her stories "Moral Tales" and she was interested in the homely rather than in the heroic virtues. She was an Irishwoman, and when Scott wrote Waverley he professed that his ambition was "in some degree to emulate the admirable Irish portraits of Miss Edgeworth." Her portraits of Ireland, in other words were recognised by Scott as an artist's record of the country, and though she was indeed a moralist, her books hold their place by their fidelity to fact, and by their admirably natural manner. Miss Edgeworth's stories, Castle Rackrent and The Absentee, give vivid pictures of the condition of certain estates in Ireland which were in the ownership of landlords living in England and the management of which was left in the hands of unsympathetic or ineffective superintendents. Miss Edgeworth's stories for children, the most important of which is the collection known as the Parent's Assistant, have held their own as classics for more than a century, and have given pleasure to several generations of English-speaking youngsters throughout the world. Contemporary with Miss Edgeworth was the Scottish Susan Ferrier, whom Scott called his "sister shadow," a novelist with a somewhat bitter wit more like Jane Austen than the "moral" Maria Edgeworth.

§ 8

JANE AUSTEN

With Jane Austen, this survey of the beginning of modern fiction may fitly end.

The Perfect Realist

How did Jane Austen excel? The answer is prompt. She was a realist. And as a realist, within her own delicately drawn pen-and-ink circle, she was perfect—a word often applied too carelessly, but here most miraculously justified. She was the chronicler of that most breathless and fascinating fairy-tale in the world, the fairy-tale of our own daily life. Jane Austen set down, for our infinite cosy content, the enthralling details of our

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selves and our neighbours-for in essentials a century is lightly spanned-walking and driving and conversing; eating, too, with greater or less appetite, according to the state of our affections. Minor differences there were, of course, between Jane Austen's characters and ourselves. They set higher store on the outward observances of good breeding than we do nowadays. For the rest, they gossiped, and fell in love, and danced, and made mistakes; and occasionally travelled a little by post-chaise or carriage. And if they suffered, it was usually more annoyance than tragedy.

Jane Austen put it all down because it never struck her that it might not be interesting. She was not preoccupied with Form or Art or the Limitations of the Novel, or other inventions of the High-brow to hamper spontaneity. How marvellously Jane Austen, with her elvish talent for burlesquing a prevalent mania, which twinkles and stings in Love and Friendship and Northanger Abbey, would have twinkled and stung at the expense of an English Hotel Rambouillet!

Yet, as Mr. Saintsbury has admirably said,

"Simple as are the plots, they are worked out with extraordinary closeness and completeness, and the characters and dialogue are of such astonishing finesse and life that it would hardly matter if there were no plot at all. From first to last this hold on life never fails Miss Austen, nor does the simple, suggestive, half-ironic style in which she manages to convey her meaning. Not even Scott's or Thackeray's characters dwell in the mind more securely than John Thorpe, the bragging, babbling undergraduate in Northanger Abbey, and the feather-brained, cold-hearted flirt, his sister Isabella; than the Bennet family in Pride and Prejudice, every member of which is a masterpiece, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the arrogant lady patroness, and Mr. Collins, her willing toady; than Mrs. Norris, half sycophant, half tyrant, in Mansfield Park; than the notable chatterer Miss Bates in Emma."

Biographers regret that the definite facts which can be supplied about Jane Austen's life and doings are few. She was born at Steventon in Hampshire in 1775; her father was a clergyman of moderate means; she had five brothers, four older and one younger than herself; and one intimate and adored elder sister, Cassandra. Two of her brothers became sailors. Jane had a moderately sufficient education and went to school at Reading. She was attractive to look at, and accomplished in games of skill, drawing, music, and needlework; graceful and "finished" in all her movements, and an animated correspondent. As for her literary career, it was, like her life, without extremes; she was neither left to pine in a garret nor feasted as a genius. In fact, she rarely visited London at all; after Steventon, her father moved with his family to Bath. After his death, Mrs. Austen, with Jane and Cassandra, went to live at Southampton.

When Jane Austen died at Winchester in 1817, at the age of forty-two, she was practically unknown in the literary world. She had not put her name to her four published novels (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma), though she had allowed her authorship to be known among her friends. In an age of abounding literary society she had met no famous writer or editor and had corresponded with none. She was never in touch with the book-market. Her novels usually lay in her desk a long time before they appeared, and they did not come out in the order in which she wrote them. Her earliest was sold to a Bath publisher in 1803 for £10, and he did nothing with it. A few years later she bought it back from him for the same sum, he little knowing that she was the author of four popular novels. This, the earliest of her stories, did not appear, however, until a year after her death, when it was accompanied through the press by her latest, Persuasion.

In all she had received for her novels at the time of her death £700. She was entirely without the money-making idea, and when she secured £150 for Sense and Sensibility she considered this sum "a prodigious recompense for what had cost her nothing."

§ 10

The lack of facts in our knowledge of Jane Austen certainly need not mean a lack of intimacy. If we know little, we also know everything. Her books are there; and surmising where two twos undoubtedly make five, is always a fascinating pastime. Thus we surmise that she was indolent, for she rarely troubled to invent situations or emotions, but utilised those that were handy, and within her easy reach and cognisance. The same plot, what there was of it, served again and again. Therefore, we argue from analogy, she also did not invent her characters, but drew them from among her acquaintances. It is a pleasing reflection that Mr. Collins and Mrs. Allen and Selina with her "barouche-landau," were actual living people. She had the rare vision to see what was already there, and to enchant it into delicious immobility for our future benefit. Vision, but no imagination. That lack of imagination might account for her unseeing indifference to the lower classes; she can sympathise with straitened means-but her understanding halts and goes. numb and blind at the possibility of no means at all.

This, too, Jane Austen's books have revealed to us about Jane Austen: that she lived her short life singularly free from fear. Fear breeds obsessions, and no obsessions have found an outlet in those six novels, so precious for their well-balanced outlook and serene philosophy; except, perhaps, the fear of misunderstanding, and parting through misunderstanding; this indeed, occurs over and over again between her hero and heroine. Elizabeth and Darcy are separated through Wickham's misrepre

sentations: Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney through the inexplicable behaviour of the latter's father; Emma and Knightly because he firmly believes Emma has given her heart to Frank Churchill; Elinor Dashwood and Edward . . . the list swells; but perhaps the most feeling example is the long misunderstanding between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, owing to Anne's submission to worldly persuasion that he was not a suitable match. Persuasion was the last and most mature of Jane Austen's books, and one cannot miss in it the depth of personal conviction in Anne's ruined happiness-for twenty-seven was at that period a hopeless age for a woman to have reached without attaining matrimony. Who cares to, may read a hint of longing in Persuasion's final chapters of perfect reconciliation between Anne and Wentworth: "Thus it should have been-thus it might have been . . . for me!" Were those the author's secret thoughts at the time of writing? Her biographers have traced, from various sources, the existence of one outstanding love-affair in Jane Austen's life. Whether pride or circumstances or death prevented a happy conclusion, is not known. But the knowledge of it adds poignancy to the fact that her every last chapter is a summary of quiet rapture with anticipations into a future of unbroken wedded felicity.

The Theme of her Novels

In a letter to a friend Jane Austen compared her novels to "a little bit of ivory, two inches thick," on which she worked "with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labour.” Never was there such exquisite manners-painting; but the plots are of the slightest. For example, that of Sense and Sensibility is really a study of the opposing characters of Elinor Dashwood, who stands for "Sense," and of her sister Marianne, who is the embodiment of “Sensibility"; while the plot is just the narrative of the widely different manner in which they act towards their lovers, and their friends. In Pride and Prejudice there are again