The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.
Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;
The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless;
And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine,
If it but herald Death, the vision is divine.
Consider, I say, that the authoress of Cranford not only lived with these fierce women and comforted them as their benign friend, with a comfort that no soul can give to another without understanding, but portrayed them (their struggles ended) in a book that combines the English (even the Victorian English) with the Greek, a fidelity to awful fact with a serene judgment, a tender mercy—the two so discovering and covering all, that—whether it be in charity or in justice—its core of truth has never been challenged: that it stands yet among the noblest few of English biographies. I put it to you that, if you but set together those two books—Cranford and the Life of Charlotte Brontë—at once you must recognise the operating hand—the quietly operating hand—of genius. But this, even when Mrs. Gaskell’s longer novels are thrown into the scale, has avoided, I think—because she herself is so equable, so temperate—its right recognition. Yes, her very portrait has a Hellenic look, so beautiful it is, so penetrating its calm gaze.
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.”