Page images
PDF
EPUB

the whole point of reading lies in eager cooperation with a sympathetic writer. The more rigid, in fact, the elimination of the non-essential, the more blazing the certitude with which the essential is projected. Jane Austen is even of an Elizabethan economy in her stage-settings. Modern writers pretend to reveal their characters by dint of descriptions copious as an upholsterer's catalogue; she produces her details sparingly, bit by bit, only where each is dramatically necessary to the course of character or action; often, by one of her most characteristic exquisitenesses, they are only revealed in the conversation of her persons. And, in the result, with what a life-long intimacy do we come at last to know her houses and her rooms, her gardens and shrubberies! This indirect method, too, she often chooses, to give emotions and impressions and personal pictures. Elizabeth Bennet's own delightfulness is sensibly enhanced by that of Mrs Gardiner, since she was so special a favourite there; while Elizabeth Elliot's 'something so formal and arrangé in her air; and she sits so upright,' though it comes quite at the end of the book, gives us an instant intimate vision of Lady Russell, besides flashing at us the whole essence of Elizabeth herself.

As for landscape, so often the stumbling-block of novelists, Jane Austen cannot be said to make any very serious use of it in her first period; but in the second, although she is far too craft-wise to fancy you can vitalise a character by dint of emotionalising its countryside and garden, she quite definitely (though still with finest economy) avails herself more and more of the outer world, not only for its value as a picture in itself-we may spend a vivid day at Sotherton-but also as playing its part in the development of her people. The squalor of Portsmouth, the autumn landscapes of Lyme and Uppercross, have a definite place in the evolution of Fanny and Anne; while the July storm which darkens the dark climax of Emma' is the pathetic fallacy pure and simple. It is only towards the end of her own life, that is, with the deepening of her own sympathies, that her faultless sense of fitness and relevance so far widens also as to give greater latitude to her methods of inspiring sympathy.

For it is but fair to her cruder critics to admit that

Jane Austen has no taste for expressed erotics, and will thereby always seem insipid to the large crowd of readers, chiefly women, who are responsible for that perennial ill-repute of fiction against which Jane Austen herself personally launches the novelist's Magna Carta in 'Northanger Abbey,' because they read fiction principally as an erotic stimulant, and judge its merits accordingly, by the ardour of its descriptions and expressions. In this aspect of life Jane Austen has no interest. Her concern is primarily with character unfolded through love, not with that love's crudities of appetite and incident. In the supreme moments, in point of fact, humanity becomes inarticulate, and thus no longer gives material for art. Jane Austen, knowing this, is too honest to forge us false coin of phrases, and too much an artist to pad out her lines with asterisks and dashes and ejaculations. She accepts the condition, asks her reader to accept it also, and contents herself with dealing with the emotions on either side of the crucial outbreak. It is notorious how she avoids detail in her proposalscenes; certainly not from 'ladylike' cowardice, nor from any incapacity, but merely in her artist's certainty that the epical instants of life are not to be adequately expressed in words. 'What did she say? Just what she should, of course: a lady always does.' Jane Austen, with whimsical gaiety of candour, here lays down her position once for all, and frankly tells her reader that there are matters into which neither he nor she can decently pry. That she could tear a passion to tatters with the best of them, indeed, is shown by Marianne Dashwood; that she never repeated the picture shows her sense of its unfitness and fatal facility, by comparison with the subtler treatments of emotion in which alone she was interested. Any red-blood writer can state passions, it takes a genius to suggest them; and Jane Austen is preeminently a clear-brained writer rather than a red-blooded one. Yet no one is left doubting Emma's feeling for Knightley, or Anne's for Wentworth, though nothing at all is said of physical attractions, and the whole effect is made by implication. But made it indubitably is, and indelibly.

On the feelings of her men, of course, Jane Austen has nothing to say at first hand, is too honest an artist

to invent, and too clean a woman to attempt the modern female trick of gratifying her own passions by inventing a lover, and then identifying herself with his desires, in so far as she can concoct them. Yet it would be quite a mistake to call her men pallid or shadowy. In point of fact, they are usually carried out with all her vivid certainty, yet considered only in relation to her women, and thus, by comparison, quieter in colour, deliberately subordinate in her scheme. Even the earlier heroes will be found perfectly adapted to their place in her books, when once that place is understood; as for the later ones, they stand most definitely on legs of their own, so far as their movements in the story require. Perhaps the best of all is Knightley, not only in relation to Emma but also in himself.

Nor must it be brought against Jane Austen that she does not lard her work with sociology, religion or metaphysics. Such divagations may make a story more stirring; they certainly make it more ephemeral. And, against such writers as believe the novel is Heaven's appointed jam for the powder of their own opinions, Jane Austen decisively heads the other school, which believes that 'the book, the whole book, and nothing but the book' is the novelist's best motto. She herself pours scorn on the notion that 'Pride and Prejudice' would really be better if padded out with 'solemn nonsense about Bonaparte'; and where for once (in order to prove Fanny's brains) she ventures on irrelevant flights of rhetoric, she for once lamentably falls to earth, in those two speeches of Fanny's in the Vicarage shrubbery— deliverances false in fact, trite in thought, turgid and sententious in expression. Normally, however, she remains undistracted from the purpose of her book; and, from the first sentence, submerges herself in the single thought of the story's development, with that wholeheartedness of delight in creation for its own sake which is the prerogative of the highest genius alone, alone awakening in the reader an answering rapture of conviction and absorption. Thus it is that, to her faithful, Jane Austen has become flesh and blood of their mind's inmost fabric. Who commonly quotes Charlotte Bronté or George Eliot? But every turn and corner of life is illuminated or defined for us by some sentence of Jane

Austen's; and every dim character in our 'dusty mortal days' has something of one or another in the long gallery of her creations. Thus to become the very texture of humanity's mind and talk from generation to generation, is the attainment of the supreme visualisers only; talent, at the best, can merely photograph, either from the real or from an ideal.

So far we have looked only at the literary aspect of Jane Austen. The secret of her immortality is to be found in that underlying something which is the woman herself; for, of all writers, she it is who pursues truth with most utter and undeviable devotion. The real thing is her only object always. She declines to write of scenes and circumstances that she does not know at first hand; she refuses recognition, and even condonement, to all thought or emotion that conflicts with truth, or burkes it, or fails to prove pure diamond to the solvent of her acid. She is, in fact, the most merciless, though calmest, of iconoclasts; only her calm has obscured from her critics the steely quality, the inexorable rigour of her judgment. Even Butler, her nearest descendant in this generation, never seems really to have recognised his affinity. For Jane Austen has no passion, preaches no gospel, grinds no axe; standing aloof from the world, she sees it, on the whole, as silly. She has no animosity for it; but she has no affection. She does not want to better fools, or to abuse them; she simply sets herself to glean pleasure from their folly. Nothing but the firstrate in life is good enough for her tolerance; remember Anne Elliot's definition of 'good company,' and her cousin's rejoinder, 'That is not good company; that is the best.'

Everything false and feeble, in fact, withers in the demure greyness of her gaze; in 'follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies,' she finds nothing but diversion, dispassionate but pitiless. For, while no novelist is more sympathetic to real values and sincere emotion, none also is so keen on detecting false currency, or so relentless in exposing it. At times, even, her antagonism to conventionalities and shams betrays her almost to a touch of passion. Yet, if ever she seems cruel, her anger is but just impatience against the slack thought and ready-made pretences that pass current in the world and

move her always to her quiet but destructive merriment; as in the famous outburst about Miss Musgrove's 'large fat sighings over a son whom alive no one had cared for-a cri de cœur for which the author for once feels immediately bound to come before the curtain, to mitigate it with a quasi-apology quite devoid of either conviction or recantation. Nor will she hear of any reserves in honesty and candour; not only the truth, but the whole truth, must be vital to any character of whom she herself is to approve. Civilised urbane discretion, and assent to social falsehoods, make strong points in Anne's private distrust of William Elliot, and in Fanny's disapproval of Henry Crawford, artfully thrown in contrast as he is against the breezy impetuous young frankness of William Price.

She is consumed with a passion for the real, as apart from the realistic; and the result is that her creations, though obviously observed, are no less obviously generalised into a new identity of their own. She acknowledges no individual portrait, such as those in which alone such essentially unimaginative writers as Charlotte Bronté can deal. And in this intense preoccupation with character, she is frankly bored with events; the accident at Lyme shows how perfunctorily she can handle a mere occurrence, being concentrated all the time on the emotions that engender it, and the emotions it engenders. Her very style is the mirror of her temperament. Naturally enough, she both writes and makes her people speak an English much more flowing and lucid than is fashionable in ordinary writers and ordinary life; but, allowing for this inevitable blemish, the note of her style is the very note of her nature, in its lovely limpidity, cool and clear and flashing as an alpine stream, without ebulliencies or turbidness of any kind. It is not for nothing that 'rational' is almost her highest word of praise. Good sense, in the widest meaning of the word, is her be-all and end-all; the perfect σωφροσύνη which is also the perfect αὐταρκεια.

For her whole sex she revolts against 'elegant females,' and sums up her ideal woman, not as a 'good-natured unaffected girl' (a phrase which, with her, connotes a certain quite kindly contempt), but as a 'rational creature.' The pretences of 'Vanity Fair,' for instance,

« PreviousContinue »