JANE AUSTEN
AND HER
COUNTRY-HOUSE COMEDY
I
DOMINANT QUALITIES
Jane Austen's abiding freshness—Why she has not more readers—Characteristics of her work—Absence of passion—Balzac, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë—Jane in her home circle—Her tranquil nature—Her unselfishness—Compared with Dorothy Osborne—Prudent heroines—Thoughtless admiration.
The year 1775, which deprived England of her American colonies, was generous to English art and literature. Had it only produced Walter Savage Landor, or even no better worthy than James Smith of the Rejected Addresses, it would not have done badly. But these were its added bounties. Its greater gifts were Turner, Charles Lamb and Jane Austen. Could we be offered the choice of re-possessing the United States, or losing the very memory of these three, which alternative would we choose?
It is difficult to appreciate the lapse of time since Jane Austen was at work. We are now within a few years of the centenary of her death. She had been laid beneath that black slab in Winchester Cathedral before the first railway had been planned, or the first telegraph wire stretched from town to town, or the first steamship steered across the Atlantic. Yet the must of age has not settled on her books. The lavender may lie between their pages, but it is still sweet, and there is many a successful novelist of our own times whose work is already far more out of date than hers.
This perennial timeliness of atmosphere is no necessity of genius. Fielding and Scott remain a delight for succeeding generations, because they possess the essential quality of humanity, but the life which they offer us is largely remote from our own, foreign to our experience. Jane Austen invites us to enjoy a change of air among people with most of whom we may soon feel at ease, finding nothing in their conversation that will disturb our equanimity. If you are one of Jane Austen's lovers, you come back to her novels for a holiday from the noise and whirl of modern fiction, as you would come from a great city to the countryside or the coast village for rest and restoration.
The failure of her books to attract the mass of novel-readers is due in the first place to a lack of "exciting" qualities. No syndicate that knew its business would offer them for serial purposes; they have no breathless "situations," and their strong appeal is to the calmer feelings and the intellect, not to the passions and the prejudices. In one respect only has she anything in common with the popular novelists of our day. Her set of characters is even more limited than theirs. The virtuous heroine, the handsome hero, the frivolous coquette, the fascinating libertine, the worldly priest, are to be encountered in her pages, but the wicked nobleman and the criminal adventuress find no places there. What is often overlooked, however, by those who speak of Jane Austen's few characters, is that no two of them have quite the same characteristics of mind. They are differentiated with admirable art. Even so, the types are few, and the smallness of the field which she cultivated has been frequently adduced as a bar to her inclusion among the masters of English fiction. She has the least range of them all. When one thinks of the host of strongly-marked types in Scott, in Dickens, in Thackeray, of the diversity of scenes and incidents which fill the pages of their books, her few squires and parsons and unemployed officers, with their wives and daughters, who live out their days in Georgian parlours and in shrubberies and parks, make a poor enough show in the dramatic and spectacular way.
No particular passion dominates the life of any one of her leading personages. Avarice, which has afforded such notable figures to almost every great novelist, in her world is only represented by meanness; lust and hate are nowhere strongly emphasized, even love is rarely permitted to suggest the possibility of becoming violent. There are no Pecksniffs, Quilps, Père Grandets, nor Lord Steynes; no Lady Kews, Jane Eyres, nor Lisbeth Fischers. Only into the hearts of her younger women does Jane Austen throw the searchlight of complete knowledge, lit by her own feelings, and tended with self-analysis, and her heroines still leave a large part of virtuous womankind unrepresented.