“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.
II
The sin is the worse because every one acknowledges the Life of Charlotte Brontë to be—after Boswell’s Life of Johnson, admittedly beyond competition—among the two or three best biographies in our language. Conceive the Brontës—not Charlotte alone, but the whole family—the whole of that terrible family in that terrible parsonage at Haworth—as this staid lady, wife of a Unitarian minister, faithfully depicts them—the wastrel son, Branwell: through long nights tearing his own heart out, with his stern old father’s, in the bedroom they had, for safety, to occupy together: in the end pulling himself up to die standing: the shuddering sisters listening on the stairs; Emily, doomed and fierce, she too in her turn standing up to die. Consider—I will not say Wuthering Heights, or Charlotte’s well-known magnificent description, in Villette, of Rachel and her tortured acting—but consider if only by illustration of contrast this most maddened poem by Emily—and there are others as tragic—
The Prisoner
Still let my tyrants know, I am not doom’d to wear
Year after year in gloom and desolate despair;
A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,