The charm of friends of pen-and-ink is their unchangeableness. We go to
them when we want them. We know where to seek them; we know what to
expect from them. They are never preoccupied; they are always 'at home;'
they never turn their backs nor walk away as people do in real life, nor
let their houses and leave the neighbourhood, and disappear for weeks
together; they are never taken up with strange people, nor suddenly
absorbed into some more genteel society, or by some nearer fancy. Even
the most volatile among them is to be counted upon. We may have
neglected them, and yet when we meet again there are the familiar old
friends, and we seem to find our own old selves again in their company.
For us time has, perhaps, passed away; feelings have swept by, leaving
interests and recollections in their place; but at all ages there must
be days that belong to our youth, hours that will recur so long as men
forbear and women remember, and life itself exists. Perhaps the most
fashionable marriage on the _tapis_ no longer excites us very much, but
the sentiment of an Emma or an Anne Elliot comes home to some of us as
vividly as ever. It is something to have such old friends who are so
young. An Emma, blooming, without a wrinkle or a grey hair, after
twenty years' acquaintance; an Elizabeth Bennet, sprightly and charming
ever....
In the 'Roundabout Papers' there is a passage about the pen-and-ink
friends my father loved:--
'They used to call the good Sir Walter the "Wizard of the North." What
if some writer should appear who can write so _enchantingly_ that he
shall be able to call into actual life the people whom he invents? What
if Mignon, and Margaret, and Goetz von Berlichingen are alive now
(though I don't say they are visible), and Dugald Dalgetty and Ivanhoe
were to step in at that open window by the little garden yonder? Suppose
Uncas and our noble old Leather Stocking were to glide in silent?
Suppose Athos, Porthos, and Aramis should enter, with a noiseless
swagger, curling their moustaches? And dearest Amelia Booth, on Uncle
Toby's arm; and Tittlebat Titmouse with his hair dyed green; and all the
Crummles company of comedians, with the Gil Blas troop; and Sir Roger
de Coverley; and the greatest of all crazy gentlemen, the Knight of La
Mancha, with his blessed squire? I say to you, I look rather wistfully
towards the window, musing upon these people. Were any of them to enter,
I think I should not be very much frightened....'
Are not such friends as these, and others unnamed here, but who will
come unannounced to join the goodly company, creations that, like some
people, do actually make part of our existence, and make us the better
for theirs? To express some vague feelings is to stamp them. Have we any
one of us a friend in a Knight of La Mancha, a Colonel Newcome, a Sir
Roger de Coverley? They live for us even though they may have never
lived. They are, and do actually make part of our lives, one of the best
and noblest parts. To love them is like a direct communication with the
great and generous minds that conceived them.
* * * * *
It is difficult, reading the novels of succeeding generations, to
determine how much each book reflects of the time in which it was
written; how much of its character depends upon the mind and the mood of
the writer. The greatest minds, the most original, have the least stamp
of the age, the most of that dominant natural reality which belongs to
all great minds. We know how a landscape changes as the day goes on,
and how the scene brightens and gains in beauty as the shadows begin to
lengthen. The clearest eyes must see by the light of their own hour.
Jane Austen's literary hour must have been a midday hour: bright,
unsuggestive, with objects standing clear, without much shadow or
elaborate artistic effect. Our own age is more essentially an age of
strained emotion, little remains to us of starch, or powder, or courtly
reserve. What we have lost in calm, in happiness, in tranquillity, we
have gained in emphasis. Our danger is now, not of expressing and
feeling too little, but of expressing more than we feel.
The living writers of to-day lead us into distant realms and worlds
undreamt of in the placid and easily contented gigot age. Our characters
travel by rail and are no longer confined to postchaises. There is
certainly a wide difference between Miss Austen's heroines and, let us
say, a Maggie Tulliver. One would be curious to know whether, between
the human beings who read Jane Austen's books to-day and those who read
them fifty years ago, there is as great a contrast. One reason may be,
perhaps, that characters in novels are certainly more intimate with us
and on less ceremonious terms than in Jane Austen's days, when heroines
never gave up a certain gentle self-respect and humour and hardness of
heart in which some modern types are a little wanting. Whatever happens
they could for the most part speak of quietly and without bitterness.
Love with them does not mean a passion so much as an interest, deep,
silent, not quite incompatible with a secondary flirtation. Marianne
Dashwood's tears are evidently meant to be dried. Jane Bennet smiles,
sighs and makes excuses for Bingley's neglect. Emma passes one
disagreeable morning making up her mind to the unnatural alliance
between Mr. Knightly and Harriet Smith. It was the spirit of the age,
and, perhaps, one not to be unenvied. It was not that Jane Austen
herself was incapable of understanding a deeper feeling. In the last
written page of her last written book, there is an expression of the
deepest and truest experience. Annie Elliot's talk with Captain Benfield
is the touching utterance of a good woman's feelings. They are speaking
of men and of women's affections. 'You are always labouring and
toiling,' she says, 'exposed to every risk and hardship. Your home,
country, friends, all united; neither time nor life to be called your
own. It would be too hard, indeed (with a faltering voice), if a woman's
feelings were to be added to all this.'
Further on she says, eagerly: 'I hope I do justice to all that is
felt by you, and by those who resemble you. God forbid that I should
undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures.
I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment
and constancy were known only by woman. No! I believe you capable of
everything good and great in your married lives. I believe you equal
to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance so long
as--if I may be allowed the expression--so long as you have an object;
I mean while the woman you love lives and lives for you. _All the
privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you
need not court it) is that of loving longest when existence or when hope
is gone._'
She could not immediately have uttered another sentence--her heart was
too full, her breath too much oppressed.
Dear Anne Elliot!--sweet, impulsive, womanly, tender-hearted--one can
almost hear her voice, pleading the cause of all true women. In those
days when, perhaps, people's nerves were stronger than they are now,
sentiment may have existed in a less degree, or have been more ruled by
judgment, it may have been calmer and more matter-of-fact; and yet Jane
Austen, at the very end of her life, wrote thus. Her words seem to ring
in our ears after they have been spoken. Anne Elliot must have been Jane
Austen herself, speaking for the last time. There is something so true,
so womanly about her, that it is impossible not to love her most of all.
She is the bright-eyed heroine of the earlier novels, matured, softened,
cultivated, to whom fidelity has brought only greater depth and
sweetness instead of bitterness and pain.
What a difficult thing it would be to sit down and try to enumerate the
different influences by which our lives have been affected--influences
of other lives, of art, of nature, of place and circumstance,--of
beautiful sights passing before our eyes, or painful ones: seasons
following in their course--hills rising on our horizons--scenes of ruin
and desolation--crowded thoroughfares--sounds in our ears, jarring or
harmonious--the voices of friends, calling, warning, encouraging--of
preachers preaching--of people in the street below, complaining, and
asking our pity! What long processions of human beings are passing
before us! What trains of thought go sweeping through our brains! Man
seems a strange and ill-kept record of many and bewildering experiences.
Looking at oneself--not as oneself, but as an abstract human being--one
is lost in wonder at the vast complexities which have been brought to
bear upon it; lost in wonder, and in disappointment perhaps, at the
discordant result of so great a harmony. Only we know that the whole
diapason is beyond our grasp: one man cannot hear the note of the
grasshoppers, another is deaf when the cannon sounds. Waiting among
these many echoes and mysteries of every kind, and light and darkness,
and life and death, we seize a note or two of the great symphony, and
try to sing; and because these notes happen to jar, we think all is
discordant hopelessness. Then come pressing onward in the crowd of
life, voices with some of the notes that are wanting to our own
part--voices tuned to the same key as our own, or to an accordant one;
making harmony for us as they pass us by. Perhaps this is in life the
happiest of all experience, and to few of us there exists any more
complete ideal.
And so now and then in our lives, when we learn to love a sweet and
noble character, we all feel happier and better for the goodness and
charity which is not ours, and yet which seems to belong to us while
we are near it. Just as some people and states of mind affect us
uncomfortably, so we seem to be true to ourselves with a truthful
person, generous-minded with a generous nature; life seems less
disappointing and self-seeking when we think of the just and sweet and
unselfish spirits, moving untroubled among dinning and distracting
influences. These are our friends in the best and noblest sense. We are
the happier for their existence,--it is so much gain to us. They may
have lived at some distant time, we may never have met face to face, or
we may have known them and been blessed by their love; but their light
shines from afar, their life is for us and with us in its generous
example; their song is for our ears, and we hear it and love it still,
though the singer may be lying dead.