Attention has been drawn of late to a marked contrast between the French comedy of “social gesture”—which is entirely intellectual—and the whole-souled laughter of the English. Shakespeare’s comic “figures are not a criticism of life—no great English literature is that. It is a piece of life imaginatively realised. Falstaff is not judged, he is accepted. Dogberry is not offered as a fool to be ridiculed by his intellectual betters. We are not asked to deride him. We are asked to become part of his folly. Falstaff appeals to the Falstaff in ourselves. Dogberry is our common stupidity, enjoyed for the sake of the dear fool that is part of every man. Shakespeare’s laugh includes vice and folly in a humour which is the tolerance of Nature herself for all her works.... English laughter lives in good fellowship.”
Since Macaulay did not hesitate to compare Jane Austen with Shakespeare in one matter, we may repeat his audacity here. The definition, if definition it can be called, will surely apply to Emma and Pride and Prejudice. They are “pieces of life imaginatively realised.” We laugh with the eccentricities, not at them. Properly speaking, Miss Austen is no satirist. She can amuse us without killing emotion.
As hinted already, Charlotte Brontë has neither humour nor wit. She takes life most seriously; and, in attempting a comic relief, becomes lumping or savage. The fact of her “Shirley” curates recognising, and enjoying, their own portraits may serve to measure the limit of her success. Such men could only enjoy the second-rate. Her satire against charity schools and Belgian pensionnats is mere spite.
We must pass on, therefore, to George Eliot, who certainly had wit, and was once acclaimed very humorous. Here, as elsewhere, our authoress appears to have gathered up the resources of her predecessors, developed them by study and culture, dressed them up in the language of the professional. The fact that the mechanism of her humour can be analysed, however, must prove its limitation. It is “worked in,” skilfully, but obviously. There is everywhere an “impression of highly-wrought sentences which are meant to arrest the reader’s attention and warn him what he is to look for of tragedy, of humour, of philosophy.” The humour is obviously “composed” to heighten the tragic effect by contrast. In her earlier work, indeed, every form of elaboration in style was but “one sign of her overmastering emotion,” therefore “fitting and suitable”; but repetition made it tedious and mechanical. After a time we see through “the expression of a humorous fancy in a pedantic phrase; the reminiscence of a classical idiom applied to some everyday triviality; the slight exaggeration of verbiage which is to accentuate an aphorism ... moulded on the plaster casts of the schools.”
The fact is that humour, and even wit, flourish most happily in uncultured fields—for there is only one George Meredith. Yet, within her limitations, there is triumph for the genius of George Eliot. None can deny tribute to Mrs. Poyser, or the “Aunts” in The Mill on the Floss. That very severe study and applied observation, which kills spontaneity, lent her the power to excite tears and laughter. She has given us oddities as rugged as, and more various than, Miss Burney’s, contrasts of manners as bustling; scenes and persons as humanly humorous as Jane Austen’s. She combines their methods, enriching them by dialect, antithesis, allusion, and the “study” of types. There is humour and wit in her work.
If, as we certainly admit, both are “worked out” carefully and the labour shows through, we must also acknowledge that she has embraced, and extended, all the achievements of woman before her day, indicating the powers realised and the possibilities to be accomplished.
THE WOMAN’S MAN
Although, as we have seen everywhere, the women novelists did so much in lifting the veil and, so to speak, giving themselves away; they also held up the mirror to man’s complacency, and, in a measure, enabled the other sex to see himself as they saw him. In the process they created a type, beloved of schoolgirls, which can only be described as the “Woman’s Man,” and must be admitted a partial travesty on human nature. It does not, however, reveal any less insight than much of man’s feminine portraiture.
Curiously enough, the earliest “Woman’s Man” in fiction was of male origin. We all know how Richardson, having given us Clarissa, was invited to exert his genius upon the “perfect gentleman.” But the little printer had ever an eye on the ladies, and, whether or no of malice prepense, drew the immaculate Sir Charles Grandison—frankly, in every particular—not as he must have known him in real life, but rather according to the pretty fancy of the dear creatures whose entreaties had called into being the gallant hero.
And, as elsewhere, Fanny Burney took up the type, refined it, and lent an attractive subtlety to that somewhat monumental erection of the infallible. The actual imaginings of woman are proved less wooden than Richardson supposed them, and infinitely more like human nature. In many things Lord Orville resembles Sir Charles. He is scarcely less perfect, but his empire is more restricted. The chorus of admiration granted to Grandison, and his astounding complacency, are replaced by the unconscious revelations of innocent girlhood naturally expressing her simple enthusiasm to the kindest of foster-parents. The peerless Orville, indeed, is not exactly a “popular” hero. It needs a superior mind to appreciate his superiority; and we suspect there were circles in which he was voted a “prodigious dull fellow.” His life was not passed in an atmosphere of worship. It is only in the heart of Evelina that he is king. Nor can we fancy Miss Burney submitting her heroine to the ignominy, as modern readers must judge it, of patiently and contentedly waiting, like Harriet Byron, until such time as his majesty should determine between the well-balanced claims of herself and her rival to the honour of his hand. Personally, we have never been able to satisfy ourselves whether Grandison loved Clementina more or less than Harriet; if he was properly “in love” with either.