But yet, for her own sake as a novelist alone, her untimely death is a matter for deep regret.It is clear in this novel of Wives and Daughters , in the exquisite little story that preceded it, Cousin Phillis , and in Sylvia's Lovers , that Mrs Gaskell had within these five years started upon a new career with all the freshness of youth, and with a mind which seemed to have put off its clay and to have been born again.But that 'put off its clay' must be taken in a very narrow sense.All minds are tinctured more or less with the 'muddy vesture' in which they are contained; but few minds ever showed less of base earth than Mrs Gaskell's.It was so at all times; but lately even the original slight tincture seemed to disappear.While you read any one of the last three books we have named, you feel yourself caught out of an abominable wicked world, crawling with selfishness and reeking with base passions, into one where there is much weakness, many mistakes, sufferings long and bitter, but where it is possible for people to live calm and wholesome lives.and, what is more, you feel that this is at least as real a world as the other.The kindly spirit which thinks no ill looks out of her pages irradiate; and while we read them, we breathe the purer intelligence which prefers to deal with emotions and passions which have a living root in minds within the pale of salvation, and not with those which rot without it.This spirit is more especially declared in Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters - their author's latest works; they seem to show that for her the end of life was not descent amongst the clods of the valley, but ascent into the purer air of the heaven-aspiring hills.
We are saying nothing now of the merely intellectual qualities displayed in these later works.Twenty years to come, that may be thought the more important question of the two; in the presence of her grave we cannot think so; but it is true, all the same, that as mere works of art and observation, these later novels of Mrs Gaskell's are among the finest of our time.There is a scene in Cousin Phillis - where Holman, making hay with his men, ends the day with a psalm - which is not excelled as a picture in all modern fiction; and the same may be said of that chapter of this last story in which Roger smokes a pipe with the Squire after the quarrel with Osborne.There is little in either of these scenes, or in a score of others which succeed each other like gems in a cabinet, which the ordinary novel-maker could 'seize.' There is no 'material' for him in half-a-dozen farming men singing hymns in a field, or a discontented old gentleman smoking tobacco with his son.Still less could he avail himself of the miseries of a little girl sent to be happy in a fine house full of fine people: but it is just in such things as these that true genius appears brightest and most unapproachable.