Ever since Eve gave Adam of the forbidden fruit, "and he did eat," the relative position of the sexes has rankled in the heart of man. The sons of Adam proclaim loudly that they were given dominion over the earth and all that the earth contained; but they have been ever ready to follow blindly the beckoning finger of some fair daughter of Eve. Perhaps it is a consciousness of this domination of the weaker sex that has led man to proclaim in such loud tones his mastery over woman, having some doubts of its being recognised by her unless asserted in bold language. At a time when the novels of women received as warm a welcome from the public and as large checks from the publishers as those of men, a writer whose sex need not be given thus discussed their relative merits:
"What is woman, regarded as a literary worker? Simply an inferior animal, educated as an inferior animal. And what is man? He is a superior being, educated by a superior being. So how can they ever be equal in that particular line?"
Granted the premises, there can be but one conclusion.
The perfect assurance with which men have asserted their own sufficiency in all lines of art would be amusing if it had not been so disastrous in distorting and warping at least three of them: music, the drama, and prose fiction. As slow as the growth of spirituality, has been the recognition of woman's mental and moral power. It seems almost incredible that not many years ago only male voices were heard in places of amusement. Deep, rich, full, and sonorous, no one disputes the beauty of the male chorus; but modern opera would be impossible without the soprano and alto voices, and Madame Patti, Madame Sembrich, and Madame Lehman have proved that in natural gifts and in the technique of art women are not inferior to their brethren.
By the same slow process women have won recognition on the stage. Even in Shakespeare's time men saw no reason why women should acquire the histrionic art. Imagine Juliet played by a boy! Yet Essex, Leicester, Southampton, in the boxes, the groundlings in the pit, and Ben Jonson sitting as critic of all, were well satisfied with it, for they were used to it, just as men have accepted the heroines of their own novels, though every woman they meet is a refutation of their truth. It only needed a woman in a woman's part to open the eyes of the audience to all they had missed before. Not until the Restoration, did any woman appear on the English stage. The following lines given in the prologue written for the revival of Othello, in which the part of Desdemona was acted for the first time by a woman, show how quick critics were to see the folly of the old custom:
For to speak truth, men act, that are between
Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen,
With bone so large, and nerve so uncompliant,
When you call Desdemona, enter Giant.
As we cannot conceive of the English stage without such women as Mrs. Siddons, Charlotte Cushman, and Ellen Terry, so we cannot conceive of the English novel without such writers as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Mary Mitford, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, each one of whom carried some phase of the novel to so high a point that she has stood pre-eminent in her own particular line. Too often we confuse art with its subject-matter. If it requires as much skill to give interest to the everyday occurrences of the home as to the thrilling adventures abroad; to depict the life of women as the life of men; to reveal the joys and sorrows of a woman's heart as the exultations and griefs of man's; then these women deserve a place equal to that held by Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray. Their art, as their subject-matter, is different. With the exception of George Eliot, they have not virility with its strength and power, but they have femininity, no less strong and powerful, a quality possessed by Scott, but by no other of these masculine writers, with the possible exception of Dickens, and in him it is a femininity, which tends to run to sentimentalism, a different characteristic.
Elizabeth Gaskell, one of the most feminine of writers, is so well known as the author of Cranford, that delightful village whose only gentleman dies early in the story, that many of its readers do not know that its author was better known by her contemporaries through her humanitarian novels; in which she discussed the great problems that face the poor.
Mrs. Gaskell, whose maiden name was Stevenson, was born in Chelsea in 1810. She spent the greater part of her childhood and girlhood at the home of her mother's family, Knutsford in Cheshire, the place she afterward made famous under the name of Cranford. In 1832, she married the Reverend William Gaskell, minister of the Unitarian chapel in Manchester, and that city became her home. She took an active interest in all the affairs of the city, and constantly visited the poor. Her husband's father, besides being the professor of English History and Literature in Manchester New College, a Unitarian institution, was a manufacturer; thus Mrs. Gaskell had the opportunity of hearing both sides of the controversy which was then waging between labour and capital.