Miss Austen shunned the romantic—like Wordsworth she might have said "the moving accident is not my trade," but her incidents move us (for example, Louisa Musgrove's fall off the Cobb at Lyme Regis); and the mystery of Jane Fairfax's piano in "Emma," is as exciting as the black curtain behind which Catherine Morland expected to discover the skeleton of Laurentina. John Thorpe said of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels (which he had not read), "there is some fun and nature in them" (and there is plenty of fun), Miss Austen found in them much more of fun than of nature.
It is said that she is afraid of the passions, but what can be more passionate than the constancy of Anne Elliot, or more ardent than the first love of Marianne Dashwood? All the family of the Bennets are charming or diverting in their various ways; the humorous father, the foolish mother, the witty and spirited Elizabeth, the gentle, beautiful Jane, the pedantic Mary, the colourless Kitty, and Lydia who might have shone in a comedy by Vanbrugh. It is rather hard to believe that Elizabeth could accept Darcy after he, like the Master of Ravenswood, had told his lady that her father was not a gentleman. But then Elizabeth came to see Darcy's house and place in Derbyshire!
If one novel is not quite so good as the rest, it is "Mansfield Park"; but to name it recalls Mrs. Norris, and the return of the heavy father as his progeny are rehearsing a dubious play from the German; and one has a tenderness for the good little heroine, and for her rather squalid kinsfolk, and for both of the naughty Crawfords. "Mansfield Park" is a masterpiece like the rest. Perhaps Miss Austen's heroes are not so good as her heroines; but Henry Crawford and Frank Churchill, in "Emma" prove that her young men are not mere lay figures.
She never went outside of the life she knew to draw wicked dukes and the virtuous poor; she had no villains, no rebels; if she read Crabbe's lurid and realistic studies of poverty and crime, she did not imitate them in prose. Her characters are perfectly indifferent to public affairs, throughout the struggle with Napoleon; except when the authoress cannot conceal her passionate enthusiasm for the men who fought under Nelson and Collingwood. But the expression is not enthusiastic in terms.
Miss Austen's art has the exquisite balance and limit of Greek art in the best period. She knew what she could do, she did it to perfection; and, naturally, the humourless Charlotte Brontë thought her tame and dull. But from Scott himself to Macaulay and Archbishop Whately, nay, from the Prince Regent (George IV., who had a set of her novels in each of his houses), the best judges recognized the greatness of one of the six greatest English writers of fiction, and, a century after the publication of "Pride and Prejudice," she is a more popular favourite by far than in her own brief day. To judge by a miniature of Miss Austen, done when she was of the age when Catherine Morland began to give up playing cricket and baseball, her face and figure were as bright and charming as her genius. Like Milton's Eve, Miss Austen is "fairest of her daughters" in art, though among them are Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Thackeray (Lady Ritchie).
Walter Scott.
The Novelist.
When Scott, in 1814, sought for some fly-hooks in a bureau, and found the lost first chapter of "Waverley," a novel begun in 1805, prose fiction seemed to be under general contempt, was only fit for milliners, said his friend Morritt of "Rokeby". Yet, in fact, the good novel was not left without a witness. Miss Edgeworth's tales of Irish life and manners excited, said Scott, his own wish to write of his own people, and Miss Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent" is of 1800. Jane Austen had written "Northanger Abbey" in 1797; it remained unpublished, but "Sense and Sensibility" is of 1811, "Pride and Prejudice" of 1813; thus both were prior to "Waverley". But neither, great as are their merits, attracted attention then, as Miss Burney's novels had done from the first; and probably the contempt of novels was one of the various causes, the chief being that "it was his humour," which made Scott conceal his authorship of his prose romances.
"Waverley"—in the first and long-lost chapters—is reckoned tame; but the hero's youth in peaceful rural England was deliberately designed as a quiet approach to his richly varied adventures under the White Cockade. From the moment when Waverley enters the village, so strange to English eyes, and the still stranger castle, of Tullyveolan, he passes into the land of romance; all was, to English readers, as novel and unexpected as if Edward had joined a tribe of Central Africa. The ancient feudal manners, Lowland or Highland; the learned, eccentric, brave old baron; the half idiot jester, Davy Gellatley; the Bailie, Balmawhapple; the clansmen, the Celtic chief, Fergus MacIvor; the survivor of the Remnant, gifted Gilfillan, were humorous and masterly creations, while the gallant figure of the doomed Prince and his wonderful adventure, narrated with sympathy, completed the charm. The world was taken by storm, believed in Flora MacIvor, and wept afresh over the shambles of Carlisle.
Written in six weeks, the romance of "Guy Mannering" (1815), with its pell-mell of characters from the Colonel (who was thought like Scott), and his lively dark-eyed daughter Julia, (certainly like Mrs. Scott), to Pleydel, Meg Merrilies, Glossin, the bankrupt Bertram laird, to Dominie Sampson, and Dandie Dinmont with his dogs, was only less popular from the first. "The Antiquary" (1816) added a romance of dark complexion to a study of modern manners of the preceding decade; while "Old Mortality," at the end of the year, did for 1679 and the Covenanters, with even greater skill, what "Waverley" had done for the clans and the Forty-five. "Old Mortality" is probably the greatest of Scott's historical novels. The friends of the persecuted Remnant exclaimed against historical unfairness, but the friends of the "Indulged" of 1679, and of Claverhouse, had as good a right to pick a quarrel.