JANE AlJSTEN.* THIS is a very pleasant little book, which
has only one (Idea, that it appears to be written rather for those who do not know Miss Austen well than for those who do, and that we should doubt whether any book about her will ever attract those who can care for her and who do not already know her,
• Eminent Women Series. Edited by John H. Ingram:—Jana Austen- By Mrs. Charles Malden. London : W. H. Allen and Co.
half as much as one of her own novels; while those who do know Miss Austen would have preferred to have had a good deal less of rehearsal of the plots of her novels, with which they ' are perfectly familiar, and a good deal more of that finer criticism which would bring out her delicate insight, her play- fulness, her irony, her certainty of touch, and her perfect finish, with new force. No one can say that Mrs. Charles Malden makes too little of her heroine. But we wish she had assumed that all who would read her study were already as familiar with the six novels, as mere stories, as she herself is, and had devoted herself to the task of giving her readers a deeper insight into the wonderful faculty which produced them.
Perhaps the most definite evidence of artistic faculty that can be produced is a fine irony. No one who has it can possibly be destitute of artistic feeling, and no one who wants it can be in the highest sense an artist. It is quite possible for a master of irony to be destitute of productive power, of fertility,—like the poet Gray, for example,—but no master of irony ever wanted the power to say with art whatever he had to say at all. Compare Miss Austen's irony with that of perhaps her greatest rival, in many respects her superior, in a similar field, George Eliot, and we shall remark at once that Miss Austen had an almost immense superiority in artistic feeling and delicacy of finish, though her great rival had a far larger field in which to work. George Eliot's humour is often rich enough, her mother-wit especially is abundant ; but directly she attempts irony, you hear the falsetto note. The heaviness of her style will not admit of that light touch in which there is just a laughing echo, and no more. There is more true irony in a single chapter of Pride and Prejudice or Emma than in all George Eliot's works put together ; and that is the chief indication of the exquisiteness of Miss Austen's art. Mrs. Charles Malden should have given us a separate chapter on Miss Austen's irony, another on her young clergymen, a third on her marvellous variety of selfish women (like Miss Elliot in Persuasion, Mrs. John Dashwood and Lady Middleton and Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility, Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park, Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey, Lady Catherine de Burgh and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, and Mrs. Elton in Emma), and a fourth on Miss Austen's vulgar people, whom we regret to say that Mrs. Charles Malden hardly appreciates highly enough, though we doubt whether anything shows Miss Austen's power so much as her exquisite skill in delineating both refinement and vulgarity. Indeed, it is not easy to say how many chapters of the kind we have suggested, Mrs. Malden might not have written which would have opened the eyes even of the elect who love Miss Austen to some of her more subtle charms. It was a mistake, we think, to write on Miss Austen for the benefit of those who do not know her. No one but Miss Austen will ever make a convert to her genius ; but Mrs. Malden might have taught the converted to marvel even more than they do now at the depth and subtlety and reticence and wonderful variety of insight which is contained in six modest and unpretending stories.
One of Mrs. Malden's acutest remarks is that Miss Austen had the courage necessary " to omit the moralising which our ancestors considered necessary to counteract the baleful effects of being amused," a remark which is quite in Miss Austen's own style of criticism. That courage is, indeed, one of the best evidences of Miss Austen's genius. But did she quite succeed in this in Mansfield Park? To our mind, good as Mansfield Park is, it is the heaviest of Miss Austen's stories, and we should put all the rest, on the whole, above it. No doubt Mrs. Norris is a great conception, a great conception to which even Mrs. Charles Malden hardly does justice,—why did she not call attention to the " handsome " present which Mrs. Norris gave her nephew William, when Lady Bertram " only" gave him ten pounds, and to the confidential information given by Miss Austen to her niece as to the exact sum to which that hand- some present amounted ?—but even Mrs. Norris cannot bring Mansfield Park up to the level of the other stories. It seems to us that the exquisite lightness of touch which perhaps reaches
its highest point in Pride and Prejudice or Emma, is more deficient in Mansfield Park than in any other of the six novels.
Nor can even the heroine of Mansfield Park compare in interest, we think, with the heroine of Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion, while none of the men, unless it be Henry Crawford, are really interesting at all.
Mrs. Charles Malden has written a pleasant little book,--an sensible books about Miss Austen are pleasant, and can hardly help being so,—and this book is certainly not only sensible, but in parts acute,—but we feel persuaded that she could have written a much better book than this within the same com- pass, if she had frankly devoted herself to writing for the Austenites, and not for the external world.
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