The Quarterly Review

'To lounge away the time as they could, with sofas and chitchat, and Quarterly Reviews.'' Mansfield Park,' Cap. X. THE concluding storms of a great conflict had hardly died down, when her world, almost unaware, bade farewell to Jane Austen; now, amid the closing cataclysms of a conflict yet more gigantic, we celebrate the hundredth year of her immortality. Time is the woodsman who fells the smaller trees and coppice in the forest of literature, and allows us at last to see the true proportions of its enduring giants; and the century that has passed since Jane Austen's death now sees her preeminence securely established. An early editor could only dare timidly to suggest that perhaps she might be found not wholly unworthy of a place in the same shelf with Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth. Alas for both these, gone by now into the spare bedroom, and become the dusty curiosities of literature! Not even Jane Austen's devotion has availed to save Fanny Burney from a toogeneral oblivion, whereas Jane Austen herself has long since taken rank as the centre of a cult as ardent as a religion. There is no via media, indeed, where Jane Austen is concerned; by those who might have lent features to her fools she is vividly disliked,* and by those for whom her fools were drawn, she is no less fervently adored. In water-logged trench, in cold cave of the mountains, in sickness and in health, in dulness, tribulation and fatigue, an ever-increasing crowd of worshippers

* Women often appreciate her imperfectly, because she appreciated them so perfectly, and so inexorably revealed them.

Vol. 228.-No. 452.

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flies insatiably for comfort and company perennially refreshing, to Hartfield and Randalls, Longbourn, Northanger, Sotherton and Uppercross.

Such positions in literature are not achieved by logrolling... Macaulay blunders, indeed, in his praise, and in the instances he selects for it; but he undoubtedly hits the ball's eye with his usual essential accuracy, when he lights on the fact that Jane Austen is comparable only with Shakespeare. For both attain their solitary and 3pecial supremacy by dint of a common capacity for intense vitalisation; both have the culminating gift of immediately projecting a living human being who is not only a human being, but also something much greater than any one person, a quintessentialised instance of humanity, a generalisation made incarnate and personal by genius. But the dramatist has the easier task; the novelist, unaided by actors or stage, has to impress his own imagination straight upon ours. And it is of this secret that Jane Austen is so capital a mistress; a prefatory line or two, an initial sentence, and there goes Mrs Allen or Mrs Price, a complete and complex identity, walking independently away down the ages. Even in their circumstances, too, Shakespeare and Jane Austen run curiously parallel. Our two greatest creators exist for us only in their work; and, when we search into their personal lives and tastes and tragedies, we glean nothing but a little chopped dull chaff of details, in which all trace of the sacred germ is lacking. In Jane Austen's case, indeed, the disappearance of the creator into his creation is made but the completer for the abundance of superficial details with which we are provided. When the dry bones of her facts are fitted together, there results for us only a lay-figure, comfortable and comely, but conveying no faintest suggestion of the genuine Jane Austen.

She was obviously ill-served by her circumstances. Behind the official biographies, and the pleasant little empty letters, and the accounts of how good she was to her mother and wouldn't use the sofa, we feel always that she really lived remote in a great reserve. She praised and valued domesticity indeed, sincerely loved her own family, and made domestic instincts a cardinal virtue in all her heroes. But the praise and value are rather official than personal; her only real intimate at

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The Quarterly Review, Volume 228