No More Learning

There was nothing of the literary woman in the external
affairs of her life and its conduct. Born on 16 December 1775, at
Steventon in Hampshire, of which her father was rector, and
dying at Winchester on 18 July 1817, she passed the intervening


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232
[CH.
Jane Austen
years almost entirely in the country. She lived with her family in
Bath from 1801 to 1806, and at Southampton from 1806 to 1809.
Later, she paid occasional visits to London, where she went not
a little to the play ; but she never moved in ‘literary circles,' was
never ‘lionised' and never drew much advantage from personal
contact with other people of intellect. The moment of her
greatest worldly exaltation occurred, probably, on 13 November
1815, when, by order of the prince regent, his librarian, J. S. Clarke,
showed her over the library of Carlton house, and intimated
that she might dedicate her next novel to his royal highness.
A few months later, Clarke, now chaplain and private English
secretary to prince Leopold of Coburg, wrote to her suggest-
ing that another novel should be dedicated to the prince, and
adding that'any historical romance, illustrative of the history of
the august House of Cobourg, would just now be very interesting. '
Jane Austen replied :
You are very, very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which
might recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical
romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be much more to
the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in
country villages as I deal in. But
no more write a romance than
an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance
under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for
me to keep it up, and never relax into laughing at myself or at 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, and though I may
never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in
any other.
The letter is full of touches characteristic of its author; but
the immediate point is Jane Austen's consciousness of her limits.
Living a quiet life in the country or at Bath, she kept her eyes
steadily upon the comedy and character about her? ; and, writing
her novels in the common sitting-room of the family, or in the
room which she shared with her beloved sister Cassandra, she gave
herself no airs.
Jane Austen was not a great or an adventurous reader. She
told her niece that she regretted not having read more and written
less in her younger days. She appears to have read what people
in general were reading. Her admiration for Crabbe inspired a
characteristically playful jest about her intending to become his
wife; Richardson she studied closely. For the most part, she
6
? Compare, with this letter, the amusing Plan of a novel, according to hints from
various quarters,' printed in Austen-Leigh, W. and R. A. , Jane Austen, pp. 337 ff.


## p. 233 (#257) ############################################

x]
233
Early Tales
read, like other people, the current novels and poems. But,
whatever she read, she turned to account-largely, it must be
admitted, through her shrewd sense of humour. The aim of
making fun of other novels underlay the first work which she
completed and sold, Northanger Abbey ; and burlesque and
parody appear to have been the motives of most of the stories
which she wrote while she was a young girl. They are extant in
manuscript; and we are told that they
are of a slight and flimsy texture, and are generally intended to be non-
sensical. . . . However puerile the matter, they are always composed in pure
simple English, quite free from the over-ornamented style which might be
expected from so young a writer.
Others of these early stories were seriously intended ; and the
opening of one of them, Kitty, or The Bower, has the very manner
of the opening of her published novels.
The transition from these earliest efforts to her published work
may be found in an unfinished story, which the author refrained
from making public, but which was printed by J. E. Austen-Leigh
in the second edition (1871) of his Memoir of Jane Austen.
Somewhere, so far as can be ascertained, between 1792 and 1796,
when Jane Austen was between seventeen and twenty-one years
old, she wrote this fragment, Lady Susan. The influence of
Richardson upon its form is clear; the tale is written in letters.
Possibly, too, Fanny Burney's Evelina may have provided a hint
for the situation of a young girl, Frederica. The chief character,
Lady Susan Vernon, is a finished and impressive study of a very
wicked woman—a cruel and utterly selfish schemer. Jane Austen
left the tale unfinished, possibly because she found that Lady Susan
was too wicked to be consonant with her own powers of character-
drawing ; possibly, because she felt hampered (brilliant letter-
writer though she was in her own person, and in the persons of her
creation) by the epistolary form. In either case, we see at work
that severe artistic self-judgment which is one of the chief causes
of her power. About the same time, she completed Elinor and
Marianne, a first sketch for Sense and Sensibility, which, like
Lady Susan, was written in letters. The author did not offer it
for publication, and never afterwards attempted the epistolary
form of novel.
Jane Austen was twenty-one when she began, in 1796, the
earliest of her published works, the novel then called First
Impressions, but new-named Pride and Prejudice on its publica-
tion, in a revised form, in 1813. In 1797, her father offered the


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234
[CH.
Jane Austen
manuscript to Cadell, the London publisher, who promptly
declined to consider it. First Impressions had been completed
some three months when Jane Austen began to write Sense and
Sensibility. This novel appears to have been left unfinished for
some thirteen years, or, if finished, to have been left unrevised;
for it was not till April 1811 that it was in the hands of the
printer, and it was published in the autumn of that year, the title-
page stating that it was written By a Lady. This was the first
of Jane Austen's books to be published. Its success was im-
mediate. In 1798, she began to write Susan, which was the
first draft of Northanger Abbey. This, too, she put by for some
years. In 1803, she sold it to a London publisher, who did not
issue it; in 1809, she tried in vain to secure publication ; in 1816,
she succeeded in recovering the manuscript. She then, perhaps,
worked upon it further ; yet, she was still doubtful whether she
; ,
should publish it or not, and, at last, it was posthumously published
in two volumes in 1818, at the same time as Persuasion'. In 1803
or 1804 (according to the only piece of evidence-the dates in
the water-marks of the paper on which it is written), Jane Austen
began a story that she never finished; it was published under the
title The Watsons, by J. E. Austen-Leigh in the second edition
(1871) of his Memoir. He suggests that
the author became aware of the evil of having placed her heroine too low, in
such a position of poverty and obscurity as, though not necessarily connected
with vulgarity, has a sad tendency to degenerate into it-
a suggestion which displays little appreciation of the spirit of
Jane Austen's work, and is at variance with the facts of the story.
Emma Watson, though poor, is gentle-born; and the only hint
of vulgarity to be observed in the tale is furnished by an im-
pertinent peer, Lord Osborne, and a hardened flirt in good
circumstances, Tom Musgrave. It appears to have been the
author's intention that the heroine should ultimately marry a
refined and intelligent clergyman, whose character, together with
that of Henry Tilney, might have served to counteract the im-
pression produced by that of Mr Collins and of Mr Elton.
After 1803, or 1804, there came a gap of several years in Jane
Austen's literary work. It was not till 1812 that she began
Mansfield Park, which was finished in June 1813, and published
in or about May 1814. Emma was begun in January 1814,
1 On the writing and publication of Northanger Abbey, see Austen-Leigh, W. and
R. A. , Jane Austen, pp. 96–97, 174–5, 230—4, 333, 336, 337.


## p. 235 (#259) ############################################

x]
Northanger Abbey
235
finished in March 1815 and published in December 1815. Per-
suasion, the last-written of her published works, was begun in
the spring or summer of 1815 and finished in July 1816. The
manuscript was still in her hands at her death in 1817; and was
posthumously published in two volumes in 1818. In January
1817, she began to write a new novel, but, after the middle of
March, could work no more. Various reasons have been assigned
for the gap in her literary production between 1803 or 1804 and
1812. It will be noticed that, from 1812 to 1816, she worked
steadily; and further significance of the dates mentioned above is
her reluctance to publish anything that had not undergone long
meditation and revision.
Of the six published novels, Northanger Abbey is, probably,
that which comes nearest to being Jane Austen's earliest work.
Finished before 1803, it may have been revised after she recovered
the manuscript in 1816; but it seems unlikely that it received
80 complete a revision as did Pride and Prejudice and Sense and
Sensibility. In the 'Advertisement by the Authoress,' which
prefaced the book on its publication, Jane Austen writes :
The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed
since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during
that period places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone consider-
able changes.
The novel paints the world of 1803, not that of 1816.
It has,
moreover, features that distinguish it from the other published
works. It is linked to the earlier stories, in which Jane Austen
made fun of the sensational and romantic novels then popular.
As the source of Joseph Andrews was the desire to ridicule
Pamela, so the source of Northanger Abbey was the desire to
ridicule such romantic tales as The Mysteries of Udolpho by
Mrs Radcliffe ; and, as Joseph Andrews developed into something
beyond a parody, so did Northanger Abbey. Secondly, there is a
youthful gaiety, almost jollity, about the work, a touch of some-
thing very near to farce, which appears in none of the other novels.
Catherine Morland, again, may not be the youngest of Jane
Austen's heroines (Marianne Dashwood and Fanny Price were
certainly younger); but the frank girlishness which makes her
delightful gives the impression of being more in tune with the
author's spirit than the more critically studied natures of
Marianne and Fanny. Be that as it may, Northanger Abbey
has more in it of the spirit of youthfulness than any of the other
novels. Its idea was, apparently, intended to be the contrast


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236
[CH.
Jane Austen
between a normal, healthy-natured girl and the romantic heroines
of fiction; and, by showing the girl slightly affected with romantic
notions, Jane Austen exhibits the contrast between the world as
it is and the world as imagined by the romancers whom she
wished to ridicule. The first paragraph of the first chapter,
in telling us what Catherine Morland was, tells us, with delicate
irony, what she was not; dwelling, in every line, upon the ex-
traordinary beauty and ability of romantic heroines. As the
story goes on, we learn that a girl may completely lack this
extraordinary beauty and ability without falling into the opposite
extremes. At Bath, Catherine Morland comes into contact with
silly and vulgar people, the Thorpes ; and the contrast makes her
candour and right feeling shine all the brighter; while, under the
educative influence of wellbred people with a sense of humour,
the Tilneys, she develops quickly. Staying at the Tilneys' house,
she is cured of her last remnant of romantic folly ; and, on
leaving her, we are confident that she will make Henry Tilney
a sensible and charming wife. Jane Austen's sound and lively
sense, her Greek feeling for balance and proportion, are not less
clear in Northanger Abbey than in the other novels. None of the
others, moreover, gives so clear an impression of the author's enjoy-
ment in writing her story. The scenes of amusement at Bath, the
vulgarity and insincerity of Isabella Thorpe, the broader comedy
of her brother, the ironic talk of Henry Tilney, all are executed
with high-spirited gusto; and we may believe that Jane Austen
loved the simple-minded, warm-hearted girl, whom she tenderly
steers between the rocks into harbour.
With Sense and Sensibility, we revert to the chronological
order of publication. Elinor and Marianne, a first sketch of the
story, written in the form of letters, appears to have been read
aloud by Jane Austen to her family about 1795 ; in the autumn of
1797, she began to write the novel in its present form ; and, after
laying it aside for some years, she prepared it for publication in
1809, when, after several changes of abode, she had settled at
Chawton in Hampshire. Begun before Northanger Abbey, it
lacks the youthful spirit of that novel, while betraying, in a
different manner, the inexperience of its author. In construction
and characterisation, it is the weakest of Jane Austen's novels.
The hearty, vulgar Mrs Jennings, her bearish son-in-law,
Mr Palmer, her silly daughter, Mrs Palmer, provide comedy, it is
true; but this comedy is mere. comic relief '-a separate matter
;
from the story; and it is not fitted to the story with perfect


## p. 237 (#261) ############################################

CH.
237
x]
Sense and Sensibility
3
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adroitness. In the conduct of the novel, the feebleness of
Edward Ferrars, the nonentity of colonel Brandon and the mean-
ness of the Steele sisters are all a little exaggerated, as if Jane
Austen's desire to make her point had interfered with her
complete control of her material. It is, to some extent, the same
with Mrs Dashwood and her two elder daughters. Anxiety to
demonstrate that strong feelings are not incompatible with self-
restraint, and to show the folly of an exaggerated expression of
sentiment, has resulted in a touch of something like acerbity in
the treatment of Mrs Dashwood and Marianne (suggesting that
Jane Austen was personally angry with them), and in a too rarely
dissipated atmosphere of reproof about Elinor. The spirit of
pure comedy is not so constant in Sense and Sensibility as in any
other novel that Jane Austen wrote; though the second chapter,
which describes the famous discussion between John Dashwood
and his wife, is, perhaps, the most perfect to be found in any
of her novels.
Jane Austen’s next novel, Pride and Prejudice, published in
1813, is her most brilliant work. The wit in it sparkles. She
herself thought that it needed more relief. She wrote to her
sister, Cassandra, with a characteristic couching of sober sense in
playful exaggeration :
The work rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade;
it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if
it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something
unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott,
or the history of Buonoparte, on anything that would form a contrast, and
bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism
of the general style.
She did not perceive, perhaps, how the story gains in gravity and
quiet when it comes to the change in Elizabeth Bennet's feeling
for Darcy. This part of the book offers a foretaste of the sym-
pathetic understanding which, later, was to give its peculiar
charm to Persuasion; and, besides supplying the needed relief
to the flashing wit with which Jane Austen reveals her critical
insight into people with whom she did not sympathise, it
affords a signal example of her subtle method. The story is
seen almost wholly through the eyes of Elizabeth Bennet; yet,
without moving from this standpoint, Jane Austen contrives to
show what was happening, without Elizabeth's knowledge, in
Elizabeth's mind. To a modern reader, the great blot on the
book is the author's neglect to lift Darcy sufficiently above
the level of aristocratic brutality: it has constantly to be
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## p. 238 (#262) ############################################

238
[CH.
Jane Austen
remembered that, in Jane Austen's day and social class, birth and
fortune were regarded with more respect than they are now.
Darcy's pride was something other than snobbishness; it was
the result of a genuinely aristocratic consciousness of merit,
acting upon a haughty nature. To Jane Austen herself, Eliza-
beth Bennet was 'as delightful a creature as ever appeared
in print'; and Pride and Prejudice (immediately upon its
publication) was 'her own darling child. ' With subsequent
generations, it has been the most popular of her novels, but not
because of Elizabeth or Darcy, still less for sweet Jane Bennet
and her honest Bingley. The outstanding merit of the book is
its witty exposition of foolish and disagreeable people : Mr
Bennet (he must be included for his moral indolence, however
he may delight by his humour), Mrs Bennet, Elizabeth's younger
sisters, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, best of all, Mr Collins.
Taken by itself, this study of a pompous prig is masterly; but, in
Pride and Prejudice, nothing can be taken by itself. The art of
the book is so fine that it contains no character which is without
effect upon the whole ; and, in a novel dealing with pride and
with prejudice, the study of such toadyism and such stupidity
as that of Mr Collins gives and gains incalculable force.
Jane Austen's next novel, Mansfield Park, is less brilliant
and sparkling than Pride and Prejudice, and, while entering no
less subtly than Persuasion into the fine shades of the affections
and feelings, it is the widest in scope of the six. Begun, pro-
bably, in the autumn of 1812, and finished in the summer of 1813,
this was the first novel which Jane Austen had written without
interruption, and remains the finest example of her power of
sustaining the interest throughout a long and quiet narrative.
The development of Fanny Price, from the shy little girl into the
woman who marries Edmund Bertram, is one of Jane Austen's
finest achievements in the exposition of character; and, in all
fiction, there are few more masterly devices of artistic truth than
the effect of Crawford's advances upon Fanny herself and upon
Fanny's importance in the reader's mind. In Mansfield Park,
the study of Fanny Price is only one of several excellent studies
of
young women--the two Bertram girls and Miss Crawford being
chief among the rest. Mansfield Park is the book in which Jane
Austen most clearly shows the influence of Richardson, whose Sir
Charles Grandison was one of her favourite novels; and her genius
can scarcely be more happily appreciated than by a study of the
manner in which she weaves into material of a Richardsonian
-


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x]
239
Mansfield Park.
Emma
fineness the brilliant threads of such witty portraiture of mean or
foolish people as that of Lady Bertram, of Mrs Norris, of Fanny's
own family, of Mr Yates, Mr Rushworth and others. Edmund
Bertram, though presenting a great advance on the Edward Ferrars
of Sense and Sensibility, suffers, in his character of 'hero,' from
something of the same disability, a weakness which, to some
extent, interferes with the reader's interest in his fortune. And
there appears to be some slight uncertainty in the drawing of
Sir Thomas Bertram, whom we are scarcely prepared by the early
part of the story to find a man of so much good sense and
affection as he appears later. Against him, however, must be set
,
the author's notable success in the character of Henry Crawford
an example of male portraiture that has never been equalled by
a woman writer. One subsidiary person in the novel may lend to
it a personal interest. It has been suggested that Fanny's
brother, William Price, the young sailor, was drawn from Jane
Austen's recollections of what one of her own sailor brothers,
Charles Austen, had been, twelve or fourteen years earlier.
Emma, the fourth and last novel which Jane Austen published
in her lifetime, was begun in January 1814, and finished in March
1815, to appear in the following December. Jane Austen was
now at the height of her powers. The book was written rapidly
and surely; and the success of her previous novels doubtless
encouraged her to express herself with confidence in the way
peculiarly her own. She chose, as she declared, 'a heroine whom
no one but myself will much like'; and, in delineating her, she
made no sacrifices to any public desire for what Mary Russell
Mitford, in passing judgment on her work, called the beau
idéal of the female character. ' Emma is a tiresome girl, full of
faults ; and yet, far from not being 'much liked,' she has called
forth more fervent affection than any other of Jane Austen's
characters. Jane Austen herself admired Elizabeth Bennet; she
loved little Fanny Price; Emma, she both loved and admired,
without a shade of patronage or a hint of heroine-worship.
That Emma should be loved, as she is loved, for her faults as well
as for her virtues, is one among Jane Austen’s many claims to the
rank of greatness in her art. Scarcely less skilful is the portrait
of the wise and patient Knightley, whose reproofs to the way-
ward girl never shake the reader's conviction of his humanity and
charm. The laughter of the comic spirit never comes near to
sharpness in Emma, except in the case of Mrs Elton; and, even
1 Austen-Leigh, W. and R. A. , Jane Austen, p. 298.


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240
[CH.
Jane Austen
with Mrs Elton, we feel, as we scarcely feel with the Steele sisters
or with Mr Collins, that Jane Austen is not allowing the lady to
show herself at her very worst. For Mr Woodhouse, Miss Bates
and Harriet Smith she clearly had some degree of affection, which
she communicates to her readers. And, with regard to Harriet
Smith, it is to be noticed that, rarely as Jane Austen touches our
pity, she feels this helpless, bewildered creature to be a fit occasion
for compassion, as her more capable women are not, and allows
us to be touched by Harriet Smith's regrets for Robert Martin
and the Abbey Mill farm. There are, we may add, few finer
examples in fiction of suggestive reticence than Jane Austen's
treatment of Jane Fairfax. The mystery of the story demands
that we should be kept in the dark about her ; yet we feel that we
know her as well as any character that Jane Austen created.
After Emma, Jane Austen published nothing in her lifetime.
The posthumous novel Persuasion was begun in the spring or
summer of 1815 and finished in July 1816, the last two chapters
being written a little later, to take the place of the original last
chapter, which did not satisfy the author. Then she put the
manuscript by ; and her ill-health and death caused it to remain un-
published. Signs of failing energy and spirits have been observed
by some in Persuasion. The interpolated story told to Anne
Eliot by Mrs Smith may be admitted to be dull, for Jane Austen ;
and some weight may be attached to her statement that Anne
Eliot was 'almost too good for me. ' The tone of the novel, as a
whole, is graver and tenderer than that of any of the other five;
but woven in with its gravity and tenderness is the most delicate
and mellow of all Jane Austen's humour. Such imperfections
as the novel may have may be interpreted with equal fairness
as signs of growth rather than of decay. Jane Austen, was
changing her tone, and had not yet completely mastered the new
conditions. Whether Anne Eliot was 'too good' for her or not,
she achieved the difficult feat of making her interesting from start
to finish
The same may be said of captain Wentworth. In
himself, he is an interesting personage ; but, in Persuasion, Jane
Austen accomplishes more perfectly than in any other of her
novels the task of revealing the interest which lies in the inter-
play of ordinary persons.
All the characters in Persuasion are
less sharply accentuated than those in the other novels. In Sir
Walter Eliot and Miss Eliot, Mrs Clay and Mr and Mrs Charles
Musgrave, Jane Austen is making milder fun than usual of less
prominent 'humours' than usual. The charm of the novel lies in
.


## p. 241 (#265) ############################################

x] The Novel of Character 241
the luminous reactions of one character upon another, and of all
upon each ; and, considering its difference from the other novels, it
suggests that Jane Austen, had she lived, would have excelled
in fiction of another kind than that which she had hitherto
practised.
From one point of view, then, Persuasion may be regarded
as Jane Austen’s most characteristic novel. If it lacks the sharp
wit and the high spirits of Pride and Prejudice, and the wide
scope of Mansfield Park, it reveals more than they do of the
interest which the seeing eye may find in ordinary people. Therein
lies Jane Austen’s individual quality. We have seen how conscious
she was of her peculiar bent, and how resolute to keep to it. Maria
Edgeworth, as Scott remarked, can offer us higher life, more
romantic incident and broader comedy. Of romance, Jane Austen
has none, either in character or in setting. The rocks and streams,
the forests and castles, which form the furniture of the romantics,
have no place in her novels. This was due to no want of appre-
ciation of natural beauty. The opening of chapter ix of Sense
and Sensibility would be sufficient to prove the contrary. Elinor,
Marianne and Edward's talk on the picturesque in chapter XVIII
of the same novel reveals once more the justice, the Greek sense
and balance, that determine all Jane Austen's work; and, in
chapter VIII of Mansfield Park, we find her giving the capital
example of her principle. The party approaching Sotherton dis-
cusses its appearance ; yet, the prominent interest of the scene is
not the picturesqueness of Sotherton, but the relation of Sotherton
and of its owner, Mr Rushworth, to the hopes and fears of women
among the visitors. In her reaction from romance, Jane Austen
dispensed with all aids borrowed from romance. The fall of Louisa
Musgrave from the steps on the Cobb at Lyme Regis (an incident
strictly consonant with the character and aims of Louisa); the
fall of Marianne on the hill at Barton ; the sudden return of Sir
Thomas Bertram to Mansfield park—these are the most exciting
incidents in the six novels. The very elopements are contem-
plated indirectly, and used, not for their own dramatic force, but
for their effect upon the lives of others than the runaways.
Character, not incident, was Jane Austen's aim; and, of character,
whether in itself marked, or interesting only in its interactions,
she found enough in the narrow circle and the humdrum life
encountered by her immediate view. Humdrum, it certainly was.
During Jane Austen’s working years, while England was fighting
for existence or newly triumphant, while the prince regent
16
E, L. XII,
CH. X.


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242
[ch.
Jane Austen
was in the hey-day of his luxury and while revolutionary ideas
were winning for poets and reformers present shame and future
glory, there can have been no lack of bright colour and sharp
contrast in life. Local humours, ripe and rich in the days of
Fielding, can hardly have been planed away by the action of the
growing refinement. Jane Austen, as novelist, is blind to all this
multicoloured life. There are no extremes, social or other, in her
books.
The peasantry is scarcely mentioned ; of noblemen, there
is not one. Of set purpose, she keeps her eye fixed upon the
manners of a small circle of country gentlefolk, who seem to
have nothing to do but to pay calls, picnic, take walks, drive out,
talk and dance. Of dancing, Jane Austen herself was fond;
private theatricals are considered a little too heady an amuse-
ment for that circle. It is a world of idle men-her clergy are
frequently absentees—and of unoccupied women, not one of
whom is remarkable for any fineness or complexity of dis-
position or intellect, or for any strong peculiarity of circum-
stance. She shows, moreover, no ardent moral purpose or
intellectual passion which might lend force where force was not
to be found ; she never uses her characters as pegs for ethical or
metaphysical doctrines. Newman remarked of her that she had
not a dream of the high catholic roos. There are no great
passions in her stories. She rarely appeals to her reader's
emotions, and never by means of the characters that she most
admires or likes. It may be said that, on the whole, she appears
to trust and to value love—it was observed by Whately that all
Anne Eliot's troubles arose from her not yielding to her
youthful love for Wentworth—but, beyond that, it would be
unsafe to go.
With these limitations, natural and chosen, and out of these
unpromising materials, Jane Austen composed novels that come
near to artistic perfection. Her greatest gift was that sense of
balance and proportion to which reference has been already made.
To everything that she saw, she applied this touchstone of good
sense. Next came her extraordinarily perspicacious and sensitive
understanding, not of women only, but of men as well. Not-
withstanding her sheltered life and the moderate amount of her
learning, she saw deeply and clearly to the springs of action, and
understood the finest shades of feeling and motive. She was
sensitive to the slightest deviation from the standard of good
breeding and good sense ; and any deviation (there can be no
doubt of it) appealed to her sense of fun. Gossip by Miss Mitford


## p. 243 (#267) ############################################

x]
Her Discrimination
243
and, perhaps, others, brought her a reputation for acerbity and
spleen. She reveals scarcely a hint of either in her writings ; she is
scrupulously fair even to Mrs Norris and to Mr Collins. Her
attitude as satirist is best explained by a quotation from chapter XI
of Pride and Prejudice. Says Darcy :
The wisest and the best of men-nay, the wisest and best of their
actions-may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life
is a joke.
'Certainly,' replied Elizabeth—there are such people, but I hope I am
not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and
nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at
them whenever I can. '
And her sense of fun was proportioned to the follies which
diverted her. Gross humours she disliked in other writers'
novels, and never attempted in her own. With the sharpest and
most delicate of wit, as deft in expression as it was subtle in
perception, she diverted herself and her readers with the fine
shades of folly in a circle of which the rudest member might be
called refined. Her fun, moreover, was always fair, always good-
tempered and always maintained in relation to her standard of
good sense and good manners. To her delicate perception and
her fairness, combined, is due what Whately called her Shake-
spearean discrimination in fools. Mr Collins could not be con-
fused with Mr Elton, nor Lucy Steele with Mrs Elton, nor the
proud Miss Eliot with the proud Misses Bertram. Jane Austen
clings to her fairness even when it seems to tell against her
favourite characters. She makes Fanny Price unhappy in her
parents' home at Portsmouth, where a feebler novelist would have
attempted to show her heroine in a light purely favourable; she
attributes to Emma Woodhouse innumerable little failings. This
just and consistent fidelity to character plays a large part in the
subtlety of her discrimination, not only in fools but in less
obviously diverting people. Her clarity of imaginative vision, and
her fidelity to what she saw with it, make her characters real.
Imagine Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse
to be living women today, and at a first meeting in a drawing-
room we might not know which was which. After seeing them
through Jane Austen's eyes, we know them as thoroughly as we
know the characters of Shakespeare ; for, like Shakespeare, she
knew all about the creatures of her observation and imagination.
It is not only that she could tell her family and friends particulars
of their lives which did not appear in the novels, or that she left
their natures so plain that later writers may amuse themselves by
16--2


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244
[CH. X
Jane Austen
continuing their histories? They are seen in the round, and are
true, in the smallest details, to the particular nature.
Modest as she was, and working purposely in a very restricted
field, Jane Austen set herself a very high artistic aim. To imagine
and express personages, not types; to develop and preserve their
characters with strict fidelity; to reveal them not by external
analysis but by narrative in which they should appear to reveal
themselves; to attain, in the construction of her novels, as near
as might be, to a perfection of form that should be the outcome of
the interaction of the natures and motives in the story: these
were her aims, and these aims she achieved, perhaps, with more
consistency and more completeness than any other novelist except,
it may be, de Maupassant. In the earlier novels, her wit diverts
her readers with its liveliness ; her later work shows a tenderer,
graver outlook and a deepening of her study of character.
Through all alike, there runs the endearing charm of a shrewd
mind and a sweet nature.
1 Cf. Brinton, Sybil G. , Old Friends and New Fancies, 1913.


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CHAPTER XI
LESSER NOVELISTS
2
JANE AUSTEN did not found any school ; and her artistic
strictness is not shown by any of her contemporaries or immediate
successors. Several among them, especially women writers, took
advantage of the new fields which she had opened to fiction;
but, in most cases, the influence of the earlier and less regular
novel is evident, and perhaps the influence of a period full of con-
trasts and extremes. In the novels of Susan Edmondstone Ferrier
there is something of the rough sarcasm of Smollett, mingled with
a strong didactic flavour and with occasional displays of sentiment
that may be due to Mackenzie. To her personal friend Scott, she
may have owed something in her studies of Scottish life, but
Maria Edgeworth was her principal model. Her first novel,
Marriage, was written in 1810, though it was not published till
1818, when it appeared anonymously. Marriage is full of vigorous
work. The studies of the highland family into which an English
lady of aristocratic birth and selfish temper marries by elope-
ment are spirited and humourous; but the story rambles on through
a good many years; and the character of Lady Juliana, poor,
proud and worldly, is but a thin thread on which to hang the tale
of three generations. The Inheritance, published in 1824, has
more unity. Destiny, published in 1831, is chiefly remarkable for
the character of McDow, the minister. To compare McDow with
Mr Collins is to see the difference between Jane Austen and
Susan Ferrier; but the latter, with her coarse workmanship
succeeds in achieving a picture full of humour. The novel becomes
very sentimental and strained towards the close, a criticism which,
also, holds true of The Inheritance; but Susan Ferrier was a
novelist of power, whose work is still fresh and interesting.
Coarse as her workmanship may be compared with that of
Jane Austen, it is refined and delicate by the side of that of a re-
markable woman, Frances, the mother of Anthony and Augustus, Adolphers. !
1


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246
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
Trollope. Mrs Trollope's best work was done in middle-age,
and may be found in two novels, The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837)
and The Widow Barnaby (1838). The Vicar of Wrexhill is
a book of virulent malignity, in which the chief character is a
clergyman of evangelical beliefs. He is licentious, suave, cold and
cruel; and the force with which his vices are shown to be mingled
with his religion could only have been displayed by a novelist of
courageous and powerful mind. Be the character possible or im-
possible, it is throughout credible in the reading; and Mrs
Trollope never permits her reader to escape from the terror which
the man and his deeds arouse. The Widow Barnaby is written
in more humourous mood. The chief character is the buxom widow
of a country apothecary, who poses as a woman of fortune.
Vulgar, selfish and cruel, she is still a source of constant delight
to readers who have stomached coarser things in Smollett.
Rough as Mrs Trollope's work is, and crude, especially in the
drawing of minor characters, her power and her directness remain
unmatched by any English author of her sex, save Aphra Behn.
There is something, perhaps, of Jane Austen's influence to be
traced in the novels of Catherine Grace Gore. Mrs Gore, like
Mrs Trollope, was a very prolific worker. Her reputation has
suffered at Thackeray's hands. From Lords and Liveries, by
the author of Dukes and Déjeuners, Heart and Diamonds,
Marchionesses and Milliners, one of Thackeray's Novels by
Eminent Hands, it might be imagined that Mrs Gore was
nothing but a novelist of 'high life. ' True, she liked to give her
characters titles of nobility; and that was exactly the feature
in her work which would attract Thackeray's notice. But, in
Mrs Armytage, or Female Domination (1836) and in Mothers
and Daughters (1831) there is considerable ability. In Mothers
and Daughters may be traced clearly an attempt to follow Jane
Austen in fidelity to life and in unity of form and matter ; and
the study of the heartless ‘society' mother, Lady Maria Willingham,
is a more finely-painted piece of work than Susan Ferrier's more
extravagantly designed Lady Juliana Douglas. In Mrs Armytage,
Mrs Gore came nearest to being a novelist of the first rank. The
chief character in this tale of landed gentry in Yorkshire is a
woman of heroic and domineering temper, whose rather weak-
willed son has married the pretty daughter of a vulgar betting-
Broad contrasts, like that between Mrs Armytage and the
coarse and good-hearted relatives of her daughter-in-law, and
fine contrasts like that between Mrs Armytage and her son, are


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XI]
247
Mrs Gore. Mary Shelley
contrived with a sincere but not too subtle art, so as to throw
into relief the nature of this terrible and oppressive but, never-
theless, majestic woman. In all the unhappiness that she causes,
she is never altogether hateful; but, at the close, the author
refrains from exaggerating her punishment. The book shows a
fitness and justice that make it comparable to the work of Jane
Austen, though it is quite unlike that work in its gravity, its
didactic tone and its use of incident.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the poet, scarcely survives now as
a novelist, although Ethel Churchill, her last and best attempt in
fiction (1837), may take its place among the second-rate novels of
the day. So, too, may the Granby (1826) of Thomas Henry Lister.
Lister was a rather ladylike novelist, which, perhaps, accounts for
the erroneous attribution to him of Mrs Cradock’s novel, Hulse
House. But there is good work in Granby, with its fine, manly
hero and its baseborn, reckless, but not unattractive villain.
Lister moves easily among titles of nobility, and, in the course
of this story, presents us with an aristocratic coxcomb whom it
is difficult not to regard as a perverted Darcy. Lister is clever at
smart conversation, which seems to have been much valued in
its own day, however tiresome it may appear now; and he
succeeds in conveying an impression of a real world, inhabited by
real people. He has his interest, therefore, for the student of
external manners.
Meanwhile, the novel of terror, of which Jane Austen bad
made fun in Northanger Abbey, continued to flourish, though in a
modified form; and women were prominent among those who
wrote this kind of fiction. It was a woman, and a woman of
a later period in its history, who produced the finest work of
genius to be found in this class of writings, Frankenstein, or The
Modern Prometheus (1818).
Its author, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, has left on record the
circumstances of its production. With her husband, Byron and
Polidori, she occupied part of a wet summer in Switzerland in
reading volumes of ghost stories translated from German into
French. Byron suggested that each member of the party should
write a ghost story. Mary Shelley waited long for an idea. Con-
versations between Shelley and Byron about the experiments of
Darwin and the principle of life at length suggested to her the
subject of Frankenstein.
At first I thought but of a few pages or of a short tale; but Shelley urged
me to develop the idea at greater length. I certainly did not owe the


## p. 248 (#272) ############################################

248
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my
husband, and yet but for his incitement it would never have taken the form
in which it was presented to the world. From this declaration I must except
the preface. As far as I can recollect, it was entirely written by him.
It has been held, nevertheless, that Mary Shelley, unaided, was
incapable of writing so fine a story. 'Nothing,' wrote Richard
Garnett, 'but an absolute magnetising of her brain by Shelley's
can account for her having risen so far above her usual self as in
Frankenstein. Comparison of Frankenstein with a later work by
Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826), may, perhaps, temper that
judgment. The Last Man is a much longer work than Franken-
stein. It describes the destruction, spread over many years, of
the entire human race, all but one man, by an epidemic disease.
The book shows many signs of effort and labour. The imaginative
faculty often runs wild, and often flags. The social and political
foresight displayed is but feeble. The work is unequal and extra-
vagant. Yet, in The Last Man, there are indubitable traces of
the power that created Frankenstein ; and, if Mary Shelley, working
in unhappy days at a task too comprehensive for her strength,
could produce such a book as The Last Man, there is no reason
for doubting her capacity, while in stimulating society and amid
inspiring conversation, to reach the imaginative height of
Frankenstein. To a modern reader, the introductory part, which
relates to the Englishmen who met Frankenstein in the Polar
seas, seems too long and elaborate ; when the story becomes
confined to Frankenstein and the monster that he created, the
form is as pure as the matter is engrossing. And, unlike most
tales of terror, Frankenstein is entirely free from anything absurd.
The intellectual, no less than the emotional, level is maintained
throughout. In Mary Shelley's other principal novels, Valperga
(1823), a romance of medieval Italy, to which her father Godwin
gave some finishing touches, and Lodore (1835), a partly auto-
biographical story, there is clear evidence of a strong imagination
and no little power of emotional writing, though both lack sustained
mastery.
Frankenstein is founded upon scientific research, as if the time
had come when it was necessary to give some rational basis to the
terror which novel-readers had been content to accept for its own
sake. A later writer, Catherine Crowe, went further than Mary
Shelley in this direction. Mrs Crowe not only delighted in ghosts
and similar occasions of terror; in The Night Side of Nature
(1848), she attempted to find a scientific, or, as we should now call


## p. 249 (#273) ############################################

XI]
Catherine Crowe. George Croly 249
6
it, a psychic' explanation of such things; and the result is an
engaging volume of mingled story and speculation. In her two
novels, Adventures of Susan Hopley; or Circumstantial Evidence
(1841) and The Story of Lilly Dawson (1847), the horrors owe
but little to the supernatural. Robberies, murders and abductions
are the chief ingredients. Mrs Crowe had some power of imagina-
tion, or, rather, perhaps, of ingenuity in spinning tales of crime.
But her work is very ragged. She introduces so many characters
and so many unrelated episodes, that any skill which she may
show in weaving them together at the close of the book comes too
late to console the still bewildered reader.
Though the fiction of George Croly deals but little with the
supernatural, it has, on one side, a distinct affinity with the
novel of terror. The principal aim of his chief novel, Salathiel
(1829), is to overwhelm the reader with monstrous visions of
terror and dismay. The theme of the story is the destruction of
Jerusalem by the Romans under Titus; and here, as in Marston
(1846), a romance of the French revolution and the subsequent
European warfare, Croly touches, on another side, the historical
novelists. But he has not more affinity with Scott than with
Mrs Radcliffe. His models are two : Byron, from whom he takes
the character of his heroes, persons who do terrific deeds and
seldom cease complaining of their dark and tragic fate; and
De Quincey, on whom he modelled his prose. Often turgid, often
extravagant, often vulgar in its display, like that of his exemplar,
Croly's prose not seldom succeeds in impressing the reader by its
weight and volume; and he had a large vision of his subject.
A dash of humour might have made him a great novelist. Yet it
will remain strange that anyone writing historical romances in the
heyday of the fame of Walter Scott could write so wholly unlike
Scott as did Croly. The difference between them was due partly
to a sturdy and pugnacious independence in Croly of which there
is much further evidence in his life and writings.
Another cause must be sought for the difference between
Scott and George Payne Rainsford James. As a historical novelist,
James was a professed follower of Scott. In the preface to the
third edition of his first novel, Richelieu (1829), James relates
how be sent the MS to Scott, who, after keeping it for some
months, returned it with a letter full of kindness and encourage-
ment. Without a particle of Scott's genius, James was a quick,
patient, indefatigable worker. He poured forth historical novel
after historical novel, all conscientiously accurate in historical


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250
Lesser Novelists
[CH.
fact, all dressed in well-invented incident, all diffuse and pompous in
style, and all lifeless, humourless and characterless. James fell an
easy victim to Thackeray's gift for parody; but the modern reader
will wonder why Thackeray took the trouble to parody James,
unless it were that the task was agreeably easy and that James's
popularity was worth a shaft of ridicule.
There is far more life and spirit about another author of
fiction half-historical, half-terrific, who also owed not a little
to the encouragement of Scott. William Harrison Ainsworth
has kept some of his popularity, while that of James has faded,
because Ainsworth, as little able as was James to unite
history with the study of character, had a vigorous imagina-
tion and wrote with gusto. Rookwood (1834), Jack Sheppard
(1839), The Tower of London (1840), Guy Fawkes (1841), Old
St Paul's (1841), The Lancashire Witches (1848), The South Sea
Bubble (1868): these and others in a very long list of romances
can still delight many grown men as well as boys, thanks to
their energetic movement and their vivid though rough style of
narration.
The coming of Scott did not suffice to divert certain older
channels of fiction that were still, if feebly, flowing. And, in the
work of Frederick Marryat, a stream that had sprung from Smollett
a
received a sudden access of volume and power. At one time, it
was customary to regard captain Marryat as a genial amateur,
a sea-captain who wrote sea-stories for boys. The fact that, from
1806 to 1830, Marryat served actively and ably in the navy did not
prevent him from being a novelist of very near the first rank.
He had little mastery over the construction of plot; his satire (as
exhibited, for instance, in Mr Easy's expositions of the doctrines
of liberty) is very thin and shallow. But, in the deft delineation of
oddity of character he is worthy of mention with Sterne or with
Dickens; and, in the narration of stirring incident, he was un-
rivalled in his day. Indeed, excepting Walter Scott, Marryat was
the only novelist of his period who might lay claim to eminence. To
read the novels of his prime: Peter Simple (1834), Mr Midship-
man Easy (1836), Japhet in search of a Father (1836) or Jacob
Faithful (1837), is to find a rich humour, a wide knowledge of
men and things, intense and telling narrative, an artistic re-
straint which forbids extravagance or exaggeration and an all but
Tolstoy-like power over detail. Within his narrower limits,
captain Marryat, at his best, is a choicer artist than Defoe, whom,
in many points, he resembles-among others, in having had his


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XI]
Marryat. Hook
251
mal
Jaze
Jana
un
.
kr
Tle 1
finest work regarded, for a time, as merely reading for boys. ' From
that implied reproach, Marryat's best novels, like Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe, have, ultimately, escaped. Indeed, the stories that Marryat
himself intended for boys–Masterman Ready (1841), The Settlers
in Canada (1844) and others are found to have qualities that make
them welcome to grown men. In Marryat, there are touches here
and there of the lower humour of Smollett, but these occur
almost entirely in his early work, written before he had learned
his business as novelist'. His mind, moreover, was finer in
quality than that of another writer, to whom, doubtless, he owed
something, Theodore Hook.
Of Hook's fiction, it is difficult to write. It had a wide
influence; and it is of little value. It lacks all the higher
;
qualities, but suggested possibilities to many a later writer. The
nine volumes of Hook's novels, Sayings and Doings (1826–9),
were, in their own day, very popular: to a modern reader, even
the best of them, Gervase Skinner, seems flimsy, vulgar and
trivial. However, there is a lively spirit in them; and Hook's
value to English fiction seems to lie in his very freedom and
'modernity. He reminded fiction—for, indeed, she seemed to
have forgotten what Fielding had made clear-that all life was her
province. He showed that it was possible to be 'up-to-date,' free
(and also easy), without degrading the art; thus, he opened a way
to minds like Marryat's which had a truer originality and a fresher
vision. Before long, Dickens was to appear, to make supreme
use of the lately won liberty.
Before this chapter is brought to a close, two Scottish
novelists should not be left without mention. John Galt, in The
Ayrshire Legatees, The Entail and The Annals of the Parish,
gave admirably minute and real studies of rural life in Scotland,
full of strong delineation of character and forcible detail. As
imaginative pictures of homely life under perfectly known con-
ditions, Galt's novels occupy an important place in fiction. The
fame of the Waverley novels tempted him later to compete
with Scott in historical fiction, in which he succeeded but mode-
rately.
David Macbeth Moir wrote for his friend, Galt, the last
chapters of a novel, The Last of the Lairds, and was the author
of The Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith (1828), a
partly satirical, and very amusing, study of humble Scottish
* In connection with Marryat and the sea-novel two other writers of the time are
worth mention : William Nugent Glascock and Frank Chamier.
Tot
.
I
rah
rith
T:
ind
it
be
nie
oslanced


## p. 252 (#276) ############################################

252
Lesser Novelists
[CH. XI
character, so shrewdly observed and neatly set down that the
reader regrets its interruption by the interpolated romance The
Curate of Suverdsio.
The period, as a whole, was productive of no great fiction, and
of very little that can be considered first-rate. Neither Scott nor
Jane Austen inspired any eminent follower; and the time, in spite
of an immense production of romances and novels, did little more
than keep the art of fiction alive till the coming of Dickens
and of Thackeray.


## p. 253 (#277) ############################################

CHAPTER XII
THE OXFORD MOVEMENT
THE remarkable influence which affected English religion in
the middle of the nineteenth century could not have failed to
affect English literature. But the one stood apart from the other
in a way unusual in English history. At the age of the reforma-
tion, at the time of the Laudian movement under Charles I and
in the time of the later Caroline divines, religious literature
occupied a prominent, sometimes a commanding, position in the
eyes of all who were alive to the currents of public life. It is true
that the great dramatic literature of Elizabeth's day was concerned
very little with the wranglings of divines; but no record of the
literary giants of those days could omit the name of Hooker,
whose influence on English prose was immense. Jeremy Taylor
was a great man of letters, and, in Dryden's day, theological
questions were the staple of many a discussion which might
appear to belong to pure literature. But the Oxford movement
seemed, throughout almost its whole course, to stand apart from the
literature of the day. Men went on for a long time thinking and
writing in other fields of learning as if there were no such persons
as Newman and Keble and Pusey; or, like Carlyle, dismissed them
contemptuously from their thoughts as having but the brain of
rabbits. Only very gradually was the persistence of their work
felt outside religious or academic circles; and, to the end, there
was not more than one of their writers who seriously affected the
current of English letters. Mark Pattison, long after 'the Trac-
tarian infatuation' had ceased to influence him, complained that
there was ‘no proper public for either' theology or church history.
But, none the less, the Oxford movement, as it came to be called,
formed a most important epoch in literature: yet, for a long while
it stood apart, as philosophy commonly does, from the ordinary
work of men who wrote and men who read.
Nor was it, at least till late in its progress, affected by foreign


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254 The Oxford Movement [ch.
influences. James Anthony Froude, who, at one time, had run
hotfoot with the movement, said, in later life, that its whole history,
if not that of the English church, would have been different if
Newman had known German; and the extremely superficial gene-
ralisation has been widely accepted. It would be more true to
say that with the German theology of the period, its theorising, its
sentimentalism and its haste, the tractarian leaders had no affinity.
Those who knew it, such as Pusey and Hugh James Rose, believed
that they saw through and beyond it. The other leaders at least
knew what its principles were, and decisively rejected them.