Among the last things which Miss Austen did was to flatter the great public—unless, indeed, one considers that she paid it the highest compliment of all—by assuming it was a clever public, and must enjoy being made game of, to its face. A stupid public was not, and has never been, Jane Austen’s public. On such her fine sense and abounding humour, pervaded by the true refinement in which neither the woman nor the gentlewoman is for a moment forgotten, fall absolutely flat. I cannot conceive such a public, which is ordinarily fond of coarse, crude mental stimulants, as appreciating and enjoying Jane Austen, though her consummate art as a story-teller may beguile it into dozing over her pages, or hurrying through them. But there is such a thing as having a good taste cultivated and not perverted, and budding intelligence may be drawn out, not stultified.
To those who are not by mental constitution impelled altogether into the abnormal school of fiction—to those who can read between the lines—reading Jane Austen will always be studying under a wise teacher, and keenly relishing an exquisite treat.
In some respects “Northanger Abbey” is among the author’s masterpieces. It contains two or three of her most finished portraits. Nowhere is her writing more incisive, her epigrams neater, her wit at once drier and more sparkling.
But “Northanger Abbey” has also blemishes which are absent from other works by the same novelist. It lacks unity; it does not grow out of itself in close sequence, like “Emma.” Its different parts are so far inconsistent with each other, for strong realism and airy burlesque do not match quite well together. There are considerable improbabilities in “Northanger Abbey”—above all, there is not a trace of the lurking pathos and pensive charm which blend with and relieve the humour of “Persuasion.”
On the contrary, the almost incessant banter of “Northanger Abbey,” excellent as it is in its way, has a certain hardness in it—perhaps, in this instance, the result of the unripe youth of the author—and possesses a tendency to fatigue and vex the reader who wishes to be serious for a moment—who regards the best of life and art as that which, in one fashion or another, reflects both life and art as serious and earnest.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Written in 1798. “Read Dickens’s ‘Hard Times,’ and another book of ‘Pliny’s Letters;’ read ‘Northanger Abbey,’ worth all Dickens and Pliny together, yet it was the work of a girl.”—Macaulay.
[19] Jane Austen may have had in her mind Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines; to whom sketching from nature seems to have come by nature—who were all, as a matter of course, accomplished artists.
[20] Weymouth and Ramsgate, among sea-bathing places, seemed to rise most readily before her mind, though she alluded also to Southend and Cromer—not to say described Lyme—which she made her own.