The Smile is the Signature
Jane Austen. By Lord Press. Is. 6d.)
David Cecil. (Cambridge University
Jane Austen. By Lord Press. Is. 6d.) JANE AUSTEN'S art was a smiling criticism of life. It is this same and smiling quality of her work that Lord David Cecil emphasizes • throughout his Leslie Stephen lecture. Though morally she was inflexible—Lord David speaks of her characters as being " brought to trial before the triple bar of taste, sense and virtue "—she was a woman with no cause at heart, no wish to demonstrate what she found self- evident, conscious of none of those enemies to the spirit that make a writer .combative. Irony, unlike satire, is not militant, and, coming at the close of a century of satirists, it is as an ironist that she excels. It is the extreme calm of her attitude that gives her writing force.
Appreciations of Jane Austen have been too often tinged with a possessive whimsicality she would have found odious. Lord David's appreciation has, throughout his lecture, a detachment she would have liked. She has been read for the right reasons, but too often approved for the wrong ; she offers, she would have wished to offer, no retreat from
reality. Her very style adjudicates. However . smiling, however brief her visits to the writing table, she wrote hardly a sentence that is not informed with the rationality of the age at whose close she had been born. A gulf lies between her work and the bulk of 'the English nineteenth-century novels—these lacking her untendentious coolness, her mistrust of the gothic. Flaubert identifies style with vision. Jane Austen gives vision a quality : she makes style a high kind of common sense.
Lord David's appreciation is constructive. He establishes Jane Austen's seriousness as an artist—her, as it were, involuntary seriousness—by showing that she satisfies, as a novelist, three requirements. She knew her own range and kept within it. She fused imagination and reality. She kept a rare, if not always perfect, balance between fact and form. Though she may not haVe been intimidated by the difficulties of her craft, one cannot believe she surmounted them quite unawares. If it was seldon difficult, it can never have been in the slack sense easy for her to, write. . . Her knowledge of her own range is, above all, important. Now and then her major characters bound outside it, as any artist's vital characters must : they hit earth, or her sapience, again at unexpected spots. If at a height of confused and violent feeling, to which she does not attempt to follow, one or two of her characters change or even lose their nature (Lord David instances Henry Crawford), one must accept that, as she does. People in whom passion and wordliness mix often do behave unaccountably. She may oppose emotion but she never invalidates it.
The development of Jane Austen from the clever girl to the woman, with the increasing sureness of her feeling about feeling, Lord David traces throughout the novels., When one is young nothing abates cleverness ; one can draw in clear lines and ignore shadows. Persuasion gains in gravity, depth and profoundly human uncertainty what it has lost of the glittering certainty of Pride and Prejudice. The antithesis of Sense and Sensibility is no longer before us : one sees antithesis more sharply before one feels. In her iast novel, feeling is restrained, but restrained because of her own sense of power : the scales are no longer weighted against emotion, which has here, by implication, its full poetic force.
" Irony," says Lord David, " is the substance of her style." This delicate, doubtful, yet certain smile does indeed inform the novels. She is a difficult subject for criticism, likely to make its methods pompous and unwieldy. The opening paragraph of Lord David's lecture makes Jane Austen personally present at its delivery : at no point in its course need her presence discountenance him, for in method and manner both the speaker suits his subject. Throughout, the lecture shows a reflection of the smile.
ELIZAOETII BOWEN.
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