THE CHARM OF MISS AlJSTEN.
MR. GOLDWIN SMITH has added another to the not inconsiderable roll of eminent men who have found their delight in Miss Austen. His little book upon her just published by Walter Scott in the series on " Great Writers," edited by Professor Eric S. Robertson, is certainly a fascinating book to those who already know her and love her well; and we have little doubt that it will prove also a fascinating book to those who have still to make her acquaintance. Every one knows how enthusiastically her six novels were admired by Sir Walter Scott, by Sydney Smith, by Lord Macaulay, by George Eliot, by Walter Bagehot, and almost all the finest judges of delicate literary workmanship. Mr. Goldwin Smith proves himself to be one of the finest of these judges of delicate literary workmanship, though we protest against his view that Sir Walter Elliot's empty family pride and Lady Catherine de Burgh's ill-bred insolence of station are over- done. That only means, we take it, that they would be less natural and credible now than they were in Miss Austen's time, which is true ; but it is equally true that a good many other social features of that day,—for example, Mr. Collins's clerical servility, and Mrs. Jennings's unashamed vulgarity,— would be less natural and credible now than in Miss Austen's time. But, on the whole, Mr. Goldwin Smith is as fine a critic of Miss Austen's slight imperfections as he is of her manifold perfections. He is more trustworthy, for instance, than Lord Macatilay, for he rightly denies to Miss Austen's men anything like the exquisite truth and finish which he finds in her women. Admirable as are many of her pictures of men, there are not a few very vaguely and indistinctly outlined,—Edward Ferrara, for example, and Edmund Bertram. If now and then Mr. Goldwin Smith says
a word that is perhaps too depreciating, he is generally as sure in detecting a flaw as in signalising a success. And he does not get into ecstasies, but shows all the fine sense and moderation, which Miss Austen herself evinced in so high a degree, in the zest with which he brings out her almost in- exhaustible humour, and the keenness of vision with which he discriminates her marvellously vivid, but more or less softened and subdued, realism.
However, the chief interest in this fresh delineation of Miss Austen's wonderful literary power is the light it throws on the question of the secret of her charm for the few, and her want of charm for the many,—for it cannot be denied that for a very considerable number of remarkably able men, Miss Austen wields no spell at all, though for those over whom she does wield a spell, she wields a spell of quite curious force. We believe that the secret both of her great charm for those whom she does charm, and of her complete failure to fascinate a large class of able men, is in the fineness,— and, indeed, we may say, the reduced scale,—of her exquisite pictures. It is not everybody who can appreciate the minia- ture ; it is not everybody who can see life at all through a minifying instead of a magnifying medium. On the other hand, to those who can, there is a peculiar attraction in such life. You can get a glimpse of what it was in Sir Walter Scott's remark : " The big bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any one now going ; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me." That just hits the mark where it makes Scott disparage his own " big bow-wow strain,"---in other words, the deep passions and eager ambitions which really filled his own imagination,—but it misses the mark when he supposes himself unable to touch off the truth and sentiment of common- place situations, for no one could do it better than Scott, where the truth and sentiment of commonplace things was of a plain masculine type, like the interest of Jeanie Deans in her home, in her cows, and her dairy, or of Dinmont in his farm, or of the canny innkeeeper, Neale Blanc, in keeping well with Covenanters and Royalists alike. But what Scott really meant that he could not do, and that Jane Austen could do, was so to epitomise and yet delineate pride and meanness and vulgarity and selfishness, and the like, as to give in one and the same sentence a glimpse of the reality and yet of the amusingness of life, to reduce its scale while really multi- plying its humours. No one does this like Miss Austen. Sir Walter Scott and Fielding and Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot all need considerable space for their pictures ; and when you have got them, even the least literary eye can see that the scale of drawing is by no means harmonious through; out ; that some passions are life-size, and others hastily indi- cated by a line here and a line there ; that some characters are slightly exaggerated, and others hardly made visible at all ; and that while the imagination is roused and exalted by some scenes, there are others which, though necessary to the story, are not additions to its charm. But with Miss Austen this is hardly ever so. No drawing so delicate and yet so artistic has been seen in English literature. It is a selectionrof all that is most superficially interesting in human life, of all that is most easily appreciated without going very deep, and an exclusion of all that it takes real wear and tear of spirit to enter thoroughly into. That was what made its singular charm to men like Sir Walter Scott and Sydney Smith, and Lord Macaulay and Mr. Goldwin. Smith, who have wanted rest and entertainment when they turned to fiction, rather than new labour. And that is what renders Miss Austen caviare to the great majority of men, who want, not rest and entertainment, but new exeite- ment, new stimulus. " What should I do," says Miss Austen to a contemporary, "with your strong, vigorous sketches full of variety and glow P How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour P" In that minute scale and high finish we have the secret, in our opinion, both of the delight that is felt in Miss Austen by the few, and the indifference felt for her by the many. In order to work on that little bit of ivory with any effect, she had to select only what could be given without broad or strong touches ; she had to select just what interested and amused herself, and that was not either the most substantial or the most tragic or the most impressive or the most representa- tive parts of human life, but was just what chiefly excited the interest of a lively and humorous woman who lived her life amongst the rural gentry of the Southern Counties in the time of the great war at the beginning of the century. It was hardly possible to find a finer sieve, a more effective strainer for artistic material, than such a mind as this, and the result was something exquisitely interesting and attrac- tive to those who liked the fastidious selection of social elements which such a mind instinctively made for itself, and intolerably uninteresting and unattractive to those who loved to brood over the larger enterprises, the deeper passions, the weightier responsibilities, the more massive interests at which Miss Austen hardly glanced except to convince herself that she must leave them to the care of others. The many states- men and thinkers, and the many humorous women who loVe Miss Austen's books, love them because they find in them a social world like enough to the real world to be for the time eagerly lived in, and yet one relieved of the bitterest elements and infinitely more entertaining than the real world, a world which rivets the attention without wearying it, and makes life appear far less dreary and burdensome, though also far less laborious, eager, and anxious, than it really is. This is the true charm of Miss Austen to those who love her, and the true source of indifference to those who do not. The former want a lively social picture in which they will be constantly amused and interested, and never required to attempt any great stretch of their powers of sympathy and imagination, one in contemplating which they can constantly laugh at the pompous self-importance of some men and the frank selfish- ness of others, without grappling too closely with any of the great problems of duty, or any of the great mysteries and paradoxes of faith. The anti-Austenites, on the other hand, want something very different in literature from this. The lively superficies of life is nothing to them in a mere literary mirror ; they like to study it at the original sources among the smiles and frowns and flying shafts of actual society. When they take the trouble to read a book at all, they want something that excites and awakens them, that makes a kind of impression which even the most lively society could not provide, but which they might remember in their dreams. Miss Austen's fine feminine sieve sifts away all that has most interest for such men, and leaves nothing but the aroma of society without the actual interest of personal relations. The delicate touches that the miniature preserves are interesting enough to men of this kind, if they see them in living eyes and on living lips ; bat when they are registered only in the fine strokes of the literary miniature, they do not affect them. They expect literature to reveal something beyond even the best and most delicately sifted experience of ordinary life; they expect it either to stir them to the very depths and electrify them, or to present them with some new mass of facts not otherwise attainable; and the delicate literary miniature painting answers neither purpose. But for those wbo like nothing better than to live by imagination alone among just such figures as would bore them if they were in the flesh, but only delight them in the delicately conceived field of a refined and vivid artist's canvas, Miss Austen's novels are the moat perfectly amusing in the world. There is absolutely no strain in them, nothing but the lightest tracing of the characteristic vanities, self- deceptions, follies, and weaknesses, as well as shrewdnesses and wit, of human life, so delineated as to make them all alike seem even less important than they really are ; and yet they secure all, and more than all, the charms of society to those who do not care to be themselves actors in the society they observe. If the Lady of Shalott had had Miss Austen's pictures before her, she would perhaps have been satisfied without plunging into the stream of real life; for no magic mirror ever reflected so much of it that amuses, and so little that heats and excites the soul to thirst after and taste the reality. In Miss Austen's world we are content to live as mere observers, while most of the great novelists of Europe succeed in agitating the heart and stimulating the instincts which lead to passion or action.
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