ON SOME OF THE OLD NOVELS.*
WE have been re-reading the old novels, and were this paper to appear this day four years, we might say with literal truth, what we may already say with actual truth—we have been living in the last century. Very far away are the days when " Highbnry," a village within a drive of Box Hill, was a whole day's journey from London, and when strong-mindecl ladies such as Miss Clarendon in Helen inveighed against the " stupid safety" and " expedition " of coach journeys in England. The outside face of the world has changed,— manners have altered, and these ladies and gentlemen clothe their thoughts in such different language to our own, that we overlook the essential likeness of their ideas, and hold them old-fashioned, artificial, and affected. Their talk amuses, astonishes, and finally wearies us, and we close the books, sorry that, with two exceptions, we cannot read these authors who would give us such curious pictures of the life of our grandfathers, with greater pleasure to ourselves. The first of our exceptions is James Morier, and here it is subject rather than style which makes us forget that his work was done so long ago. Hadjji Baba is a picture of the manners of the East, and in the East, to-day, yesterday, and to-morrow are all one. The caravans still journey from Ispahan to Teheran as they did seventy, as they did seven hundred, years ago, and the nameless adventurer may still rise to even higher posts than that of first Mirza or Secretary to an Ambassador. Mr. Curzon in his introduction points out certain changes of costume and in the buildings of Teheran, but except for these differences the adventures of one of the most entertaining of scoundrels might, so far as internal evidence goes, have been written yesterday.
Very different is the case with the other author, whose literary skill is so great that we forget all changes of language and custom, and welcome her world of men and women as contemporaries. Jane Austen's hand can actually recreate for us the life of the youngest years of the century. We read her books with no sense of shock in the difference of manners. We never say to ourselves, "How odd the world must have been when people spoke and acted like this." We accept both language and action as inevitable and natural,— the first few pages bring her world into focus for us, and we enjoy the rest of the book with no feeling of strain. Miss • Emma, Prida and Prejudice. JIeln, Headlong Hell, Jamb Faithful. Th. King's Own, Hadjji Bab; dre. " Feacuck Series." LondJo Macmillan and Go.
Austen saw life through a thin veil of kindly sarcasm, and such as she saw it so she gives it to us. There is hardly a word of her writing which is not touched with, as it were, a ripple of irony, but of irony so cheerful and delicate that we are in love with the very folly of the world. The brutal and passionate sarcasm of Swift revolts us and makes us angry with ourselves for being men and women. The cynicism of Thackeray saddens us, and for a moment we despair of human nature. At Miss Austen's irony we smile indulgently. "Lord ! what fools these mortals be,"—but such kindly pleasant fools ;
fools that we should like to know, fools that it were no .disgrace to be. We fear, however, that her work does not appeal to all alike. A recent criticism of the latest addition to the " Peacock" reprints, Ernma, talks of the " lifelessness " of the characters of the book. Miss Bates lifeless ! Who
could possibly apply the adjective to her who has shrank under the intolerable torrent of her words ? She shares with Mrs. Nickleby the faculty of making the reader long to throw down the book and stop his ears to escape from the clatter. How much, too, do we sympathise with Emma's weariness at the sight of one of Jane Fairfax's interminable letters. Again, is it possible that any one can consider Mrs.
Elton lifeless ? Mrs. Elton, on the contrary, lives, and will live for ever. The present writer met her, some years ago, in the person of the newly married curate's wife in a quiet country village. She hailed from the modern counter- part of Bath,—a smart seaside town, of the grandeur of which she spoke with ineffable complacency. She appeared in a magnificent white satin gown the first time she and her husband were asked to dine, quite alone, with their astonished
rector, because, as she remarked, almost in the words of her illustrious prototype, "I must put on a few ornaments now, because it is expected of me." Finally, she too had a well-
married sister, the roll-call of whose equipages included a conveyance which closely resembled the celebrated barouche landau." With Emma herself we confess to having little patience. She was so inconceivably snobbish
and self-important. Witness her speech to Mr. Knightley when he drives instead of walking out to dinner. "This is
coming, as you should do, like a gentleman." Mr. Knightley very properly snubs her, an exercise he is extremely fond of, for "Knightley," as the sprightly Mrs. Elton loves to call him, is an incontestable prig. Indeed, Miss Austen seldom avoids that pitfall for the virtuous hero, and a list of her heroes will furnish several varieties of the species,—as Mr. Knightley and Colonel Brandon, both dry prigs ; Mr. Darcy, the prig pompous; Edmund Bertram and Henry Tilney, amiable prigs.
Only for gentle Anne Elliot does Miss Austen provide a mate who, though his conduct gives some cause for anxiety before marriage, will, we feel, be a thoroughly pleasant companion through life. We should like to meet Captain and Mrs. Wentworth.
Although Miss Austen's novels are such pleasant reading, it is not only there that we shall find most interesting and illuminating side-lights on the minds and methods of thought of our immediate ancestors. Let us take these old-fashioned novels as "human documents," and undaunted by the fatigue engendered by focussing one's mind's eye at an artificial angle, go down through the differences of manner to the human nature beneath. How like these men and women are
to ourselves,—their motives, their aims, their faults, the very way of committing these faults. We of the present day are often reproached by old-fashioned people for the wicked luxury and extravagance in which we live. As to extravagance in dress, we should say that nothing which goes on to-day was worse than the following instance of extravagance given by Lady Davenant in Helen of "a lady of high rank, who hires a certain pair of emerald earrings at fifteen hundred pounds per annum. She rents them in this way from some German countess, in whose family they are an heirloom and cannot be sold." Who indeed would sell, even if they could, earrings which bring in the income of a small landed estate ? Again, to what could that fatiguing phrase, "fin de siècle," be more appropriately applied than to the account, also given by Lady Davenant, of the following transactions ?— " Young ladies enter into regular partnerships—joint-stock companies—with dressmakers and jewellers, who make their ventures and bargains on the more or less reputation of the young ladies for beauty or for fashion, supply them with finery, speculate on their probabilities of matrimonial success, and trust to being repaid after marriage. Why not pursue this plan next season in town?"
We have been told of this undignified speculation taking place in these days—been told of it with a shake of the head given by a virtuous matron, who assured us that such doings were unheard of in her day. And now, behold it is an old and stale device inherited from our great-grandmothers. Human nature has not changed, but only the conventions which modify it. The discoveries of steam and electricity have really left us very much where we were. They have given us more of "that unrest which men miscall delight," but our minds work on much the same lines as those of our forefathers worked a hundred years ago. Our manners certainly are fundamentally changed, for we have replaced an artificial ceremoniousness with an affectation of frankness and unreserve. We plume ourselves on our advance in civilisation, we regard the unfortunate people who lived before our own day with most complacent pity,—pity for the narrowness of their ideas and pity for the poverty of their resources. But if we study the old novels we shall find that our immediate forefathers were very like ourselves, with the same faults, the same pleasures as our own, and that but for the difference in language and in manner, the world in those days went very much as it does in these.
Previous page
