England! I grant that thou dost justly boastOf splendid geniuses beyond compare;Men great and gallant,—women good and fair,—Skilled in all arts, and filling every postOf learning, science, fame,—a mighty host!Poets divine, and benefactors rare,—Statesmen,—philosophers,—and they who dareBoldly to explore heaven's vast and boundless coast,To one alone I dedicate this rhyme,Whose virtues with a starry lustre glow,Whose heart is large, whose spirit is sublime,The friend of liberty, of wrong the Foe:Long be inscribed upon the roll of timeThe name, the worth, the works ofHarriet Martineau.
England! I grant that thou dost justly boastOf splendid geniuses beyond compare;Men great and gallant,—women good and fair,—Skilled in all arts, and filling every postOf learning, science, fame,—a mighty host!Poets divine, and benefactors rare,—Statesmen,—philosophers,—and they who dareBoldly to explore heaven's vast and boundless coast,To one alone I dedicate this rhyme,Whose virtues with a starry lustre glow,Whose heart is large, whose spirit is sublime,The friend of liberty, of wrong the Foe:Long be inscribed upon the roll of timeThe name, the worth, the works ofHarriet Martineau.
Miss Martineau wrote on a variety of subjects, and generally held a view contrary to the accepted one. She wrote upon mesmerism, positivism, atheism, which she professed, and after each book warriors armed with pens sprang up to assail the author. But she had many friends, even among those who were most bitter against her doctrines. One wrote of her, "There is the fine, honest, solid, North-country element in her." R. Brimley Johnson inEnglish Prose, edited by Craik in 1896, said of her writings:
"Her gift to literature was for her own generation. She is the exponent of the infant century in many branches of thought:—its eager andsanguine philanthropy, its awakening interest in history and science, its rigid and prosaic philosophy. But her genuine humanity and real moral earnestness give a value to her more personal utterances, which do not lose their charm with the lapse of time."
Harriet Martineau's name and personality will be remembered in history after her books have been forgotten.
During the middle of the nineteenth century, English fiction largely depicted manners and customs of different classes and different parts of England. While Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, and Mrs. Gaskell were writing realistic novels, romantic fiction found noble exponents in the Brontë sisters.
The quiet life lived by the Brontës in the vicarage on the edge of the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire seems prosaic to the casual observer, but it had many weird elements of romanticism. The purple moors stretching away behind the grey stone vicarage, the grey sky, and the sun always half-frowning, and never sporting with nature here as it does over the mountains in Westmoreland, make thought earnest and deep, and suggest the mystery which surrounds human life. It is a serious country, that of the Wharf valley; the people are a serious people, silent and observant. The Brontës were a direct outcome of thiscountry and people, only in them their severity and silence were kindled into life by a Celtic imagination.
What a group of people lived within those grey stone walls! As the vicar and his four motherless children gathered about their simple board, while they engaged in conversation with each other or with the curate, what scenes would have been enacted in that quiet room if the fancies teeming in each childish brain could have been suddenly endowed with life! How could even a dull curate, with an undercurrent of addition and subtraction running in his brain, based upon his meagre salary and economical expenditures, have been insensible to the thought with which the very atmosphere must have been surcharged? The brother, Patrick Branwell, found his audience in the public house, and delighted it with his wit and conversation. The sisters, after their household tasks were done, wrote their stories and often read them to each other.
But fate had chosen her darkest hues in which to weave the warp and woof of their lives. The wild dissipations and wilder talk of their brother Branwell clouded the imaginations of his sisters, and in a short time death was a constant presence in their midst. In September, 1848, Branwell died at the age of thirty; in less than three months, Emily died at the age of twenty-nine;and in five-months, Anne died at the age of twenty-seven; and Charlotte, the eldest, was left alone with her father. During the remaining six years of her life, her compensation for her loss of companionship was her writing. Not long after the death of her sisters, Mr. Nicholls proposed to her; was refused; proposed again and was accepted; then came the separation caused by Mr. Brontë's hostility to the marriage; then the marriage in the church under whose pavement so many members of her family were buried, grim attendants of her wedding; then the nine short months of married life; then the death of the last of the Brontë sisters at the age of thirty-nine. Mr. Brontë outlived her only six years, but he was the last of his family. Six children had been born to Patrick Brontë, not one survived him. Forty years had eliminated a family which yet lives through the imaginative powers of the three daughters who reached years of maturity.
Of the three sisters, the least is known of Emily, and her one novel,Wuthering Heights, reveals nothing of herself. Not one of the characters thought or felt as did the quiet, retiring author. Yet so great was her dramatic power that her brother Branwell was credited with the book, as it was deemed impossible for a woman to have conceived the character of Heathcliff. And yet this arch-fiend of literature was created by the daughter of a country vicar, whose only journeys from home had been to schools, either as pupil or governess. Charlotte Brontë has thrown but little light upon her sister's character. She says that she loved animals and the moors, but was cold toward people and repelled any attempt to win her confidence. The author ofJane Eyreseems neither to have understood Emily's nature nor her genius. Yet we are told that Emily was constantly seen with her arms around the gentle Anne, and that they were inseparable companions. If Anne Brontë could have lived longer, she would have thrown much light upon the character of the author ofWuthering Heights. But now, as we read of her brief life and her one novel, she seems to belong to the great dramatists rather than to the novelists, to the poets who live apart from the world and commune only with the people of their own creating.
Wuthering Heightsstands alone in the history of prose fiction. It belongs to the wild region of romanticism, but it imitates no book, and has never been copied. No incident, no character, no description, can be traced to the influence of any other book, but the atmosphere is that of the West Riding of Yorkshire.
Charlotte Brontë thus speaks of it in a letter to a friend:
"Wuthering Heightswas hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister: a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape, and there it stands, colossal, dark and frowning, half statue, half rock, in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it, and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot."
All of this is true, but it gives only the general outlines, nothing of the inner meaning.
In all literature, there is not so repulsive a villain as Heathcliff, the offspring of the gipsies. Insensible to kindness, but resentful of wrong; hard, scheming, indomitable in resolution; quick to put off the avenging of an injury until he can make his revenge serve his purpose; the personification of strength and power; he is yet capable of a love stronger than his hate. Heathcliff is so repulsive that he does not attract, and drawn with such skill that, as has been said, he has not been imitated.
But the strong, dark picture of Heathcliff makes us forget that Catharine is the centre of the story. The night that Mr. Lockwood spends at Wuthering Heights he reads her books, and her spirit appears to him crying for entrance at the window, and complaining that she has wandered on the moors for twenty years. While living, she represents a human soul balanced between heaven and hell, loved by both the powers of darkness and of light. But in her earliest years, she had loved Heathcliff; their thoughts, their affections were intertwined, and they were welded, as it were, into one soul, not at first by love, but by their common hatred of Hindley Earnshaw. When Catharine meets Edgar Linton, her finer nature asserts itself. She loves him as a being from another world; he gives her the first glimpse of real goodness, kindness, and gentleness. She catches through him a gleam of Paradise. But she knows how transient this is, and says to her old nurse, Nelly Dean:
"I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; and that, not because he's handsome, no, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mineare the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire."
But Catharine is married to Edgar, and for three years her better nature triumphs. Heathcliff is away; Edgar Linton loves her truly, and their home is happy. Catharine alone knows that that house is not her true place of abode. She alone knows that Edgar has not touched her inner nature. She knows that her real self, the self that must abide through the centuries, is indissolubly linked with another's. And when Heathcliff returns, the intensity of her joy, her almost unearthly delight, she neither can nor attempts to conceal. Not once is she deceived as to his true nature. She knows the depth of his depravity, and thus warns the girl who has fallen in love with him:
"He's not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic;—he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him, let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them,—I say, let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged: and he'd crush you, like a sparrow's egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge."
But Catharine's nature is akin to his, and it is with almost brutal delight that she helps forward this marriage, when she finds the girl does not trust her word.
Then comes the strife between Edgar and Heathcliff for the soul, so it seems, of Catharine. There is no jealousy on Edgar's part. The book never stoops to anything so earthly. Edgar loathes Heathcliff and cannot understand Catharine's affection for her early playmate. Although she never for a moment hesitates in her allegiance to Heathcliff, it is this strife that causes her death. The strife between good and evil wears her out.
Even after her death, her soul cannot leave this earth. It is still joined to Heathcliff's. It resembles here the story of Paola and Francesca. Catharine is waiting for him and his only delight is in her haunting presence. Heathcliff cannot be accused of keeping Catharine from Paradise. In life she would not let him from her presence, and she clings to him now. It is the story ofUndinereversed. Undine gained a soul through a mortal's love. And we feel toward the close that Catharine, selfish and passionate as she was, is yet Heathcliff's better spirit. Catharine while living had prevented Heathcliff from killing her brother. Although he loved Catharine better than himself, and would have made any sacrifice at her request, he feels no more tenderness for her offspring than for his own. But the spirit of Catharine lived in her child and nephew, and when they looked at him with her eyes, he hadno pleasure in his revenge upon the son of Hindley nor on the daughter of Edgar Linton.
In the tenderness that once or twice comes over Heathcliff as he looks at Hareton Earnshaw, there is a ray of promise that he may be redeemed. And in the final outcome of the story, one can but hope that Catharine's restless spirit, as it watches and waits for Heathcliff, is striving to bring some blessing upon her house. The awakening of a better nature in Hareton, through his love for Catharine's daughter, is a pretty, tender idyl. The book is like a Greek tragedy in this, that at the close the atmosphere has been purged; the sun once more shines through the windows of Wuthering Heights; hatred is dead, and love reigns supreme.
Wuthering Heightsis a novel not of externals, not of character, but of something deeper, more vital. The love of Catharine and Heathcliff has no physical basis; it is the union of souls evil, but not material. It is the sex of spirit, not of body, that adds its might to the resistless force that unites these two. Notwithstanding the external pictures are so distinct that a painter could transfer them to his canvas, the book is a soul-tragedy.
Wuthering Heightscannot be classed among the so-called popular novels. It has appealed to the poets rather than to the readers of fiction. It has received the warmest praise from thepoet Swinburne. InThe Athenæumof June 16, 1883, he thus eulogises it:
"Now inWuthering Heightsthis one thing needful ['logical and moral certitude'] is as perfectly and triumphantly attained as inKing LearorThe Duchess of Malfi, inThe Bride of LammermoororNotre-Dame de Paris. From the first we breathe the fresh dark air of tragic passion and presage; and to the last the changing wind and flying sunlight are in keeping with the stormy promise of the dawn. There is no monotony, there is no repetition, but there is no discord. This is the first and last necessity, the foundation of all labour and the crown of all success, for a poem worthy of the name; and this it is that distinguishes the hand of Emily from the hand of Charlotte Brontë. All the works of the elder sister are rich in poetic spirit, poetic feeling, and poetic detail; but the younger sister's work is essentially and definitely a poem in the fullest and most positive sense of the term."
At the close of this essay he writes:
"It may be true that not many will ever take it to their hearts; it is certain that those who do like it will like nothing very much better in the whole world of poetry or prose."
All that we know of Emily Brontë's nature is consistent, such as we would expect of the author ofWuthering Heights. The first stanzaof her last poem, written but a short time before her death, reveals her strength of will and faith:
No coward soul is mine,No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:I see Heaven's glories shine,And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
No coward soul is mine,No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:I see Heaven's glories shine,And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
These lines evoked the following tribute from Matthew Arnold:
——she(How shall I sing her?) whose soulKnew no fellow for might,Passion, vehemence, grief,Daring, since Byron died,That world-famed son of fire—she, who sankBaffled, unknown, self-consumed;Whose too bold dying songStirr'd, like a clarion-blast, my soul.
——she(How shall I sing her?) whose soulKnew no fellow for might,Passion, vehemence, grief,Daring, since Byron died,That world-famed son of fire—she, who sankBaffled, unknown, self-consumed;Whose too bold dying songStirr'd, like a clarion-blast, my soul.
The great books of prose fiction have been for the most part the work of mature years. The lyric poets burst into rhapsody at the dawn of life; but the powers of the novelist have ripened more slowly. The novelists have done better work after thirty-five than at an earlier age but few of them have written a classic at the age of twenty-eight, as did Emily Brontë.
Anne Brontë's fame has been both augmented and dimmed by the greater genius of her two sisters. She is remembered principally as oneof the Brontës, so that her books have been oftener reprinted and more extensively read than their actual merit would warrant. In comparison with the greater genius of Charlotte and Emily, her writings have been declared void of interest, and without any ray of the brilliancy which distinguishes their books. This latter statement is not true. Anne Brontë did not have their imaginative power, but she reproduced what she had seen and learned of life with conscientious devotion to truth.Wuthering HeightsandAgnes Grey, Anne Brontë's first book, were published together in three volumes so as to meet the popular demand that novels, like the graces, should appear in threes. It is a photographic representation of the life of a governess in England during the forties. Agnes's courage in determining to augment the family income by seeking a position as governess; the high hopes with which she enters upon her first position; her conscientious resolve to do her full Christian duty to the spoiled children of the Bloomfields; her dismissal and sad return home; her second position in the family of Mr. Murray, a country squire; the two daughters, one determined to make a fine match for herself, the other a perfect hoyden without a thought beyond the horses and dogs; the disregard of the truth in both; Mr. Hatfield, the minister, who caredonly for the county families among his parishioners; Miss Murray's marriage for position and the unhappiness that followed it—form a series of photographs, which only a sensitive, responsive nature could have produced. The contrast between the gentle, refined governess, and the coarse natures upon whom she is dependent, is well shown, although there is no attempt on the part of the author to assert any superiority of one over the other. We have many books in which the shrinking governess is described from the point of view of the family or one of their guests, but here the governess of an English fox-hunting squire has spoken for herself; she has described her trials and the constant self-sacrifice which is demanded of her without bitterness, and in a kindly spirit withal, and for that reason the book is a valuable addition to the history of the life and manners of the century.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, her second novel, was a peculiar book to have shaped itself in the brain of the gentle youngest daughter of the Vicar of Haworth. But Anne Brontë had seen phases of life which must have sorely wounded her pure spirit. She had been governess at Thorp Green, where her brother Branwell was tutor, and where he formed that unfortunate attachment for the wife of his employer, which, with the help of liquor and opium, deranged his mind. Anne wrote in her diary at this time, "I havehad some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience of human nature." As we picture Anne Brontë, with her light brown hair, violet-blue eyes, shaded by pencilled eyebrows, and transparent complexion, she seems a spirit of goodness and purity made to behold daily a depth of evil in the nature of one dear to her, which fills her with wonderment and horror.
Mr. Huntingdon of Wildfell Hall was drawn from personal observation of her brother. She wrote with minuteness, because she believed it her duty to hold up his life as a warning to others. The gradual change in Mr. Huntingdon from the happy confident lover to the ruined debauchee is well traced; the story of his infatuation for the wife of his friend, so reckless that he attempted no concealment, is realistic in the extreme. But what a change in the novel! A hundred years before, Huntingdon would have made a fine hero of romance, but here he is disgraced to the position of chief villain, and the reader feels for him only pity and loathing. Probably a man's pen would have touched his errors more lightly, but Anne Brontë painted him as he appeared to her. The author attributes such a character as Huntingdon's to false education, and makes her heroine say:
"As for my son—if I thought he would grow up to be what you call a man of the world,—onethat has 'seen life,' and glories in his experience, even though he should so far profit by it as to sober down, at length, into a useful and respected member of society—I would rather that he died to-morrow—rather a thousand times."
Notwithstanding its defects—and it is full of them judged from the stand-point of art—Wildfell Hallis a book of promise. In the descriptions of the Hall, the mystery that surrounds its mistress, the rumours of her unknown lover, the heathclad hills and the desolate fields, there are romantic elements that remind one ofWuthering Heights. The book is more faulty thanAgnes Grey, but the writer had a deeper vision of life with its weaknesses and its depths of human passion. If years had mellowed that "undreamt-of experience" of Thorp Green, Anne Brontë with her truthful observation and sympathetic insight into character might have written a classic. The material out of whichWildfell Hallwas wrought, under a more mature mind, with a better grasp of the whole and a better regard for proportion, would have made a novel worthy of a place besideJane Eyre.
That English fiction has produced sweeter and more varied fruit by being grafted with the novels of women no one who gives the matter a serious thought can for a moment doubt.One distinctive phase of woman's mind made its way but slowly in the English novel. Women are by nature introspective. They read character and are quick to grasp the motives and passions that underlie action. The French women have again and again embodied this view of human nature in their novels, which are essentially of the inner life.The Princess of Clèvesby Madame de Lafayette, written in 1678, is the first book in which all the conflicts are those of the emotions; here the great triumph is that which a woman wins over her own heart. Madame de Tencin inMémoires du Comte de Commingesrepresents her hero and heroine under the influence of two great passions, religion and love. Madame de Souza, Madame Cottin, Madame de Genlis, Madame de Staël, and George Sand wrote novels of the inner life. The Princess of Clèves with noble dignity controls her emotion and at last conquers it. The pages of George Sand thrill with unbridled passion.
The English women, however, are more repressed by nature than the French, and the English novel of the inner life advanced but slowly. The emotions of the long-forgotten Sidney Biddulph are minutely told.A Simple Storyby Mrs. Inchbald is a psychological novel. Amelia Opie, Mary Brunton, and Mrs. Shelley wrote novels of the inner life.
ButJane Eyreis the first English novel which in sustained intensity of emotion can compare with the novels of Madame de Staël or George Sand. The style partakes of the high-wrought character of the heroine, and the reader is whirled along in the vortex of feeling until he too partakes of every varied mood of the characters, and closes the book fevered and exhausted. It is one of the ironies of fate that Charlotte Brontë with her strong pro-Anglican prejudices should belong to the school of these French women. But there is the same difference between their writings that there is between the French temperament and the English. Even in the wildest moments of Jane Eyre her passion is rather like the river Wharf when it has overflowed its banks; while theirs is like the mountain torrent that bears all down before it.
Much of the passion that Charlotte Brontë describes is pure imagination. She wrote freely to her friends about herself and the people whom she knew. The three rejected suitors caused her only a little amusement. Her love for Mr. Nicholls, whom she afterwards married, was little warmer than respect. We could as easily weave a romance out of Jane Austen's remark that the poet Crabbe was a man whom she could marry as to make a love story out of Charlotte's relations to Monseiur Héger, who figures as the hero in three of her books. Here she is greaterthan the French women writers: they knew by experience what they wrote; she by innate genius.
Perhaps no novelist ever had more meagre materials out of which to make four novels than had Charlotte Brontë: her sisters, Monsieur and Madame Héger, the curates, and herself; a small village in Yorkshire, two boarding schools, two positions as governess, and a short time spent in a school in Brussels. Compare this range with the material that Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray had—then judge how much of the elixir of genius was given to each.
The early pages ofJane Eyre, the first novel which Charlotte Brontë published, describe Lowood Institution, a place modelled upon Cowan's Bridge School. The two teachers, the kind Miss Temple and the cruel Miss Scatcherd, were drawn from two instructors there at the time the Brontës attended it. Helen Burns, so untidy but so meek in spirit, was Maria Brontë, the eldest sister, who died at the age of eleven, probably as a result of the poor food and harsh treatment of the school. With what calm she replies to Jane, when she would sympathise with her for an unjust punishment:
"I am, as Miss Scatcherd said, slatternly; I seldom put, and never keep, things in order; I am careless; I forget rules; I read when I should learn my lessons; I have no method; andsometimes I say, like you, I cannot bear to be subjected to systematic arrangements. This is all very provoking to Miss Scatcherd, who is naturally neat, punctual, and particular."
Helen Burns, with her calm submission, and Jane Eyre, with her rebellious spirit, are finely contrasted. Jane's passionate resentment of the punishments which Miss Scatcherd inflicted on Helen was genuine. Charlotte was nine years old when she left Cowan's Bridge School, but her suppressed anger at the punishments which her sister Maria had received there flashed out years afterwards inJane Eyre.
Charlotte Brontë was writingJane Eyreat the same time that Emily and Anne were writingWuthering HeightsandAgnes Grey. As they read from their manuscripts, Charlotte objected to beauty as a requisite of a heroine, and said, "I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours." So arose the conception of Jane Eyre. If the slight, shy, Yorkshire governess, without beauty or charm of manner, had appeared before the imagination of any novelist either male or female, at that time, and asked to be admitted into the house of fiction, she would have been refused entrance as cruelly as Hannah shut the door in the face of Jane Eyre, when she came to her dripping with the rain, cold and weak from two nights' exposure on themoor, and asking for charity. But Charlotte Brontë, with a woman's sympathetic eye made doubly penetrating and loving by genius, chose this outcast from romance as a heroine, a woman without beauty or charm, and boldly proclaimed that moral beauty was superior to physical beauty, and that the attraction of one soul for another lay quite beyond the pale of external form.
Jane Eyre is not, however, Charlotte Brontë, as has been so often asserted. She would not have gone back to comfort Mr. Rochester, after she had once left the Hall. One suspects that he was drawn from reading, since the author hardly trusted her knowledge of worldly men to draw a fitting lover for Jane. Mr. Rochester is very much the same type of man as Mr. B., whom Pamela married, and the independent Jane addresses him as "My Master," an expression constantly on the lips of Pamela. Yet Rochester leaves a permanent impression on the mind, for he represents a strong man at war with destiny. He conceals his marriage because of his determination to conquer fate. It is pointed out by critics to-day that he is quite an impossible character, that he is, in fact, a woman's hero. It is well to remember, however, that the author ofJane Eyrewas believed at first to have been a man, as it was thought impossible for a man like Rochester to havebeen conceived in a woman's brain, and not until Mrs. Gaskell's life of the Brontës was published was Charlotte's character as a modest woman established. But men have repudiated Mr. Rochester, and so we must accept their judgment.
The heroine of her next novel,Shirley, was suggested by Emily Brontë. Only Shirley was not Emily. Shirley could not have conceived even the dim outlines ofWuthering Heights, but she had many of the strong qualities of Emily, and these, mingled with the softer stuff of her own nature, make her contradictory but charming, and Louis Moore, an agreeable tutor whom Emily Brontë would have quite despised, naturally falls in love with his wayward pupil, as they pore over books in the school-room. Shirley is contrasted with Caroline Helstone, of whom Mrs. Humphry Ward says: "For delicacy, poetry, divination, charm, Caroline stands supreme among the women of Miss Brontë's gallery." Even if other admirers of Miss Brontë deny her this eminence, she certainly possesses all the qualities, rare among heroines, which Mrs. Ward has attributed to her.
In many of the conversations between Shirley and Caroline, there are reminders of what passed between the Brontë sisters in their own home. The relative excellence of men and women novelists always interested them. Shirleyevidently expressed Charlotte's own views in the following words:
"If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other's creations, worshipping the heroine of such a poem—novel—drama, thinking it fine,—divine! Fine and divine it may be, but often quite artificial—false as the rose in my best bonnet there. If I spoke all I think on this point, if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half-an-hour."
"After all," says Caroline, "authors' heroines are almost as good as authoresses' heroes."
"Not at all," Shirley replies. "Women read men more truly than men read women. I'll prove that in a magazine article some day when I've time; only it will never be inserted; it will be 'declined with thanks,' and left for me at the publisher's."
The greater part of the men inShirleywere drawn from life, and are as true to their sex as were the heroines of Dickens, Thackeray, orDisraeli, who were then writing. As for the curates, they are perfect. No man's hand could have executed their portraits so skilfully. They have no more real use in the story than they seem to have had in their respective parishes. But this daughter of a country vicar, who knew nothing of the London cockney, who was then enlivening the books of Dickens, seized upon the funniest people she knew, the curates, and they have been immortalised.
There is often in Charlotte Brontë's novels a separation of plot and character, as if they formed themselves independently in her mind. This is especially true ofShirley. At that time the attention of England was directed toward the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Mrs. Trollope and Harriet Martineau had written upon conditions of life there. InSybilDisraeli considered broadly the underlying causes of the misery of the operatives. Mrs. Gaskell wroteMary Barton, a story of Manchester life, the same year that Charlotte Brontë was writingShirley. The plot of the last named is laid in the early years of the nineteenth century, and turns upon the opposition of the workmen to the introduction of machinery. But the plot and characters are constantly getting in each other's way and tripping each other up. Though the book is full of defects, one cannot judge it harshly. Whenshe began the funny description of the curates' tea-drinking, her brother and sisters were with her. Before it was finished, she and her father were left alone. But at this time the public demanded melodrama. Fires, drownings, and death-beds were popular methods of untying hard knots and of playing upon the emotions of the reader. She, like Mrs. Gaskell, constantly resorts to outside circumstances to help put things to rights when they are drifting in the wrong direction, circumstances which Jane Austen would not have admitted in a book of hers.
Before Charlotte Brontë wroteJane EyreorShirley, she had finishedThe Professor, and offered it to different publishers, but it was rejected by all. Finally she herself lost faith in it, and transformed it into the beautiful story ofVillette, where the school of Madame and Monseiur Héger in Brussels is made immortal. In the plot ofVillette, as in the plot ofJane Eyreand ofShirley, many extraneous events happen which are either unexpected or unnecessary. LikeJane Eyre,Villetteis steeped in the romantic spirit, but the hard light of reason again dispels the illusion. In the management of the supernatural Charlotte is far inferior to Emily. The explanation of the nun inVilletteis even childish. It is the mistake made by Mrs. Radcliffe, by nearly all writersof the age of reason. They give a ray, as it were, a whisper from the mysterious world which surrounds that which is manifest to our everyday senses. Be it the fourth dimension, or what not, we catch for a moment a message from this other world, which, even indistinct, still tells us that this visible world is not all, that there is something beyond. Then, with hard common-sense, they deny their own message, and, so doing, deny to us the world of mystery, and leave us only the material world in which to believe. Not so Emily Brontë. Not so Scott or Shakespeare. We may believe in Hamlet's ghost or not; we may believe or not in the White Lady of Avenel; we may believe or not that Catharine's soul hovered near Heathcliff. But we are still left with a belief in the life after death, and still believe in something beyond experience, and still grope to find those things in heaven and earth of which philosophy does not dream.
But the characters, not the plot, remain in the mind, after readingVillette. Madame Beck, whose prototype was Madame Héger, is as clever as Cardinal Wolsey or Cardinal Richelieu; but she uses all her diplomatic skill in the management of a lady's school, which, under her ever watchful eye, with the aid of duplicate keys to the trunks and drawers of the teachers and pupils, runs without friction of any kind.Lucy Snowe, the English teacher inVillette, is far more pleasing than Jane Eyre; she is not so passionate, but her view of life is deeper and broader, and consequently kinder. And there is Paul Emanuel. Who would have believed the rejected professor would have grown into that scholar of middle age? He is so distinctly the foreigner in showing every emotion under which he is labouring. How pathetic and how lovable he is on the day of his fête when he thinks that the English governess has forgotten him, and has not brought even a flower to make the day happier for him! So fretful in little things, so heroic in large things, with so many faults which every pupil can see, but with so many virtues, frank even about his little deceptions, he is a lovable man. But many of Miss Brontë's readers do not find Paul Emanuel as delightful as Paulina, the womanly little girl who grows into the childlike woman. She is as sensitive as the mimosa plant to the people about her. Every event of her childhood, all the people she cared for then, remained indelibly imprinted on her mind, so that, with her, friendship and love are strong and abiding.
Notwithstanding their many defects, Charlotte Brontë's novels have left a permanent impression upon English fiction and have won an acknowledged place among English classics. She first made a minute analysis of the varyingemotions of men and women, and noted the strange, unaccountable attractions and repulsions which everybody has experienced. Paulina, a girl of six, is happy at the feet of Graham, a boy of sixteen, although he is unconscious of her presence. And so instance after instance can be given of affinities and antipathies which lie beyond human reason. She, like her sister Emily, though with less clear vision, was searching for the hidden sources of human feeling and human action.
Charlotte Brontë wrote to a friend:
"I always through my whole life liked to penetrate to the real truth; I like seeking the goddess in her temple, and handling the veil, and daring the dread glance."
Her truthfulness in painting emotion, which to her own generation seemed most daring, even coarse, has given an abiding quality to her work. And besides she created Paulina and Paul Emanuel.
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? Heis 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 theywere 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 ofOthello, 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 betweenForty and fifty, wenches of fifteen,With bone so large, and nerve so uncompliant,When you call Desdemona, enter Giant.
For to speak truth, men act, that are betweenForty 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 lifeof 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 ofCranford, 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.
In the early forties, there was much suffering among the "mill-hands"; many were dying of starvation, and consequently there were many strikes and uprisings. These conditions led to her writing her first novel,Mary Barton. The book was written during the years 1845-1847, although it was not published until 1848. The nucleus of it, Mrs. Gaskell wrote to a friend, was John Barton. Since she herself was constantly wondering at the inequalities of fortune, which permitted some to starve, while others had abundance, how must it affect an ignorant man, himself on the verge of starvation, and filled with pity for the sufferings of his friends? Driven almost insane by the condition of society, and hoping to remedy it, he commits a crime, which preys so upon his conscience that it finally wears out his own life.
Mrs. Gaskell in this, her first novel, has left an undying picture of that section of smokyManchester where the mill-workers live: its narrow lanes; small but not uncomfortable cottages, well supplied with furniture in days when work was plentiful, but destitute even of a fire when it was scarce; the undersized men and women, with irregular features, pale blue eyes, sallow complexions, but with an intelligence rendered quick and sharp by their life among the machinery, and by their hard struggle for existence. The life of the poor had often furnished a theme for the poets, but it was the life of shepherds and milkmaids, above whom the blue sky arched, and whose labours were brightened by the songs of the birds, and the colours and sweet odours of fruit and flowers. But Mrs. Gaskell described the life of the poor in a town where factory smoke obscured the light of the sun, and where the weariness of labour was rendered more intense by the clanging factory bell, and the constant whirr of machinery ringing in their ears. It is a gloomy picture, but no gloomier than the reality.
Disraeli inSybildiscussed the questions of labour and capital in their relations to the history of England, with a broad intellectual grasp of the sociological causes which produced these conditions. He wrote in the interests of two classes, the Crown and the People, with the hope that England might again have a free monarchy and a prosperous people. It is awell illustrated treatise on government, but the principles advocated or discussed always overshadow the characters. He had no such intimate knowledge of the lives of the poor as had Mrs. Gaskell. She conducts us to the homes of John Barton, George Wilson, and Job Legh, shows the simplicity of their lives, and their sense of the injustice under which they are suffering, and their helpfulness to each other in times of need.
How simple and true is the friendship that binds Mary Barton, the dressmaker's apprentice; Margaret, the blind singer; and Alice Wilson, the aged laundress, whose mind is constantly dwelling on the green fields and running brooks of her childhood's home. These women possess the strength of character of the early Teutonic women. They are reticent, not given to the exchange of confidences, but ready to help a friend with all they have in the hour of need. When Margaret thinks that the Bartons are in want of money, she says to Mary, "Remember, if you're sore pressed for money, we shall take it very unkind if you do not let us know." But she does not question her. Later when her great trouble comes to Mary Barton, which she must bear alone, when she must free a lover from the charge of murder without incriminating her father, she shows presence of mind, clearness of vision, and both moral and physical courage.
Jem Wilson, the hero of the story, is as strong as Mary Barton, the heroine. Although Dickens was writing of the poor, he always found some means to educate his heroes, and generally placed them among gentlemen. Jem Wilson's education was received in the factory, and the little rise he made above his fellows was due to his better understanding of machinery. He was a working man, proud of his skill, and of his good name for honesty and sobriety.
The plot ofMary Bartonis highly melodramatic, and its technique is open to criticism. It should not be read, however, for the story, but for the many home scenes in which we come into close sympathy with the men and women of Manchester. There is no novel in which we feel more strongly the heart-beats of humanity. It leaves the impression, not of art, but of life.
Mrs. Gaskell turned again to the struggles between labour and capital for the plot of her novelNorth and South. Between this story andMary Bartonshe had writtenCranfordandRuth, but her mind seemed to revert, as it were, from the peaceful village life to the stirring mill-towns of Lancashire. The great contrast between life in the counties of England presided over by the landed gentry, and that in the counties where the manufacturers formed the aristocracy, suggested this book. It was published in 1855, seven years afterMary Barton. The plot ofNorth and Southis better proportioned than is that ofMary Barton. There are fewer characters, better contrasted. It is a brighter picture, with more humour, but it does not leave so strong an impression on the mind as does the earlier work. Both, however, are more accurate thanHard Times, a book with which Dickens himself was highly dissatisfied. He knew little of the life in the manufacturing districts, but, in a spirit of indignation at the poverty brought on by grasping manufacturers, he caricatured the entire class in the persons of Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby. When these men are compared with the manufacturers as represented inNorth and South, Mrs. Gaskell's more intimate knowledge of them is at once apparent.
Mrs. Gaskell had been accused of taking sides with the working men, and representing their point of view inMary Barton. InNorth and South, the hero, Mr. Thornton, is a rich manufacturer, a fine type of the self-made man, but standing squarely on his right to do what he pleases in his own factory. "He looks like a person who would enjoy battling with every adverse thing he could meet with—enemies, winds, or circumstances," was Margaret Hale's comment when she first met him. "He's worth fighting wi', is John Thornton," said one of the leaders of the strike. For althoughthe condition of affairs in the mill-towns had much improved since John Barton went to London as a delegate from his starving townsmen, and was refused a hearing by Parliament, a large part of the book is concerned with the story of a strike, which in its outcome brought starvation to many of the men, and bankruptcy to some of the masters, the acknowledged victors.
Higgins, one of the leaders of the working men, is a true Lancashire man, and like Thornton, the leader of the masters, has many traits of character as truly American as English. His sturdy independence is well shown in Margaret's first interview with him. The daughter of a vicar in the south of England, she had been accustomed to call upon the poor in her father's parish. Learning that Higgins's daughter, Bessy, is ill she expresses her desire to call upon her. "I'm none so fond of having stranger folk in my house," Higgins informs her, but he finally relents and says, "Yo may come if yo like."
But besides the conflict between the manufacturers and their employees, with which much of the book is concerned, there is the sharp contrast between the Hales, born and bred in the south of England, and the mill-owners in whose society they are placed. Mr. Hale, indecisive, inactive, in whom thought is morepowerful than reality, is as helpless as a child among these men of action, and utterly unable to cope with the problems they are facing. Margaret, the refined daughter of a poor clergyman, is contrasted with the proud Mrs. Thornton, the mother of a wealthy manufacturer, who would make money, not birth, the basis of social distinctions. But Margaret is even better contrasted with the poor factory girl, Bessy Higgins, who turns to her for help and sympathy. There is hardly a story of Mrs. Gaskell's which is not adorned by the friendship of the heroine for some other woman in the book.
In both these novels, she taught that the only solution of the great problem of capital and labour was a recognition of the fact that their interests were identical, and that friendly intercourse was the only means of breaking down the barrier that divided them.
Mrs. Gaskell was so versatile, she touched upon so many problems of human life, that it is almost impossible to summarise her work.Ruthconsiders the question of the girl who has been betrayed. Ruth is as pure as Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and like her is a victim of circumstances. A stranger who has taken her under her protection reports that Ruth is a widow, and Ruth passively acquiesces in the deception, hoping that her son may never know the disgrace of his birth. But the truth comesto light, involving in temporary disgrace Ruth and her son, and the household of Mr. Benson, the dissenting minister whose home had been her place of refuge. But Mrs. Gaskell is always optimistic. By her good deeds, Ruth wins the love and honour of the entire community. This novel was loudly assailed. It was claimed that Mrs. Gaskell had condoned immorality, and it was considered dangerous teaching that good deeds were an atonement for such a sin. But ifRuthfound detractors, it also found warm admirers, who recognised the broader teachings of the story. Mrs. Jameson wrote to Mrs. Gaskell:
"I hope I do understand your aim—you have lifted up your voice against 'that demoralising laxity of principle,' which I regard as the ulcer lying round the roots of society; and you have done it wisely and well, with a mingled courage and delicacy which excite at once my gratitude and my admiration."
The scene ofSylvia's Loversis laid in Whitby, at a time when the press-gang was kidnapping men for the British navy. It is a story of the loves, jealousies, and sorrows of sailors, shopkeepers, and small farmers, among whom Sylvia moves as the central figure. Du Maurier, who illustrated the second edition of this novel, was so charmed with the heroine that he named his daughter Sylvia for her. This story, likeRuth, has much of the sentimentalism so fashionable in the middle of the nineteenth century. The leading canon of criticism at that time was the power with which a writer could move the emotions of the reader, and the novelist was expected either to convulse his readers with laughter or dissolve them into tears. There are many funny scenes inSylvia's Lovers, but the key-note is pathos. Like many novels of Dickens, there are death-bed scenes introduced only for the luxury of weeping over sorrows that are not real, and there are melodramatic situations as in her other books. Parts of this novel suggested to Tennyson the poem ofEnoch Arden.
But, however powerful may be the novels dealing with the questions that daily confront the poor, there is a perennial charm in the society of people who dwell amid rural scenes. Mrs. Gaskell has written several short stories of the pastoral type. Such a story isCousin Phillis. It is a beautiful idyl and reminds one of the old pastorals in which ladies and gentlemen played at shepherds and shepherdesses. Cousin Phillis cooks, irons, reads Dante, helps the haymakers, falls in love, and mends a broken heart, and is brave, true, and unselfish. Her father is what one would expect from such a daughter. He cultivates his small farm, finds rest from his labours in reading, and neglectsnone of the many duties which belong to him as the dissenting minister of a small village.
CranfordandWives and Daughtershave this in common, that the scene of both is laid in the village of Knutsford. The former is a rambling story of events in two or three households, and of the social affairs in which all the village is concerned. It is without doubt the favourite of Mrs. Gaskell's novels.Wives and Daughterswas Mrs. Gaskell's last story, and was left unfinished at her death. It shows a great artistic advance over her earlier work. The plot is more natural; it has not so many sharp contrasts, which George Eliot criticised in Mrs. Gaskell's stories. The characters are also more subtle. Molly, the daughter of the village doctor, is an unselfish, thoughtful girl, but with none of that unreal goodness which Dickens sometimes gave to his heroines. When she receives her first invitation to a child's party, and her father is wondering whether or not she can go, her speech is characteristic of her nature:
"Please, Papa,—I do wish to go—but I don't care about it."
Molly feels very keenly, and longs for things with all the strength of an ardent nature, but she always subordinates herself and her wishes to others. In the character of Cynthia, Mrs. Gaskell makes a plea for the heartless coquette. Cynthia is beautiful, she likes to please thosein whose company she finds herself, but quickly forgets the absent. It is not her fault that young men's hearts are brittle, for it is as natural for her to smile, and be gay and forget, as it is for Molly to love, be silent, and remember. So it is Cynthia who has the lovers, while Molly is neglected. Clare, Cynthia's mother, is more selfish than her daughter, but she has learned the art of seeming to please others while thinking only of pleasing herself. She is as crafty as Becky Sharp, but softer, more feline, and more subtle; a much commoner type in real life than Thackeray's diplomatic heroine.
Mr. A. W. Ward, in the biographical introduction to the Knutsford Edition of her novels, says of her later work:
"When Mrs. Gaskell had become conscious that if true to herself, to her own ways of looking at men and things, to the sympathies and hopes with which life inspired her, she had but to put pen to paper, she found what it has been usual to call her later manner—the manner of whichCranfordoffered the first adequate illustration, and of whichCousin PhillisandWives and Daughtersrepresent the consummation."
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 Cottagesuggested many parts ofThe 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 ofcharacter, 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 ofRomolanorMiddlemarch. 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, butCranfordwill 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 hisBook 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, onlyshe 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 Bartonis 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 ofAurora Leigh. But her readers will always love Mrs. Gaskell for the sake of the gentle ladies ofCranford.