It is a commonplace of those who refuse to recognize the claims of woman to equal treatment in spheres of activity where man has long held a monopoly, to ask what great thing has woman done in any walk of life? One may talk in reply of Sappho, of Joan of Arc, of George Sand, of George Eliot, of Florence Nightingale, and two or three others, and the retort, if the greatness of these be admitted, is that they are the exceptions that "prove" the rule. It is difficult, impossible perhaps, to upset the man who denies that anything of "the greatest" in art, or literature, or science has been achieved by a woman. The list of women who have left an abiding fame as poets, or novelists, or painters is soon exhausted, and there is not a name that can, without reserve, be placed among the Rembrandts and Turners, the Goethes and Miltons, the Newtons and Darwins of mankind. Maybe this deficiency is largely due to lack of opportunity. Since the gates were partly opened to woman, within the lifetime of those who are still not old, she has done enough to change the opinions of many who held that rocking the cradle was a sufficiently active share in the ruling of the world for the sex that produced the Maid of Orleans and the Lady with the Lamp. Such justly conspicuous success as Madame Curie has attained in chemistry, or Mrs. Garrett Anderson in medicine, or Mrs. Scharlieb in surgery, has compelled the admission that even if woman were by nature unfitted to reach the highest levels of intellectual achievement, she at least could not be excluded from the learned professions on the ground of inadequate mental equipment.
"Nature's old Salic law," said Huxley, "will not be repealed, and no change of dynasty will be effected." Jane Austen, at any rate, did not desire to repeal it. She was among the most feminine of the women writers who have left an enduring reputation. It is something of a paradox, therefore, that the quality on which her fame chiefly rests is one which is rare among women, and in which most of those women who have attained success in literature have been conspicuously lacking—satirical humour. Apart from physical disabilities, want of humour is woman's heaviest handicap in the conflict of life. Humour is the principal ingredient of the philosophic temperament. Woman has courage in adversity, she can suffer intensely without complaint, but she rarely possesses the power of laughing at her own misfortunes.
It has been said, and the saying might not easily be gainsaid, that none of the great jokes of the world was made by a woman. There are perhaps fifty great jokes—spoken jokes, of course, are meant, not those generally humourless things known as "practical jokes"—and the good stories that are told and received as novelties are, save in the rarest instances, merely new editions of some wheeze which was already ancient when it was told to a circle of mead-drinkers round a fire the smoke whereof—or some of it—escaped through the roof. It is, there is reason to believe, no mere figure of speech that originally most of the basic jokes were told round the galley fire of the Ark during the long dark evenings after the animals had been fed, the decks swept down, and the women had retired to their quarters. Thus may we account for the otherwise inexplicably large proportion of sea-faring and animal tales among the mirth-provoking yarns of man. A woman might never make a joke, and yet have a keen sense of humour, while, on the other hand, she might make many jokes, and have no sense of humour at all. Most of the jokes that have any element of freshness are alive with fun, and not with humour. Who is more humourless than the notoriously funny man?
Jane Austen is not often funny and seldom makes jokes in her novels. Her humour is of the essential kind, which is so nearly akin to wit that it is often almost identical with it. Wit and humour, after all definitions, are brothers who might be taken for one another by those who do not notice that the one has colder hands than the other.
If you want to laugh heartily you must not trust to Jane's novels for a stimulant. Her characters laugh but little among themselves, and are the cause of intellectual joy rather than of physical contractions in those who read about them.
When, after a re-reading of the novels, we sit and think over their delights, many are the admirable bits of character-drawing that come to mind. After we have thought of the heroines, the "good" people, in the common meaning of the word, do not come back to us so readily as those who, if not "bad," are decidedly faulty. The Westons, the Gardiners, the Harvilles, the Crofts, Lady Russell, the John Knightleys, we recall when we jog our memories. After Elizabeth, and Emma, and Anne, it is the appallingly tactless Mrs. Bennet, the odiously snobbish Mrs. Elton, the race-proud Lady Catherine, the entirely selfish Mr. Collins, the lazy and thoughtless Lady Bertram, the mean and tyrannical Mrs. Norris, the fatuous Sir Walter Elliot, these and their like, who throng into view. No writer—not even Thackeray—has realized the female snob more knowingly than Jane Austen in Mrs. Elton, whose constant reference of all matters of taste to the standard presented by "Maple Grove" and the "barouche-landau" renders her as diverting to us as she was insufferable to Emma Woodhouse. A woman like this, who is never betrayed into an unselfish action or a noble aspiration, is happily not a common object in real life, but there are enough of Mrs. Elton's great-granddaughters about the world to exculpate Jane from the charge of undue exaggeration. Emma herself has been called a snob, and only the other day was described as "perpetually acting with bad taste." But Emma's disdain for Robert Martin, and her opinion of the degradation of marrying a governess, were due to prejudices of convention, which thought—under Knightley's influence—dispelled. Mrs. Elton was a snob at heart, who revelled in her own vulgarity of instinct.
If the snob is portrayed to perfection in Mrs. Elton, the valetudinarian is no less happily presented in Mr. Woodhouse—"My dear Emma, suppose we all have a little gruel"—and for a picture of an empty-headed, frivolous wife married to a rational and bearish husband, the Palmers, in Sense and Sensibility, have few equals. As for Miss Bates, she is without a serious rival as an inconsequential babbler, and though we may be, and ought to be, as angry with Emma for her rudeness at the Box Hill picnic as was Mr. Knightley himself, we must admit that years of Miss Bates's disjoined garrulity were some set-off against that gross breach of charity and good manners. Lady Catherine de Bourgh has been placed by some critical readers among Jane Austen's obvious caricatures. Is she not an entirely credible, if happily rare, type? She is seen in a strong light in her attempt to bully Elizabeth into a promise not to marry Darcy—
"'With regard to the resentment of his family,' says Elizabeth at last, 'or the indignation of the world, if the former were excited by his marrying me, it would not give me one moment's concern—and the world in general would have too much sense to join in the scorn.'
"'And this is your real opinion!' replies Lady Catherine. 'This is your final resolve! Very well. I shall now know how to act. Do not imagine, Miss Bennet, that your ambition will ever be gratified. I came to try you. I hoped to find you reasonable; but, depend upon it, I will carry my point.'