JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS.
The study of Jane Austen’s novels is in some respects a liberal education. The proper appreciation of these stories has been suggested as a gauge of intellect. But though the verdict of the best judges, including the earnest, well-nigh reverential approbation of Sir Walter Scott, and the boundless enthusiasm of Lord Macaulay, who has pronounced Jane Austen, in her more limited walk, next to Shakespeare, the test is unfair, so long as men and women’s minds, no less than the schools of fiction, are in two major, in addition to many minor divisions. Of course, where authors are concerned, in rare and great instances, as in that of Shakespeare, the divisions are united, and we have a comprehensive, many-sided genius. But these exceptions are few and far between, like stars of the first magnitude. There is a cast of inventive intellect, and a school of writing which deal exclusively with human nature in the mass, choosing to work with common materials, and to make them valuable by the penetrating fidelity, and nice perception and adaptation of the workmanship. There is another order of genius and of wit, which selects an extraordinary, sometimes an abnormal subject, whether man or woman, story or surroundings, and by the sheer power and the passionate insight which are shown in the treatment, compel our comprehension and sympathy for what would otherwise be strange, perhaps repugnant to us.
These minds and schools are, and always must be, in natural antagonism to each other. The disciples of the one have rarely such breadth of faculty and taste as to be the disciples of the other. Among women, Jane Austen may be taken as the representative of the first class, Charlotte Brontë of the second. The fervent, faithful followers of the one genius are apt, more or less, to condemn and slight the other.
It is more than questionable whether the two women, had they been contemporaries, could have sympathised strongly. Of course, the opportunity was not granted to Jane Austen; but in the case of Charlotte Brontë, who stands here for what is, after all, the narrower school, though its inspiration may be deeper, she was perplexed and annoyed by the recommendation of a critic to whom she paid deference that she should read and re-read Miss Austen. Jane Austen’s work was “tame and domestic,” if not peddling, to Charlotte Brontë.
After dismissing the unfair insistence on a universal acknowledgment of the surpassing qualities, in her own line, of Jane Austen, it is still true that they are as nearly as possible perfect. Great variety of character, though in one class and amidst the same surroundings—which rendered the achievement of such variety the more remarkable—lively interest excited by the most legitimate means; the artistic cunning with which every-day events are handled; keen irony; delicate, exquisite humour, which never fails; the greatest capacity for selecting and grouping her materials—where shall we find these attractions in an equal degree to that in which they are to be met in Jane Austen’s novels? Above all, every story is as wholesome and sweet, without cloyness, as English wheat-fields repaying the cultivation of generations, and the roses, set in hardy prickles, of English gardens.
We hear much, with reason, of the great English humourists. Why has a secondary place among them not been assigned to Jane Austen? Making due allowance for sex and rank, and the double restrictions which they laid upon her, none can read her novels with intelligent appreciation and fail to see that she deserves to stand high in the rank of English humourists, unless, indeed, the root-word humour is understood to mean oddity and eccentricity, and the definition humourist is confined to the writer who illustrates oddities. For it is one of Miss Austen’s crowning distinctions, that just as she hardly ever exaggerated or caricatured, so she did not care to have to do with men and women riding their hobbies.
I have been amazed to read one criticism of Jane Austen, which denies her all humour, and only grants her a sense of the ridiculous and a power of expressing it, in addition to her life-like pictures of English country life in her own rank. The critic remarks that she only provokes a smile, never a laugh. No doubt standards are different, but I am inclined to suspect that the broad burlesque and screaming farce, which to this critic appears to sum up every display of humour, and which might draw shouts of laughter from him and his school, would not win so much as a smile from the admirers of Miss Austen.
Another accusation which has been brought against Jane Austen is, that she is deficient in strength and warmth. But violence is not strength, neither is demonstrativeness warmth. Unquestionably this novelist never tears her passion to tatters. For that matter she elected not to deal with fierce passions. But in her own field of art, if restrained power and marvellous flexibility be strength, then she is strong. Indeed, the idea of weakness associated with Jane Austen is superlatively absurd. Again, self-respectful, delicate reticence may be called cold, but if so the coldness is shared by some of the best writers of fiction in every generation, and it would be well for modern English literature and its readers if such coldness were more common.
I should like to say a word on the real limitations of Jane Austen’s genius in her novels. In the first place, while the talk and writing of our mothers and grandmothers were, with regard to many things, simpler and more plain-spoken than ours, there is another side on which they were strictly reserved. Deep feeling, religious opinions, personal testimony on the highest questions, were, unless in exceptional circles, withheld and kept hidden as too sacred for general discussion; above all, as unfit for the pages of a story. No one who knows much of the women and their books can doubt the vital religious principles of Jane Austen and Jane and Anna Maria Porter. But though Jane Porter always included fervent religious faith among the attributes of her idealised fantastic heroes of romance, Anna Maria, in the only tale in which she showed how well and pleasantly she could deal with contemporary life, apologised anxiously in the preface for the serious tone of the later volumes. Jane Austen, a stronger-minded woman, could entertain a still more decided view of her calling, and could restrain any impulse to overstep it. She is almost absolutely silent on every motive and principle out of what she held to be her province; nay, she frequently brings forward the lower motives of sound common sense and rational prudence, just as a sensitive person would prefer to urge them still, in mixed company, rather than bring in loftier obligations, when to do so might be casting pearls before swine. We have to study the conduct rather than the speeches of her characters, just as we have to look at the lives of some of the best men and women in every generation, to discern to our satisfaction that they are, with all their human frailties, thoroughly reverent and noble-minded.
There is nothing in the last observation to imply that the author shirked any duty of speech which she recognised. On the contrary, in carrying out her purpose of exhibiting the deplorable results of an entirely worldly education in the Crawfords and Bertrams in “Mansfield Park;” in indicating the little straws of former bad habits which are enough to expose a hypocrite to eyes willing to be enlightened in Mr. Elliot in “Persuasion,” she probably put force upon her natural reserve, that she might not fail in her fidelity to her moral. For one of the most gifted English novelists never wrote without a good moral, more or less conspicuous. So universally was the true morality of Jane Austen’s novels acknowledged, that at a time when novels were, with too much cause, largely tabooed in many households, there was a general exception made in favour of the tales in which the characters said little or nothing about religion, but lived it to some extent.
The absence of the most distant allusion to a higher life and its power is most conspicuous in the clergymen who figure largely in Miss Austen’s novels. Her biographer and nephew, Mr. Austen Leigh, himself a clergyman, and the son and grandson of clergymen, sees himself called upon to refer to this, when he says in her memoir that the standard of duty in the Church is much higher than formerly, and that the profession and practice even of Henry Tilney and Edmund Bertram would be different to-day.
It is to this marked restraint which Jane Austen put upon the expression of all sacred depths of feeling, whether they belonged to religion or not, quite as much as to her mental constitution, or to the formal conditions of her generation, that another result is due. While we have so much that may instruct, entertain, and delight us in her stories, we have nothing that will harrow, and not much that will move us to thoughts which lie too deep for tears. There is no end of enchanting humour; there is curiously little pathos.
With regard to that other criticism which may be made of defective taste and sentiment in some of the work which is otherwise so excellent, as in “Pride and Prejudice,” in the free discussion not only by a vulgar matchmaker like Mrs. Bennet, and by her silly, giddy younger daughters, but by modest and charming girls like Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, of the probability of Mr. Bingley’s falling in love with one of the girls among whom he has come, and marrying her—thus at the same time securing her happiness and providing her with an unexceptionable establishment—I believe it is an example at once of blunter candour than exists at present, and of the sole light in which a girl’s position was then regarded. It goes without saying that Jane and Elizabeth were incapable either of instituting unbecoming and unwomanly attempts to attract the hero of the hour, or of consenting to marry any other hero, whom they could neither respect nor love, simply as the means to secure an establishment in life. As it happened, Cassandra and Jane Austen, in whom some of their contemporaries saw the originals of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, proved equally incapable of the last piece of unworthy time-serving. But Miss Austen was what all true artists and teachers must be,—in advance of the prevailing morality of her day. She argued and acted on the side of what was upright and unworldly; still she was so far affected by the tone of thought around her as to cause her best women in “Pride and Prejudice” to wait and watch for Bingley’s throwing the handkerchief, while they coolly debate Jane Bennet’s chances of attracting and fixing his regard. A hundred or eighty years ago there was but one career for a woman not possessed of an independent fortune—that of marriage. Jane Austen never concealed—on the contrary, she publicly proclaimed in “Emma,” that she looked upon the necessity of a gentlewoman’s working for her livelihood as a very hard and well-nigh degrading obligation, an ordeal which would expose her to much that was at once painful and injurious. We may hope that we have to some extent happily changed all that. Besides the prejudices, no doubt not ill-founded, on all the evidence which was then in the possession of even the wisest and most liberal-minded of our predecessors, we must not forget that Miss Austen has placed her five Miss Bennets in a specially trying and precarious position. Their father’s estate was entailed on male heirs, and on his death passed to a cousin, who was a stranger to the family. The interest of the mother’s small fortune of four thousand pounds was inadequate to maintain her daughters, save in a poor way, altogether beneath what they had been accustomed to. The circumstances were not enough to tempt the fine-spirited, true-hearted elder girls into any betrayal of their real dignity and independence in the matter of marriage. But Jane Austen did not mean—it would be ridiculous in taking the generation and its rooted restrictions into consideration, to suppose she could—that the precariousness of the Bennets’ prospects did not influence them, and their friends for them, in desiring that they should be speedily and well married.
There is an undeniable occasional hardness and sharpness of satire, most perceptible in the earlier of the novels, and softening as the author’s nature mellowed. As an instance of change in a familiar custom, there is hardly ever an abbreviation of a christian name in the family life of Miss Austen’s novels, any more than in the family life of her class in that day. With the exception of Lizzy Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice,” and Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park,” the abbreviations end with the period of childhood. No perpetual Charlies and Neds, Kates or Kittys, and Babs, meet us at every step. There may be less formality in the modern practice, but there is also a suspicion of less manliness and womanliness, with their earnestness and responsibility. What serious sense of duty can be expected from a Hal, or a Loo, not to say from a Dolly representing an Adolphus, or a Dot standing as a pet name for a stately Margaret or a grandly simple Mary?
Jane Austen had a high opinion of the merit of her work. When her characters were compared to living people, she maintained stoutly that she was too proud of her gentlemen to admit that they were only Mr. A. or Colonel B., although she qualified the assertion by allowing—for the credit of human nature, and for her own credit—to avoid the accusation of painting angels instead of men, that with regard to her favourites, Edmund Bertram and Mr. Knightley, they were very far from being what she knew English gentlemen often were.
In the long list—growing always longer with the years—of the distinguished admirers of Miss Austen’s books, Mr. Austen Leigh quotes formidable names—formidable to those who hold an opposite view of her claims as an author. Among widely different names of men are those of Southey, Coleridge, Sir James Mackintosh, Guizot, Lord Holland, Whewell, Sydney Smith, Archbishop Whately, Sir Walter Scott,[12] the American statesman Quincey, and Lord Macaulay. Only one woman’s name is given—that of Miss Mitford. We must hope, for the honour of intellectual and literary women, that many more names might have been added of women who have gladly and gratefully acknowledged Jane Austen as a queen of novelists. To the examples cited, large additions might be made from the names of modern thinkers and students of human nature, since among them the novelist’s fame is still increasing.
Let it never be said, for women’s own sakes, that it is among women—among bright, quick-witted girls such as she herself was when she wrote “Pride and Prejudice” and “Northanger Abbey,” far outstripping mature competitors—that Jane Austen begins to be no longer read and reverenced.
In her own day, Jane Austen kept a collection of such criticisms of her books as she could come across, including in the collection various contemptuous opinions as that “one lady could say nothing better of ‘Mansfield Park’ than that it was a ‘mere novel.’”
Another owned that “she thought ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ downright nonsense, but expected to like ‘Mansfield Park’ better, and, having finished the first volume, hoped that she had got through the worst.”
Another “did not like ‘Mansfield Park.’ Nothing interesting in the characters, language poor.”
“One gentleman read the first and last chapters of ‘Emma,’ but did not look at the rest, because he had been told that it was not interesting.”
“The opinions of another gentleman about ‘Emma’ were so bad that they could not be repeated to the author.”
Among the most remarkable of the criticisms worthy of the name of Jane Austen, are those of Sir Walter Scott and Macaulay. The generous entry in Sir Walter’s diary is as follows:—“Read again, for the third time at least, ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!”
Macaulay has this entry in his journal:—“I have now read once again all Miss Austen’s novels—charming they are. There are in the world no compositions which approach nearer to perfection.”
In Macaulay’s well-known essay on Madame d’Arblay, there is, in the course of an admirable comparison between the two writers, the following high praise of Jane Austen:—
“Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue, stands Shakespeare. His variety is, like the variety of nature, endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. The characters of which he has given us an impression, as vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we could call very eccentric if we met it in real life. The silly rule that every man has one ruling passion, and that this clue, once known, unravels all the mysteries of his conduct, finds no countenance in the plays of Shakespeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn. What is Hamlet’s ruling passion? Or Othello’s? Or Harry the Fifth’s? Or Wolsey’s? Or Lear’s? Or Shylock’s? Or Benedick’s? Or Macbeth’s? Or that of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might go on for ever. Take a single example—Shylock. Is he so eager for money as to be indifferent to revenge? Or so eager for revenge as to be indifferent to money? Or so bent on both together as to be indifferent to the honour of his nation and the law of Moses? All his propensities are mingled with each other, so that, in trying to apportion to each its proper part, we find the same difficulty which constantly meets us in real life. A superficial critic may say that hatred is Shylock’s ruling passion. But how many passions have amalgamated to form that hatred? It is partly the result of wounded pride: Antonio has called him dog. It is partly the result of covetousness: Antonio has hindered him of half a million; and when Antonio is gone, there will be no limit to the gains of usury. It is partly the result of national and religious feeling: Antonio has spat on the Jewish gabardine; and the oath of revenge has been sworn by the Jewish Sabbath. We might go through all the characters which we have mentioned, and through fifty more in the same way, for it is the constant manner of Shakespeare to represent the human mind as lying not under the absolute dominion of one despotic propensity, but under a mixed government, in which a hundred powers balance each other. Admirable as he was in all parts of his art, we most admire him for this, that, while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature.
“Shakespeare has neither equal nor second; but among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all in a certain sense commonplace, all such as we meet every day; yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom—Mr. Edward Ferrars, Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class; they have all been liberally educated; they all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession; they are all young; they are all in love; not one of them has any hobby-horse, to use the phrase of Sterne; not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope. Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagon is not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike to Sir Lucius O’Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen’s young divines to all of his reverend brethren. And almost all this is done by touches so delicate, that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed.”
Macaulay’s sister, Lady Trevelyan, told Mr. Austen Leigh that her brother had intended to write a memoir of Jane Austen, with criticisms on her works, to prefix it to a new edition of her novels, and from the proceeds of the sale to erect a monument to her memory in Winchester Cathedral. It is said that the references to the novels in Lord Macaulay’s “Journal” served to carry out his purpose so far, attracting a public which—to its shame, shall I say?—knew not the author, and selling off a whole edition of Jane Austen’s tales. That the erection of the monument in Winchester Cathedral followed is of less consequence. She needs no monument save what her brain and hands wrought out. Let her own works follow her.
