two opposing characters, a priggish lover, Darcy, and a girl of sense and spirit, Elizabeth Bennet, and the plot, if so it can be called, tells only how they squabbled, came gradually to like each other, and were married and lived happily at last. Mansfield Park is the story of a young girl, Fanny Price, left penniless, who is adopted into the family circle of her cousins, two sisters, and a son, Edmond; and the plot is little more than the way in which he falls in and out of love with Fanny and how they are married in the end. But these gossamer threads of story are woven into a fabric all a-glisten with the lights and shades of life. Her principal themes were family life, and-what is rarer in to-day's realism, but evidently played an important part then -neighbourly life, its ebb and flow, actions and reactions, gossip, opportunities of matchmaking, and discussions as to the exact niceties of behaviour. The complications which modern fiction creates out of temperament then arose mainly from class distinction. Preoccupation with class distinction is so clearly the basis of all major and minor incidents and reflections in Jane Austen's books, that it cannot be ignored as mere personal snobbery on the part of the author. Obviously the upper classes were then soaked to the bone in it. Jane could chuckle at the exaggerated snobbery of Mr. Collins, of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, of General Tilney and Sir Walter Elliott and Mr. Elton; but she was certainly not free from it herself; she deprecates marriage where there is any disparity of birth; she converses most seriously on incomes, dowries, rank, and occupation; a slip of good manners in one of her creatures is at once shown up and dwelt upon at length. Emma talks pages of sheer rot to her protégée, Harriet, about the "consequence" she will gain by entering a house like Hartfield on equal footing with its young mistress; Darcy is condemned for jibing at Elizabeth because some of her relations are in trade-and this, with Emma's reluctance to honour the worthy Coles with her presence at dinner, proves that trade was then very far from mixing with gentility; and that, in spite of the French Revolution, democracy was a long way from England. Apparently, snobbery and prejudice were at this period. as eternally, peculiar to the older generation; and the young folk, impatient of restriction, were just beginning to emerge from it, winning for themselves more freedom of thought and independence of movement than formerly. The theme which never alters! The novelists of a hundred years hence will surely still be writing of it. But Jane Austen chiefly owes her fame to her exquisite and unparalleled gift of comedy. Posterity can never be sufficiently grateful for Mr. Collins, Mr. Woodhouse, Miss Bates, Lady Bertram, Mr. Rushworth, Isabella Thorpe, Miss Jennings, Mrs. Bennet. To the reader who asks that a novel shall take him "out of himself," Jane Austen's appeal is small. But is that quality the test of a good novel? Is not the true test its power to take us into ourselves—that is to say, into our human nature, of which the true and lively exhibition is the very purpose of all drama? It is possible to make truth look small. The map of Jane Austen's world looks insignificant at a first glance, but, within it, all is truth, wit, sense, and proportion. The plot seems to be inevitable to the characters, and the characters the very natives of the plot. BIBLIOGRAPHY THE RISE OF THE NOVEL. G. Saintsbury's The English Novel. DANIEL DEFOE. Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, The Memoirs of a Cavalier, and Journal of the Plague Year are all obtainable in the Everyman's Library. W. P. Trent, How to Know Defoe. W. Minto's Defoe in the "English Men of Letters" Series. LDING. Jones (2 vols.), Amelia (2 vols.), and Joseph Andrews (1 vol.), Bohn's Popular Library. in Dobson's Fielding. CHARDSON. issa Harlowe, Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison. ‣LLETT. grine Pickle (2 vols.), Sir Launcelot Greaves and Adventures of m (1 vol.), Humphry Clinker, Roderick Random, and Ferdinand, Fathom. EN. Jane Austen's works, there are many editions. -14 |