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by painting or sculpture or literature. If it use outside events at all, it must subdue them to its medium, and become their master, not their mere vehicle. So a hundred thousand novels come and go; but Jane Austen can never be out of date, because she never was in any particular date (that is to say, never imprisoned in any), but is coextensive with human nature.

Talk of her limitations' is vain, and based on a misapprehension. When we speak of her as our greatest artist in English fiction we do not mean that she has the loudest mastery of any particular mood, the most clamant voice, the widest gamut of subjects; we mean that she stands supreme and alone among English writers in possession of the secret which so many French ones possess-that is, a most perfect mastery of her weapons, a most faultless and precise adjustment of means to end. She is, in English fiction, as Milton in English poetry, the one completely conscious and almost unerring artist. This is to take only the technical side of her work; her scale and scope are different matters. There is, in some quarters, a tendency to quarrel with Jane Austen because in her books there is nothing that she never intended to be there, no heroic hectorings, no Brontesque ebulliencies, no mountain or moor or bonny beck' (to use Charlotte Bronté's own phrase)-surely one of the monumental ineptitudes of criticism, seeing that the most elementary axiom of art is the artist's initial right to choose his own medium. We have no more right, in fact, to cavil at Jane Austen for not writing The Duchess of Malfi' than at Webster for not writing 'Northanger Abbey.'

At the same time, it must never be thought that limitation of scene implies limitation of human emotion. The measure of perfection has no relation to the size of its material. Perfection is one and incommensurable. Class-limitation, in fact, is no limitation of sympathy; and a breaking heart is a breaking heart, no more nor less, whether it find vent in the ululations of Tamburlaine, or in the almost screamed with agony' of Marianne Dashwood. Jane Austen's heroes and heroines and subject-matter are, in fact, universal human nature, and conterminous with it, though manifested only in one class, with that class's superficial limitations, in habits and manner of life.

And here another error vitiates the caviller's thought. Readers fall into two groups-the objective and the subjective. And it is only the objective class who, because emotion is not vehemently expressed by Jane Austen, will fail to realise with what profound effect it is implied. She does not expound feeling; she conveys it. With her artist's instinct, she knows that exposition by the writer destroys conviction in the reader. She has at heart, all through her life, that maxim of the French which English writers find it so impossible to assimilate -'Glissez toujours, n'appuyez pas': do your work rightly, and trust the intelligence of the reader to do the rest. When Anne again meets Wentworth there is nothing shown in the text but the little flutter given to the sentence by the repetition of the descriptive adjective in:'The room seemed full, full of persons and voices;' but the sensitised reader is left fairly staggering in the gale of Anne's emotion, revealed in that tiny hint more intimately than by all the paragraphs of passionate prose in which other writers would exhaustively set out the emotions of Wentworth and Anne, until no emotion at all was left in the reader. For the objective writer toils and toils outside his subject, accumulating convincing details until conviction is destroyed; the subjective gives the bare and encyclopædic essential in a line or a word, and then goes on. And of all great writers Jane Austen is the most evocative, doing in half a dozen words (applied in exactly the proper measure, in exactly the proper place) what the sedulous subtleties of Henry James are unable to convey so clearly in as many fine-spun pages. Knightley, for instance, staying 'vigorously' on, away from Emma in Brunswick Square, gives us in one syllable more of Knightley and more of Emma than whole long paragraphs of analysis.

And among the secrets of Jane Austen's inexhaustible charm is that her work, especially in her second period, is so packed with such minute and far-reaching felicities that the thousandth reading of 'Emma' or 'Persuasion' will be certain to reveal to you a handful of such brilliant jewels unnoticed before. If she has nothing to say to those who want to sit passive while the whole story is put down plain before them like meat on a plate, she has all the more delights to unfold for those who know that

the whole point of reading lies in eager cooperation with a sympathetic writer. The more rigid, in fact, the elimination of the non-essential, the more blazing the certitude with which the essential is projected. Jane Austen is even of an Elizabethan economy in her stage-settings. Modern writers pretend to reveal their characters by dint of descriptions copious as an upholsterer's catalogue; she produces her details sparingly, bit by bit, only where each is dramatically necessary to the course of character or action; often, by one of her most characteristic exquisitenesses, they are only revealed in the conversation of her persons. And, in the result, with what a life-long intimacy do we come at last to know her houses and her rooms, her gardens and shrubberies! This indirect method, too, she often chooses, to give emotions and impressions and personal pictures. Elizabeth Bennet's own delightfulness is sensibly enhanced by that of Mrs Gardiner, since she was so special a favourite there; while Elizabeth Elliot's 'something so formal and arrangé in her air; and she sits so upright,' though it comes quite at the end of the book, gives us an instant intimate vision of Lady Russell, besides flashing at us the whole essence of Elizabeth herself.

As for landscape, so often the stumbling-block of novelists, Jane Austen cannot be said to make any very serious use of it in her first period; but in the second, although she is far too craft-wise to fancy you can vitalise a character by dint of emotionalising its countryside and garden, she quite definitely (though still with finest economy) avails herself more and more of the outer world, not only for its value as a picture in itself-we may spend a vivid day at Sotherton-but also as playing its part in the development of her people. The squalor of Portsmouth, the autumn landscapes of Lyme and Uppercross, have a definite place in the evolution of Fanny and Anne; while the July storm which darkens the dark climax of Emma' is the pathetic fallacy pure and simple. It is only towards the end of her own life, that is, with the deepening of her own sympathies, that her faultless sense of fitness and relevance so far widens also as to give greater latitude to her methods of inspiring sympathy.

For it is but fair to her cruder critics to admit that

Jane Austen has no taste for expressed erotics, and will thereby always seem insipid to the large crowd of readers, chiefly women, who are responsible for that perennial ill-repute of fiction against which Jane Austen herself personally launches the novelist's Magna Carta in 'Northanger Abbey,' because they read fiction principally as an erotic stimulant, and judge its merits accordingly, by the ardour of its descriptions and expressions. In this aspect of life Jane Austen has no interest. Her concern is primarily with character unfolded through love, not with that love's crudities of appetite and incident. In the supreme moments, in point of fact, humanity becomes inarticulate, and thus no longer gives material for art. Jane Austen, knowing this, is too honest to forge us false coin of phrases, and too much an artist to pad out her lines with asterisks and dashes and ejaculations. She accepts the condition, asks her reader to accept it also, and contents herself with dealing with the emotions on either side of the crucial outbreak. It is notorious how she avoids detail in her proposalscenes; certainly not from 'ladylike' cowardice, nor from any incapacity, but merely in her artist's certainty that the epical instants of life are not to be adequately expressed in words. What did she say? Just what she should, of course: a lady always does.' Jane Austen, with whimsical gaiety of candour, here lays down her position once for all, and frankly tells her reader that there are matters into which neither he nor she can decently pry. That she could tear a passion to tatters with the best of them, indeed, is shown by Marianne Dashwood; that she never repeated the picture shows her sense of its unfitness and fatal facility, by comparison with the subtler treatments of emotion in which alone she was interested. Any red-blood writer can state passions, it takes a genius to suggest them; and Jane Austen is preeminently a clear-brained writer rather than a red-blooded one. Yet no one is left doubting Emma's feeling for Knightley, or Anne's for Wentworth, though nothing at all is said of physical attractions, and the whole effect is made by implication. But made it indubitably is, and indelibly.

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On the feelings of her men, of course, Jane Austen has nothing to say at first hand, is too honest an artist

to invent, and too clean a woman to attempt the modern female trick of gratifying her own passions by inventing a lover, and then identifying herself with his desires, in so far as she can concoct them. Yet it would be quite a mistake to call her men pallid or shadowy. In point of fact, they are usually carried out with all her vivid certainty, yet considered only in relation to her women, and thus, by comparison, quieter in colour, deliberately subordinate in her scheme. Even the earlier heroes will be found perfectly adapted to their place in her books, when once that place is understood; as for the later ones, they stand most definitely on legs of their own, so far as their movements in the story require. Perhaps the best of all is Knightley, not only in relation to Emma but also in himself.

Nor must it be brought against Jane Austen that she does not lard her work with sociology, religion or metaphysics. Such divagations may make a story more stirring; they certainly make it more ephemeral. And, against such writers as believe the novel is Heaven's appointed jam for the powder of their own opinions, Jane Austen decisively heads the other school, which believes that 'the book, the whole book, and nothing but the book' is the novelist's best motto. She herself pours scorn on the notion that 'Pride and Prejudice' would really be better if padded out with 'solemn nonsense about Bonaparte'; and where for once (in order to prove Fanny's brains) she ventures on irrelevant flights of rhetoric, she for once lamentably falls to earth, in those two speeches of Fanny's in the Vicarage shrubberydeliverances false in fact, trite in thought, turgid and sententious in expression. Normally, however, she remains undistracted from the purpose of her book; and, from the first sentence, submerges herself in the single thought of the story's development, with that wholeheartedness of delight in creation for its own sake which is the prerogative of the highest genius alone, alone awakening in the reader an answering rapture of conviction and absorption. Thus it is that, to her faithful, Jane Austen has become flesh and blood of their mind's inmost fabric. Who commonly quotes Charlotte Bronté or George Eliot? But every turn and corner of life is illuminated or defined for us by some sentence of Jane

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