In spite, too, of the thorough good breeding of this woman writer, the primness even of her outlook upon the world, there is plain speaking in her books, even touches of coarseness that are but the echo of the rankness which abounds in the Fielding-Smollett school. Happily, it is a faint one.
Granting the slightness of her plots and their family likeness, warm praise is due for the skill with which they are conducted; they are neatly articulated, the climactic effect is, as a rule, beautifully graduated and sure in its final force: the multitude of littles which go to make up the story are, upon examination, seen to be not irrelevant but members of the one body, working together towards a common end. It is a puzzling question how this firm art was secured: since technique does not mean so much a gift from heaven as the taking of forethought, the self-conscious skill of a practitioner. Miss Austen, setting down her thoughts of an evening in a copybook in her lap, interrupted by conversations and at the beck and call of household duties, does not seem as one who was acquiring the mastery of a difficult art-form. But the wind bloweth where it listeth—and the evidences of skill are there; we can but chronicle the fact, and welcome the result.
She was old-fashioned in her adherence to the "pleasant ending"; realist though she was, she could not go to the lengths either of theme or interpretation in the portrayal of life which later novelists have so sturdily ventured. It is easy to understand that with her avowed dislike of tragedy, living in a time when it was regarded as the business of fiction to be amusing—when, in short, it was not fashionable to be disagreeable, as it has since become—Jane Austen should have preferred to round out her stories with a "curtain" that sends the audience home content. She treats this desire in herself with a gentle cynicism which, read to-day, detracts somewhat perhaps from the verity of her pictures. She steps out from the picture at the close of her book to say a word in proper person. Thus, in "Mansfield Park," in bringing Fanny Price into the arms of her early lover, Edmund, she says: "I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions and the transfer of unchanging attachments must vary much as to time in different people. I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire."
But it cannot be urged against her that it was her habit to effect these agreeable conclusions to her social histories by tampering with probability or violently wresting events from their proper sequence. Life is neither comedy nor tragedy—it is tragi-comedy, or, if you prefer the graver emphasis, comi-tragedy. Miss Austen, truth-lover, has as good a right to leave her lovers at the juncture when we see them happily mated, as at those more grievous junctures so much affected by later fiction. Both representations may be true or false in effect, according as the fictionist throws emphasis and manages light-and-shade. A final page whereon all is couleur de rose has, no doubt, an artificial look to us now: a writer of Miss Austen's school or her kind of genius for reporting fact, could not have finished her fictions in just the same way. There is no blame properly, since the phenomenon has to do with the growth of human thought, the change of ideals reflected in literature.
For one more point: Miss Austen only knew, or anyhow, only cared to write, one sort of Novel—the love story. With her, a young man and woman (or two couples having similar relations) are interested in each other and after various complications arising from their personal characteristics, from family interference or other criss-cross of events, misplacement of affection being a trump card, are united in the end. The formula is of primitive simplicity. The wonder is that so much of involvement and genuine human interest can be got out of such scant use of the possible permutations of plot. It is all in the way it is done.
Love stories are still written in profusion, and we imagine that so compelling a motive for fiction will still be vital (in some one of its innumerable phases) in the twenty-fifth century. Yet it is true that novelists now point with pride to the work of the last generation of their art, in that it has so often made sex love subsidiary to other appeals, or even eliminated it altogether from their books. Some even boast of the fact that not a woman is to be found in the pages of their latest creation. Nearly one hundred years ago, Defoe showed the possibility (if you happen to have genius) of making a powerful story without the introduction of the eternal feminine: Crusoe could not declare with Cyrano de Bergerac:
"Je vous dois d'avoir eu tout au moins, une amie;
Grace a vous, une robe a passe dans ma vie."
It is but natural that, immensely powerful as it is, such a motive should have been over-worked: the gamut of variations has been run from love licit to love illicit, and love degenerate and abnormal to no-love-at-all. But any publisher will assure you that still "love conquers all"; and in the early nineteenth century any novelist who did not write tales of amatory interest was a fool: the time was not ripe to consider an extension of the theme nor a shifted point of view. For the earlier story-tellers, in the language of Browning's lyric,
"Love is best."
Jane Austen's diction—or better, her style, which is more than diction—in writing her series of social studies, affords a fine example of the adaptation of means to end. Given the work to be accomplished, the tools are perfect instruments for the purpose. The student of English style in its evolution must marvel at the idiom of Austen, so strangely modern is it, so little has time been able to make it passe. From her first book, her manner seems to be easy, adequate, unforced, with nothing about it self-conscious or gauche. In the development of some great writers the change from unsureness and vulgarity to the mastery of mature years can be traced: Dickens is one such. But nothing of the sort can be found in Austen. She has in "Northanger Abbey" and "Pride and Prejudice"—early works—a power in idiomatic English which enables her reader to see her thought through its limpid medium of language, giving, it may be, as little attention to the form of expression as a man uninstructed in the niceties of a woman's dress gives to those details which none the less in their totality produce on him a most formidable effect. Miss Austen's is not the style of startling tricks: nor has she the flashing felicities of a Stevenson which lead one to return to a passage for re-gustation. Her manner rarely if ever takes the attention from her matter. But her words and their marshaling (always bearing in her mind her unambitious purpose) make as fit a garment for her thought as was ever devised upon English looms. If this is style, then Jane Austen possesses it, as have very few of the race. There is just a touch of the archaic in it, enough to give a quaintness that has charm without being precious in the French sense; hers are breeding and dignity without distance or stiffness. Now and again the life-likeness is accentuated by a sort of undress which goes to the verge of the slip-shod—as if a gentlewoman should not be too particular, lest she seem professional; the sort of liberty with the starched proprieties of English which Thackeray later took with such delightful results. Of her style as a whole, then, we may say that it is good literature for the very reason that it is not literary; neither mannered nor mincing nor affectedly plain. The style is the woman—and the woman wrote as a lady should who is portraying genteel society; very much as she would talk—with the difference the artist will always make between life and its expression in letters.