when devoted to this dead lady, reaches to a religious note of chivalry.
Her married life was one of unbroken happiness. Her husband had literary leanings, and in 1838 she writes to Mrs. Howitt, “We once thought of trying to write sketches among the poor, rather in the manner of Crabbe (now don’t think this presumptuous), but in a more beauty-seeing spirit: and one—the only one—was published in Blackwood, January, 1837.[5] But I suppose we spoke our plan near a dog-rose, for it never went any further.”
[5] The curious may read it in Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. CCIV, or in Sir Adolphus Ward’s Biographical Introduction.
So you see that she had already made Manchester her home, and was already interested in the poor.
Also one may interpose here that (without evidence of her portrait) she was acknowledged by all who met her to be a person of quite remarkable beauty, and as little conscious of it as any beautiful woman has any right to be: since as Jaques noted:
if ladies be but young and fair,
They have the gift to know it.
Above all, she had the ineffable charm of being the least assertive, the most concerned with others, in any company. I think that of her rather than of any other writing-woman one may quote Mrs. Browning’s lines on her Kate—
I doubt if she said to you much that could act
As a thought or suggestion: she did not attract
In the sense of the brilliant or wise: I infer
’Twas her thinking for others made you think of her.
She never found fault with you, never implied
Your wrong by her right: and yet men at her side
Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town
The children were gladder that pulled at her gown....
The weak and the gentle, the ribald and rude,
She took as she found them, and did them all good:
It always was so with her—see what you have!
She has made the grass greener even here ... with her grave.
Such a woman, as I trace her portrait, was Mrs. Gaskell, and I think the end of the story will confirm my reading of her. She made no show: without interfering she saw beauty in the lives of the poor: she lived with the misery of Manchester and pitied it; and across a personal bereavement—or (shall we say?) out of the very anguish of her own breast—she relieved her heart in her first long book in pity for that place.
In 1844 Mr. and Mrs. Gaskell revisited Festiniog, in North Wales, a halt of their wedding tour. They took their children with them; and at the inn there the eldest daughter caught the scarlet fever. Mrs. Gaskell removed her with her infant brother to Portmadoc, where he sickened of the fever and died. It was in search of an anodyne for sorrow that the mother began to write Mary Barton. Read that book with just these two or three facts in your mind, and you will find an illustration—though it almost shames me to give you one so poignant—of the way in which the sincerest art is begotten and brought forth: that is, by lifting one’s own experience up to a Universal, and then bringing it back to reclothe it in imaginary, particular, men and women.