Tales of Three Villages

MADAME BLANC, in the cleverest and most sympathetic review which has ever been written of Miss Jewett’s work as a whole, speaks of Country By-Ways as being modeled upon Our Village,¹ the now semi-classic production of Mary Russell Mitford. The differences between the old England and the new are too various to be perceived by a foreign critic, even by one with so wide an horizon as that within the view of Madame “ Th. Bentzon ; ” but she implies her perception of Miss Jewett’s finer qualities if only in the phrase “ notre subtile Américaine.” And the comparison is as much a reminder of the debt, greater or less, of all subsequent literary villages in our language to the claim staked out by Miss Mitford in and about Three Mile Cross as is the occurrence of it in the Revue des Deux Mondes an indication that the fame of several quiet volumes has been louder than their undemanding tone would seem to warrant. The debt to Miss Mitford of the author of The Town Poor is too indirect for estimate; but it is a commonplace of criticism that the delectable composition which first appeared in 1853, and is now issued, with many drawings by Mr. Hugh Thomson, — drawings that have the rare distinction of being inventive without failing to be representative, — owes its suggestion, and even a little more, to Our Village. Cranford,² again, somewhat burlesqued, and with the young lady from Bloody Gulch for a visitor, is quite too obviously the Slowbridge depicted by Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, and helped her to obtain most of the entertaining though flimsy effects of A Fair Barbarian;³ and thus is Miss Mitford not without responsibility for Miss Octavia Bassett.

She would without doubt have been responsible for a much less quantity of writing, and there would be less inequality in bulk between the original volumes of Our Village and the excellent, brief selection by Mr. Ernest Rhys, which is certainly as much as readers of the present; day will concern themselves with, had it not been for the person who richly deserved the title of “that awful dad.” Dr. Mitford, indeed, to use more elegant language, offers in his single person a handsome recompense for all those parents in literature who have been neglected or ill treated by their children. The pathos of the daughter’s attitude, in this case, was her constant inability to see how completely undeserving the spoiled father was of his child’s devotion. She had done him one disservice, to be sure, in the guise of a good fairy, by drawing, at the age of ten, a prize of twenty thousand pounds in an Irish lottery. This rescued the family from the King’s Bench prison, but it also confirmed Dr. Mitford in his reliance on brute luck, — a reliance sufficiently justified, perhaps, in a daughter who constantly gave Providence her most energetic help. The Bohemian parent so far prevailed, however, as to muddle away nearly the whole of the lottery money, and in 1820 the Mitfords removed to a cottage which was, as Miss Mitford aptly wrote to a friend, “ a fine lesson of condensation.” This tiny abode was in the remote Berkshire hamlet of which, under one disguise and another, her readers were destined to hear so much; for Three Mile Cross was virtually “Our Village.”

Three Mile Cross and 1820, Miss Mitford being by that time about thirty-four years old, marked not only the beginning of a new career for her, but also the relinquishment of an old one. The imitation Joanna Baillie, and author of Charles the First, Rienzi, and the like, was to give the world another instance of Cato and The Spectator. But the long hours were not wasted that had been passed in reading Dodsley’s old plays and in wrestling with dramatic verse on her own account, since these exercises must have helped to make flexible a singularly free and simple prose manner. Nor is Jack Hatch, although it is not unjustly taken as the best example of her accomplishment in this kind, at all the only token of Miss Mitford’s sympathetic knowledge of Shakespeare, and even of the older English literature.

Mrs. Gaskell never reached Miss Mitford’s craft in mere writing, and almost all her books have, besides, clumsiness of form, in one sense or another; but her talent is so much richer, deeper, more comprehensive, that a really kind heart is ready to grant Miss Mitford, at once and without grudging, whatever superiority may be hers. Mrs. Gaskell’s variety and excellence in variety are shown if only by the wide differences among good judges as to what her masterpiece may be. We must own to a particular affection for My Lady Ludlow, that portrait of an exquisite old being who thought a knowledge of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer essential to salvation, but had conscientious prejudices against the introduction of Sunday-schools into her village. Quaintest, most Old World of all, was her belief that the power to detect the odor of the dying strawberry leaf— mentioned by Lord Bacon as having “ a most excellent cordial smell ’—lingered in her own and a few other old families, and in those only. If the whole of the book were equal to the best of it. My Lady Ludlow might have a good title to be thought the highest pledge of Mrs. Gaskell’s powers ; but it is diffuse, the machinery is cumbrous, and all there was to tell might, in very truth, have been confined within the limits of a conte. There are those who put Cousin Phillis at the top, but, charming as is Cousin Phillis, it grows dim and vague in one’s remembrance beside the blended humor and pathos and sweet reasonableness of Cranford. Perhaps, to stray back to the point of departure, it could have been without Our Village; but it would not have been exactly as it is, for listen to what Miss Mitford had said of “a spruce brick tenement, red, high, and narrow ; boasting, one above another, three sash-windows, the only sash-windows in the village, with a clematis on one side and a rose on the other, tall and narrow like itself. That slender mansion has a fine, genteel look. The little parlor seems made for Hogarth’s old maid and her stunted footboy; for tea and card parties, — it would just hold one table; for the rustle of faded silks and the splendor of old china; for the delight of four by honors, and a little, snug, quiet scandal between the deals; for affected gentility and real starvation. This should have been its destiny, but fate has been unpropitious; it belongs to a plump, merry, bustling dame, with four fat, rosy, noisy children, the very essence of vulgarity and plenty.” Fate relented within the next quarter century ; this and other slender mansions became the property of the gentle, genteel Amazons of Cranford ; and if Mrs. Gaskell omits to give us Hogarth’s old maid and her footboy, she very acceptably provides Mrs. Forrester instead, and the little charityschool girl who, when Mrs. Forrester “ gave a party in her baby-house of a dwelling, . . . disturbed the ladies on the sofa by a request that she might get the tea-tray out from underneath.”

Other premonitory hints of Cranford there are in Our Village, but Mr. Rhys’s selection is such — and rightly such — that they scarcely appear within its covers. Either The General and his Lady, or The French Teacher, or An Old Bachelor would be a fair showing of what Miss Mitford can do with character ; all three may fairly be called general suggestions for the later book, and none of them shows Miss Mitford quite at her best; so that Mr. Rhys has been well advised in leaving all of them out of his pleasantly edited little volume. Indeed, Mrs. Gaskell’s immense superiority in drawing character, if not in painting portraits, recalls a curious infelicity of Lord Houghton’s, which Miss Thackeray, oddly enough, quotes with approval from the new Dictionary of Biography, in her indolently agreeable preface to the illustrated Cranford. This book, wrote Lord Houghton, is “ the finest piece of humoristic description that has been added to British literature since Charles Lamb.” Now surely “description ” was not just the word Lord Houghton had in mind when he was praising Cranford, and equally of a surety it is the precise word to use of Our Village ; and herein may be said, roughly but validly, to reside the distinction between the two books. The five volumes of Our Village are almost unmitigated description, always pleasant, sometimes “ humoristic ” (if we rightly apprehend that word), sometimes not. But the adorable Cranford is character and drama. In short, Miss Mitford is an essayist, with a talent for sketching ; Mrs. Gaskell is a novelist, born and made.

What Miss Thackeray herself has to say of Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell is less open to cavil than the set terms of Lord Houghton, but it is nevertheless debatable. Miss Thackeray holds that “ Cranford is farther removed from the world, and yet more attuned to its larger interests, than Meryton, or Kellynch, or Hartfield.” That Mary Barton and North and South keep time to the world’s pulse in a sense quite unknown to Miss Austen’s most perfect work is a fact which will not be denied even by her cult. But is it quite so indisputably a fact as regards Cranford and Meryton, or Cranford and Highbury ? There is undoubtedly more deep and true feeling in one chapter of Mrs. Gaskell’s tale than in the whole of any one novel of Miss Austen’s, always with the exception of Persuasion. But it is open to inquiry whether there is not so much feeling in Cranford, or rather so much reminiscent feeling, as to endanger its harmony with the larger interests of the world, and to make over the superiority in this regard to the narrow but sane and very shrewd imaginings of Jane Austen. The world is elderly, but it is not an elderly spinster ; and, however much the heart may be hardened by the world, it is at least not so much faded by it as by a too frequent recurrence to the withered flowers, the yellowed letters, the sentiments, and the loves of the past.

Humor it is, of course, that keeps Cranford from being a bit morbid, and makes its artificial but extremely clever scheme of old maids and old fashions harmonize as well as it does with “ the gross band of the unfaithful.” Our Village, too, has gentle humor, enough and to spare ; but Mrs. Gaskell’s town would have been to Miss Mitford, in her own words, “ a fine lesson of condensation.” For five volumes we have one tiny volume. The long, straggling country road has shrunk to the taut lines of a town. Both the humor and the pathos are immeasurably keener. The people of Our Village Miss Mitford has known and told us about; but the ladies of Cranford are our own familiar friends. This is only another and a less harsh way of emphasizing the richer endowment of Mrs. Gaskell. But let it not be forgotten that Miss Mitford came first and had to break ground, and probably the degrees of importance of our three villages will never be settled beyond the knowledge that Slowbridge is of definitely less moment than either of the other chronological levels of this petty Troy. There are many who say that Miss Mitford herself took a hint from White of Selborne. If he could come again to the surface of earth and time, and lift his eyes to the topmost tower of this provincial Ilium, the Reverend Gilbert White would see dwelling there a young maid as foreign to his own chronology and condition as a March hare to “ the old Sussex tortoise ” which he spent so many hours in watching. Even Cranford moves, and the most retired nook of Britain may at any minute be invaded by Miss Octavia Bassett.