The day has not yet come when public bodies could be sufficiently affected by imaginative literature to place memorials on the houses where fictitious personages have been supposed to dwell. In Paris the memorial to Charlet is an admirable group of a grenadier and a gamin—typical characters from his work, and a musketeer guards the monument of Dumas. The gods forbid that any sculptor should be commissioned to give us life-size figures of Emma, Elizabeth, Anne, and Fanny to sit around a statue of Jane Austen. But when next the London County Council contemplates the placing of plaques on the former residences of departed worthies they might consider whether—of course with the consent of the freeholder and the leaseholder—her name might not be placed on the house in Henrietta Street, once her brother Henry's home, where so many of her letters were written. She tells of the convenient arrangement of its rooms for the comfort of herself and her nieces, and from its door she went to the neighbouring church, or the theatres, which were within a few minutes' walk. It is not likely that any political prejudice would cause even the most advanced Progressive on the Council to object to the name of so very mild a Tory being thus honoured. As to the more probable objection that she did not "reside" there, but was only a visitor, one may plead that as there is a plaque on a newly-erected tube station recalling the "residence" of Mrs. Siddons, and that a tablet proclaims that Turner "lived" in a house built thirty years after his death, there would be no great straining of logic in admitting the claim of a house in which Jane Austen did undoubtedly write, and sleep, and talk. The front was cemented in the middle of the last century, and the ground-floor is now used for business purposes, but otherwise the house is little changed since the Austens were there.
VII
INFLUENCE IN LITERATURE
Jane Austen's genius ignored—Negative and positive instances—The literary orchard—Jane's influence in English literature.
The author of a book bearing the title Great English Novelists, published just ninety-one years after Jane Austen's death, does not include her in his selection. He deals with eleven authors—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Scott, Lytton, Disraeli, Dickens, Thackeray, Meredith. The very fact that he stops short at eleven, instead of making a round dozen, suggests that he really could not think of any other novelist worthy to be credited with greatness. It will be observed that all the team are men. Without quibbling as to whether they are all "English," or all "great," or even all "novelists" in the ordinary sense of the word, we may legitimately suppose that the author is one of those to whom Jane Austen makes no strong appeal. The peculiarity of her position among English novelists could not well be more pointedly emphasized than in the fact that while Macaulay placed her next to Shakespeare as a painter of character-studies, a critic should be found—and he is by no means isolated—who can choose eleven great representatives of English fiction without adding her as a twelfth. In the same week in which the book just referred to was published, came a portfolio of twelve photogravures entitled Britain's Great Authors. Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, of course, were among them, and of right, but not Jane Austen.
Perhaps even more suggestive is the statement of a clever woman-writer the other day that Jane Austen's novels are merely "memorials," books which no gentleman's (or lady's) library should be without, but which are for show rather than for use.
Her name may never be among those that are painted round the reading-rooms of National Libraries, nor included by many school-children in examination lists of eminent authors. Hers is too delicate a product to attract the man or woman "in the street." There is a bouquet about it that is lost on the palate which enjoys the "strong" fiction of the material phase through which humanity is now passing—passing perhaps more briefly than most of us imagine.
It has been the endeavour of this book to show Jane Austen as she lives in her writings, and to suggest some at least of the many directions in which those writings may be explored, and thus, if so may be, to bring new members into the large but comparatively restricted circle wherein she is regarded, not always as the first of English novelists, but at least as second to none in the quality of her work. Sappho enjoys undying fame with only a few fragments of verse still to her credit, Omar for his one poem transformed by another mind, Boccaccio for a volume of short stories, Boswell for one biography, Thomas à Kempis for one devotional manual. Sparsity of performance, it is evident, is no bar to enduring fame. Jane Austen's work, indeed, was not sparse. There are, undoubtedly, novelists who have passed the record of Balzac with his forty novels and scores of short stories, but their books for the most part suggest the interminable succession of poplars along so many a high road of France. Some of the trees have more foliage than others, some are more green or more blue in tone, a little more tortuous, or robust, but in spite of all trivial differences plus ça change plus c'est la même chose. If this arboreal parallel may be pursued, may we not compare the work of Jane Austen with a group of apple-trees in a sunny corner of some vast orchard? There are eight Austen trees in the literary orchard. Two of them are stunted and bear a poor crop of a sort little better than crabapples. The other six are of several kinds, but all of fine quality and producing delicious fruit of varying sweetness. Countless thousands of novels have been published since Jane Austen's were given to the world, and many of them have been unseemly, and of evil influence. But the taste of countless writers and readers has been sweetened by the fruit of her delightful mind, of the passing of whose fragrant harvest through English literature it is not too much to say, as Jane herself said of Anne Elliot's walk through Bath: "It was almost enough to spread purification and perfume all the way."