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.