[11] In addition, there is now a monument which was erected to Jane Austen’s memory by her nephew, the writer of the memoir.
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.