The same critic compares the later work of Mrs. Gaskell with the later work of George Sand and finds that "in their large-heartedness" they are similar. He also gives George Sand's tribute to her English contemporary. "Mrs. Gaskell," she said, "has done what neither I nor other female writers in France can accomplish: she has written novels which excite the deepest interest in men of the world, and yet which every girl will be the better for reading."
It is not often that a novelist finds another writer to take up and enlarge her work as did Mrs. Gaskell. Her novels contain the germ of much of George Eliot's earlier writings. The Moorland Cottage suggested many parts of The Mill on the Floss. Edward and Maggie Brown—the former important, consequential and dictatorial, the latter self-forgetful, eager to help others, and by her very eagerness prone to blunders—were developed by George Eliot into the characters of Tom and Maggie Tulliver. The weak and fretful mothers in the two books are much alike, while the love story and the catastrophe have the same general outline.
They both drew largely from the working people of the North or of the Midlands, and both constantly introduced Dissenters. Silas Marner belongs to the manufacturing North, and the people of Lantern Yard are of the same class as those of Manchester and Milton. Felix Holt and Adam Bede belong to the same type as Jem Wilson and Mr. Thornton, while Esther Lyon is not unlike Margaret Hale. Both often presented life from the point of view of the poor.
Both were interested in the development of character, and in the changes which it underwent for good or evil under the influence of outward circumstances. But George Eliot had greater intellectual power than Mrs. Gaskell. She had the broader view and the deeper insight. Mrs. Gaskell could never have conceived the plots nor the characters of Romola nor Middlemarch. She constantly introduced extraneous matter to shape her plots according to her will, while with George Eliot the fate of character is as hard and unyielding as was the fate of predestination in the sermons of the old Calvinistic divines. Mrs. Gaskell, like Dickens, introduced death-bed scenes merely to play upon the emotions. George Eliot was never guilty of this defect; with her, character is a fatalism that is inexorable.
But Mrs. Gaskell had a more hopeful view of life than had George Eliot. The Unitarians believe in man and have faith in the clemency of God. This makes them a cheerful people. However dark the picture that Mrs. Gaskell paints, we have faith that conditions will soon be better, and at the close of the book we see the dawn of a brighter day. George Eliot had taken the suggestions of Mrs. Gaskell and amplified them with many details that the woman of lesser genius had omitted. But to each was given her special gift. If George Eliot's characters stand out as more distinct personalities, they are drawn with less sympathy. George Eliot's men and women are often hard and sharp in outline; Mrs. Gaskell's, no matter how poor or ignorant, are softened and refined.
It was this quality that made it possible for her to write that inimitable comedy of manners, Cranford. Her other novels with their deep pathos, strong passion, and dramatic situations must be read to show the breadth of her powers, but Cranford will always give its author a unique place in literature. Imagine the material that furnished the groundwork of this story put into the hands of any novelist from Richardson to Henry James. It seems almost like sacrilege to think what even Jane Austen might have said of these dear elderly ladies. As for Thackeray, their little devices to keep up appearances would have seemed to him instances of feminine deceit, and he might have put even Miss Jenkyns with her admiration of Dr. Johnson into his Book of Snobs. What tears Dickens would have drawn from our eyes over the love story of Miss Matty and Mr. Holbrook. How George Eliot would have mourned over the shallowness of their lives. Henry James would have squinted at them and their surroundings through his eye-glass until he had discovered every faded spot on the carpet or skilful darn in the curtain. Miss Mitford would have appreciated these ladies and loved them as did Mrs. Gaskell, only she would have been so interested in the flowers and birds and clouds that she would have forgotten all about the Cranford parties, and would probably have ignored the presence in their midst of the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson, the sister-in-law of an earl. So we must conclude that only Mrs. Gaskell could make immortal this village of femininity, where to be a man was considered almost vulgar, but into which she has introduced one of the most chivalrous gentlemen in the person of Captain Browne, and one of the most faithful of lovers in the person of Mr. Holbrook, while no book has a more lovable heroine than fluttering, indecisive Miss Matty, over whose fifty odd years the sorrows of her youth have cast their lengthening shadows.
Mary Barton is a work of genius. Only a woman of high ideals could have drawn the character of Margaret Hale, an earlier Marcella, or Molly Gibson, or Mr. Thornton, or Mr. Holman. Only a woman of deep insight could have created a woman like Ruth: a book which in its problem and its deep earnestness reminds one of Aurora Leigh. But her readers will always love Mrs. Gaskell for the sake of the gentle ladies of Cranford.