I shall pass the catalogue of these writings very quickly in review. The authoress of Mary Barton was hailed at that time, when novels were yet few and even poetry but beginning to recover its strength, by great men and by Dickens especially, who engaged her pen for the first number of his serial adventure, Household Words. In 1853 appeared her second important novel, Ruth (which possibly influenced Dickens’ own Hard Times, published a year later). Then in June, 1853, came Cranford, made into a book from papers contributed to Household Words between December, 1851, and May, 1853. North and South ran in Household Words from September, 1854, to January, 1855, and appeared as a book, with some slight alterations, in that year. In that year also (on March 31st) Charlotte Brontë died and Mrs. Gaskell consented, at the old father’s urgent request, to write the Biography. She gave herself up to the work and finished it in the spring of 1857. The strictures on it—truth, as Milton says, never comes into the world but as a bastard—broke her spirit for a while for all but occasional writing: and then came the cotton famine, of which I have spoken, to tax all her energies. But after the stress of this they revived. In 1863 appeared Sylvia’s Lovers, in 1863–4 Cousin Phillis in the pages of the Cornhill Magazine. In this magazine (August, 1864–January, 1866) followed her last story, Wives and Daughters, published soon after in that year as an unfinished work. So you see the whole tale of it lies within the central years of the last century, beginning with Mary Barton in 1848 and ending sharply just eighteen years after.
VII
I do not propose to discuss the toll of her work this morning. I wish that those of you who aspire to write, and are here learning to write, would study it—for two reasons. For the first, while I admit many flaws, it seems to me elementally of the best literary breeding, so urbane it is, so disposedly truthful; so much of the world, quizzing it; so well aware, all the while, of another. For my second, that here you have, refuting, an exception to all hasty generalisations about the nineteenth century, the Victorian Age, horsehair sofas, the Evangelicals, the Prince Consort, the Great Exhibition of 1851 and all that bagful of cheap rubbish. In 1851 this lady was writing Cranford: in 1863 she was writing Cousin Phillis: and considering that most lovely idyll, I am moved to ask, “Do you, at any rate, know it, this Sicilian yet most English thing of the mid-nineteenth century?” I am moved to say, “Yes, Keats is lovely, and was lovely to me alas! before ever you were born: but quit your gushing and your talk about ‘romantic revivals’—which are but figments invented by fellows who walk round and round a Grecian urn, appraising it scholastically. Quit it, and try to make a Grecian urn. The horses on the frieze of the Parthenon are good horses: but you have as good to study to-day or to-morrow if you will but take a short journey out to Newmarket and study them. Which is better?—to watch a gallop between two colts on a heath, or to bend a congested nose over Ferrex and Porrex?”
To be classical is not to copy the classics: to be classical is to learn the intelligence of the classics and apply just that to this present world and particularly to this island of ours so familiar and yet so romantic.
VIII
I spoke, a while back, of three masterpieces of Mrs. Gaskell, naming two, leaving you to guess the third. Lay by your Cranford, and take up and study Cousin Phillis.
I suppose its underlying sadness has kept it out of popular esteem—this tale of scarcely more than a hundred pages—a pale and shadowy sister of Cranford. It has none, or little of Cranford’s pawky fun: it has not Cranford’s factitious happy ending. But it beats me to guess how any true critic can pass it over and neglect a thing with all that is best in Theocritus moving in rustic English hearts. And it is not invented. It has in all its movements the suggestion of things actually seen—of small things that could not have occurred to any mind save that of an eye-witness—of small recognitions, each in its turn a little flash of light upon the steady background of rural England. It is England and yet pure Virgil—as purely Virgilian as the vignette, in the Fourth Georgic, of the old man of Corycus tilling his scanty acres:
nec fertilis ilia juvencis
Nec pecori opportuna seges nec commoda Baccho—
who yet brought home his own-grown vegetables at night and cast them on the table, in his mind equal to the wealth of kings. I shall read you two passages—the first of young Paul’s introduction, by his cousin Phillis, to her father the ex-minister and Virgilian scholar turned farmer and labouring with his hinds—