In My Good Books

by V. S. Pritchett

  “And so the Shepherd is not enough”, said he, “to defend his lambkin?”

  “The Shepherd is too fond of playing at cards and going to his clubs,” answered Becky, laughing.

  “‘Gad, what a debauched Corydon!” said my Lord—“what a mouth for a pipe!”

  “I take your three to two,” here said Rawdon, at the card-table.

  “Hark at Melibeus,” snarled the noble Marquis; “he’s pastorally occupied too; he’s shearing a Southdown. What an innocent mutton, hey? Damme, what a snowy fleece!”

  Rebecca’s eyes shot out gleams of scornful humour. “My Lord,” she said, “you are a knight of the Order.” He had the collar round his neck, indeed—a gift of the restored Princes of Spain.

  Lord Steyne in early life had been notorious for his daring and his success at play. He had sat up two days and two nights with Mr. Fox at hazard. He had won money of the most august personages of the realm; he had won his marquisate, it was said, at the gaming-table; but he did not like an allusion to those bygone fredaines. Rebecca saw the scowl gathering over his heavy brow.

  She rose up from her sofa, and went and took his coffee-cup out of his hand with a little curtsey. “Yes,” she said, “I must get a watch-dog. But he won’t bark at you.” And, going into the other drawing-room, she sat down to the piano, and began to sing little French songs in such a charming, thrilling voice, that the mollified nobleman speedily followed her into that chamber, and might be seen nodding his head and bowing time over her.

  Rawdon and his friend meanwhile played écarté until they had enough. The Colonel won; but, say that he won ever so much and often, nights like these, which occurred many times in the week—his wife having all the talk and all the admiration, and he sitting silent without the circle, not comprehending a word of the jokes, the allusions, the mystical language within—must have been wearisome to the ex-dragoon.

  “How is Mrs. Crawley’s husband?” Lord Steyne used to say to him by way of a good-day when they met: and indeed that was now his avocation in life. He was Colonel Crawley no more. He was Mrs. Crawley’s husband.

  We cannot say “reporter”, but how actual, on the spot, caught in the casualness of the moment, those people are. Rawdon’s slang, even Jos Sedley’s jokes, Becky’s startling opening sentences, George Osborne’s exclamations—these are not jollifications of language; they are real. Yellowplush, the snob book, and all those curious phonetic dialogues of his—Joyce-like in their way—indicate something like the modern ear’s curiosity. Cut Vanity Fair by a third and the rest moves at once into step with our lives.

  The South Goes North

  The chief fault of the Victorian novelists, says Lord David Cecil, writing of Mrs. Gaskell in his Early Victorian Novelists, is that they write beyond their range. This criticism is probably true, but it is one, I think, that must be applied with great caution. What is the range of a novelist? Even of Turgenev it has been objected that he went beyond his range in his portraits of the revolutionaries in Virgin Soil. There can be few novelists in any country who keep to the things they know in their bones. Opinion, beliefs collected and disputed, Weltanschauung, are shovelled into all but the purely aesthetic novels; part of the impulse to write novels and a good deal of the material is in a sense the work of the period in which a novelist lives. It is a dangerous criticism which picks out from the past the fragments that appeal to us, and which suggests for example that the Victorian domestic charm can be separated from the Victorian sermon. And if, in picking up novels like Mrs. Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters or North and South, we say we prefer a self-regarding and captivating young flirt and hedonist like Cynthia Kirkpatrick to the worthy Molly Gibsons or the prim and reprimanding Margaret Hales, we have no right to say the latter are lay figures, sticks and prigs. All early and mid-Victorian fiction, with the exception perhaps of Wuthering Heights, inculcates the idea of responsibility, as our own novels seek to impress us with ideas of self-sufficiency and guilt, and if we find responsible characters heavy going, or too good to be true, there was a time in which they were considered passionately attractive.

  What a sombre, violent and emotional scene these early Victorian novelists present. Did they create those melodramatic plots to relieve the peaceful boredom of prosperity? A glance at the social history of the nineteenth century shows that this cannot be so. It was a time of spiritual and material turbulence. Victorian melodrama was only a very slightly exaggerated picture of Victorian life. The riots, shipwrecks, fires, lunatic asylums and deportations, we read of in the novels, the awful family splits about legacies and estates, the sons told never again to darken the door, the rejected lovers trekking off to the brutal colonies, all are real enough. In these novels one sees a panorama where women in childbed die like flies, where stepmothers are rampant, orphanages overflow and hordes of fallen women grovel helplessly in the wake of a seducer who has the devil-may-care air of a disguised Sunday School teacher. And beyond them, in the middle distance, the factory smoke rises, the workers herd into the workshops, the mob plunges in the streets. Everything we can learn of Victorian life confirms the picture. People did turn out to be the missing sons of earls, honest families were ruined in the markets, clergymen were able to work themselves up to crises of conscience on what seems to us a mere point of order. My own early impression of Victorian novels in childhood was of islands of domestic peace surrounded by a sea of moral peril. One read not for pleasure, but to worry and to be frightened. The truth is, I think, that a passionate and brutal age, intoxicated above all by the idea of power—not only Carlyle, but Mrs. Gaskell too, had a weakness for the rough Teutonic ancestor, the Viking and the Nordic myth—could control itself only by moral violence. The castration of youth, the idealisation of middle age seem to indicate this. The Victorian novel not only put the heart in the mouth; it started the burglar alarm of conscience very loudly in the head, and conventions are strong when the passions are strong. The very complications of the plots and sub-plots, the stagey coincidences, the impossible innocence and the impossible vice, are photographs of the Victorian mind which carried its characteristic doctrine of the survival of the fittest even into the reader’s task as he sat down to be tortured into taking life still more seriously by the latest serial instalment.

  It is not on these grounds that we would praise Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South or Mary Barton, as the Victorian critics did; but it is on these grounds that we must defend her. They were didactic melodramas and best sellers in their time, and we must not forget this when we find Cranford or the social comedy of Wives and Daughters more to our taste.

  North and South is dead now and that is a pity; for now that we have ceased to believe that the most important events in life occur only in the drawing-room, the bedroom or the psychologist’s clinic, it is interesting to discover that Mrs. Gaskell was intensely moved by the questions of her time. The idea of responsibility was not merely philanthropical; it sprang from a practical and religious sense of the coherence of society.

  Like all her books, except Cranford, like all Victorian novels, North and South is too long; that it is stiff, stilted and lifeless no one who has lived in the industrial North will ever agree. And on this point I must differ with Lord David Cecil. Economics were outside her range, but the men and women of the industrial revolution were not. North and South succeeds where Mrs. Gaskell always succeeds: in the simple essentials of character, in her skill at distinguishing and presenting manners, in her delightful eye for detail, the mild deftness of her satire. Ladylike though she was and very apt with a moral, she had an untroubled steadiness of eye when she faced human emotions. She shrank from investigating the passions, but she at least missed nothing from their outline. The motive of jealousy is lightly touched; it is never missed. Margaret Hale is a prig, no doubt, when she attacks John Thornton for abusing his workers. She is a snob also about tradesmen and manufacturers; but she is capable of strong feeling, her pride is not sick and self-consuming, but is directed outward upon her
relationships with people, a firm consummate assertion of her personality. Margaret Hale is a prig, if you like, in the sense in which most of us are prigs; but it is more truthful to say that she is stubborn in her loyalties and decided in her affections. She is assured in her class, in her belief, for example, of the superiority of southern English culture when it is contrasted with the rougher manners of the North; but she has not simply inherited these things without enquiry. She has a strong mind and is prepared to argue. I take it that a novelist unwittingly draws a stick and a prig when he uses a character to express views he approves of and then, so to speak, publicly congratulates the character on being an example to us all, without building this upon the positives and negatives of human nature. Now Mrs. Gaskell is quite clear about the nature of Margaret Hale. John Thornton’s dour, jealous and terrifying old mother observes Margaret with detachment and judges her as one woman judges another. Mrs. Thornton is reserved about the question of Margaret Hale’s goodness; the quality the hard old lady notes with approval is not goodness; but the fundamental one of will. The plain north-country people are always quick to criticise Margaret’s virtuousness. They tell her she is a mere social manner and that she fails to fulfil promises. There is, it is true, one of those awful self-sacrificial moments, so common in the early Victorian novels, when Margaret tells a lie to shield her brother. It is one of those lies which, apparently, could wreck love affairs because the Victorian belief in appearances seems to have prevented enquiry. (Obviously in a passionate age if you saw a lady walking unattended with a strange man, it was natural and stimulated more excitement if you assumed she was an abandoned woman.) Margaret Hale makes a terrible fuss about this fib of hers, treating it, in the best pious tradition, as if it were incest or adultery; but when you look at the matter more closely, you see that Mrs. Gaskell never really neglected real human motive for long. It is Margaret Hale’s pride, not her conscience, which is disturbed. She is afraid that she has exposed a weakness of will to a lover whom she has so far kept at arm’s length. As the portrait of a normally prim young woman (and it was Fielding who, with real Englishness, spoke of the irresistible attraction of the prude) on the defensive in a hostile environment, Mrs. Gaskell’s picture of the conflicts in Margaret Hale’s character is an accurate one.

  John Thornton’s mother is a wonderful sketch. One sees her in that too brilliant and ornate drawing-room which looks out upon the mill, a woman with a single passion, a primitive love for her son. “Her face moved slowly from one decided expression to another equally decided.” Stiff and forbidding she is to the southerner, implacable, blankly insensitive and interfering, but the heart is there, now fierce, now yielding. Hard as she is, she is at her son’s mercy. She is the first to see that he will fall for Margaret because of Margaret’s pride, because he knows the affair will be a battle and probably will be lost. The obstinacy of the northern character, an aggressiveness in it which instinctively prefers enemies to friends, or resistance to acquiescence, is admirably displayed. This is brought out even more successfully in the tale of Thornton’s relations with his workers. At first Margaret sees only the mutual hatred in the relationship; then she perceives that both sides like hating. Their hatred is a sort of independence with them, a sport, an animal instinct which on both sides seeks not moral solutions, but a master. The reconciliation of Thornton with the strike leader whom he has sacked and intends to victimise has the inevitable sugaring of Victorian domestic sentiment in it—“remember the poor children”—but it is very truthful to northern manners.

  Higgins did not turn round, or immediately respond to this. But when he did speak, it was in a softened tone, although the words were gruff enough.

  “Yo’ve no business to go prying into what happened between Boucher and me. He’s dead and I’m sorry. That’s enough.”

  “So it is. Will you take work with me? That’s what I came to ask.”

  Higgins’s obstinacy wavered, recovered strength, and stood firm. He would not speak. Mr. Thornton would not ask again. Higgins’s eye fell on the children.

  “Yo’ve called me impudent, and a liar, and a mischief-maker, and you might ha’ said wi’ some truth, as I were now and then given to drink. An’ I ha’ called you a tyrant, and an oud bull-dog, and a hard, cruel master; that’s where it stands. But for th’ childer. Measter, do yo’ think we can e’er get on together?”

  “Well!” said Mr. Thornton, half-laughing, “it was not my proposal that we should go together. But there’s one comfort, on your own showing. We neither of us can think much worse of the other than we do now.”

  “That’s true,” said Higgins reflectively. “I’ve been thinking, ever sin’ I saw you, what a marcy it were yo’ did na take me on, for that I ne’er saw a man whom I could less abide. But that’s maybe been a hasty judgment; and work’s work to such as me. So, measter, I’ll come; and what’s more I thank yo’; and that’s a deal fro’ me,” said he, more frankly, suddenly turning round and facing Mr. Thornton fully for the first time.

  “And this is a deal from me,” said Mr. Thornton, giving Higgins’s hand a good grip. “Now mind, you come sharp to your time,” continued he, resuming the master. “I’ll have no laggards at my mill. What fines we have, we keep pretty sharply. And the first time I catch you making mischief, off you go. So now you know where you are.”

  “Yo’ spoke of me wisdom this morning. I reckon I may bring it wi’ me; or would yo’ rayther have me ’bout my brains!”

  “‘Bout your brains if you use them for meddling with my business; with your brains if you can keep to your own.”

  “I shall need a deal o’ brains to settle where my business ends and yo’rs begins.”

  “Your business has not begun yet, and mine stands still for me. So good afternoon.”

  And in fact whenever Mrs. Gaskell is among the lives of people—and the half-starving Darkshire workers with their deathbeds, their drunks and their touch of fantastic Methodism are a different human species from the ladies of Cranford—she has a true eye and ear.

  In all her work from Cranford onwards, Mrs. Gaskell is the neat social historian. First of all she is the historian of the impecunious genteel, then her net is thrown wider until, in Wives and Daughters, it catches a whole society from the aristocracy and the squirearchy down to the professions and trades. “Why”, Molly Gibson, the doctor’s daughter, asks Lady Harriet, “why do you speak of my class as if we were a strange kind of animal instead of human beings?” That question Mrs. Gaskell put to all classes. In her own way, Mrs. Gaskell was a Lady Harriet, an animal collector. She never gets speech wrong, from dialect to drawl. So that when she came to social strife in North and South—and it may be remembered that Dickens published her immediately after Hard Times—she had the practice of faithful record. The streets and, again, the manners of the streets in that northern town are done with the fidelity of a Dutch painting, though never overdone. She observes not only particular looks and phrases, but the general look, the drift of the common gossip. She contrasts the brutality of the mill atmosphere with the superstition of Margaret’s beloved Hampshire village. With the reproachfulness of the good but detached Unitarian lady, she notes how both places go blindly on in the pursuit of their own magic. The chapters of discussion are not good, they stick out like lectures, simply because Mr. Hale is in them and Mr. Hale is a failure. (He is the inevitably Victorian tribute to the tedious pathos of self-pity.) But there is one passage of discussion which strikes the eye nowadays because of its curious modern echo. Thornton is answering the liberal intellectual Platonist from Oxford:

  “Remember we are of a different race from the Greeks…. I belong to Teutonic blood; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it is in others; we retain much of their language; we retain more of their spirit; we do not look upon life as a time of enjoyment, but as a time for action and exertion.”

  (He would certainly get that in marrying Mildred.) The don cuts him short when Thornton declares for tribal inde
pendence:

  “In short you would like the Heptarchy back again. You are regular worshippers of Thor.”

  Rosenberg in Yorkshire! Is it an inevitable phase in the development of new communities which are feeling their strength? The discussion ends in the air, indeed it is cut short by a more familiar Mrs. Gaskell who has the art of introducing a distrait remark which will also indicate a fresh touch to the development of a situation. Her sister writes from Corfu (Margaret suddenly interjects), that calico is cheaper and better there! Just a small, trite remark apropros of nothing and yet, what has the author done? She has shown that Margaret is beginning to get interested in the vulgar textile trade—a sign favourable for Mr. Thornton—and that before long Mr. Thornton will have to keep his eye on foreign competition. It would be foolish to make much of a point of such a detail, but Mrs. Gaskell’s work was built out of thousands of small, light, truthful touches. The parish visitor sees what is in a room, though she may not grasp the forces that have made that room what it is. In the long domestic gossip of that visit, Mrs. Gaskell is one of the quickest pairs of eyes, one of the frankest tongues.

  The Proximity of Wine

  The desire for settlement comes with peculiar force to stockbrokers; but the wish of Mr. Crotchet, the retired City man of Weybridge, is common to us all:

  “The sentimental against the rational,” said Mr. Crotchet, “the intuitive against the inductive, the ornamental against the useful, the intense against the tranquil, the romantic against the classical: these are the great and interesting controversies which I should like, before I die, to see satisfactorily settled.”