[26] His most ambitious studies in strict character are the closely connected heroines of The Bertrams (1859) and Can you Forgive Her? (1864-1865).  But the first-named book has never been popular; and the other hardly owes its popularity to the heroine.

A novelist who might have been in front of the first flight of these in point of time, and who is actually put by some in the first flight in point of merit, is Mrs. Gaskell.  Born in 1810, she accumulated the material for her future Cranford at Knutsford in Cheshire:  but did not publish this till after Dickens had, in 1850, established Household Words, where it appeared in instalments.  She had a little earlier, in 1848, published her first novel, Mary Barton—­a vivid but distinctly one-sided picture of factory life in Lancashire.  In the same year with the collected Cranford (1853) appeared Ruth, also a “strife-novel” (as the Germans would say) though in a different way:  and two years later what is perhaps her most elaborate effort, North and South.  A year or two before her death in 1865 Sylvia’s Lovers was warmly welcomed by some:  and the unfinished Wives and Daughters, which was actually interrupted by that death, has been considered her maturest work.  Her famous and much controverted Life of Charlotte Bronte does not belong to us, except in so far as it knits the two novelists together.

From hints dropped already, it may be seen that the present writer does not find Mrs. Gaskell his easiest subject.  There is much in her work which, in Hobbes’s phrase, is both “an effect of power and a cause of pleasure”:  but there appears to some to be in her a pervading want of actual success—­of reussite—­absolute and unquestionable.  The sketches of Cranford are very agreeable and very admirable performances in the manner first definitely thrown out by Addison, and turned to consummate perfection in the way of the regular novel (which be it remembered Cranford is not) by Miss Austen.  But the mere mention of the last name kills them.  The author of Emma would have treated Miss Matty and the rest much less lovingly, but she would have made them persons.  Mrs. Gaskell has left them mere types of amiable country-townishness in respectable if not very lively times.  Excessive respectability cannot be charged against Mary Barton and Ruth, but here the “problem”—­the “purpose”—­interposes its evil influence:  and we have got to take a side with men or with masters, with selfish tempters of one class and deluded maidens of another. North and South is perhaps on the whole the best place in which to study Mrs. Gaskell’s art:  for Wives and Daughters is unfinished and the books just named are tentatives.  It begins by laying a not inconsiderable hold on the reader:  and, as it is worked out at great length, the author has every opportunity of strengthening