Plutarch parallels Cato with Phocion, Demosthenes with Cicero, Brutus with Dion—the Dion whose history inspired the poem of Wordsworth. Greek republicanism, too, had its fatal hour; but we do not pour scorn and contumely on those who strove to prolong the life of Athens beyond the term assigned by fate. The case of Athens, a single independent state, was no doubt different from that of Rome with so many subject nations under her sway. Still in each case there was the commonwealth, standing in glorious contrast to the barbarous despotisms of other nations, the highest social and political state which humanity had known or for ages afterwards was to know. And this light of civilization was, so far as the last republicans could see, not only to be eclipsed for a time or put out, as now in a single nation, while it burns on in others, but to be swallowed up in hopeless night.
Mr. Charles Norton in the notes to his recent translation of the "Vita Nuova" of Dante quotes a decree made by the commonwealth of Florence for the building of the cathedral.
"Whereas it is the highest interest of a people of illustrious origin so to proceed in their affairs that men may perceive from their external works that their doings are at once wise and magnanimous, it is therefore ordered that Arnulf, architect of our commune, prepare the model or design for the rebuilding of Santa Reparata with such supreme and lavish magnificence, that neither the industry nor the capacity of man shall be able to devise anything more grand or more beautiful, inasmuch as the most judicious in this city have pronounced the opinion, in public and private conferences, that no work of the commune should be undertaken unless the design be such as to make it correspond with a heart which is of the greatest nature because composed of the spirit of many citizens united together in one single will." [Footnote: In his later and very valuable work on Church Building in the Middle Ages, Mr. Norton casts doubt on the authenticity of the decree. It is genuine at all events, as an expression of Florentine sentiment, if not as an extract from the archives.]
Let Imperialism, legitimist or democratic, match that! Florence, too, had her political vices, many and grave, she tyrannized over Pisa and other dependants, there was faction in her councils, anarchy, bloody anarchy, in her streets, for her, too, the hour of doom arrived, and the conspiracy of the Pazzi was as much an anachronism as that of the republicans who slew Caesar. But Florence had that heart composed of the united spirits of many citizens out of which came all that the world admires and loves in the works of the Florentine. She produced, though she exiled Dante. That which followed was more tranquil, more orderly perhaps, materially speaking, not less happy, but it had no heart at all.
AUSTEN-LEIGH'S MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN
[Footnote: "A Memoir of Jane Austen. By her nephew, J. E. Austen-Leigh,
Vicar of Bray, Berks." London: Richard Bentley; New York: Scribner,
Welford & Co.]
The walls of our cities were placarded, the other day, with an advertisement of a new sensational novel, the flaring woodcut of which represented a girl tied down upon a table, and a villain preparing to cut off her feet. If this were the general taste, there would be no use in talking about Jane Austen. But if you ask at the libraries you will find that her works are still taken out; so that there must still be a faithful few who, like ourselves, will have welcomed the announcement of a Memoir of the authoress of "Pride and Prejudice," "Mansfield Park," and "Emma."
If Jane Austen's train of admirers has not been so large as those of many other novelists, it has been first-rate in quality. She has been praised—we should rather say, loved by all, from Walter Scott to Guizot, whose love was the truest fame. Her name has often been coupled with that of Shakespeare, to whom Macaulay places her second in the nice discrimination of shades of character. The difference between the two minds in degree is, of course, immense; but both belong to the same rare kind. Both are really creative; both purely artistic; both have the marvellous power of endowing the products of their imagination with a life, as it were, apart from their own. Each holds up a perfectly clear and undistorting mirror—Shakespeare to the moral universe, Jane Austen to the little world in which she lived. In the case of neither does the personality of the author ever come between the spectator and the drama. Vulgar criticism calls Jane Austen's work Dutch painting. Miniature painting would be nearer the truth; she speaks of herself as working with a fine brush on a piece of ivory two inches wide. Dutch painting implies the selection of subjects in themselves low and uninteresting, for the purpose of displaying the skill of a painter, who can interest by the mere excellence of his imitation. Jane Austen lived in the society of English country gentlemen and their families as they were in the last century—a society affluent, comfortable, domestic, rather monotonous, without the interest which attaches to the struggles of labour without tragic events or figures seldom, in fact rising dramatically above the level of sentimental comedy, but presenting nevertheless, its varieties of character, its vicissitudes, its moral lessons—in a word, its humanity. She has painted it as it was, in all its features the most tragic as well as the most comic, avoiding only melodrama. "In all the important preparations of the mind, she (Miss Bertram) was complete, being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, restraint and tranquillity, by the misery of disappointed affection and contempt of the man she was to marry; the rest might wait." This is not the touch of Gerard Douw. An undertone of irony, never obtrusive but everywhere perceptible, shows that the artist herself knew very well that she was not painting gods and Titans, and keeps everything on the right level.
Jane Austen, then, was worthy of a memoir. But it was almost too late to write one. Like Shakespeare, she was too artistic to be autobiographic. She was never brought into contact with men of letters, and her own fame was almost posthumous, so that nobody took notes. She had been fifty years in her grave when her nephew, the Rev J. E. Austen-Leigh, the youngest of the mourners who attended her funeral, undertook to make a volume of his own recollections, those of one or two other surviving relatives, and a few letters. Of 230 pages, in large print, and with a margin the vastness of which requires to be relieved by a rod rubric, not above a third is really biography, the rest is genealogy, description of places, manners, and customs, critical disquisition, testimonies of admirers. Still, thanks to the real capacity of the biographer, and to the strong impression left by a character of remarkable beauty on his mind, we catch a pretty perfect though faint outline of the figure which was just hovering on the verge of memory, and in a few years more would, like the figure of Shakespeare, have been swallowed up in night.
Jane Austen was the flower of a stock, full, apparently, through all its branches, of shrewd sense and caustic humour, which in her were combined with the creative imagination. She was born in 1775, at Steventon, in Hampshire, a country parish, of which her father was the rector. A village of cottages at the foot of a gentle slope, an old church with its coeval yew, an old manor-house, an old parsonage all surrounded by tall elms, green meadows, hedgerows full of primroses and wild hyacinths—such was the scene in which Jane Austen grew. It is the picture which rises in the mind of every Englishman when he thinks of his country. Around dwelt the gentry, more numerous and, if coarser and duller, more home-loving and less like pachas than they are now, when the smaller squires and yeomen have been swallowed up in the growing lordships of a few grandees who spend more than half their time in London or in other seats of politics or pleasure. Not far off was a country town, a "Meriton," the central gossiping place of the neighbourhood, and the abode of the semi-genteel. If a gentleman like Mr. Woodhouse lives equivocally close to the town, his "place" is distinguished by a separate name. There was no resident squire at Steventon, the old manor-house being let to a tenant, so that Jane's father was at once parson and squire. "That house (Edmund Bertram's parsonage) may receive such an air as to make its owner be set down as the great landowner of the parish by every creature travelling the road, especially as there is no real squire's house to dispute the point, a circumstance, between ourselves, to enhance the value of such a situation in point of privilege and advantage beyond all calculation." Her father having from old age resigned Steventon when Jane was six and twenty, she afterwards lived for a time with her family at Bath, a great watering-place, and the scene of the first part of "Northanger Abbey;" at Lyme, a pretty little sea-bathing place on the coast of Dorset, on the "Cobb" of which takes place the catastrophe of "Persuasion;" and at Southampton, now a great port, then a special seat of gentility. Finally, she found a second home with her widowed mother and her sister at Chawton, another village in Hampshire.