Ten Novels And Their Authors (10 page)

It is odd that Sir Walter should have omitted to make mention of the young lady’s most precious talent: her observation was searching and her sentiment edifying, but it was her humour that gave point to her observation and a prim liveliness to her sentiment. Her range was narrow. She wrote very much the same sort of story in all her books, and there is no great variety in her characters. They are very much the same persons, seen from a somewhat different point of view. She had common sense in a high degree, and no one knew better than she her limitations. Her experience of life was confined to a small circle of provincial society, and that is what she was content to deal with. She wrote only of what she knew. As was first pointed out by Dr. Chapman, she never attempted to reproduce a conversation of men when by themselves, which in the nature of things she could never have heard.

It has been noticed that though she lived through some
of the most stirring events of the world’s history, the French Revolution, the Terror, the rise and fall of Napoleon, she made no reference to them in her novels. She has on this account been blamed for an undue detachment. It should be remembered that in her day it was not polite for women to occupy themselves with politics, that was a matter for men to deal with; few women even read the newspapers; but there is no reason to suppose that, because she did not write about these events, she was not affected by them. She was fond of her family, two of her brothers were in the Navy, often enough in danger, and her letters show that they were much on her mind. But did she not display her good sense in not writing about such matters? She was too modest to suppose that her novels would be read long after her death; but if that had been her aim, she could not have acted more wisely than she did in avoiding to deal with affairs which from the literary standpoint were of passing interest. Already the novels concerned with the Second World War that have been written in the last few years are as dead as mutton. They were as ephemeral as the newspapers that day by day told us what was happening.

Most novelists have their ups and downs. Miss Austen is the only exception I know to prove the rule that only the mediocre maintain an equal level, a level of mediocrity. She is never more than a little below her best. Even in
Sense and Sensibility
and
Northanger Abbey
, in which there is much to cavil at, there is more to delight. Each of the others has its devoted, and even fanatic, admirers. Macaulay thought
Mansfield Park
her greatest achievement; other readers, equally illustrious, have preferred
Emma
; Disraeli read
Pride and Prejudice
seventeen times; to-day many look upon
Persuasion
as her most finished work. The great mass of readers, I believe, has accepted
Pride and Prejudice
as her masterpiece, and in such a case I think it well to accept their judgment. What makes a classic is not that it is praised by critics,
expounded by professors and studied in schools, but that large numbers of readers, generation after generation, have found pleasure and spiritual profit in reading it.

I myself think that
Pride and Prejudice
is on the whole the most satisfactory of all the novels. Its first sentence puts you in good humour: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ It sets the note, and the good humour it induces remains with you till, with regret, you have reached the last page.
Emma
is the only one of Miss Austen’s novels that I find long-winded. I can take no great interest in the love affair of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax; and, though Miss Bates is immensely amusing, don’t we get a little too much of her? The heroine is a snob, and the way she patronises those whom she looks upon as her social inferiors is repulsive. But we must not blame Miss Austen for that: we must remember that we of to-day do not read the same novel that was read by the readers of
her
day. Changes in manners and customs have wrought change in our outlook; in some ways we are narrower than our forebears, in others more liberal; an attitude which even a hundred years ago was general now affects us with malaise. We judge the books we read by our own prepossessions and our own standards of behaviour. That is unfair, but inevitable. In
Mansfield Park
the hero and heroine, Fanny and Edmund, are intolerable prigs; and all my sympathies go out to the unscrupulous, sprightly and charming Henry and Mary Crawford. I cannot understand why Sir Thomas Bertram should have been enraged when, on his return from overseas, he found his family amusing themselves with private theatricals. Since Jane herself thoroughly enjoyed them, one cannot see why she found his anger justifiable.
Persuasion
has a rare charm, and though one may wish that Anne were a little less matter-of-fact, a little more disinterested, a little more impulsive – in fact a little less old-maidish – except for the incident on the Cobb at Lyme Regis, I
should be forced to look upon it as the most perfect of the six. Jane Austen had no particular gift for inventing incident of an unusual character, and this one seems to me a very clumsy contrivance. Louisa Musgrove runs up some steep steps, and is ‘jumped down’ by her admirer, Captain Wentworth. He misses her, she falls on her head and is stunned. If he were going to give her his hands, as we are told he had been in the habit of doing in ‘jumping her off’ a stile, even if the Cobb then were twice as high as it is now, she could not have been more than six feet from the ground and, as she was jumping down, it is impossible that she should have fallen on her head. In any case, she would have fallen against the stalwart sailor and, though perhaps shaken and frightened, could hardly have hurt herself. Anyhow, she was unconscious, and the fuss that ensued is unbelievable. Captain Wentworth, who has seen action and made a fortune from prize-money, is paralysed with horror. The immediately subsequent behaviour of all concerned is so idiotic that I find it hard to believe that Miss Austen, who was able to take the illnesses and death of her friends and relations with quiet fortitude, did not look upon it as uncommonly foolish.

Professor Garrod, a learned and witty critic, has said that Jane Austen was incapable of writing a story, by which, he explains, he means a sequence of happenings, either romantic or uncommon. But that is not what Jane Austen had a talent for, and not what she tried to do. She had too much sense, and too sprightly a humour, to be romantic, and she was interested not in the uncommon, but in the common. She
made
it uncommon by the keenness of her observation, her irony and her playful wit. By a story most of us mean a connected and coherent narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Pride and Prejudice
begins in the right place, with the arrival on the scene of the two young men whose love for Elizabeth Bennet and her sister Jane provide the novel with its plot,
and it ends in the right place with their marriage. It is the traditional happy ending. This kind of ending has excited the scorn of the sophisticated, and of course it is true that many, perhaps most, marriages are not happy, and, further, that marriage concludes nothing; it is merely an introduction to another order of experience. Many authors have in consequence started their novels with marriage and dealt with its outcome. It is their right. But there is something to be said for the simple people who look upon marriage as a satisfactory conclusion to a work of fiction. They do so because they have an instinctive feeling that, by mating, a man and a woman have fulfilled their biological function; the interest which it is natural to feel in the steps that have led to this consummation, the birth of love, the obstacles, the misunderstandings, the avowals, now yields to its result, their issue, which is the generation that will succeed them. To nature, each couple is but a link in a chain, and the only importance of the link is that another link may be added to it. This is the novelist’s justification for the happy ending. In
Pride and Prejudice
, the reader’s satisfaction is considerably enhanced by the knowledge that the bridegroom has a substantial income and will take his bride to a fine house, surrounded by a park, and furnished throughout with expensive and elegant furniture.

Pride and Prejudice
is a very well-constructed book. The incidents follow one another naturally, and one’s sense of probability is nowhere outraged. It is, perhaps, odd that Elizabeth and Jane should be well-bred and well-behaved, whereas their mother and their three younger sisters should be, as Lady Knatchbull put it, ‘very much below par as to good society and its ways’; but that this should be so was essential to the story. I have allowed myself to wonder that Miss Austen did not avoid this tumbling-block by making Elizabeth and Jane the daughters of a first marriage of Mr. Bennet and making the Mrs. Bennet of the novel his second wife and the mother of
the three younger daughters. She liked Elizabeth best of all her heroines. ‘I must confess,’ she wrote, ‘that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.’ If, as some have thought, she was herself the original for her portrait of Elizabeth – and she has certainly given her her own gaiety, high spirit and courage, wit and readiness, good sense and right feeling – it is perhaps not rash to suppose that when she drew the placid, kindly and beautiful Jane Bennet she had in mind her sister Cassandra. Darcy has been generally regarded as a fearful cad. His first offence was his disinclination to dance with people he didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, at a public ball to which he had gone with a party. Not a very heinous one. It was unfortunate that Elizabeth should overhear the derogatory terms in which he spoke of her to Bingley, but he could not know that she was listening, and his excuse might have been that his friend was badgering him to do what he had no wish to. It is true that when Darcy proposes to Elizabeth it is with an unpardonable insolence, but pride, pride of birth and position, was the predominant trait of his character, and without it there would have been no story to tell, the manner of his proposal, moreover, gave Jane Austen opportunity for the most dramatic scene in the book; it is conceivable that, with the experience she gained later, she might have been able to indicate Darcy’s feelings, very natural and comprehensible feelings, in such a way as to antagonize Elizabeth, without putting into his mouth speeches so outrageous as to shock the reader. There is, perhaps, some exaggeration in the drawing of Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins, but to my mind little more than comedy allows. Comedy sees life in a light more sparkling, but colder, than that of common day, and a touch of exaggeration, that is, of farce, is often no disadvantage. A discreet admixture of farce, like a sprinkle of sugar on strawberries, may well make comedy more palatable. With regard to Lady Catherine, one must remember that in Miss Austen’s day
rank gave its possessors a sense of immense superiority over persons of inferior station; and they not only expected to be treated by them with the utmost deference, but were. In my own youth I knew great ladies whose sense of importance, though not quite so blatant, was not far removed from Lady Catherine’s. And as for Mr. Collins, who has not known, even to-day, men with that combination of obsequiousness and pomposity? That they have learnt to screen it with a front of geniality only makes it more odious.

Jane Austen was not a great stylist, but she wrote plainly and without affection. I think the influence of Dr. Johnson may be discerned in the structure of her sentences. She is apt to use the word of Latin origin, rather than the homely English one. It gives her phrase a slight formality which is far from unpleasant; indeed, it often adds point to a witty remark, and a demure savour to a malicious one. Her dialogue is probably as natural as dialogue could then be. To us it may seem somewhat stilted. Jane Bennet, speaking of her lover’s sisters, says: ‘They were certainly no friends to his acquaintance with me, which I cannot wonder at, since he might have chosen so much more advantageously in many respects.’ It may, of course, be that these were the very words she uttered; I think it unlikely. It is obviously not how a modern novelist would phrase the same remark. To set down on paper speech exactly as it is spoken is very tedious, and some arrangement of it is certainly necessary. It is only of late years, comparatively, that novelists, striving for verisimilitude, have been at pains to make their dialogue as colloquial as possible: I suspect that it was a convention of the past to cause persons of education to express themselves with a balance, and with a grammatical correctness, which cannot commonly have been at their command, and I presume readers accepted it as natural.

Allowing, then, for the slight formality of Miss Austen’s
dialogue, we must admit that she invariably made the person of her stories speak in character. I have only noticed one occasion upon which she slipped up: ‘Anne smiled and said, “My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation, that is what I call good company.” “You are mistaken,” said he gently, “that is not good company that is the best.”’

Mr. Elliot had faults of character; but if he was capable of making so admirable a reply to Anne’s remark, he must have had qualities with which his creator did not see fit to acquaint us. For my part, I am so charmed with it that I would have been content to see her marry him rather than the stodgy Captain Wentworth. It is true that Mr. Elliot had married a woman ‘of inferior station’ for her money, and neglected her; and his treatment of Mrs. Smith was ungenerous; but, after all, we only have her side of the story, and it may be that, had we been given a chance to hear his, we should have found his conduct pardonable.

There is one merit which Miss Austen has and which I have almost omitted to mention. She is wonderfully readable – more readable than some greater and more famous novelists. She deals, as Walter Scott said, with commonplace things, ‘the involvements, feelings and characters of ordinary life’; nothing very much happens in her books, and yet, when you come to the bottom of a page, you eagerly turn it to learn what will happen next. Nothing very much does and again you eagerly turn the page. The novelist who has the power to achieve this has the most precious gift a novelist can possess.