REALISM: JANE AUSTEN
It has been said that Miss Austen came nearer to showing life as
it is,--the life she knew and chose to depict,--than any other
novelist of English race. In other words, she is a princess
among the truth-tellers. Whether or not this claim can be
substantiated, it is sure that, writing practically half a
century after Richardson and Fielding, she far surpassed those
pioneers in the exquisite and easy verisimilitude of her art.
Nay, we can go further and say that nobody has reproduced life
with a more faithful accuracy, that yet was not photography
because it gave the pleasure proper to art, than this same Jane
Austen, spinster, well-born and well-bred: in her own phrase, an
"elegant female" of the English past. Scott's famous remark can
not be too often quoted: "That young lady had a talent for
describing the movements and feelings of characters of ordinary
life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with."
If you look on the map at the small Southern county of
Hampshire, you will see that the town of Steventon lies hard by
Selborne, another name which the naturalist White has made
pleasant to the ear. Throughout her forty-two years of life--she
was born the year of American revolution and died shortly after
Scott had begun his Waverley series--she was a country-woman in
the best sense: a clergyman's daughter identified with her
neighborhood, dignified and private in her manner of existence,
her one sensational outing being a four years' residence in the
fashionable watering-place of Bath, where Beau Nash once reigned
supreme and in our day, Beaucaire has been made to rebuke Lady
Mary Carlisle for her cold patrician pride. Quiet she lived and
died, nor was she reckoned great in letters by her
contemporaries. She wrote on her lap with others in the room,
refused to take herself seriously and in no respect was like the
authoress who is kodaked at the writing-desk and chronicled in
her movements by land and sea. She was not the least bit
"literary." Fanny Burney, who had talent to Jane Austen's
genius, was in a blaze of social recognition, a petted darling
of the town, where the other walked in rural ways and unnoted of
the world, wrote novels that were to make literary history. Such
are the revenges of the whirligig, Time.
Austen's indestructible reputation is founded on half a dozen
pieces of fiction: the best, and best known, "Sense and
Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice," although "Mansfield
Park," "Emma," "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion" (in order of
publication but not of actual composition) are all of importance
to the understanding and enjoyment of her, and her evenness of
performance, on the whole, is remarkable. The earlier three of
these books were written by Miss Austen when a young woman In
the twenties, but published much later, and were anonymous--an
indication of her tendency to take her authorship as an aside.
Two of them appeared posthumously. Curiously, "Northanger
Abbey," that capital hit at the Radcliffe romanticism, and first
written of her stories, was disposed of to a publisher when the
writer was but three and twenty, yet was not printed until she
had passed away nearly twenty years later,--a sufficient proof
of her unpopularity from the mercantile point of view.
Here is one of the paradoxes of literature: this gentlewoman
dabbling in a seemingly amateur fashion in letters, turns out to
be the ablest novelist of her sex and race, one of the very few
great craftsmen, one may say, since art is no respector of sex.
Jane Austen is the best example in the whole range of English
literature of the wisdom of knowing your limitations and
cultivating your own special plot of ground. She offers a
permanent rebuke to those who (because of youth or a failure to
grasp the meaning of life) fancy that the only thing worth while
lies on the other side of the Pyrenees; when all the while at
one's own back-door blooms the miracle. She had a clear-eyed
comprehension of her own restrictions; and possessed that power
of self-criticism which some truly great authors lack. She has
herself given us the aptest comment ever made on her books:
speaking of the "little bit of ivory two inches wide on which
she worked with a brush so fine as to produce little effect
after much labor";--a judgment hardly fair as to the interest
she arouses, but nevertheless absolutely descriptive of the plus
and minus of her gift.
Miss Austen knew the genteel life of the upper middle class
Hampshire folk, "the Squirearchy and the upper professional
class," as Professor Saintsbury expresses it, down to the
ground--knew it as a sympathetic onlooker slightly detached (she
never married), yet not coldly aloof but a part of it as devoted
sister and maiden aunt, and friend-in-general to the community.
She could do two things which John Ruskin so often lauded as
both rare and difficult: see straight and then report
accurately; a literary Pre-Raphaelite, be it noted, before the
term was coined. It not only came natural to her to tell the
truth about average humanity as she saw it; she could not be
deflected from her calling. Winning no general recognition
during her life-time, she was not subjected to the temptations
of the popular novelist; but she had her chance to go wrong, for
it is recorded how that the Librarian to King George the Third,
an absurd creature yclept Clark, informed the authoress that his
Highness admired her works, and suggested that in view of the
fact that Prince Leonard was to marry the Princess Charlotte,
Miss Austen should indite "An historical romance illustrative of
the august house of Coburg." To which, Miss Jane, with a humor
and good-sense quite in character (and, it may be feared, not
appreciated by the recipient): "I could not sit down to write a
serious romance under any other motive than amusement to save my
life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up, and
never relax into laughter at myself and other people, I am sure
I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I
must keep to my own style and go on in my own way."
There is scarce a clearer proof of genius than this ability to
strike out a path and keep to it: in striking contrast with the
weak wobbling so often shown in the desire to follow literary
fashion or be complaisant before the suggestion of the merchants
of letters.
All her novels are prophetic of what was long to rule, in their
slight framework of fable; the handling of the scenes by the
way, the characterization, the natural dialogue, the
vraisemblance of setting, the witty irony of observation, these
are the elements of interest. Jane Austen's plots are mere
tempests in tea-pots; yet she does not go to the extreme of the
plotless fiction of the present. She has a story to tell, as
Trollope would say, and knows how to tell it in such a way as to
subtract from it every ounce of value. There is a clear kernel
of idea in each and every one of her tales. Thus, in "Sense and
Sensibility," we meet two sisters who stand for the
characteristics contrasted in the title, and in the fortunes of
Mariane, whose flighty romanticism is cured so that she makes a
sensible marriage after learning the villainy of her earlier
lover and finding that foolish sentimentalism may well give way
to the informing experiences of life,--the thesis, satirically
conveyed though with more subtlety than in the earlier
"Northanger Abbey," proclaims the folly of young-girl
sentimentality and hysteria. In "Pride and Prejudice," ranked by
many as her masterpiece, Darcy, with his foolish hauteur, his
self-consciousness of superior birth, is temporarily blind to
the worth of Elizabeth, who, on her part, does not see the good
in him through her sensitiveness to his patronizing attitude; as
the course of development brings them together in a happy union,
the lesson of toleration, of mutual comprehension, sinks into
the mind. The reader realizes the pettiness of the worldly
wisdom which blocks the way of joy. As we have said, "Northanger
Abbey" speaks a wise word against the abuse of emotionalism; it
tells of the experiences of a flighty Miss, bred on the
"Mysteries of Udolpho" style of literature, during a visit to a
country house where she imagined all the medieval romanticism
incident to that school of fiction,--aided and abetted by such
innocuous helps as a storm without and a lonesome chamber within
doors. Of the later stories, "Mansfield Park" asks us to
remember what it is to be poor and reared among rich relations;
"Emma" displays a reverse misery: the rich young woman whose
character is exposed to the adulations and shams incident upon
her position; while in "Persuasion," there is yet another idea
expressed by and through another type of girl; she who has
fallen into the habit of allowing herself to be over-ridden and
used by friends and family.--There is something all but
Shaksperian in that story's illustration of "the uncertainty of
all human events and calculations," as she herself expresses it:
Anne Eliot's radical victory is a moral triumph yet a warning
withal. And in each book, the lesson has been conveyed with the
unobtrusive indirection of fine art; the story is ever first, we
are getting fiction not lectures. These novels adorn truth; they
show what literature can effect by the method of much-in-little.
There is nothing sensational in incident or complication: as
with Richardson, an elopement is the highest stretch of external
excitement Miss Austen vouchsafes. Yet all is drawn so
beautifully to scale, as in such a scene as that of the quarrel
and estrangement of Elizabeth and Darcy in "Pride and
Prejudice," that the effect is greater than in the case of many
a misused opportunity where the events are earth-shaking in
import. The situation means so much to the participants, that
the reader becomes sympathetically involved. After all,
importance in fiction is exactly like importance in life;
important to whom? the philosopher asks. The relativity of
things human is a wholesome theory for the artist to bear in
mind. Even as the most terrific cataclysm on this third planet
from the sun in a minor system, makes not a ripple upon Mars, so
the most infinitesimal occurrence in eighteenth century
Hampshire may seem of account,--if only a master draws the
picture.
Not alone by making her characters thoroughly alive and
interesting does Miss Austen effect this result: but by her way
of telling the tale as well; by a preponderance of dialogue
along with clear portraiture she actually gets an effect that is
dramatic. Scenes from her books are staged even to the present
day. She found this manner of dialogue with comparative
parsimony of description and narration, to be her true method as
she grew as a fiction-maker: the early unpublished story
"Susan," and the first draught of "Sense and Sensibility," had
the epistolary form of Richardson, the more undramatic nature of
which is self-evident. As for characterization itself, she is
with the few: she has added famous specimens--men and women
both--to the natural history of fiction. To think of but one
book, "Pride and Prejudice," what an inimitable study of a
foolish woman is Mrs. Bennett! Who has drawn the insufferable
patroness more vividly than in a Lady Catherine de Bourgh! And
is not the sycophant clergyman hit off to the life in Mr.
Collins! Looking to the stories as a group, are not her
heroines, with Anne Eliot perhaps at their head, wonderful for
quiet attraction and truth, for distinctness, charm and variety?
Her personages are all observed; she had the admirable good
sense not to go beyond her last. She had every opportunity to
see the county squire, the baronet puffed up with a sense of his
own importance, the rattle and rake of her day, the tuft hunter,
the gentleman scholar, and the retired admiral (her two brothers
had that rank)--and she wisely decided to exhibit these and
other types familiar to her locality and class, instead of
drawing on her imagination or trying to extend by guess-work her
social purview. Her women in general, whether satiric and
unpleasant like Mrs. Norris in "Mansfield Park" or full of
winning qualities like Catherine Moreland and Anne Eliot, are
drawn with a sureness of hand, an insight, a complete
comprehension that cannot be over-praised. Jane Austen's
heroines are not only superior to her heroes (some of whom do
not get off scot-free from the charge of priggishness) but they
excel the female characterization of all English novelists save
only two or three,--one of them being Hardy. Her characters were
so real to herself, that she made statements about them to her
family as if they were actual,--a habit which reminds of Balzac.
The particular angle from which she looked on life was the
satirical: therefore, her danger is exaggeration, caricature.
Yet she yielded surprisingly little, and her reputation for
faithful transcripts from reality, can not now be assailed. Her
detached, whimsical attitude of scrutinizing the little cross-section
of life she has in hand, is of the very essence of her
charm: hers is that wit which is the humor of the mind:
something for inward smiling, though the features may not
change. Her comedy has in this way the unerring thrust and the
amused tolerance of a Moliere whom her admirer Macaulay should
have named rather than Shakspere when wishing to compliment her
by a comparison; with her manner of representation and her view
of life in mind, one reverts to Meredith's acute description of
the spirit that inheres in true comedy. "That slim, feasting
smile, shaped like the longbow, was once a big round satyr's
laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by
gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the
order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the
mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common
aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a
full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels,
without any flattering eagerness. Men's future upon earth does
not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present
does; and whenever they were out of proportion, overthrown,
affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic,
fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or
hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into
vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly,
plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their
professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws
binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they
offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or
mined with conceit, individually or in the bulk--the Spirit
overhead will look humanly malign and cast an oblique light on
them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic
Spirit."
If the "silvery laughter" betimes sounds a bit sharp and thinly
feminine, what would you have? Even genius must be subject to
the defect of its quality. Still, it must be confessed that this
attitude of the artist observer is broken in upon a little in
the later novels, beginning with "Mansfield Park," by a growing
tendency to moral on the time, a tendency that points ominously
to didacticism. There is something of the difference in Jane
Austen between early and late, that we shall afterwards meet in
that other great woman novelist, George Eliot. One might push
the point too far, but it is fair to make it.
We may also inquire--trying to see the thing freshly, with
independence, and to get away from the mere handing-on of a
traditional opinion--if Jane Austen's character-drawing, so far-famed
for its truth, does not at times o'erstep the modesty of
Nature. Goldwin Smith, in his biography of her, is quite right
in pointing out that she unquestionably overdraws her types: Mr.
Collins is at moments almost a reminder of Uriah Heap for oily
submissiveness: Sir Walter Eliot's conceit goes so far he seems
a theory more than a man, a "humor" in the Ben Jonson sense. So,
too, the valetudinarianism of Mr. Wood-house, like that of
Smollett's Bramble, is something strained; so is Lady de
Bourgh's pride and General Tilney's tyranny. Critics are fond of
violent contrasts and to set over against one another authors so
unlike, for example, as Miss Austen and Dickens is a favorite
occupation. Also is it convenient to put a tag on every author:
a mask reading realist, romanticist, psychologue, sensation-monger,
or some such designation, and then hold him to the name.
Thus, in the case of Austen it is a temptation to call her the
greatest truth-teller among novelists, and so leave her. But, as
a matter of fact, great as realist and artist as she was, she
does not hesitate at that heightening of effect which insures
clearer seeing, longer remembering and a keener pleasure.
Perhaps she is in the broad view all the better artist because
of this: a thought sadly forgotten by the extreme veritists of
our day. It is the business of art to improve upon Nature.
Again the reader of Jane Austen must expect to find her with the
limitation of her time and place: it is, frankly, a dreadfully
contracted view of the world she represents, just for the reason
that it is the view of her Hampshire gentry in the day of the
third George. The ideals seem low, narrow; they lack air and
light. Woman's only role is marriage; female propriety chokes
originality; money talks, family places individuals, and the
estimate of sex-relations is intricately involved with these
eidola. There is little sense of the higher and broader issues:
the spiritual restrictions are as definite as the social and
geographical: the insularity is magnificent. It all makes you
think of Tennyson's lines:
"They take the rustic cackle of their burg
For the great wave that echoes round the world!"
Hence, one of the bye-products of Miss Austen's books is their
revelation of hide-bound class-distinction, the not seldom ugly
parochialism--the utilitarian aims of a circle of highly
respectable English country folk during the closing years of the
eighteenth century. The opening sentence of her masterpiece
reads: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man
in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
Needless to say that "universally" here is applicable to a tiny
area of earth observed by a most charming spinster, at a certain
period of society now fast fading into a dim past. But the
sentence might serve fairly well as a motto for all her work:
every plot she conceived is firm-based upon this as a major
premise, and the particular feminine deduction from those words
may be found in the following taken from another work,
"Mansfield Park": "Being now in her twenty-first year, Maria
Bertram was beginning to think marriage a duty; and as a
marriage with Mr. Rushford would give her the enjoyment of a
larger income than her father's, as well as insure her the house
in town, which was now a prime object, it became by the same
rule of moral obligation, her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushford
if she could." The egocentric worldliness of this is superb. The
author, it may be granted, has a certain playful satire in her
manner here and elsewhere, when setting forth such views: yet it
seems to be fair to her to say that, taking her fiction as a
whole, she contentedly accepts this order of things and builds
upon it. She and her world exhibit not only worldliness but that
"other-worldliness" which is equally self-centered and
materialistic. Jane Austen is a highly enjoyable mondaine. To
compare her gamut with that of George Eliot or George Meredith
is to appreciate how much has happened since in social and
individual evolution. The wide social sympathy that throbs in
modern fiction is hardly born.
In spite, too, of the thorough good breeding of this woman
writer, the primness even of her outlook upon the world, there
is plain speaking in her books, even touches of coarseness that
are but the echo of the rankness which abounds in the
Fielding-Smollett school. Happily, it is a faint one.
Granting the slightness of her plots and their family likeness,
warm praise is due for the skill with which they are conducted;
they are neatly articulated, the climactic effect is, as a rule,
beautifully graduated and sure in its final force: the multitude
of littles which go to make up the story are, upon examination,
seen to be not irrelevant but members of the one body, working
together towards a common end. It is a puzzling question how
this firm art was secured: since technique does not mean so much
a gift from heaven as the taking of forethought, the self-conscious
skill of a practitioner. Miss Austen, setting down her
thoughts of an evening in a copybook in her lap, interrupted by
conversations and at the beck and call of household duties, does
not seem as one who was acquiring the mastery of a difficult
art-form. But the wind bloweth where it listeth--and the
evidences of skill are there; we can but chronicle the fact, and
welcome the result.
She was old-fashioned in her adherence to the "pleasant ending";
realist though she was, she could not go to the lengths either
of theme or interpretation in the portrayal of life which later
novelists have so sturdily ventured. It is easy to understand
that with her avowed dislike of tragedy, living in a time when
it was regarded as the business of fiction to be amusing--when,
in short, it was not fashionable to be disagreeable, as it has
since become--Jane Austen should have preferred to round out her
stories with a "curtain" that sends the audience home content.
She treats this desire in herself with a gentle cynicism which,
read to-day, detracts somewhat perhaps from the verity of her
pictures. She steps out from the picture at the close of her
book to say a word in proper person. Thus, in "Mansfield Park,"
in bringing Fanny Price into the arms of her early lover,
Edmund, she says: "I purposely abstain from dates on this
occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own,
aware that the cure of unconquerable passions and the transfer
of unchanging attachments must vary much as to time in different
people. I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the
time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a
week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford and
became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire."
But it cannot be urged against her that it was her habit to
effect these agreeable conclusions to her social histories by
tampering with probability or violently wresting events from
their proper sequence. Life is neither comedy nor tragedy--it is
tragi-comedy, or, if you prefer the graver emphasis, comi-tragedy.
Miss Austen, truth-lover, has as good a right to leave
her lovers at the juncture when we see them happily mated, as at
those more grievous junctures so much affected by later fiction.
Both representations may be true or false in effect, according
as the fictionist throws emphasis and manages light-and-shade. A
final page whereon all is couleur de rose has, no doubt, an
artificial look to us now: a writer of Miss Austen's school or
her kind of genius for reporting fact, could not have finished
her fictions in just the same way. There is no blame properly,
since the phenomenon has to do with the growth of human thought,
the change of ideals reflected in literature.
For one more point: Miss Austen only knew, or anyhow, only cared
to write, one sort of Novel--the love story. With her, a young
man and woman (or two couples having similar relations) are
interested in each other and after various complications arising
from their personal characteristics, from family interference or
other criss-cross of events, misplacement of affection being a
trump card, are united in the end. The formula is of primitive
simplicity. The wonder is that so much of involvement and
genuine human interest can be got out of such scant use of the
possible permutations of plot. It is all in the way it is done.
Love stories are still written in profusion, and we imagine that
so compelling a motive for fiction will still be vital (in some
one of its innumerable phases) in the twenty-fifth century. Yet
it is true that novelists now point with pride to the work of
the last generation of their art, in that it has so often made
sex love subsidiary to other appeals, or even eliminated it
altogether from their books. Some even boast of the fact that
not a woman is to be found in the pages of their latest
creation. Nearly one hundred years ago, Defoe showed the
possibility (if you happen to have genius) of making a powerful
story without the introduction of the eternal feminine: Crusoe
could not declare with Cyrano de Bergerac:
"Je vous dois d'avoir eu tout au moins, une amie;
Grace a vous, une robe a passe dans ma vie."
It is but natural that, immensely powerful as it is, such a
motive should have been over-worked: the gamut of variations has
been run from love licit to love illicit, and love degenerate
and abnormal to no-love-at-all. But any publisher will assure
you that still "love conquers all"; and in the early nineteenth
century any novelist who did not write tales of amatory interest
was a fool: the time was not ripe to consider an extension of
the theme nor a shifted point of view. For the earlier
story-tellers, in the language of Browning's lyric,
"Love is best."
Jane Austen's diction--or better, her style, which is more than
diction--in writing her series of social studies, affords a fine
example of the adaptation of means to end. Given the work to be
accomplished, the tools are perfect instruments for the purpose.
The student of English style in its evolution must marvel at the
idiom of Austen, so strangely modern is it, so little has time
been able to make it passe. From her first book, her manner
seems to be easy, adequate, unforced, with nothing about it
self-conscious or gauche. In the development of some great
writers the change from unsureness and vulgarity to the mastery
of mature years can be traced: Dickens is one such. But nothing
of the sort can be found in Austen. She has in "Northanger
Abbey" and "Pride and Prejudice"--early works--a power in
idiomatic English which enables her reader to see her thought
through its limpid medium of language, giving, it may be, as
little attention to the form of expression as a man uninstructed
in the niceties of a woman's dress gives to those details which
none the less in their totality produce on him a most formidable
effect. Miss Austen's is not the style of startling tricks: nor
has she the flashing felicities of a Stevenson which lead one to
return to a passage for re-gustation. Her manner rarely if ever
takes the attention from her matter. But her words and their
marshaling (always bearing in her mind her unambitious purpose)
make as fit a garment for her thought as was ever devised upon
English looms. If this is style, then Jane Austen possesses it,
as have very few of the race. There is just a touch of the
archaic in it, enough to give a quaintness that has charm
without being precious in the French sense; hers are breeding
and dignity without distance or stiffness. Now and again the
life-likeness is accentuated by a sort of undress which goes to
the verge of the slip-shod--as if a gentlewoman should not be
too particular, lest she seem professional; the sort of liberty
with the starched proprieties of English which Thackeray later
took with such delightful results. Of her style as a whole,
then, we may say that it is good literature for the very reason
that it is not literary; neither mannered nor mincing nor
affectedly plain. The style is the woman--and the woman wrote as
a lady should who is portraying genteel society; very much as
she would talk--with the difference the artist will always make
between life and its expression in letters.
Miss Austen's place was won slowly but surely, unlike those
authors whose works spring into instantaneous popularity, to be
forgotten with equal promptness, or others who like Mrs. Stowe
write a book which, for historical reasons, gains immediate
vogue and yet retains a certain reputation. The author of "Pride
and Prejudice" gains in position with the passing of the years.
She is one of the select company of English writers who after a
century are really read, really of more than historical
significance. New and attractive editions of her books are
frequent: she not only holds critical regard (and to criticism
her importance is permanent) but is read by an appreciable
number of the lovers of sound literature; read far more
generally, we feel sure, than Disraeli or Bulwer or Charles
Kingsley, who are so much nearer our own day and who filled so
large a place in their respective times. Compared with them,
Jane Austen appears a serene classic. When all is said, the
test, the supreme test, is to be read: that means that an author
is vitally alive, not dead on the shelves of a library where he
has been placed out of deference to the literary Mrs. Grundy.
Lessing felt this when he wrote his brilliant quatrain:
Wer wird nicht einen Klopstock loben,
Doch wird ihn jeder lesen? Nein!
Wir wollen weniger erhoben
Und fleissiger gelesen sein,
So was the century which was to be conspicuous for its
development of fiction that should portray the social relations
of contemporary life with fine and ever-increasing truth, most
happily inaugurated by a woman who founded its traditions and
was a wonderful example of its method. She is the literary
godmother of Trollope and Howells, and of all other novelists
since who prefer to the most spectacular uses of the imagination
the unsensational chronicling of life.