Bagehot [63a] in his article on the Letters of Cowper unconsciously describes the life at Hartfield or Mansfield Park. Of Cowper he writes: “Detail was his forte and quietness his element. Accordingly his delicate humour plays over perhaps a million letters mostly descriptive of events which no one else would have thought worth narrating, and yet which, when narrated, show to us, and will show to persons to whom it will be yet more strange, the familiar, placid, easy, ruminating, provincial existence of our great grandfathers.”
The domestic and intimate parts of life are the most lastingly happy, and thus it is that an imaginary existence, which in some moods seems to be unbearably humdrum, harmonises with the best parts of our own life. The quiet winds that blow through Miss Austen’s imagined land cannot turn windmills or overset tall trees, but they can set going those tunelike chains of simple experiences written on our memories by the quiet and happy parts of life.
Imaginative writing is often compared to painting, and Miss Austen has spoken [63b] of “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work
with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour.” But this gives a false impression, suggesting a niggling character from which her work is free. What strikes one is rather how much she conveys by touches which seem trifling until we realise the triumph of the result. The effect is not a miniature, as the author suspects, but something essentially broad in spite of its detail, like a picture by Jan Steen.
To discuss why Jane Austen’s humour is admirable, or how she reaches such perfection in the drawing of character, seems to me as hopeless as to ask by what means Bach or Beethoven wrote such divinely beautiful tunes. Her powers are rendered even more admirable by the fact [64a] that she did not draw portraits, so that no one could say A is Mr. Collins and B is Mrs. Palmer.
I think it is true, but not easily explained, that the simplest people in her books give us most pleasure. Why is Admiral Croft so delightful, and why do we read again and again the speech about his wife, who suffered from sharing the exercise prescribed for her husband’s gout? “She, poor soul, is tied by the leg with a blister on one of her heels as big as a three-shilling piece.” Why do we delight in Mr. Woodhouse’s perambulation among his guests, and his words to Jane Fairfax, “My dear, did you change your stockings?” In this respect we have advanced beyond the Quarterly reviewer of 1815, [64b] who says: “The faults of these works arise
from the minute detail which the author’s plan comprehends. Characters of folly or simplicity, such as those of old Woodhouse and Miss Bates, are ridiculous when first presented, but if too often brought forward, or too long dwelt on, their prosing is apt to become as tiresome in fiction as in real society.” If ever a reviewer “damned himself to everlasting fame,” surely this writer did so; but, indeed, we need not have quoted so much, since (in the words of Corporal Trim) “he is damned already” for leaving out the ‘Mr.’ before the name Woodhouse.
But six years later (1821) another Quarterly reviewer (said to be Archbishop Whately) reversed the above unfortunate judgment by singling out the drawing of Miss Austen’s fools as shining examples of her skill.
Jane Austen must surely be the most re-read author of the last hundred years. Lord Holland is said to have read her books when he had the gout, and in that case he must have experienced what smaller people have suffered during less picturesque complaints, viz., from not being able to determine which of her books they have most nearly forgotten. In this frame of mind one longs for a new Miss Austen more than for a new symphony of Beethoven, or a play of Shakespeare, and much more than for the lost books of Livy, which, indeed, I, for one, do not desire at all.
The power of endlessly re-reading the novels of Miss Austen is the only advantage conferred by a bad memory. I do not imagine that Macaulay, greatly as he admired her, could have endured to