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 equal 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 at
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 quality; 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 thoughts 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 houses. 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.