Sensibility,' standing sole, would not be itself enough to establish an author's reputation. The opening dialogue, for instance, between John and Fanny Dashwoodobviously belonging to the second version of the storyranks among the finest bits of revelation that even Jane Austen has given us; and criticism stands blissfully silent before Sir John Middleton, Mrs Jennings, and the juxtaposition of Lady Middleton and Fanny Dashwood, 'who sympathised with each other in an insipid propriety of demeanour and a general want of understanding.' But its tremendous successors set up a standard beside which Sense and Sensibility' is bound to appear grey and cool; nobody will choose this as his favourite Jane Austen, whereas each one of the others has its fanatics who prefer it above all the rest.

But now comes the greatest miracle of English Literature. Straight on the heels of 'Lady Susan' and 'Sense and Sensibility' this country parson's daughter of barely twenty-one breaks covert with a book of such effortless mastery, such easy and sustained brilliance, as would seem quite beyond reach of any but the most mature genius. Yet, though 'Pride and Prejudice' has probably given more perfect pleasure than any other novel (Elizabeth, to Jane Austen first, and now to all time, 'is as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print,' literature's most radiant heroine, besides being the most personally redolent of her creator), its very youthful note of joyousness is also the negation of that deeper quality which makes the later work so inexhaustible. Without ingratitude to the inimitable sparkle of this glorious book, even 'Northanger Abbey,' in its different scale, must be recognised as of a more sumptuous vintage. Pride and Prejudice' is, in fact, alone among the Immortal Five, a story pure and simple, though unfolded in and by character, indeed, with a dexterity which the author never aimed at repeating. For, as Jane Austen's power and personality unfold, character becomes more and more the very fabric of her works, and the later books are entirely absorbed and dominated by their leading figures; whereas Darcy and Elizabeth are actors among others in their comedy, instead of being the very essence of it, like Anne or Emma. And to the reader, the difference is that, whereas

he can never come to an end of the subtle delights that lurk in every sentence of the later books, there does come a point at which he has 'Pride and Prejudice' completely assimilated.

6

Perhaps Jane Austen never quite recovered this first fine careless rapture; still, the book has other signs of youth. It has a vice-word, 'tolerably,' and its dialogue retains traces of Fanny Burney. Compare the heavy latinised paragraphs of the crucial quarrel between Darcy and Elizabeth (the sentence which proved so indelible a whip-lash to Darcy's pride is hardly capable of delivery in dialogue at all, still less by a young girl in a tottering passion) with the crisp and crashing exchanges in the parallel scene between Elton and Emma. The later book provides another comparison. Throughout, when once its secret is grasped, the reader is left in no doubt that subconsciously Emma was in love with Knightley all the time. In Pride and Prejudice' the author has rather fumbled with an analogous psychological situation, and is so far from making clear the real feeling which underlies Elizabeth's deliberately fostered dislike of Darcy, that she has uncharacteristically left herself open to such a monstrous misreading as Sir Walter Scott's, who believed that Elizabeth was subdued to Darcy by the sight of Pemberley. In point of fact, we are expressly told that her inevitable feeling, 'this might have been mine,' is instantly extinguished by the belief that she could not bear it to be hers, at the price of having Darcy too; while her subsequent remark to Jane is emphatically a joke, and is immediately so treated by Jane herself (another entreaty that she would be serious,' etc.), wiser than some later readers of the

scene.

Sir Walter's example should be a warning of how easy it is to trip even amid the looser mesh of Jane Austen's early work. Rapid reading of her is faulty reading. As for Mr Collins and Lady Catherine, whom some are ungrateful enough to call caricatures, it must definitely be said that they are figures of fun, indeed, but by no means figures of farce. At the same time both are certainly touched with a youthful sheer delight in their absurdity which gives to them an objective ebullience not to be found in more richly comic studies Vol. 228.-No. 452.

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such as Lady Bertram or Mr Woodhouse. Nor does Jane Austen ever again repeat the parallelism between two sisters, that makes the fabric of the two early books. Already, in her incisive treatment of Charlotte Lucas, the later Jane Austen is foreshadowed; and Pride and Prejudice' contains the first example of her special invention, the middle-aged married woman whose delightful presence in the middle-distance of the picture reflects an added pleasantness on the different leading figures with which Mrs Gardiner, Mrs Grant, Mrs Weston, and Mrs Croft are brought in contact, as foils and confidants. Had Macaulay happed on these examples, the proof of his contention would have been as unquestionable as its truth.

In Northanger Abbey' Jane Austen takes a big stride forward. Developing her taste for technical problems, she here tackles a very difficult one-in an artist's consciousness of the problem, indeed, but with youth's indomitable unconsciousness of its full difficulty. A lesser writer, or a maturer, would have either jibbed at such a task as that of interweaving two motives, of parody and serious drama, or would have crashed heavily through their thin ice. In buoyancy of youth and certainty of power, Jane Austen skims straight across the peril, and achieves a triumph so complete that easy readers run the risk of missing both triumph and problem, in mere joy of the book. She even allows herself to dally here with her own delight, and personally steps forward in the tale with her three great personal outbreaks,-on Novels, on Folly in Females, and on the Vanity of Feminine Motives in Dress. As for the reader, the closer his study of the dovetailing of the two motives, the profounder his pleasure. Parody rules, up to the arrival of Catherine at Northanger, which is the pivot of the composition; after which the drama, long-brewing out of the comic motive, runs current with it, and soon predominates. The requisite hyphen is provided by John and Isabella Thorpe, as differently important in one aspect of the tale as in the other. Each moment of the drama artfully echoes some note of the parody that had prevailed before; and the General's final outburst is just what had been foreshadowed long before, in burlesque, of Mrs Allen. Catherine herself suffers by this very nicety of poise and

adjustment; she is really our most delightful of all ingénues, but her story is kept so constantly comic that one has no time to concentrate on its chief figure.

*

Fun, too, tends to overshadow the emotional skill with which the movement is developed. Even the processes by which Catherine so plausibly hardens herself into her grotesque belief that General Tilney killed his wife, even her stupefaction before the commonplaceness of the murdered martyr's room, pale beside the sudden comic tragedy of her awakening, so convincing as it is, so completely blending the two motives of the book, and, in itself, so vibrant with an emotion as genuine as its generating causes are ridiculous. She raised her eyes to him more fully than she had ever done before,' is an early, but very notable, instance of Jane Austen's peculiar power of conveying intense feeling with a touch. In fact, Northanger Abbey' marks the point of transition between the author's first period and her second. Already character is a serious rival to the story; henceforth it becomes more and more the main motive, till finally we reach Persuasion,' than which no known novel of anything like equal calibre is so entirely devoid of any 'story' at all.

And now, in Jane Austen's life comes an unexpected gap. The family is moving; it goes to Bath; it goes to Portsmouth. In all those ten odd years she produces nothing, except the beginning of The Watsons,' which she soon dropped in an unexplained distaste, for which critics have vainly sought a reason. Was it, perhaps, because these were the crucial years of the Napoleonic war, during which its stress was most felt, and concentration on novel-writing was found to be impossible? Much more probably she was simply fretted with removals and uncongenial surroundings; and unhappy, not only in general circumstances, but also with what gleam of personal romance came abortive into her own life. Anne Elliot's distaste for Bath has a more personal note than is usual in her creator's work, and the Portsmouth scenes of 'Mansfield Park' a peculiarly vécu quality. Altogether one cannot but feel that in her thirties our heroine was

*Jane Austen loves to have her heroine taken in, either by herself or some one else; so that author and reader can enjoy a private smile together.

not in health of body and spirit, nor in any environment sufficiently settled and sympathetic, to generate those floods of delight which she had hitherto poured forth. And then the family settles at Chawton. Immediately Jane Austen gets to work again; and with astounding fecundity pours forth the three supreme efforts of her maturity in the last three or four years before her death, presumably of cancer, at the age of forty-two. And not one of the three is a novel of laughter, like those of the earlier period.

Mansfield Park' is Jane Austen's gran rifiuto, perhaps under the influence of the unhappiness through which she had been passing. None of her books is quite so brilliant in parts, none shows a greater technical mastery, a more audacious facing of realities, a more certain touch with character. Yet, alone of her books, 'Mansfield Park' is vitiated throughout by a radical dishonesty, that was certainly not in its author's own nature. One can almost hear the clerical relations urging 'dear Jane' to devote 'her undoubted talent to the cause of righteousness'; indeed, if dates allowed, one could even believe that Mr Clarke's unforgettable suggestion about the country clergyman had formed fruit in this biography of Edmund Bertram. In any case, her purpose of edification, being not her own, is always at cross-purposes with her unprompted joy in creation. She is always getting so interested in her subject, and so joyous in her management of it, that when her official purpose comes to mind, the resulting high sentiment or edifying speech is a wrench alike to one's attention and credulity. And this dualism of motive destroys not only the unity of the book, but its sincerity. You cannot palter with truth; one false assumption puts all the drawing and colouring out of gear.

For example, Jane Austen has vividly and sedulously shown how impossible a home is Mansfield for the young, with the father an august old Olympian bore, the mother one of literature's most finished fools, and the aunt its very Queen of Shrews; then suddenly, for edification, she turns to saying that Tom Bertram's illness converted him to a tardy appreciation of domestic bliss. Having said which, she is soon overmastered by truth once more, and lets slip that he couldn't bear his