THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

No. 452.-JULY, 1917.

Art. 1.-JANE AUSTEN, ob. JULY 18, 1817.

To lounge away the time as they could, with sofas and chitchat, and Quarterly Reviews.'-' Mansfield Park,' Cap. x. THE concluding storms of a great conflict had hardly died down, when her world, almost unaware, bade farewell to Jane Austen; now, amid the closing cataclysms of a conflict yet more gigantic, we celebrate the hundredth year of her immortality. Time is the woodsman who fells the smaller trees and coppice in the forest of literature, and allows us at last to see the true proportions of its enduring giants; and the century that has passed since Jane Austen's death now sees her preeminence securely established. An early editor could only dare timidly to suggest that perhaps she might be found not wholly unworthy of a place in the same shelf with Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth. Alas for both these, gone by now into the spare bedroom, and become the dusty curiosities of literature! Not even Jane Austen's devotion has availed to save Fanny Burney from a toogeneral oblivion, whereas Jane Austen herself has long since taken rank as the centre of a cult as ardent as a religion. There is no via media, indeed, where Jane Austen is concerned; by those who might have lent features to her fools she is vividly disliked,* and by those for whom her fools were drawn, she is no less fervently adored. In water-logged trench, in cold cave of the mountains, in sickness and in health, in dulness, tribulation and fatigue, an ever-increasing crowd of worshippers

* Women often appreciate her imperfectly, because she appreciated them so perfectly, and so inexorably revealed them.

flies insatiably for comfort and company perennially refreshing, to Hartfield and Randalls, Longbourn, Northanger, Sotherton and Uppercross.

Such positions in literature are not achieved by logrolling. Macaulay blunders, indeed, in his praise, and in the instances he selects for it; but he undoubtedly hits the bull's eye with his usual essential accuracy, when he lights on the fact that Jane Austen is comparable only with Shakespeare. For both attain their solitary and special supremacy by dint of a common capacity for intense vitalisation; both have the culminating gift of immediately projecting a living human being who is not only a human being, but also something much greater than any one person, a quintessentialised instance of humanity, a generalisation made incarnate and personal by genius. But the dramatist has the easier task; the novelist, unaided by actors or stage, has to impress his own imagination straight upon ours. And it is of this secret that Jane Austen is so capital a mistress; a prefatory line or two, an initial sentence, and there goes Mrs Allen or Mrs Price, a complete and complex identity, walking independently away down the ages. Even in their circumstances, too, Shakespeare and Jane Austen run curiously parallel. Our two greatest creators exist for us only in their work; and, when we search into their personal lives and tastes and tragedies, we glean nothing but a little chopped dull chaff of details, in which all trace of the sacred germ is lacking. In Jane Austen's case, indeed, the disappearance of the creator into his creation is made but the completer for the abundance of superficial details with which we are provided. When the dry bones of her facts are fitted together, there results for us only a lay-figure, comfortable and comely, but conveying no faintest suggestion of the genuine Jane Austen.

She was obviously ill-served by her circumstances. Behind the official biographies, and the pleasant little empty letters, and the accounts of how good she was to her mother and wouldn't use the sofa, we feel always that she really lived remote in a great reserve. She praised and valued domesticity indeed, sincerely loved her own family, and made domestic instincts a cardinal virtue in all her heroes. But the praise and value are rather official than personal; her only real intimate at

home was her sister Cassandra, and it is significant that only upstairs, behind her shut door, did she read her own work aloud, for the benefit of her chosen circle in the younger generation. Yet more significant, though, is the fact that nowhere does she give any picture of united family happiness; the successful domestic unity will certainly not be successfully sought at Longbourn or Mansfield, Northanger or Kellynch. This, to any one who understands Jane Austen's preoccupation with truth, and her selection of material only from among observed facts tested by personal experience, speaks volumes, in its characteristically quiet way, for her position towards her own family. She was in it; but she was not really of it.

Even on the point of her intimacy with Cassandra there is something curiously suggestive in the fact that, after her first two novels, she never again gives us a picture of two intimately united sisters. Maria and Julia are allies only till their interests clash; Isabella is nothing to Emma; only time and trials teach Fanny to surmount her first startled disapproval of Susan; and the best that Anne can feel for Mary Musgrove is that she is not so repulsive and unsisterly as Elizabeth.' On the other hand, in three out of these four books, the author's delight is transferred to the relations between brother and sister-Wentworth and Sophy,' Henry and Eleanor, William and Fanny, and, above all, for depth of tried alliance, Crawford and Mary. Finally, she does not even die for us of anything particular, but fades out, with Victorian gentility, in a hazy unspecified decline. How much more fortunate, in her different class, is Charlotte Bronté, of whom no detail is hidden from her admirers by any such instinct for muffling things up in discretions and evasions! Even in popular language this distinction holds; no one dreams of calling the lesser writer anything but 'Charlotte Bronté,' while there still exists a whole sect of Jane Austen's devotees, no Laodiceans either, who to this day will always talk of her as Miss Austen.' Which is as if one were to speak currently of Mr Milton, and Monsieur de Molière.

These fantasies of propriety, together with her own misleadingly modest allusion to the 'little piece of ivory' on which she worked, have done much to perpetuate the

theory, still held among the profane, that she is a 'limited' writer. It is by no means so that her faithful see their radiant and remorseless Jane; and, though criticism depends, in the last resort, chiefly on what the critic himself brings to his subject (so that what each man comes seeking, that he will most surely find), Jane Austen's personality may be much more profitably reconstructed in her work, than from the superficial details of her life, doled out to us by her biographer. A writer's fame, in fact, relies for its permanent value on his own transpiring personality; in every line he is inevitably giving himself away,' and the future of his work depends on whether what he has to give possesses the salted quality of eternity. And impersonality comes as the first ingredient in the specific for immortality. The selfrevelation of the writer must be as severely implicit as it is universally pervasive; it must never be conscious or obtruded.

There is, indeed, a section of writers, as of readers, who believe in frequent appearances of the author before his curtain, to make deductions from his text, and point out conclusions. This is a pandering to laziness in the reader; every meaning should be clearly discoverable in the text, without its being necessary for the author himself to dig it out for us. And to such readers as these, who want their pabulum already peptonised, Jane Austen deliberately avoids appeal. As in her own life she evaded the lionising that lesser women covet, and would assuredly have approved Cassandra's destruction of her private letters, so in her work she no less carefully avoids overt appearance on her stage. She is there all the time, indeed, but never in propria persona, except when she gaily smiles through the opener texture of 'Northanger Abbey,' or, with her consummate sense of art, mitigates for us the transition out of her paradises back into the grey light of ordinary life, by letting the word 'I' demurely peer forth at last, as the fantasmagoria in Mansfield Park,' 'Emma' or 'Northanger Abbey' begins to thin out to its final pages. Otherwise she is the most aloof of writers, and does not work 'for such dull elves' (as she says herself) as will not so far come to meet the author as to make out for themselves his conclusions and deductions.

This elimination of the author is only part of the intense concentration which the greatest writers develop in their subject. The essence of conviction, in the game of make-believe, is to convince yourself first of all, finally and absolutely. This can only be done by forgetting yourself entirely, by blotting out the whole irrelevant world from your purview, and centralising, with a singleeyed undeviating passion of conviction, upon the tale you are setting out to live. It is at this point that all living writers (with the exception of Rhoda Broughton) fail. They are telling stories in which they have either no flesh-and-blood belief of their own, or else too much; telling them with an eye to their audience and to themselves and their own pet notions, telling them, that is, objectively, not subjectively, and piling up masses of detail and explanation in order to obscure the inner lack of any completed identity between the author and his matter.

It is precisely here that Jane Austen so magnificently succeeds. Wars may be raging to their end as the background of Persuasion,' or social miseries strike a new facet of Emma'; otherwise all the vast anguish of her time is non-existent to Jane Austen, when once she has got pen in hand, to make us a new kingdom of refuge from the toils and frets of life. Her kingdoms are hermetically sealed, in fact, and here lies the strength of their impregnable immortality; it is not without hope or comfort for us nowadays, to remember that Mansfield Park' appeared the year before Waterloo, and 'Emma the year after. For Jane Austen is always concerned only with the universal, and not with the particular. And it is according as they invest their souls in the former or the latter that authors eternally survive or rapidly pass away. Fashions change, fads and fancies come and go, tyrannies and empires erupt and collapse; those who make events and contemporary ideas the matter of their work have their reward in instant appreciation of their topical value. And with their topical value they die. Art is a mysterious entity, outside and beyond daily life, whether its manifestation be

After Mr Gray of Sackville Street, Jane Austen specifies no tradesman, except Broadwood, nor even dwells on any detail of fashion.