The Immaculate Miniaturist
'Woo does not belong to the universal society that worships the incomparable Jane ? No one dares. to say a shrewd word. about her. Since she was heralded by the boom of Sir Walter
• Scott's big gun, she has advanced through generations of hushed and: omewhat awe-stricken. admirers.. We almost call . ourselves her devout pupils. Scott said of her : " Miss Austen has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary. life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-Wow. strain I can do myself like any now going ; but the exquisite touch which renders the ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied 'to me."
This universal devotion; howeier, has' been only of gradual growth. Even praise by the popular author of Waverley could not blow her into fame. Her muse was not congenial to contemporary taste, which revelled in Childe Harold, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Monk Lewis. In Northanger Abbey she played the Cervantes' to all that was spurious in the fashionable ivy- mantled romanticism, and her irony—so unknown a quality in young ladies then—was not appreciated. There was no brood- ing villainy in her books, nor tortured. virtue, nor thrilling vicissitudes of passion. The only secrecies in which she indulged were nice little geometrical puzzles that .played in counterpoint upon the tickled intelligence. Suspense she used as a musical device, and did not harrow thefeelings withit. Nature meant nothing to her. She introduced. no. tortuous ravines, no _ ruined castles, no haunted forests, to playsinister parts amongst her characters.. Her woods.wcre.seldom.far.from the house, or more than two acres.in extent, In consequence,. her first..book, Pride and Prejudice, waited nearly sixteen years for a pub- lisher; and her second, Sense and Sensibility, thirteen.years. Her-third one she sold to a Bath bookseller for less than twenty :pounds, and subsequently bought it back • from him. No wonder that her genius, sane and balanced as it was, fell into a torpor. For nine years, after she had-reached the age of twenty-five, she wrote nothing except the fragment of The Watsons. Yet she seemed not to fall out of love with life, or to indulge in self-pity, so common a fault in neglected talent. From what little we know of her. she appears to have settled down amiably to the life of a spinster daughter of the country rectory near Alton, in Hampshire. She sewed, and kept house ; corresponded, and took part in the cheerful local, petty, social life. Schooled by this discipline, she found a new strength and self-confidence, and in 1811 she began again, producing three masterpieces; _Emma, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park.
Recognition began to come, and we find:Emma dedicated to the Prince -Regent, who, in:spite:of his activities at Bright- helmstonc, possessed sufficient taste to carry a set of Jane's books wherever he went,- for constant- perusal; She died in 1817, at fprty4wo; still comparatively obscure, and many years were to pass before two champions of -her genius arose. These were Macaulay and Whately„Archbishop of Dublin and "famous logician. • Both these men had a peculiar dry, clear mentality that found a perfect aesthetic expression in the algebraic preciseness of Jane Austen's style, plot, and charac- terization. They began to shout their praises, and soon were joined by Tennyson and others, until finally she was carried -in triumph to a niche in the temple of immortality. To-day we have taken her down, but only to put her on a column more exalted.
. Why is this ? It is principally, I think, because of her cool detachment from her scenes and people. That is an ideal conduct after which we strive now, because we arc so troubled by the complexity of our unhealthy political and social con- dition, and so raw from the recent savagery of the War. Our younger people are very sceptical of the morbid self-analysis -which has saturated our artistic life since the 'nineties. Proust and Joyce even are a little overblown, and Mr. David Garnett and Mr. Mottram are cleaner on our palate. They stand further • off ; they don't dissolve themselves in their own emotions and pour the oblation before us. A new conserva- tism, preciseness, almost snobbery, is springing up ; some- thing more austere and sceptical than the highbrow democracy of yesterday, or, let us say, early this morning. Consequently, we find Jane Austen very much to our taste. We chuckle with understanding gratification when we read about Mr. Knightley
Of pride, indeed, there was perhaps scarcely enough ; his indifference to a confusion of rank bordered too much on inelegance of mind." We share, too, her distrust of all forms of confession, believing with her that " seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human discldsure ; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken." That might be Mr. Santayana, or Mr. Noel Coward, speaking.
But perhaps even more to our taste than this shrewd detach- ment is the marvellous and circumscribed irony in which it finds expression. We begin to feel that the limited world in Which she works is altogether more comfortable than the dark- :cornered macrocosm in which our tragic idealism has groped, and grown weary in the effort to establish a cosmology. These Time and Space philosophers, these Spenglers and Keyserlings, how unhumorous and vaguely theoretical we find them. Let us have a more tangible form of conciseness, which, though it may be equally as artificial as these vast schemata of the workings of the universe, is yet more profitable because it does "reflect the articulations of human society.
That miniature organism, that world which she said was painted " on two square inches of ivory," is what Jane 'Austen giVes _us ! There is so little assumption about her, because she is all assumption: She creates order, like the housewife, by shutting her winderWs on the swirling dust of the world, and then setting her rooms to 'rights with
• : an untiring dennestic aubtlety. The consequence is that by this method of exclusion she is able to become an easy mistress of her few poasesSiOns, showing them in all their possibilities of elegance, in every variety of light and shade. Her world is her-household, and its inhabitants' are her rela- tives. With relatives we have few "illusions. We are cruelly 'clear abont thein. 'Thus Jane can write : • " The Miss Bertrams were now fully established among the belles of -the neighbourhood ; and air they joined' to beauty and :brilliant acquirements a manner naturally -easy. and- carefully formed to general- civility and obligingness, they possessed its favour. as well as its admiration. Their vanity was in such good order that they seemed to be quite free from it. and gave themselves no airs; while the praises attending such behaviour, secured and brought round by their aunt, served to strengthen them in believing they had no faults."
Notice how that clarity of outlook has made the literary style. Was ever expression more unaffectedly limpid ?
And yet, when we examine that style more largely we find how cautious, how minuet-ish it really is, how elaborately simple ; just like Mr. Garnett's to-day: And that discovery sets us wondering ; and in our wonder we begin to feel restive. A certain lack of air is perceived, the pretty arrangement and 'good taste of the furniture becomes a re- strictive nuisance, and at last, inn fit of gasping exasperation —for nothing is so irritating as restricted breathing we rush to the windows and fling them open on the broad and flowing
World where DickenS and -Dostoievsky welter in untidy and "disreputable grandeur. And we arc no sooner out of the house than pleasant little Jane Austen has closed the door on us, smiling so -enigmatically. that we go. away suspecting that she too must make a few nocturnal excursions:from her home.
This edition is a delightful one,. with admirable and pro- vocative introductions by Mr. John Bailey.
Breirmiu Cruncir.
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