The great revolution that breaks out in the spring, when the store-houses of the plant pour nutriment into the numberless awakening buds is a miracle annually repeated in the endless procession of life. We know something of the mechanism by which mobilisation is effected. We know for instance that the starch-grains guarded by the dormant plant during the idle days of winter are liquified, or rather, that the starch is converted into sugar, and being soluble in water can flow from the magazines of the plant to where growth, implying the creation of millions of newly born cells, demands material. We are gradually learning to understand something of that seething cauldron of life which we can dimly watch in living things. The ferment diastase is one of the tools with which plants perform their miracles of chemical activity. This diastase and its brother-ferments have qualities resembling those of living creatures. They may, like seeds, be dried and kept in a bottle until they are awakened by giving them water. Perhaps this is talking in a circle, and that ferments only resemble living things because organisms contain so many of these mysterious bodies. I like to fancy that there is
something more than this, and that a ferment is an automaton which the plant compels to labour for it—a Frankenstein monster having semi-living qualities, being no more than a parody of life. But I am getting beyond the questions that are in tune with a spring day.
V
JANE AUSTEN
The most obvious characteristic of English country life as described by Jane Austen, is a quietness such as even the elder generation now living have not experienced. A quietness which many would call dull and some few peaceful. It is, indeed, hard to believe that life was once so placid, so stay-at-home, so domestic, so devoid, not merely of excitement, but of any change whatever.
The life of Emma Woodhouse (to take a single instance) has all the characteristics of this deep repose. At Hartfield there was certainly no changing “from the blue chamber to the green,” a revolution which would have made Mr. Woodhouse seriously unwell.
Emma never seems to leave home, she had not seen the sea, nor indeed had she (before a memorable occasion) explored Box Hill, a few miles away, although her father kept a carriage and a pair of horses. Nor is there any evidence of her going to London, a distance of sixteen miles. She did not engage in good works; there were no committees or meetings except those held at the ‘Crown’ at which Mr. Knightly and Mrs. Elton’s cara sposo were the leaders, and where no ladies were admitted.
In comparison with the hurried unsheltered life of the modern girl, Emma seems a princess shut in a tower of brass or an enchanted garden. And although in the course of the story she escapes this particular tower, it is only to fall into the castle of Mr. Knightly, who (with his squire William Larkins) plays the part of knight errant.
And Emma was not dull, but full of happy animation, and her quiet life encouraged the growth of an educated, or at least a cultivated, condition which re-appears in the other novels. This placid life is all the more striking in contrast to the great contemporary struggle of the Napoleonic wars, hardly a sound of which reaches Miss Austen’s readers, although in Persuasion we do hear something of Captain Wentworth’s prize money. George Eliot knew the flavour of this quietude, and reproduces it in the introduction to Felix Holt. But even in these pre-reform days the quiet is beginning to be broken; the stage-coachman is beginning to dread the railway train, and looks on Mr. Huskisson’s death as a proof of God’s anger against Stephenson. Again, in Middlemarch we see the country stirring in its sleep, and poor Dorothea suffering in the process of awakening. There is nothing of this in Miss Austen; it is true that the Miss Bennets sometimes experienced the blankness of female existence, but they could imagine nothing blanker than the departure of the militia from Meryton.
Jane Austen’s books have something of the quiet atmosphere of Cowper’s Letters. Mr. Austen Leigh in his Memoir speaks of her love for the
writings of Cowper and of Crabbe (the latter indeed she proposed to herself to marry). We know that Marianne Dashwood (that type of sensibility) was very far from finding Cowper too quiet. For when Edward Ferrars failed to read him aloud with spirit, Marianne remarks, “Nay, mamma, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!”