to be an historical novel, fade into the thinnest of hot air when one realises, with a gasp of amazement, that Amelia Sedley is actually meant to be a contemporary of Anne Elliot. And thus one understands what a deep gulf Victorianism dug between us and the past; how infinitely nearer to Jane Austen are the sane sensible young women of our own day than the flopping vaporous fools who were the fashion among the Turkish-minded male novelists of Queen Victoria's fashions.* Take Catherine Morland, a country parson's daughter, suffered to run quite wild,† and compare her list of reading with the incredible Pinkertonian education in 'accomplishments.' Imagine Miss Pinkerton allowing Amelia Sedley to read 'Othello'; or Amelia wishing to do so, or understanding any of it if she did! At the same time, the famous outburst in 'Northanger Abbey' shows that, in those days as well as later, 'imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms.' It is by a most curious irony of fate, indeed, that the ignorant attribute to Jane Austen and her heroines just that very primness and futility of which she, and they, are most contemptuous.

、

Her heroines, indeed, are out-of-door creatures, by no means fettered by conventional ignorance or innocence; and they all have minds of their own so clear and firm that, while their good-feeling remains unalienated, their judgments equally remain unconciliated. A knowledge, which she often wished less, of her father's character' is part of lovely gentle Anne; and even self-righteous Fanny owns to herself that her father was still worse than she had expected-' he swore and he drank, he was dirty and gross '-with a succinct yet comprehensive candour that would certainly not have marked any Victorian heroine's attitude towards her dear papa.'

It is but fair to add that male delight in female imbecility is as eternal as Jane Austen herself declared; and that Scott's heroines (with the exception of Diana Vernon) are generally of an insipid feebleness sinking to the lowest Victorian standards.

† Jane Austen seems to have postulated so much of intelligence in her girls, as to prefer for them a haphazard rather than a regular education. Elizabeth Bennet, also, was left to choose for herself whether she would learn or not; while Miss Lee's pompous curriculum at Mansfield is openly laughed at, and shown to lead to no good result, to no real education in character.

And, how much nearer we are to-day to Anne and Fanny than to the generation immediately behind us, is shown by the fact that Pastor Manders' ejaculation in 'Ghosts,' that it is Oswald's duty to love and honour his impossible dead father, represented such an accepted axiom to the Victorians that its obvious irony in the play was felt to be a blasphemy; whereas to us of to-day the irony has lost all point, because the axiom itself is seen as clearly to be mere nonsense, as it was seen long ago, by Fanny and Anne and Eleanor Tilney.

In fact, all the women whom Jane Austen commends are absolutely honest and well-bred in mind. Breeding is not a matter of birth or place, but of attitude towards life; Jane Austen's standard, like Anne Elliot's behaviour, is as 'consciously right as it is invariably gentle'; and, one may add, as unselfconscious about its quality as real breeding is always bound to be. Her tone of perfect quiet assurance, and taking-for-grantedness, has nowhere been equalled. Many writers, even of the great (especially nowadays, and especially among women), are too painfully at ease in their Sions of castle or countryhouse, with a naïve excessiveness, a solemn rapture of emphasis, that shows their inmost feeling to be really Mary Crawford's at finding herself in Mansfield Vicarage garden. Even Thackeray gloats over the silver coffeepots at Castle Gaunt; even Henry James lingers too lovingly amid the material details of what Gertrude Atherton would call 'aristocratic' life; Jane Austen alone is as indifferent and as much at ease, wherever she goes, as those only can be who are to the manner and the matter born and bred. Note, with what decision, for instance, but with what a lack of betraying emphasis, she reserves 'vulgar' forms, such as 'quiz' and 'beau,' and you was,' to the exclusive use of her vulgar characters. And how it is only her underbred womenIsabella Thorpe, Mrs Elton, Lucy Steele-who use the bare surname of a man; Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, even in their most intimate private dialogues, never talk of 'Bingley' or 'Darcy' until the familiarity has been justified by betrothal. And again, the middle-class

* Mary Crawford had seen scores of great houses, and cared for none of them.'

sisters, Lady Bertram and Mrs Norris, are to each other, respectively, 'Sister' and 'Lady Bertram,' throughout their book. These are samples of the small unobtruded points that give Jane Austen's readers such unending delight.

'Lady Susan' is the first of her books to call for comment. It is not good; it is crude and hard, with the usual hardness of youth. Yet it is so important to the study of its author's career and temperament that it would be disastrous to omit it from future editions, in deference to any fancied wishes of her 'shade.' The faults of youth are really only the excesses of what are to be excellences in the matured writer; and the cold unpleasantness of Lady Susan' is but the youthful exaggeration of that irreconcilable judgment which is the very backbone of Jane Austen's power, and which, harshly evident in the first book, is the essential strength of all the later ones, finally protruding its bony structure nakedly again in 'Persuasion.' But Lady Susan' also links on to 'Mansfield Park.' For where and when did Jane Austen come into contact with the 'Smart Set' of her time? Biographies give no slightest hint; but we must not forget Miss Mitford's impression of Jane Austen as a pretty little empty-headed husband-hunting fool. However violently at variance may be this verdict from all we can divine of Jane Austen, it was evidently this unsuspectedly gay creature who foregathered at one time with the 'Souls,' in intellectual attraction and moral repulsion. For out of the same set, brilliant and heartless, which is the very scene of Lady Susan, are ultimately to be projected Henry and Mary Crawford.

With 'Sense and Sensibility' we approach the maturing Jane Austen. But it has the almost inevitable frigidity of a reconstruction, besides an equally inevitable uncertainty in the author's use of her weapons. There are longueurs and clumsinesses; its conviction lacks fire; its development lacks movement; its major figures are rather incarnate qualities than qualitied incarnations. Never again does the writer introduce a character so entirely irrelevant as Margaret Dashwood, or marry a heroine to a man so remote in the story as Colonel Brandon. This is not, however, to say that 'Sense and

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.

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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