Ruth

Front matter

V o.

Vs- '

“ A V

XXXVI. Page

Ruth becomes a Governess in Mr. Bradshaw’s

Mr. Farquhar’s Attentions transferred . . 234

The Liberal Candidate and his Precursor . . 249

Sally takes her Money out of the Bank . . 373

“I MUST GO AND NURSE Mr. BELLINGHAM” . . 427

Out of Darkness into Light 440

CUMBERLAND SHEEP-SHEARERS .

MODERN GREEK SONGS .

COMPANY MANNERS ....

BESSY’S TROUBLES AT HOME HAND AND HEART .

vi

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The “Abermouth” Sands

Frontispiece

From a water-colour drawing by M. G. (1861).

The Vale of Ffestiniog .... To face page xxii After an engraving , from a drawing by David Cox.

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Introduction To “ruth,” Etc

Ruth , Mrs. Gaskell’s second larger work in order of publication, first appeared in three volumes in January, 1853. It was republished in 1855, both in England and in America; and a French translation of the book came out in 1856. This version was from the hands of the daughters of Guizot, who cherished the deepest admiration for the original — *‘je ne connais point de roman ,” he wrote from Val Richer, a few years later, “ qui m ’ ait emu aussi profondement que Ruth ”

The enquiry may seem superfluous how Mrs. Gaskell came to choose the name bestowed by her upon the heroine of a story into which she put a great deal of her heart and upon that story itself.- For Ruth is not only (as the wily Mr. Donne was quite aware when he called the fact in question) , a common enough English Christian name, but it is a very beautiful one, possessed of an ineffaceable idyllic charm. Yet it is difficult to escape the fancy that the choice of it was suggested to Mrs. Gaskell by a masterpiece of tragic pathos which must in any case have been known to her as the production of a poet much read by her — Crabbe’s story of Ruth , in the Tales of the Hall — her familiarity with which is attested by special evidence.* This story and Mrs. Gaskell’s novel differ widely from each other in both substance and tone; but to the chief figure of the prose

*In Crabbe’s Ruth is to be found the incident of the pressgang, which reappears, though in different circumstances and surroundings, in Sylvia's Lovers .

IX tale, hardly less saddening in its total effect than the poem, though irradiated by a stronger light of hope, the piteous words of the poem also apply —

“Thus my poor Ruth was wretched and undone,

Nor had a husband for her only son,

Nor had he father.”

Of far greater interest than the question of the mere title of this novel is that of its moral significance, for it would be idle to ignore the fact that such a significance and purpose its writer intended it to possess. I will defer for the moment what it seems necessary to say as to a particular, but after all not essential, feature of(the story — the concealment of poor Ruth’s sin by her passing as a widow, which has given rise to a great deal of adverse comment, For it seems to me of paramount importance to ask in the first instance whether or not the book as a whole altogether missed its aim.

This aim was certainly not to make a considerable number of more or less excellent people extremely uncomfortable. There appear to have been a number of critics (among them some to whose good or ill nature there went very little power of articulate expression), who regarded Ruth with unmitigated disfavour as exposing a social evil over which decent people prefer to cast a veil. This evil, of course, was or is the laxity of moral principle condoning such a wrong as that in which Ruth’s lover led her to participate. To the cruel though passive force of such a censure of her book Mrs. Gaskell could only oppose the consciousness of a grave and high purpose; yet it must have encouraged her unspeakably to be assured of a recognition of this purpose by many who were on this occasion united by no general uniformity of opinions, but by that higher consensus which rarely fails to unite noble minds on

“ Ruth,” etc.

great moral issues. Several letters have been preserved that show how a sympathy of this sort had been called forth by Ruth, and by its courageous exposure of a foul blot on the scutcheon of our social system.

Mrs. Jameson, the story of whose life, as well as the list of her writings, reveals a deeper nature than her facile pen always succeeded in bringing home to her readers, wrote of her gratitude for the solace and delight which Ruth had afforded her personally. “I hope,” she said, ‘‘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.” Charles Kingsley, premising characteristically, and with a due admixture of paradox, that he had

“read only a little (though of course I know the story) of the book; for the same reason that I cannot read “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or ' Othello,” or “The Bride of Lammermoor ” — it is too painfully good, as I found before I had read half the volume,”

continued his praise in a tone of real sincerity:

‘ ‘ But this I can tell you : that among all my large acquaintance I never heard but one unanimous opinion as to the beauty and righteousness of the book; and that, above all, from real Ladies , and really good women. If you could have heard the things which I have heard spoken of it this evening by a thorough high-church fine lady of the world — and by her daughter too, as pure and pious a soul as man need see — you would have no more doubt than I have, that whatsoever the ‘Snobs’ and the Bigots may think, English people in general have but one opinion of ‘ Ruth,’ and that is one of utter satisfaction. I doubt not that you have had this said to you already often. . . . Believe me, you may have it said to you as often as you will by the purest and most refined of English women. May God bless you, and xi help you to write many more great books as you have already written. ...”

And when, according to the testimony of his wife, Archdeacon Hare

‘‘heard that your virtuous friends had burnt ‘ Ruth,’ after an exclamation of horror, he quieted down with the remark. ‘Well, the Bible has been burnt, and many' other precious books have met with the same fate, which yet have done their work. ’ ”

Cobden, who “blessed the authoress, as he closed her book, for her courage and humanity”; good Sir William Fairbairn, whom some of us can still remember in full intellectual vigour though at an advanced old age, read it “with all the enthusiasm of a young man of twenty in place of one that has numbered a year or two above sixty.” The applause of staunch friends such as Dickens, John Forster, and Charlotte Bronte (who thought that her friend’s “style had never risen higher”) was not wanting ; but it was in a strain of mystic fervour that expression was given to his gratitude by yet another friend, the influence of whose teaching was strong upon her as upon many of the most high-minded of her contemporaries. In a note to one of his Lectures on the Unity of the New Testament (1854), Frederick Denison Maurice discusses the difficult words forming the earlier half of the last verse of Chapter II. of the First Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy; and he concludes: “I desire to thank a noble-hearted and pure-minded writer of our day for the courage with which she has illustrated the doctrine, ” promulgated in the words in question, “in the story of one of her sex who had fallen into evil. I allude to the beautiful tale of Ruth , which on this point and on all others is, I think, as true to human experience as it is to the divinest morality.” Maurice sent the “rather

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“Ruth,” etc.

formidable volume” containing this eloquent passage to Mrs. Gaskell, partly that he might confess his “ rather strange allusion.” Both Mrs. Gaskell and he have had their reward; for the principle enunciated in Ruth, that in the love of the child is to be found a redeeming power of incomparable strength, has come to be regarded as an axiom in rescue work.

At a later date Mrs. Gaskell must again have been deeply gratified by hearing from her friend Miss Hilary Bonham-Carter that Miss Nightingale had said of Ruth: “It is a beautiful work, and I like it better still than when I first read it.” She added the characteristic approving comment that Mrs. Gaskell “had not made Ruth start at once as a hospital nurse, but arrive at it after much other nursing that came first.”

In addition to these tributes there was one which I should like to quote at length, because it was very much prized by Mrs. Gaskell. It was from Mrs. Stanley the wife of the Bishop of Norwich, and the mother of Dean Stanley, whose literary memorial of both his parents is well known.

“ 6 Grosvenor Crescent,

“My dear Mrs. Gaskell,

“I have been intending to write to you this month past. Partly I delayed because I wished to collect more average opinion about “Ruth”; and latterly it seemed so much as if there was but one opinion about it, that I thought you could not want my assurance of it. The thing that has given me much satisfaction is the testimony borne by men — young men — to its truth and beauty; and, moreover, that they were touched, interested, and could not conceive that any one could think otherwise than themselves — that it was the most virtue-stirring book they ever read. Evidently sensible of the pure atmosphere

xiii of it, Lord Stanley (my nephew) sat up till two o’ clock reading it; and the only objection he made was that he thought it unnatural to carry Mr. Donne’s hardness of heart so far as the last scene does. Dr. and Mrs. Vaughan at Harrow thought it perfect, touching. ... I feel quits sure that your object will be gained; that you have started new views, new feelings, new thoughts upon the subject which will tell in more ways than one knows. . . . And now shall I tell you what I thought the master-stroke of the book? The very part that Lord Stanley objected to — that very hardening of Mr. Donne’s heart against the last scene. It took me by surprise. I expected differently, but I recognised at once the truth — the all-important and awful truth — that hardened- hearts do not soften — no, not ‘if one came to them from the dead.’ And this finishing stroke to that most finished portrait of the species is complete in its impression, and casts away from under one’s feet the hope that the day of change will come at last. The gradual proofs of her becoming more sensible of her sin as she advances further in goodness is beautiful. About the child, I have an instance under my own eye at this moment of the reverse of the picture — of the child being the misery, the clog, the disgrace — that is the common view, and belongs to the common feeling. That yours is the higher, the nobler, the regenerating principle I have no doubt. . . . You may well be content with the good you will have done in awakening the sense of what may and ought to come out of the darkest depths, and that many who will have been startled at first will end by having an impression left on their minds which you would feel yourself rewarded by. I have a firm conviction in the omnipotence of Truth; and that such a picture of such a human being as Ruth will have a permanent influence. Those two scenes on the sands are of thrilling interest, and the exact degree in which her early love and her later disesteem struggle one sees quite distinctly. I confess that dear Mr. Benson’s suffering was very great — the desertion of the chapel, and the lost influence of his character ; but I wish it could have been arranged in any other way; it is a beautiful picture nevertheless. Sally is inimitable; and Mr. Bradshaw. The description of the chapel brought the old chapel on Adam’s Hill at Knutsford before me — the diamond-paned windows, overshadowing tree, and outside steps. . . . And so with many xiv

“Ruth,” etc.

thanks for my share in the beauty and interest of the book, and my warm wishes for your progress in your path,

“Believe me, most sincerely yours,

“C. Stanley.”

But there was at least one voice which, while refusing to join in any expression of prudish censure, or of worldly ill-will, could not associate itself with the recognition so widely paid to the whole-hearted fulfilment of a noble purpose. The same formidable critic who had protested so forcibly against what he represented as the indictment brought in Mary Barton against the class on whose behalf he wrote, felt it his duty to place on record his caveat against the ethical imperfections of the sister-story of Ruth. At the close of an article contributed by the late Mr. W. R. Greg to the National Review , vol. viii., for 1859, and reprinted by him in his Literary and Social Judgments (second Edition, 1869), the subject of which was The False Morality of Lady Novelists , he, more in sorrow than in anger, included Ruth among the books called to account in his allocution.

After dwelling on the important social and moral influence of modern novels, and discussing several recently published (more or less ephemeral) works of fiction by female writers, the article approaches what may, perhaps, without lack of charity, be supposed to have been the theme more particularly in the reviewer’s mind. “Novelists,” he pronounces, “err grievously and habitually in their, estimates of the relative culpability of certain sins, failings, and backslidings.” Should a woman, however young, however ignorant in the world’s ways, have once fallen — a phrase cruel not so much in itself as by the world’s harsh use of it — -“she is punished without discrimination as the most sunk of sinners; and, what is more especially to our

XV present purpose, writers of fiction represent her as acquiescing in the justice of the sentence.” He then proceeds to make his application. “These remarks,” he continues,

“have been suggested to us by the reperusal of a most beautiful and touching tale, wherein the erroneous moral estimate we are signalising appears in a very mild form; and which, indeed, would appear to have been written with the design of mortifying or correcting it, though the author’s ideas were not quite clear or positive enough to enable her to carry out boldly or develop fully the conception she had formed.”

Then follows a sketch of the plot of the novel, showing how Ruth was, by the good Mr. Benson and his sister, awakened to a perception of her error and of the light, in which others regarded it; and how, by the same influence, and that of her passionate attachment to her child, her character was purified and elevated, and her fault redeemed. Then, however, came in the disturbing action of Mr. Bradshaw;

* ‘ the very distilled essence of a disagreeable Pharisee ; ostentatious, patronising, self-confident, and self- worshipping ; rigidly righteous according to his own notion, but in our eyes a heinous and habitual offender ; a harsh and oppressive tyrant in his own family without perceiving it, or rather without admitting that his harshness and oppression is other than a sublime virtue; yet driving by it one child into rebellion and another into hypocrisy and crime, and arousing the angry passions of every one with whom he comes in contact; having no notion of what temptation is, either as a thing to be resisted or succumbed to, for the simple reason that all • his temptations which are those of pride, selfishness, and temper, were yielded to and defended as virtuous impulses; prone to trample, and ignorant of the very meaning of tenderness and mercy. This man, reeking with the sins Christ most abhorred, turns upon the unhappy Ruth ... as soon as he accidentally learns her history, with a brutal, savage violence and a coarse, unfeeling

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« Ruth,” etc.

cruelty, which we need not scruple to affirm constituted a far greater sin than poor Ruth had committed, or would have committed had her lapse been wilful and persistent instead of unconscious, transient and bitterly and nobly atoned for. Something of this very conviction was evidently in Mrs. Gaskell’s mind, and we can scarcely doubt that she placed Mr. Bradshaw’s hard and aggressive Pharisaism in such strong relief and contrast, by way of insinuating the comparative moral we have boldly stated. In any case, such is the resulting impression which must be left upon the reader’s mind. But what we object to in her book is this: that the tone and language habitually adopted throughout, both by Ruth herself and by her friends when alluding to her fault, is at war with this impression, and with the true tenor of the facts recorded. Mrs. Gaskell scarcely seems at one with herself in this matter. Anxious above all things to arouse a kinder feeling in the uncharitable and bitter world towards offenders of Ruth’s sort, to show how thoughtless and sometimes almost unconscious, such offences sometimes are, and how slightly, after all, they may affect real purity of nature and piety of spirit, and how truly they may be redeemed when treated with wisdom and with gentleness, — she has first imagined a character as pure, pious, and unselfish as poet ever fancied, and described a lapse from chastity as faultless as such a fault can be; and then, with damaging and unfaithful inconsistency, has given in to the world’s estimate in such matters, by affirming that the sin committed was of so deep a dye that only a life of atoning and enduring persistence could wipe it out. If she designed to awaken the world’s compassion for the ordinary class of betrayed and deserted Magdalenes, the consequences of Ruth’s error should not have been made so innocent, nor should Ruth herself have been painted as so perfect. If she intended to describe a saint (as she has done), she should not have held conventional and mysterious language about her as a grievous sinner. . . .”

I think that in this deliverance — well-balanced as at first sight it may seem — the arbiter of true and false literary morality was in danger of losing his own footing. Doubtless the Pharisee who is blind to his own faults, is more culpable before the tribunal of perfect justice than

xvii is the sinner who sincerely repents his misdoings; but no such comparison is really in question, nor indeed anything except the necessity of repentance in both thought and action for those who have sinned, and the beneficent results which follow upon it. Repentance only ajid the grace of Heaven, of which it is an ordained instrument, can change the sinner into the saint; but in such a change there is nothing contrary either to reason or to experience. The story of Ruth, or of such a one as Ruth, implies neither that she was suddenly plunged into turpitude by her grievous error, nor that she was without the capacity of self-recovery, whether before or after her actual committal of a sin not venial, but not unpardonable. Ruth is no paragon of purity whom an evil fate had entrapped into a momentary lapse from virtue, but a gentle creature who, while an all but helpless child, had stumbled on the threshold, and whom submission to a Higher Guidance, working by its own methods, enabled to find the way in the end.

As to the deception in which Ruth takes part, or rather into which she is drawn, it has, no doubt, called forth censures that are not to be lightly dismissed. At the same time, only a blind prejudice could have imparted to the writer of the story the intention of justifying or condoning a deception which she represents as entailing deep and poignant sorrow upon those responsible for it. There would probably have been no insuperable difficulty in giving a different turn to this part of the plot, either by making the offence against truth less direct, or perhaps even by avoiding it altogether. Mrs. Gaskell seems, however, to have deliberately intended that in the construction of her story much should hinge on this “ white lie” ; indeed, it would almost appear as if in the present instance, influenced

xviii

“Ruth,” etc.

perhaps by some of the popular theology of her day, she had been attracted by the casuistry, if I may so call it, of the situation.

A perplexity of the same kind is treated humorously by old Job in Mary Barton , and it recurs incidentally in North and South ; but in the latter instance it scarcely jars upon the well-intentioned reader; for when Margaret Hale tells an untruth, she has to suffer immediately and severely for the telling of it. But in Ruth our judgment is unsteadied by the very material circumstance, that the original departure from the path of truth is not her own; that the deception is contrived, not by her, but for her, and that she is herself merely acquiescent. It should be noticed, too, as an admirable piece of practical ethics, that the falsehood grows, as it were, of itself. First, the description “Miss” is changed into “Mrs.”; then the surname of “Denbigh” is assumed, and then the wedding-ring, followed in obedience to Sally’s merciless logic by the widow’s cap; finally, good Miss Benson rounds off her invention with one or two imaginary details, and “believes” that Ruth’s husband had been a young surgeon, for “you know,” she tells her brother, “he must have been something; and young surgeons are so in the way of dying, it seemed very natural.” Moreover, it is at least suggested (see the rather over-strained argument by which Mr. Benson induces Ruth to accept a gift of widow’s weeds from an unwelcome patron) that she was resistless against the influence of so high-minded and so eloquent a spiritual guide. Mrs. Gaskell must not be supposed to have overlooked the distribution of responsibility which it had been her manifest purpose to indicate, when, in a later passage of the story, she incidentally describes Ruth’s boy, Leonard, as having “for some time

XIX shown a strange, odd disregard for truth”; for there cannot have been any intention of suggesting a hereditary element in this failing.

At the same time it is quite possible — and, indeed, to my mind it is highly probable — that the real genesis of the pathetic argument of this novel should be sought, not in the endeavour of its writer to find the true answer to one or more difficult moral problems, but rather in an imaginative association of ideas called forth by the greatest sorrow of her own life. How constantly and deeply she felt the presence of that sorrow, is shown by several passages in Ruth, but, above all, by a direct personal reminiscence early in the story, occasioned by the circumstance that the scene of a painful episode in it is laid in a Welsh country inn:

“He led the way into a large, bow- windowed room, which looked gloomy enough that afternoon, but which I have seen bright and buoyant with youth and hope within, and sunny lights creeping down the purple mountain slope, and stealing over the green, soft meadows, till they reached the little garden full of roses and lavender-bushes, lying close under the window. I have seen — but I shall see no more.”

“Little child!” — so in another passage of the tale she, with a kind of mystical rapture apostrophises the infant boy sleeping on his mother’s breast — “thy angel was with God, and drew her nearer and nearer to Him whose face is continually beheld by the angels of little children.” The idea of a young mother’s only boy may have readily suggested the idea of a young mother, to whom such a possession would be literally everything -—and, in a sense, even more full of sorrow and devoid of consolation than it would be even to a widow whose child was orphaned by the death of its father. Around

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“ Ruth,” etc.

a conception due to such an origin, the story would very naturally have grown.

Be this as it may, there are, I think, few of Mrs. Gaskell’ s books to the plan of which exception can more easily be taken than this; but there is certainly none into which she threw more of her heart and soul, and which accordingly takes a stronger hold of the reader. Construction was at no time her forte , and it cannot be said that the return of Ruth’s seducer under another name — which, as we are quite casually informed, he had assumed “for some property” — is very skilfully managed. More oddly and at the same time quite unnecessarily, Mr. Donne’s servant, who remained faithful to him in his well-deserved desolation, is in stage-fashion identified with a boy whom he had pulled out of the water in an early stage of the story. There are, too, a few slips where it approaches the border-line of politics, a sphere which Mrs. Gaskell was usually fain to avoid; and I think, Mrs. Stanley’s fine criticism notwithstanding, that there is a certain crudity in the drawing of the not altogether magnetic Lovelace, who was unable to reconquer the soul of this humble, but not less lovely, Clarissa.

On the other hand, how admirably composed is the group among which Ruth’s lot is cast, after she and her child had been rescued by the good minister. Mr. Benson himself is sympathetically drawn. His Christian name, Thurstan, was an old family name of the Hollands. Very probably some traits in him were reminiscences of an earlier friend of Mrs. Gaskell’ s — William Turner, a Unitarian minister at Newcastle-on-Tyne, in whose family she had, in her later childhood, spent two winters; but in Thurstan Benson’s talk — at once subtle and sincere — it is impossible not to trace a far-off echo of

XXI the great-hearted divine, on the influence of whose teaching I have already touched — Frederick Denison Maurice.

To the eager devotion of the brother, the droiture of the sister supplies an admirable foil.; and the most humorous character of the story is their servant Sally, worthy to be remembered with Peggotty and a very few others, but possessed of a distinct northern quality of her own. Excellent above all is her self-consciousness as a church woman, even as against her beloved master — a trait characteristic of Mrs. Gaskell, who always had a kindly corner in her heart for what then were still the comfortable ways of the establishment. It should at the same time be noticed, that while Mr. Benson is a dissenting minister, no pretence is made of his being anything else — a satisfactory proof that the complaint of one of the critics of Cranford , how in those days Nonconformity had to be translated into Church for the benefit of readers of the “first circles of polite fiction,” was losing its sting.

The Bradshaw family and their surroundings are drawn with a truthful hand — the portrait (fit for any board-room) of Mr. Bradshaw himself with a moderation that becomes apparent if it is compared with that of Mr. Bounderby in Hard Times , of whom, especially in his relation to his daughter, Mrs. Gaskell’ s earlier creation may fairly be held to have suggested the first outlines. Jemima in Ruth is a delightful picture of a pure and happy nature, to whom even jealousy, when she discovers the earliest symptoms of it in her woman’s breast, is a matter of conjecture only.

Nor is the setting of this pure and beautiful story unworthy of it. No less powerful a critic than George Eliot was to bear witness to the idyllic beauty of the

XXII

THE VALE OF FFESTINIOG.

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“Ruth,” etc.

descriptive passages of a book to which, though still written in what Mrs. Gaskell herself called the “minor key” of Mary Barton , was thus imparted a tranquillity and harmony of tone to which the great author of Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss perhaps hardly does justice in this letter. The mind takes possession once for all, of such pictures as that of Ruth and her lover at- the pool: a spot which, though the centre of the Welsh scenery in this part of the story is certainly Ffestiniog, is, in all probability, to be identified with the Deepdale Pool, Silverdale — as it was, not as it now is. George Eliot speaks of Mrs. Gaskell’s “love of sharp contrasts” and “dramatic effects,” and regrets that she should not be “content with the half-trials of real life.” “But,” the great writer continues, with less questionable justice, “how pretty and graphic are the touches of description. . . . Mrs. Gaskell has certainly a charming mind.” If by the descriptive beauty of some of its passages, Ruth was worthy of a writer in whose veins there was a drop of James Thomson’s blood, the book had higher qualities than this. There is nothing charming in dogmatism; but Ruth is, as a story, not dogmatic. Though it-s authoress could not be unaware that she was often near the confines of theological and philosophical argument, her second novel, like her first, spoke the language of her heart.