The Common Reader
bringing on “apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners
in one week”. Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to
give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off. She is
satisfied; she is content; she would not alter a hair on anybody’s head,
or move one brick or one blade of grass in a world which provides her
with such exquisite delight.
Nor, indeed, would we. For even if the pangs of outraged vanity, or the
heat of moral wrath, urged us to improve away a world so full of spite,
pettiness, and folly, the task is beyond our powers. People are like
that—the girl of fifteen knew it; the mature woman proves it. At this
very moment some Lady Bertram finds it almost too trying to keep Pug
from the flower beds; she sends Chapman to help Miss Fanny, a little
late. The discrimination is so perfect, the satire so just that,
consistent though it is, it almost escapes our notice. No touch of
pettiness, no hint of spite, rouses us from our contemplation. Delight
strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illumines these fools.
That elusive quality is indeed often made up of very different parts,
which it needs a peculiar genius to bring together. The wit of Jane
Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool,
her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model of sanity and
sense which she has in mind, and conveys to us unmistakably even while
she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an
impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring
heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows
up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among
the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts a Mary
Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets
her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten
thousand a year with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again
she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and
at once all Mary Crawford’s chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings
flat. Hence the depth, the beauty, the complexity of her scenes. From
such contrasts there comes a beauty, a solemnity even which are not only
as remarkable as her wit, but an inseparable part of it. In _The
Watsons_ she gives us a foretaste of this power; she makes us wonder why
an ordinary act of kindness, as she describes it, becomes so full of
meaning. In her masterpieces, the same gift is brought to perfection.
Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull
young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as
they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from
triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of
meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable in their
lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep,
trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this
drop in which all the happiness of life has collected gently subsides
again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.
What more natural then, with this insight into their profundity, than
that Jane Austen should have chosen to write of the trivialities of day
to day existence, of parties, picnics, and country dances? No
“suggestions to alter her style of writing” from the Prince Regent or
Mr. Clarke could tempt her; no romance, no adventure, no politics or
intrigue could hold a candle to life on a country house staircase as she
saw it. Indeed, the Prince Regent and his librarian had run their heads
against a very formidable obstacle; they were trying to tamper with an
incorruptible conscience, to disturb an infallible discretion. The child
who formed her sentences so finely when she was fifteen never ceased to
form them, and never wrote for the Prince Regent or his Librarian, but
for the world at large. She knew exactly what her powers were, and what
material they were fitted to deal with as material should be dealt with
by a writer, whose standard of finality was high. There were impressions
that lay outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice
could be properly coated and covered by her own resources. For example,
she could not make a girl talk enthusiastically of banners and chapels.
She could not throw herself wholeheartedly into a romantic moment. She
had all sorts of devices for evading scenes of passion. Nature and its
beauties she approached in a sidelong way of her own. She describes a
beautiful night without once mentioning the moon. Nevertheless, as we
read the few formal phrases about “the brilliancy of an unclouded night
and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods” the night is at once as
“solemn, and soothing, and lovely” as she tells us, quite simply, that
it was.
The balance of her gifts was singularly perfect. Among her finished
novels there are no failures, and among her many chapters few that sink
markedly below the level of the others. But, after all, she died at the
age of forty-two. She died at the height of her powers. She was still
subject to those changes which often make the final period of a writer’s
career the most interesting of all. Vivacious, irrepressible, gifted
with an invention of great vitality, there can be no doubt that she
would have written more, had she lived, and it is tempting to consider
whether she would not have written differently. The boundaries were
marked; moons, mountains, and castles lay on the other side. But was she
not sometimes tempted to trespass for a minute? Was she not beginning,
in her own gay and brilliant manner, to contemplate a little voyage of
discovery?
Let us take _Persuasion_, the last completed novel, and look by its
light at the books she might have written had she lived. There is a
peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in _Persuasion_. The dullness is
that which so often marks the transition stage between two different
periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with
the ways of her world; she no longer notes them freshly. There is an
asperity in her comedy which suggests that she has almost ceased to be
amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or the snobbery of a Miss
Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude. She is no longer so
freshly aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is not
altogether on her object. But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done
this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do
something which she has never yet attempted. There is a new element in
_Persuasion_, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and
insist that it was “the most beautiful of her works”. She is beginning
to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic
than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of
Anne: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned
romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural
beginning”. She dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of
nature, upon the autumn where she had been wont to dwell upon the
spring. She talks of the “influence so sweet and so sad of autumnal
months in the country”. She marks “the tawny leaves and withered
hedges”. “One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in
it”, she observes. But it is not only in a new sensibility to nature
that we detect the change. Her attitude to life itself is altered. She
is seeing it, for the greater part of the book, through the eyes of a
woman who, unhappy herself, has a special sympathy for the happiness and
unhappiness of others, which, until the very end, she is forced to
comment upon in silence. Therefore the observation is less of facts and
more of feelings than is usual. There is an expressed emotion in the
scene at the concert and in the famous talk about woman’s constancy
which proves not merely the biographical fact that Jane Austen had
loved, but the æsthetic fact that she was no longer afraid to say so.
Experience, when it was of a serious kind, had to sink very deep, and to
be thoroughly disinfected by the passage of time, before she allowed
herself to deal with it in fiction. But now, in 1817, she was ready.
Outwardly, too, in her circumstances, a change was imminent. Her fame
had grown very slowly. “I doubt”, wrote Mr. Austen Leigh, “whether it
would be possible to mention any other author of note whose personal
obscurity was so complete.” Had she lived a few more years only, all
that would have been altered. She would have stayed in London, dined
out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled,
and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to
feast upon at leisure.
And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane
Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of passion,
or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the importunity of
publishers or the flattery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity.
But she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been
shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less
(this is already perceptible in _Persuasion_) to dialogue and more to
reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvellous
little speeches which sum up, in a few minutes’ chatter, all that we
need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove for ever, that
shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and
psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now
perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a
method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for
conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only
what they are, but what life is. She would have stood farther away from
her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her
satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent
and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of
Proust—but enough. Vain are these speculations: the most perfect artist
among women, the writer whose books are immortal, died “just as she was
beginning to feel confidence in her own success”.
[Footnote 9: _Love and Friendship_, Chatto and Windus.]
_Modern Fiction_
In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction it
is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the
art is somehow an improvement upon the old. With their simple tools and
primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding did well and Jane Austen
even better, but compare their opportunities with ours! Their
masterpieces certainly have a strange air of simplicity. And yet the
analogy between literature and the process, to choose an example, of
making motor cars scarcely holds good beyond the first glance. It is
doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt
much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making
literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to
do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but
with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed
from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we
make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On
the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to
those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear
so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from
whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is