BOOKS AND WRITERS T was a sweet viewâsweet to the
eye and the mind. English / verdure, English culture, English comfort seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive." This is a scene in Emma. )s nearly the whole scene, the whole atmosphere, of all Jane isten's novels, culture, comfort. And nearly the whole style, 00. There is none to find fault today with that atmosphere and hat style, their "soft fall and swell." For one thing, the modern âą rmy of " Janeites," which began to mobilise about thirty years go, is now of intimidating number. Jane's ironical eyes would utinise the scene with profit. Nor, it must be agreed, is it uch easier to pick holes than to fix a pin in a billiard balL ut sometimes a- still small voice ventures to ask whether unques- 'ening worship as .of a deity is useful in criticism and biography. hether it is helpful, not to Jane Austen, who does not care, but or Barbara, the bright young thing who wanted to know the rets of the ritual and whom Miss Stern, abetted by Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith, * lures so cleverly into the cult. Barbara's young lover as "bats on your Jane Austen," and she thought she ought to go batty with him and all the saints.
No need to go batty in order to find pleasure and release from ur tormented world in a world that is gone. Nor does it matter, I ither, if that world never existed ; the play of Jane's mind makes it real, but some doubts obtrude during after-thoughts when the suspension of disbelief is less willing. Miss Margaret Kennedy,t who has written an account of the life and writings that could not be bettered in a work so restricted in space, and the authors of More Talk, which is sure of the appreciation of those who welcomed their earlier book of talk, agree more or less in explaining Jane Austen's aloofnessâif that is the wordâfrom the problems and storms of her time. The Napoleonic wars rolled past, civil war was threatened, but they left no mark on her books nor on her letters. It is said that her work reflects the state of mind of country society at -that time. Does it ? Fiction writing, like historical writing, though based on realism, is embellished by imagination. Few characters in English fiction are better delineated than Jane's ; but the atmosphere in whicif they moved and talkedâof love affairs and little elseâwas Jane's, and was restricted to the small society she knew, who spent their lives in the parlour. Miss Kennelly agrees that Jane seems never to have felt that she was living through history. She explains: "The people with whom she mixed did not feel so ; to them it was simply another war with the French, an accepted evil in the eighteenth century. It had very little effect upon the lives of most of the population ; the casualties were tiny when compared with those of modern warfare."
Did that society never hear of beacon fires ready to be lighted if Napoleon landed, of a whole continent in fear, of English families broken by the wars, of maimed men and press-gangs, of the clash of hope and terror roused in this country by the French revolution ? Some other explanation is needed of Jane Austen sitting in her parlour spinning her endearing stories of a land where ancient peace was broken only by little storms in little tea-cups. It may be psychological, in which case it were safer left alone, or spiritual. _ Her mind was at home in the earlier Augustan period of the eighteenth century, so it is possible that, like others, she regarded these large affairs as outside the business of the novel. We can only guess. The writings of Charles Lamb are, except for an occasional letter, as silent on the troubles of the time ; but no one suggests he never heard of them or was undisturbed. It may be that the horrors of those years set inward, that Lamb's essays and Jane Austen's fictions were a kind of bravery.
Charlotte BrontĂ«, puzzled by her gifted antitype, could not under- stand how so much power could work with so little passion. The very rhythm of Jane Austen's quiet flowing precisioned sentences * More Talk of Jane Austen. By Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B. Stern. (Cassell. 12s. 6d.) Vane Austen. By Margaret Kennedy. (Barker. English Novelists Series. 6s.) should have told her that Jane could not control a drama. Her talent was in a comic observance of character and manners in the only circle she knew. Others could deal with conflict of hearts or of social clash beyond the parlour. It is curious to note that the special quality of innocence in the stories of the BrontĂ« sisters, with their complications of emotion and plot, is absent in the supple and subtle mind of Jane Austen. She knows more than she tells or thinks it her business to tell Different objects having been pro- posed, different methods were pursued. Whether comedy or tragedy be the object, all the elements of either must be consonant. We are left with the question: which is the higher form of art The question answers itself, and that is why Charlotte Bronte's criticism of her fine opposite plays havoc to this day with attempts to deal with it. It noted the fidelity of Jane's delineation of the surface of the lives of genteel English people: "She ruffles her reader with nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are pei-fectly unknown to her ; she rejects even - a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood. . . . Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet. . . . What throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of deathâthis Miss Austen ignores."
- The inward eye and the outward eyeâthe difference can be disputed about endlessly. What would have been the effect of Jane Eyre on the author of Pride and Prejudice ? It is a loss that we have not Jane Austen's analysis to balance the other's. Readers can take Charlotte's terms and reverse the objections, and perhaps thereby arrive at Jane's literary creed, to Charlotte's dis- comfort. It is all a matter of personality and objective. It is the result that counts. Some are completely satisfied with the artistry which makes Jane's small world a living thing. Others, sensitive to the burden of a larger world, who feel life as an incalculatle experience, cannot be satisfied with less than the visions of tire "stormy sisterhood." It is the vision of the great poets. Charlotte BrontĂ« should have remembered the spirit that both impels and restricts the creator, as she did on another occasion. Then she noted that authors write best when "an influence seems to awaken in them which becomes their masterâwhich will have its wayâ putting out of view all behests but its own." Charlotte and Jane had different masters. There are signs that as Jane progressed in authorship her master was leading her to deeper feelings. Yet her style, so properly admired, could never have expressed a sense of tragedy in life She kept a check on emotions, and strain is betrayed in her few exalted passages. Charlotte Bronte's probe penetrates, yet misses the distinction between tragedy and comedy. Scott understood: "that young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with." Once she was urged to write a court romance. She could no more do that than write an epic poem, she said. She was content to watch the country families she knew.
More Talk is another series of fireside chats about Austenisms recollected in tranquillity. It is a work of love in spirit and execu- tion. The authors, with an identity of tastes, have drunk deep of the pure waters. They say nothing a " Janeite " could quarrel with. But some outside the priesthood may risk a question here and there, or protest, ever so mildly, 'against the making of a cult. Miss Kaye-Smith even summons Jane from spirit-land for some confidences. We are told, too, of people "whose coarse pleasure it is" to breathe on the glass of Jane's perfection. This is an Aunt Sally. No one whose opinion counts finds pleasure in that. What does sometimes cause a yawn is the sophisticated worship of everything Jane did, the use of her as a battlefield. It seems not quite consonant with the spirit of Jane Austen, English verdure, English culture. The flicker of an astringent smile rebukes from the
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