THE CLASSIC NOVELIST

Jane Austen seldom begins a novel without a deliberate chapter—generally a family chapter. A masterly consciousness of her own authority gives her the right of control over her reader’s impatience or slovenliness. The order of things is hers, not his, and he must wait her time for wit. Hers are what Jeremy Taylor, even at his prayers, calls ‘measures of address’. Her openings imply a firmer hold upon narrative than later novelists, with their verbless first sentences, their ‘he’ and ‘she’ for persons to be named later, thought to grasp at. The moderns would be much depressed were they required to open thus: ‘The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.’ We consent to read the dismal opening; we endure the pother of the unmusical words; we tolerate it all because we know that in a page or two the respectable Dashwoods will be deprived of some of the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. We know that Miss Austen will make of her personages good sport for her reader, her sense of derision being 63equal to that of her own kin, the original Philistines. For another example, would any later author, having a Mrs. Bennet to deride for our delight, consent to introduce her thus: ‘Mrs. Bennet was a woman of mean understanding’? But in this case Miss Austen’s art loses nothing, even by the chill of that presentation.

That Jane works upon very small matters is hardly worth saying, and certainly not worth complaining of. Things are not trivial merely because they are small; but that which makes life, art, and work trivial is a triviality of relations. Mankind lives by vital relations; and if these are mean, so is the life, so is the art that expresses them because it can express no more. With Miss Austen love, vengeance, devotion, duty, maternity, sacrifice, are infinitely trivial. There is also a constant relation of watchfulness, of prudence. As the people in her stories watch one another so does Miss Austen seem to be watching them, and her curiosity is intense indeed; she realizes their colds—her female characters take a great many colds—so that one seems to hear her narrate the matter in a muffled voice, but not precisely because of her sympathy. That such close observation can work on without tenderness must be a proof of this author’s exceeding cynicism.

Triviality of relations among Miss Austen’s personages does not prevent a certain kind of intensity. Lying and spite among her women work 64at close quarters. With the men we hear of a somewhat wider range; there is, in the case of one justly rejected suitor, a suspicion, a rumour of ‘Sunday travelling’; the accusation is not precisely brought home.

No one who has not read Pride and Prejudice and Emma is able to say that he knows worldliness in its own proper home. There, ‘engaging the general good opinion of surrounding acquaintance’ (the mouthful of thick words!) worldliness keeps its dowdy and hopeless state and ceremony. There is, in almost every second page of Miss Austen, a detestable thing called, in the language of the day, ‘consequence’. No slang of our own time, by the way, has ever misused a word more foolishly. To ‘consequence’, and to the heroine’s love of it, is promptly sacrificed all that might have seemed the beginnings or suggestions of spirituality. There is more that is spiritual in the heroines of to-day—in the ‘female animal’ herself—than in Anne, in Harriet, in Jane, in Fanny, or in any other of the young women who gossip through the pages of these famous novels. The men gossip, too; they are minutely occupied with the engagements, colds, arrowroot, tea-parties, and correspondence of the women.

All this, it may be said, relates to Miss Austen’s subjects and not to her perfect art. But Miss Austen’s art and her matter are made for one another. Miss Austen’s art is not of the highest 65quality; it is of an admirable secondary quality. Her gentle spinsterly manner prevents us from perceiving at first how much of her derision—for she is mistress of derision rather than of wit or humour—is caricature of a rather gross sort. ‘Lady Middleton resigned herself to the idea with all the philosophy of a well-bred woman, contenting herself with merely giving her husband a gentle reprimand on the subject five or six times every day.’ Far finer is Miss Austen’s success when she gains her effect by delicate persistence in reiteration. This is the way in which she enjoys Mr. Woodhouse, the old gentleman in whose eyes every woman who has had the good luck to marry out of his tedious house is a ‘poor dear’. His compassion makes excellent sport, of a kind, by the effect of cumulation. The author’s patience and vigilance are, indeed, perfect, insomuch as they never neglect or fail to perceive an opportunity for giving the turn to his phrase, the tone to his word. And the whole thing would advance, by the slow degrees of this method, and close in a little masterpiece, but that something of the fineness, as well as something of the increase, of the result is now and then marred by Miss Austen’s own explanation. She prepares her reader deliberately; she instructs him at the outset in what he would have become convinced of at the end.

Her irony is now and then exquisitely bitter. ‘Who could tell’—Miss Austen is presenting the 66thoughts of Mrs. John Dashwood in regard to her unwelcome sisters-in-law—‘that they might not expect to go out with her a second time? The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be hers. But that was not enough.’ About the following little sentence there is something of the wit of surprise. It describes the joys of a young woman of the less admirable sort, lately married: ‘They passed some months in great happiness at Dawlish; for she had many relations and old acquaintances to cut.’ Miss Austen has a word in dismissing the inconstant Mr. Willoughby: ‘His wife was not always out of humour; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.’

The lack of tenderness and of spirit is manifest in Miss Austen’s indifference to children. They hardly appear in her stories except to illustrate the folly of their mothers. They are not her subjects as children; they are her subjects as spoilt children, and as children through whom a mother may receive flattery from her designing acquaintance, and may inflict annoyance on her sensible friends. The novelist even spends some of her irony upon a little girl of three. She sharpens her pen over the work. The passage is too long to quote, but the reader may refer to Sense and Sensibility. In this coldness or dislike Miss Austen resembles Charlotte Brontë.

Most dully expressive are Miss Austen’s country 67houses. One description places her people in a few words in the scene that suits them with a quite subtle suitableness; and the thing is presented in words which, here again, by their very lack of music define mediocrity: ‘Cleveland was a spacious, modern-built house, situated on a sloping lawn. The pleasure grounds were tolerably extensive; and, like every other place of the same degree of importance, it had its open shrubbery, and closer wood walk; a road of smooth gravel, winding round a plantation, led to the front.’ There, there in the modern-built mansion was the goal of the hopes of heroines. To the shrubbery they betook themselves, in a ‘hurry of spirits’, or other limited forms of emotion that might make them wish to escape remark. In and out pottered the men—the men of the period, the men of so strange a sex. In the tolerably extensive grounds walked ‘consequence’, and its wheels marked the smooth gravel that wound round the plantation.

Before quitting the noble subject of ‘consequence’ let it be noted that Emma had the following hesitation about a youth she was inclined to admire (Emma was not twenty-one): ‘Of pride, indeed, there was perhaps scarcely enough; his indifference to a confusion of rank bordered too much on inelegance of mind. He could be no judge, however, of the evil he was holding cheap.’ It is an unheavenly world.

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