CRANFORD
MRS. GASKELL
“Cranford” is a novel of somewhat the same character as “Pride and Prejudice.” There are few pictures more true to life than Mrs. Gaskell’s description of the small town and the little ladies who inhabit it. It was a town from which men were mostly absent, and where it was felt that they would be quite useless even if they were there. The little women were filled with great love for gentility and a distrust of mankind so great that they almost persuaded themselves that to be a man was to be vulgar. They practiced “elegant economies”—for money-spending was “low and ostentatious.” They never admitted their poverty, and were greatly shocked when Captain Brown came to town and openly confessed his own. They were so refined that they had to retire to the privacy of their own rooms to suck an orange, and were filled with dismay when at the house of Mr. Holbrook peas were placed upon the table to be eaten with a two-pronged fork.
We have delicious bits of rambling and inconsequent talk, delicate descriptions of the various strata of respectability in Cranford, and of the autocratic social dominion exercised by one Mrs. Jameson, who, although a great tyrant over her neighbors, lived in abject fear of her own butler. The author portrays graphically the superstitions of the ladies in this little community, their belief in a “murderous gang” which was always upon the point of committing some desperate robbery, their terror of footpads who never appeared, their various opinions upon the subject of ghosts, and the ingenious scheme of rolling a ball under the bed so as to find whether a robber was hidden there, without stooping down to look. The author describes vividly the character of the small economies in which each person is said to have some specialty of his own; while one preserves bits of paper, another saves up all the strings; with a good housekeeper it is butter or cream, while with Miss Mattie Jenkyns, the heroine of the story, if the story can be said to have a heroine, it was in the matter of candles. This Miss Mattie is a lovable character, very self-depreciating and always submissive to her older sister Deborah. Miss Mattie had had a lover in her youth, one Mr. Holbrook, an old-fashioned country farmer who was found lacking in gentility by the rest of the family, therefore her days ebbed away in single blessedness.
Realistic pictures are given of the difficulties of the little ladies with servants and their “followers,” who were always forbidden by the strict rules prevailing in Cranford, but who never could be kept out.
There are episodes filled with very real and tender pathos—the sacrifices made by Miss Jessie Brown for her invalid sister, the sad picture of the suffering of the mother whose boy, after a public flogging by his father, ran off to sea. This same boy, later in life, reappeared in Cranford, ever true to his character as a practical joker, and astonished the ladies by his accounts of the hunting of cherubim among the heights of the Himalayas, a kind of sport which seemed to them little better than sacrilege.
The whole book is a delicious epitome of the narrow life of a small town, and is an ample refutation of the curious dogma, lately announced, that women are deficient in the sense of humor!
BARFÜSSELE
BERTHOLD AUERBACH
I hardly know whether Auerbach will always be regarded as one of the great masters of fiction, but to me his simple village stories take a higher rank than many works that are far more pretentious. They are filled with infinite tenderness, and are true to the essential traits of human nature. Auerbach has an intimate knowledge of the village life in the Black Forest, of which he writes, and he is able to combine universal characteristics with local peculiarities in such a way that the picture becomes vivid and convincing.
“Barfüssele” is the story of a little orphan girl, a wise child, clear-headed and reflective, who develops under the solemn training of poverty and sorrow into a character of great sweetness, self reliance, and heroism.
In the opening chapter we see her with her younger brother walking to the house where they have always lived, knocking at the door and calling for their father and mother. The children do not understand the meaning of the funeral they have attended, nor why they have been separated and given to the care of others, and they are looking for their parents to come home again. But there is no answer to their calling, so they go off to the pond and amuse themselves by throwing stones and making them skip across the water. Here Amrei, the girl, pretends to be more awkward than she really is, in order to give Dami, her little brother, the pleasure of showing his greater skill.