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A GIRL'S OPINION ON JANE AUSTEN,
by Edith Edlmann (1892).
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Very well said.
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"It has been said that the literature of a nation finds a place in the heart of men proportionately as it is able to reveal the deeper meaning—the inner heart, which lies beneath the apparent trivialities of daily life.
"To become a permanent inheritance, we know that it must reflect mankind simply and truly in ordinary garb and varying mood. Do the works of Jane Austen fulfil these requirements? In part, we must allow they do. Writing in an age when literature was forced and unnatural, when fiction was encumbered with the artificial mannerisms, the stilted rhetoric, the far-fetched plot and incidents of the romantic school and contaminated by the evil influence of effeted French Court taste, it is to the enduring merit of three English-women, Miss Ferrier, Miss Edgeworth, but above all to Miss Austen, that public taste was led into simpler and purer channels. What Wordsworth was to poetry, Miss Austen was to fiction—the pioneer of a reformation. The novel in her hands became a means of enjoyment to people of taste and intelligence; something that it was neither a shame to have written nor to have read. Miss Lydia Languish need no longer throw her book under the sofa or behind the spinnet when she heard approaching footsteps.
"Walter Bagehot, in one of his literary studies, speaks of the keen enjoyment of novel-reading as the prerogative of youth. No doubt our love for many authors is a youthful and passing taste, but in the instance of Miss Austen the case seems to be reversed. Here we find a girl writing of girls, whose warmest admirers for nearly one hundred years are found, not so much among other young people, as among savants and men of letters. The youthful enthusiasms of the many are not poured out over her as over Scott and Dickens, but the constant affection of the few and cultured still keeps her in her niche of the temple of fame.
"Jane Austen is known today as the "critic's novelist." By her purity and simplicity of style she has been capable of fascinating such men as Scott, Macaulay, Tennyson, Sydney Smith, Whately, Whewell, Coleridge, Southey, Spedding, Leslie Stephen, and many more; a style considered by Cardinal Newman to be so perfect that, to improve his own, he at one time read her works through yearly. She delights them with her perfect manner of treating commonplace matter, charms them with the descriptions of the daily lives of our great-grandmothers, whose occupations, feelings, ways, and manners are given with the "minuteness of a miniature painter"—or as they tell us, like a master of the Flemish school. The subject is ordinary enough and oft repeated, the skill lies in the wonderful accuracy of the artist's hand and eye.
" ... Every occurrence is reproduced with the truthfulness of a girl who described things as she saw them, and not as they were drawn in the artificial light of her day. Our admiration is the more aroused when we consider how very young that girl was. Before we read many pages of her work, we become aware that all she describes is familiar. We have assisted at such scenes as she depicts; those small pleasures, those small mortifications of which we read, have touched the surface of our lives. We, ourselves, have taken part in drawing-room, dining-room, ball-room scenes such as she paints, we have met such people as inhabit her world repeatedly. There is the merit of much good-natured gossip, but no scandal in her pages, for hers is a wit that laughs, but does not know how to sneer; at times it is so Addisonian that we wonder she has no better word for the Spectator."
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" ... "It is a universally acknowledged truth that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." These words commence her best novel and form the keynote of all. Had she added, "and the average mother with several daughters considers it her mission in life to fill that want," we should be possessed of the entire situation. In fact, if it were not for the bulkiness of the volume, and the size of the family party, all her characters and plots might be contained under one cover. For in these pages we meet with nothing more harrowing or exciting than the hopes and fears, the managements and heart-burnings, which arise before the music of the wedding-bells and consumption of the wedding-cake. That any other destination should await her heroine is—to Miss Austen—evidently an impossibility. Richardson may give us a Clarissa, and "make the eyes of a Scott weep and his heart ache." Miss Austen only gives us Emmas, Fannys, Elizas, all happily married in the last chapter to the most delightfully amiable and moral young men, of modest demeanour and more than modest fortune. If, by chance, providence has happened to forget ways and means before, she now makes amends by dropping a comfortable rectory into the happy young man's lap, or, more correctly speaking, by dropping the happy young man into the comfortable rectory, where he is conspicuously fitted by his extreme youth to inspire his flock with the wisdom of his precepts, and guide them through the wealth of his inexperience.
"If, however, her plots are wanting in variety they have other merits which cannot be overlooked. The extreme naturalness with which all the small complications are invested, the easy transition from incident to incident, the compactness of design, the charming way details dovetail and apparently chance remarks connect situations delight us as we watch the unfolding story. The skill with which the numerous young people are steered past shoals and quicksands into the matrimonial haven elicits our admiration and rivals in temerity that of a writer in our own day, Miss Charlotte Yonge, who brings equally large families to an equally successful anchorage."
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"In character painting she stands unrivalled. No writer has a happier knack of presenting character in so few words, so rapidly, so graphically. When she tells us that "Darcy possesses all the goodness, and Wickham all the appearance of it," the moral character of those two men is before us in a nutshell ... "
""Miss Bates enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, or married. She stood in the worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favour; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her, into outward respect. She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without goodwill. It was her own universal goodwill and contented temper which worked such wonders. She loved everybody, was interested in everybody's happiness, quick-sighted to everybody's merits... The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to everybody, and a mine of felicity to herself. She was a great talker on little matters... full of trivial communications and harmless gossip.""
"For her older men, like Darcy and Knightley, we have nothing but praise. Their unobtrusive goodness of heart, their unselfishness and thought for others, delight us. But her younger heroes ... With the exception of Captain Wentworth and William Price, in the later works, there is nothing strong or manly about them. So unlike the young men of today are they, that we are tempted to think they must be drawn from imagination rather than observation. It is hard to believe that such types represent Englishmen of not more than a century ago. Athletics, cricket, boating, golf, steeple-chasing are unknown pastimes to her country gentlemen."
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"Before leaving our subject we cannot pass unnoticed Miss Austen's merits as a contemporary, though unconscious, historian. The material is not such as Dr. Bright might use, but rather such as would delight a Macaulay. From her pages we gain a clear insight into the manners and customs of the middle-class provincial life of the last century, and gather a plain idea of the position and importance of landowners, of the state of church and church patronage, of class distinctions at that period. We read of days of franked letters and of a twopenny London post, of times when umbrellas were not universal, but when mail coaches and post-chaises were. Then writing was considered a fine art, then sailors were rich, and farmers and landowners prosperous. Then at balls country dances with innumerable steps were danced, and furious polkas and kitchen lancers lay undreamt of in the future ; then the card table was a nightly institution for dowagers and old gentlemen, and then people with any pretence at "elegance" or "gentility" dined at five o'clock. We learn also that managing mothers and garrison girls are not the exclusive product of the nineteenth century. But in no respect is the difference between the past and present more distinctly marked than in the position of the clergy, and in the prevailing ideas of the responsibilities of a parish priest."
" ... Crawford offers to rent Edmund Bertram's rectory on the supposition that Edmund will wish to live at home and will use the income of £700 a year for personal pleasure, considering the sum total of the sacrifice of taking orders to be a sermon at Christmas or Easter. Not that it was even necessary to write the discourse, as Blair, it is suggested, could always be made to supply original deficiencies. As there was no distinction between the dress of a clergyman and that of an ordinary gentleman, Mr. Tilney's coat with many capes was much admired by his lady friends. He spent two days a week in his parish, when not at Bath; this act was considered by them to show extreme, if not unnecessary, devotion to his calling."
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September 15, 2021 - September 15, 2021.
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https://www.mollands.net/etexts/other/girlsopin.html
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