‘George Sand, only a few months before Mrs. Gaskell’s death, observed to Lord Houghton: “Mrs. Gaskell 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.”’ This is high praise; and it is deserved. It must not indeed be pressed to mean that Mrs. Gaskell is the equal in genius, far less the superior, of writers like George Sand or George Eliot. Neither is she the equal of her friend, Charlotte Brontë. There is a sweep of imagination and a touch of poetry in Jane Eyre quite beyond the reach of Mrs. Gaskell. But her work is at once free from weakness and wholly innocent. She is of all the more remarkable female novelists of this period the most feminine. The traits of sex are numerous in her books, but they never appear unpleasantly. Her women are generally better than her men; yet her men are not such monsters as the Brontës loved to depict. On the contrary, she is fond of painting men of quiet worth, such as the country doctor whose ‘virtues walk their narrow round,’ who lives unknown, but who is sadly missed when he dies. Her best stories are quiet tales of the life of villages and small towns, and they show the shrewd, kindly, genial observation with which all her life she regarded those around her. She was happy in her own domestic life, and she believed that life in general, though chequered, was happy too. In her picture of human nature the virtues on the whole prevail over the vices.
Mrs. Gaskell saw everything in the light of a sympathetic humour. It is this quality that has served hitherto as salt to her books and has preserved their flavour while that of a great deal of more ambitious literature has been lost. If her humour is not equal to the best specimens of that of George Eliot, it is more diffused; if less powerful, it is gentler and quite as subtle. In style she is easy and flowing; and her later books show more freedom than her first attempt. At the same time, her writing rarely rises to eloquence. She had more talent than genius. She has created many good, but no great characters; and she stands midway between Thackeray and Dickens, who are emphatically men of genius, and writers like Trollope who, with abundant talent and exhaustless industry, have no genius whatever.
CHAPTER VI.
THE HISTORIANS AND BIOGRAPHERS.
Carlyle was so much besides being a historian, and seems, when we look back from a distance of sixty years, so clearly the leader of thought in the early part of this period, that it has been deemed advisable to treat him by himself. But even without him the volume and the quality of historical work accomplished during those forty years is very great. Besides Macaulay, who surpassed Carlyle in popular estimation, Thomas Arnold, Grote, Thirlwall and Froude were all men who, in most periods, might well have filled the first place in historical literature.
Several reasons may be assigned for the concentration of talent upon history. In the first place, the circumstances of the time made an examination of the foundations of society imperative. This necessity reveals itself everywhere, in poetry, in philosophy, and in theology, as well as in history. The cry is on all sides for reconstruction; and there is a growing sense that the reconstruction must take place upon a groundwork of fact, discoverable only by a study of the past. The pre-Revolutionary writers had relied upon a priori theory, but the immediate results were so different from their anticipations that their successors were little disposed to repeat the mistake. Modern history teaches above all things the lesson of continuity. Institutions change and grow, but they never spring up suddenly like a Jonah’s gourd; and even revolutions only modify, they do not annul the past.
Science too has had a powerful influence, and the success of the scientific method has encouraged the application of a method similar in principle, though necessarily different in minor points, to the facts of history. The last two generations have witnessed a great extension of the principle of induction in the sphere of history; and as the first step in a complex process of induction is the accumulation of masses of facts, we have here perhaps an explanation of some of the weaknesses of the modern school of history. It is apt to lose itself in detail. The reach of Tacitus or of Gibbon seems no longer attainable, because their successors must know everything, and can with difficulty restrain themselves from stating everything. Some one, doubtless, whether he be called a philosopher or a historian, will ultimately assimilate the masses of information thus laboriously compiled, and the world will once more have the principal results compactly stated and in orderly sequence. Buckle’s experiment proves that it is possible to attempt this too soon; but at the same time the welcome that experiment received is an indication that we shall not be permanently satisfied with the fragments and aspects of history which alone the new method as yet yields. Unity of treatment is ultimately as essential in history as codification is in law; and it is essential for much the same reason. The old proverb tells us that the wood may be invisible by reason of the trees.
We may trace the influence of science also in the greatly deepened sense of the importance of origins. In science the chief triumphs have been won by tracing things to their beginnings; in physical structure to atoms and molecules, in animal life to nerve cells, protoplasm, or whatever is simplest and most primitive. Exactly the same effort is made in modern history; and nothing is more distinctive of it, in contrast with the comparatively superficial historical school of the eighteenth century, than the determination to trace the starting-point and original meaning of institutions. Ages which had been previously left to legend and myth have been patiently investigated, and it is to them that we are now referred for the explanation of our own times.