The study of Jane Austen’s novels is in some respects a liberal
education. The proper appreciation of these stories has been suggested
as a gauge of intellect. But though the verdict of the best judges,
including the earnest, well-nigh reverential approbation of Sir
Walter Scott, and the boundless enthusiasm of Lord Macaulay, who has
pronounced Jane Austen, in her more limited walk, next to Shakespeare,
the test is unfair, so long as men and women’s minds, no less than
the schools of fiction, are in two major, in addition to many minor
divisions. Of course, where authors are concerned, in rare and great
instances, as in that of Shakespeare, the divisions are united, and
we have a comprehensive, many-sided genius. But these exceptions are
few and far between, like stars of the first magnitude. There is
a cast of inventive intellect, and a school of writing which deal
exclusively with human nature in the mass, choosing to work with common
materials, and to make them valuable by the penetrating fidelity, and
nice perception and adaptation of the workmanship. There is another
order of genius and of wit, which selects an extraordinary, sometimes
an abnormal subject, whether man or woman, story or surroundings,
and by the sheer power and the passionate insight which are shown in
the treatment, compel our comprehension and sympathy for what would
otherwise be strange, perhaps repugnant to us.
These minds and schools are, and always must be, in natural antagonism
to each other. The disciples of the one have rarely such breadth of
faculty and taste as to be the disciples of the other. Among women,
Jane Austen may be taken as the representative of the first class,
Charlotte Brontë of the second. The fervent, faithful followers of the
one genius are apt, more or less, to condemn and slight the other.
It is more than questionable whether the two women, had they been
contemporaries, could have sympathised strongly. Of course, the
opportunity was not granted to Jane Austen; but in the case of
Charlotte Brontë, who stands here for what is, after all, the narrower
school, though its inspiration may be deeper, she was perplexed and
annoyed by the recommendation of a critic to whom she paid deference
that she should read and re-read Miss Austen. Jane Austen’s work was
“tame and domestic,” if not peddling, to Charlotte Brontë.
After dismissing the unfair insistence on a universal acknowledgment
of the surpassing qualities, in her own line, of Jane Austen, it
is still true that they are as nearly as possible perfect. Great
variety of character, though in one class and amidst the same
surroundings--which rendered the achievement of such variety the more
remarkable--lively interest excited by the most legitimate means; the
artistic cunning with which every-day events are handled; keen irony;
delicate, exquisite humour, which never fails; the greatest capacity
for selecting and grouping her materials--where shall we find these
attractions in an equal degree to that in which they are to be met in
Jane Austen’s novels? Above all, every story is as wholesome and sweet,
without cloyness, as English wheat-fields repaying the cultivation of
generations, and the roses, set in hardy prickles, of English gardens.
We hear much, with reason, of the great English humourists. Why has
a secondary place among them not been assigned to Jane Austen? Making
due allowance for sex and rank, and the double restrictions which they
laid upon her, none can read her novels with intelligent appreciation
and fail to see that she deserves to stand high in the rank of English
humourists, unless, indeed, the root-word humour is understood to mean
oddity and eccentricity, and the definition humourist is confined to
the writer who illustrates oddities. For it is one of Miss Austen’s
crowning distinctions, that just as she hardly ever exaggerated or
caricatured, so she did not care to have to do with men and women
riding their hobbies.
I have been amazed to read one criticism of Jane Austen, which denies
her all humour, and only grants her a sense of the ridiculous and
a power of expressing it, in addition to her life-like pictures of
English country life in her own rank. The critic remarks that she only
provokes a smile, never a laugh. No doubt standards are different, but
I am inclined to suspect that the broad burlesque and screaming farce,
which to this critic appears to sum up every display of humour, and
which might draw shouts of laughter from him and his school, would not
win so much as a smile from the admirers of Miss Austen.
Another accusation which has been brought against Jane Austen is, that
she is deficient in strength and warmth. But violence is not strength,
neither is demonstrativeness warmth. Unquestionably this novelist never
tears her passion to tatters. For that matter she elected not to deal
with fierce passions. But in her own field of art, if restrained power
and marvellous flexibility be strength, then she is strong. Indeed, the
idea of weakness associated with Jane Austen is superlatively absurd.
Again, self-respectful, delicate reticence may be called cold, but if
so the coldness is shared by some of the best writers of fiction in
every generation, and it would be well for modern English literature
and its readers if such coldness were more common.
I should like to say a word on the real limitations of Jane Austen’s
genius in her novels. In the first place, while the talk and writing of
our mothers and grandmothers were, with regard to many things, simpler
and more plain-spoken than ours, there is another side on which they
were strictly reserved. Deep feeling, religious opinions, personal
testimony on the highest questions, were, unless in exceptional
circles, withheld and kept hidden as too sacred for general discussion;
above all, as unfit for the pages of a story. No one who knows much
of the women and their books can doubt the vital religious principles
of Jane Austen and Jane and Anna Maria Porter. But though Jane Porter
always included fervent religious faith among the attributes of her
idealised fantastic heroes of romance, Anna Maria, in the only tale
in which she showed how well and pleasantly she could deal with
contemporary life, apologised anxiously in the preface for the serious
tone of the later volumes. Jane Austen, a stronger-minded woman, could
entertain a still more decided view of her calling, and could restrain
any impulse to overstep it. She is almost absolutely silent on every
motive and principle out of what she held to be her province; nay, she
frequently brings forward the lower motives of sound common sense and
rational prudence, just as a sensitive person would prefer to urge them
still, in mixed company, rather than bring in loftier obligations,
when to do so might be casting pearls before swine. We have to study
the conduct rather than the speeches of her characters, just as we
have to look at the lives of some of the best men and women in every
generation, to discern to our satisfaction that they are, with all
their human frailties, thoroughly reverent and noble-minded.
There is nothing in the last observation to imply that the author
shirked any duty of speech which she recognised. On the contrary, in
carrying out her purpose of exhibiting the deplorable results of an
entirely worldly education in the Crawfords and Bertrams in “Mansfield
Park;” in indicating the little straws of former bad habits which are
enough to expose a hypocrite to eyes willing to be enlightened in
Mr. Elliot in “Persuasion,” she probably put force upon her natural
reserve, that she might not fail in her fidelity to her moral. For one
of the most gifted English novelists never wrote without a good moral,
more or less conspicuous. So universally was the true morality of Jane
Austen’s novels acknowledged, that at a time when novels were, with too
much cause, largely tabooed in many households, there was a general
exception made in favour of the tales in which the characters said
little or nothing about religion, but lived it to some extent.
The absence of the most distant allusion to a higher life and its
power is most conspicuous in the clergymen who figure largely in Miss
Austen’s novels. Her biographer and nephew, Mr. Austen Leigh, himself a
clergyman, and the son and grandson of clergymen, sees himself called
upon to refer to this, when he says in her memoir that the standard
of duty in the Church is much higher than formerly, and that the
profession and practice even of Henry Tilney and Edmund Bertram would
be different to-day.
It is to this marked restraint which Jane Austen put upon the
expression of all sacred depths of feeling, whether they belonged to
religion or not, quite as much as to her mental constitution, or to
the formal conditions of her generation, that another result is due.
While we have so much that may instruct, entertain, and delight us in
her stories, we have nothing that will harrow, and not much that will
move us to thoughts which lie too deep for tears. There is no end of
enchanting humour; there is curiously little pathos.
With regard to that other criticism which may be made of defective
taste and sentiment in some of the work which is otherwise so
excellent, as in “Pride and Prejudice,” in the free discussion not
only by a vulgar matchmaker like Mrs. Bennet, and by her silly, giddy
younger daughters, but by modest and charming girls like Jane and
Elizabeth Bennet, of the probability of Mr. Bingley’s falling in love
with one of the girls among whom he has come, and marrying her--thus
at the same time securing her happiness and providing her with an
unexceptionable establishment--I believe it is an example at once of
blunter candour than exists at present, and of the sole light in which
a girl’s position was then regarded. It goes without saying that Jane
and Elizabeth were incapable either of instituting unbecoming and
unwomanly attempts to attract the hero of the hour, or of consenting
to marry any other hero, whom they could neither respect nor love,
simply as the means to secure an establishment in life. As it happened,
Cassandra and Jane Austen, in whom some of their contemporaries saw
the originals of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, proved equally incapable
of the last piece of unworthy time-serving. But Miss Austen was what
all true artists and teachers must be,--in advance of the prevailing
morality of her day. She argued and acted on the side of what was
upright and unworldly; still she was so far affected by the tone of
thought around her as to cause her best women in “Pride and Prejudice”
to wait and watch for Bingley’s throwing the handkerchief, while they
coolly debate Jane Bennet’s chances of attracting and fixing his
regard. A hundred or eighty years ago there was but one career for a
woman not possessed of an independent fortune--that of marriage. Jane
Austen never concealed--on the contrary, she publicly proclaimed in
“Emma,” that she looked upon the necessity of a gentlewoman’s working
for her livelihood as a very hard and well-nigh degrading obligation,
an ordeal which would expose her to much that was at once painful and
injurious. We may hope that we have to some extent happily changed
all that. Besides the prejudices, no doubt not ill-founded, on all
the evidence which was then in the possession of even the wisest and
most liberal-minded of our predecessors, we must not forget that
Miss Austen has placed her five Miss Bennets in a specially trying
and precarious position. Their father’s estate was entailed on male
heirs, and on his death passed to a cousin, who was a stranger to the
family. The interest of the mother’s small fortune of four thousand
pounds was inadequate to maintain her daughters, save in a poor way,
altogether beneath what they had been accustomed to. The circumstances
were not enough to tempt the fine-spirited, true-hearted elder girls
into any betrayal of their real dignity and independence in the matter
of marriage. But Jane Austen did not mean--it would be ridiculous in
taking the generation and its rooted restrictions into consideration,
to suppose she could--that the precariousness of the Bennets’ prospects
did not influence them, and their friends for them, in desiring that
they should be speedily and well married.
There is an undeniable occasional hardness and sharpness of satire,
most perceptible in the earlier of the novels, and softening as the
author’s nature mellowed. As an instance of change in a familiar
custom, there is hardly ever an abbreviation of a christian name in the
family life of Miss Austen’s novels, any more than in the family life
of her class in that day. With the exception of Lizzy Bennet in “Pride
and Prejudice,” and Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park,” the abbreviations
end with the period of childhood. No perpetual Charlies and Neds, Kates
or Kittys, and Babs, meet us at every step. There may be less formality
in the modern practice, but there is also a suspicion of less manliness
and womanliness, with their earnestness and responsibility. What
serious sense of duty can be expected from a Hal, or a Loo, not to say
from a Dolly representing an Adolphus, or a Dot standing as a pet name
for a stately Margaret or a grandly simple Mary?
Jane Austen had a high opinion of the merit of her work. When her
characters were compared to living people, she maintained stoutly that
she was too proud of her gentlemen to admit that they were only Mr. A.
or Colonel B., although she qualified the assertion by allowing--for
the credit of human nature, and for her own credit--to avoid the
accusation of painting angels instead of men, that with regard to her
favourites, Edmund Bertram and Mr. Knightley, they were very far from
being what she knew English gentlemen often were.
In the long list--growing always longer with the years--of the
distinguished admirers of Miss Austen’s books, Mr. Austen Leigh quotes
formidable names--formidable to those who hold an opposite view of her
claims as an author. Among widely different names of men are those
of Southey, Coleridge, Sir James Mackintosh, Guizot, Lord Holland,
Whewell, Sydney Smith, Archbishop Whately, Sir Walter Scott,[12]
the American statesman Quincey, and Lord Macaulay. Only one woman’s
name is given--that of Miss Mitford. We must hope, for the honour of
intellectual and literary women, that many more names might have been
added of women who have gladly and gratefully acknowledged Jane Austen
as a queen of novelists. To the examples cited, large additions might
be made from the names of modern thinkers and students of human nature,
since among them the novelist’s fame is still increasing.
Let it never be said, for women’s own sakes, that it is among
women--among bright, quick-witted girls such as she herself was
when she wrote “Pride and Prejudice” and “Northanger Abbey,” far
outstripping mature competitors--that Jane Austen begins to be no
longer read and reverenced.
In her own day, Jane Austen kept a collection of such criticisms of her
books as she could come across, including in the collection various
contemptuous opinions as that “one lady could say nothing better of
‘Mansfield Park’ than that it was a ‘mere novel.’”
Another owned that “she thought ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and ‘Pride and
Prejudice’ downright nonsense, but expected to like ‘Mansfield Park’
better, and, having finished the first volume, hoped that she had got
through the worst.”
Another “did not like ‘Mansfield Park.’ Nothing interesting in the
characters, language poor.”
“One gentleman read the first and last chapters of ‘Emma,’ but did not
look at the rest, because he had been told that it was not interesting.”
“The opinions of another gentleman about ‘Emma’ were so bad that they
could not be repeated to the author.”
Among the most remarkable of the criticisms worthy of the name of Jane
Austen, are those of Sir Walter Scott and Macaulay. The generous entry
in Sir Walter’s diary is as follows:--“Read again, for the third time
at least, ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ That young lady had a talent for
describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary
life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big
bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going; but the exquisite
touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters
interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is
denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!”
Macaulay has this entry in his journal:--“I have now read once again
all Miss Austen’s novels--charming they are. There are in the world no
compositions which approach nearer to perfection.”
In Macaulay’s well-known essay on Madame d’Arblay, there is, in
the course of an admirable comparison between the two writers, the
following high praise of Jane Austen:--
“Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of
dialogue, stands Shakespeare. His variety is, like the variety of
nature, endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. The characters of
which he has given us an impression, as vivid as that which we receive
from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by
scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found
which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we could
call very eccentric if we met it in real life. The silly rule that
every man has one ruling passion, and that this clue, once known,
unravels all the mysteries of his conduct, finds no countenance in
the plays of Shakespeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a
crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern
him in turn. What is Hamlet’s ruling passion? Or Othello’s? Or Harry
the Fifth’s? Or Wolsey’s? Or Lear’s? Or Shylock’s? Or Benedick’s? Or
Macbeth’s? Or that of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might
go on for ever. Take a single example--Shylock. Is he so eager for
money as to be indifferent to revenge? Or so eager for revenge as to be
indifferent to money? Or so bent on both together as to be indifferent
to the honour of his nation and the law of Moses? All his propensities
are mingled with each other, so that, in trying to apportion to each
its proper part, we find the same difficulty which constantly meets us
in real life. A superficial critic may say that hatred is Shylock’s
ruling passion. But how many passions have amalgamated to form that
hatred? It is partly the result of wounded pride: Antonio has called
him dog. It is partly the result of covetousness: Antonio has hindered
him of half a million; and when Antonio is gone, there will be no
limit to the gains of usury. It is partly the result of national and
religious feeling: Antonio has spat on the Jewish gabardine; and the
oath of revenge has been sworn by the Jewish Sabbath. We might go
through all the characters which we have mentioned, and through fifty
more in the same way, for it is the constant manner of Shakespeare
to represent the human mind as lying not under the absolute dominion
of one despotic propensity, but under a mixed government, in which a
hundred powers balance each other. Admirable as he was in all parts
of his art, we most admire him for this, that, while he has left us a
greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put
together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature.
“Shakespeare has neither equal nor second; but among the writers who,
in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the
manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane
Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a
multitude of characters, all in a certain sense commonplace, all such
as we meet every day; yet they are all as perfectly discriminated
from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings.
There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be
surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom--Mr. Edward Ferrars,
Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all
specimens of the upper part of the middle class; they have all been
liberally educated; they all lie under the restraints of the same
sacred profession; they are all young; they are all in love; not one of
them has any hobby-horse, to use the phrase of Sterne; not one has a
ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope. Who would not have expected
them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagon
is not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike to
Sir Lucius O’Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen’s young divines to
all of his reverend brethren. And almost all this is done by touches
so delicate, that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of
description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect
to which they have contributed.”
Macaulay’s sister, Lady Trevelyan, told Mr. Austen Leigh that her
brother had intended to write a memoir of Jane Austen, with criticisms
on her works, to prefix it to a new edition of her novels, and
from the proceeds of the sale to erect a monument to her memory in
Winchester Cathedral. It is said that the references to the novels
in Lord Macaulay’s “Journal” served to carry out his purpose so far,
attracting a public which--to its shame, shall I say?--knew not the
author, and selling off a whole edition of Jane Austen’s tales. That
the erection of the monument in Winchester Cathedral followed is of
less consequence. She needs no monument save what her brain and hands
wrought out. Let her own works follow her.
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