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- pride-and-prejudice
- text
- aversion to actual love. I do not know whether the all-grasping hand of
the playwright has ever been laid upon_ Pride and Prejudice; _and I dare
say that, if it were, the situations would prove not startling or
garish enough for the footlights, the character-scheme too subtle and
delicate for pit and gallery. But if the attempt were made, it would
certainly not be hampered by any of those loosenesses of construction,
which, sometimes disguised by the conveniences of which the novelist can
avail himself, appear at once on the stage._
_I think, however, though the thought will doubtless seem heretical to
more than one school of critics, that construction is not the highest
merit, the choicest gift, of the novelist. It sets off his other gifts
and graces most advantageously to the critical eye; and the want of it
will sometimes mar those graces--appreciably, though not quite
consciously--to eyes by no means ultra-critical. But a very badly-built
novel which excelled in pathetic or humorous character, or which
displayed consummate command of dialogue--perhaps the rarest of all
faculties--would be an infinitely better thing than a faultless plot
acted and told by puppets with pebbles in their mouths. And despite the
ability which Miss Austen has shown in working out the story, I for one
should put_ Pride and Prejudice _far lower if it did not contain what
seem to me the very masterpieces of Miss Austen’s humour and of her
faculty of character-creation--masterpieces who may indeed admit John
Thorpe, the Eltons, Mrs. Norris, and one or two others to their company,
but who, in one instance certainly, and perhaps in others, are still
superior to them._
_The characteristics of Miss Austen’s humour are so subtle and delicate
that they are, perhaps, at all times easier to apprehend than to
express, and at any particular time likely to be differently
apprehended by different persons. To me this humour seems to possess a
greater affinity, on the whole, to that of Addison than to any other of
the numerous species of this great British genus. The differences of
scheme, of time, of subject, of literary convention, are, of course,
obvious enough; the difference of sex does not, perhaps, count for much,
for there was a distinctly feminine element in “Mr. Spectator,” and in
Jane Austen’s genius there was, though nothing mannish, much that was
masculine. But the likeness of quality consists in a great number of
common subdivisions of quality--demureness, extreme minuteness of touch,
avoidance of loud tones and glaring effects. Also there is in both a
certain not inhuman or unamiable cruelty. It is the custom with those
who judge grossly to contrast the good nature of Addison with the
savagery of Swift, the mildness of Miss Austen with the boisterousness
of Fielding and Smollett, even with the ferocious practical jokes that
her immediate predecessor, Miss Burney, allowed without very much
protest. Yet, both in Mr. Addison and in Miss Austen there is, though a
restrained and well-mannered, an insatiable and ruthless delight in
roasting and cutting up a fool. A man in the early eighteenth century,
of course, could push this taste further than a lady in the early
nineteenth; and no doubt Miss Austen’s principles, as well as her heart,
would have shrunk from such things as the letter from the unfortunate
husband in the_ Spectator, _who describes, with all the gusto and all the
innocence in the world, how his wife and his friend induce him to play
at blind-man’s-buff. But another_ Spectator _letter--that of the damsel
of fourteen who wishes to marry Mr. Shapely, and assures her selected
Mentor that “he admires your_ Spectators _mightily”--might have been
written by a rather more ladylike and intelligent Lydia Bennet in the
days of Lydia’s great-grandmother; while, on the other hand, some (I
think unreasonably) have found “cynicism” in touches of Miss Austen’s
own, such as her satire of Mrs. Musgrove’s self-deceiving regrets over
her son. But this word “cynical” is one of the most misused in the
English language, especially when, by a glaring and gratuitous
falsification of its original sense, it is applied, not to rough and
snarling invective, but to gentle and oblique satire. If cynicism means
the perception of “the other side,” the sense of “the accepted hells
beneath,” the consciousness that motives are nearly always mixed, and
that to seem is not identical with to be--if this be cynicism, then
every man and woman who is not a fool, who does not care to live in a
fool’s paradise, who has knowledge of nature and the world and life, is
a cynic. And in that sense Miss Austen certainly was one. She may even
have been one in the further sense that, like her own Mr. Bennet, she
took an epicurean delight in dissecting, in displaying, in setting at
work her fools and her mean persons. I think she did take this delight,
and I do not think at all the worse of her for it as a woman, while she
was immensely the better for it as an artist._
_In respect of her art generally, Mr. Goldwin Smith has truly observed
that “metaphor has been exhausted in depicting the perfection of it,
combined with the narrowness of her field;” and he has justly added that
we need not go beyond her own comparison to the art of a miniature
painter. To make this latter observation quite exact we must not use the
term miniature in its restricted sense, and must think rather of Memling
at one end of the history of painting and Meissonier at the other, than
of Cosway or any of his kind. And I am not so certain that I should
myself use the word “narrow” in connection with her. If her world is a
microcosm, the cosmic quality of it is at least as eminent as the
littleness. She does not touch what she did not feel herself called to
paint; I am not so sure that she could not have painted what she did not
feel herself called to touch. It is at least remarkable that in two very
short periods of writing--one of about three years, and another of not
much more than five--she executed six capital works, and has not left a
single failure. It is possible that the romantic paste in her
composition was defective: we must always remember that hardly
anybody born in her decade--that of the eighteenth-century
seventies--independently exhibited the full romantic quality. Even Scott
required hill and mountain and ballad, even Coleridge metaphysics and
German to enable them to chip the classical shell. Miss Austen was an
English girl, brought up in a country retirement, at the time when
ladies went back into the house if there was a white frost which might
pierce their kid shoes, when a sudden cold was the subject of the
gravest fears, when their studies, their ways, their conduct were
subject to all those fantastic limits and restrictions against which
Mary Wollstonecraft protested with better general sense than particular
taste or judgment. Miss Austen, too, drew back when the white frost
touched her shoes; but I think she would have made a pretty good journey
even in a black one._
_For if her knowledge was not very extended, she knew two things which
only genius knows. The one was humanity, and the other was art. On the
first head she could not make a mistake; her men, though limited, are
true, and her women are, in the old sense, “absolute.” As to art, if she
has never tried idealism, her realism is real to a degree which makes
the false realism of our own day look merely dead-alive. Take almost any
Frenchman, except the late M. de Maupassant, and watch him laboriously
piling up strokes in the hope of giving a complete impression. You get
none; you are lucky if, discarding two-thirds of what he gives, you can
shape a real impression out of the rest. But with Miss Austen the
myriad, trivial, unforced strokes build up the picture like magic.
Nothing is false; nothing is superfluous.