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JANE AUSTEN, AND THE NOVEL OF SOCIAL COMEDY
by Williams James Dawson (1905)
Chapter IV of Makers of English Fiction
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"It has often been said that an original writer has to create the taste by which he is appreciated; it may be remembered also that the original writer often unconsciously discerns an altered or a new taste in the public before the public itself is quite aware of the change ... "
" ... She brought to her task of social comedy a singular combination of rare gifts – a wit and satire of wonderful delicacy, a mind of great penetration, a style absolutely pellucid and effortless. No novelist has ever been more thoroughly an artist both in her attitude towards her own work and in her respect for her own limitations. She is so impersonal in her attitude that one may seek in vain for any trace of her own opinions or thoughts in her writings. Her respect for her own limitations is equally remarkable. "I must keep to my own style," she says, "and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other." Within her own limits she comes as near perfection as any human genius can, and those who object to the material and scale of her art should recollect that a dewdrop may be as perfect a creation as a star, a grass-blade may be fashioned with as high a skill as the most wonderful of tropic flowers.
"In order justly to appreciate Jane Austen, the first duty of the reader is, then, quite obvious; it is to respect the limitations of her art, as she herself did. It is foolish to expect from her what she does not profess to give, such as romance, or high-flown sentiment, or the tragedy of great passions. She painted the world she knew; her claim is that she not only painted it with fidelity, but with sympathy; with a lively sense of its blemishes, and with an ever-present satire, no doubt; but also with a true insight into its redeeming pieties and virtues. It is not her fault that romance and sentiment and large passions are not found in her pages; they were not found in the world she knew.
"Like the Brontës, Jane Austen was born and bred in an English parsonage, and lived in a by-road far from the main roads of life. But the Brontes had a far better opportunity than Jane Austen. They at least lived among a people in whom the primitive passions were strong and very imperfectly suppressed. The country which lay at the back of Haworth was as wild as the people, and had a primeval beauty and savageness of its own. One could conceive of great dramas, full of intense love and passion and revenge, being enacted on such a stage; there is a suggestion of the Titanic in the very scenery. But Jane Austen was born into a world of unredeemed dullness. Everything around her was prim and trim and proper. Instead of thunder-scarred hills there are leafy parks and smooth lawns. The people who move across these strictly regulated Edens have the unconscious self-poise of very proper persons; they love with discretion and sobriety ... "
"Yet it was from this material that Jane Austen has contrived to extract stories which have survived for a century, and seem likely to endure to quite unprophesied generations. The means by which this success has been achieved are quite clear to anyone who will study her works with even casual attention. She had the clearest eyes that ever detected the foibles of human character. The very limitation of her range of vision explains its intensity. She accurately described her method when she spoke of herself as a miniature painter. Broad and tumultuous effects she not merely cannot achieve —she dislikes them. But she can lay touch upon touch with an infinite patience and fineness, until the finished picture is as near perfection as one can well conceive. It may perhaps be but miniature painting —a work of art wrought upon three inches of ivory; nevertheless, to write "Pride and Prejudice" demands as fine a genius as the production of "Ivanhoe" or "Kenilworth." This no one knew better than Sir Walter Scott, who, after reading "Pride and Prejudice" for the third time, says: "The big bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any 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 me." It is this exquisite touch which Jane Austen possesses, and in a degree that is unrivalled. She has successfully contrived the apotheosis of the commonplace, and clothed dullness with distinction.
"In Jane Austen it is the very naturalness of the picture which makes it seem uninteresting. Without perhaps saying it, or even analysing our thoughts so far as to express it, we all of us favour a little exaggeration in art. We do not object to emphasis; on the contrary, it attracts us. A bit of clear blue sky and greyish-blue down is not enough for us; its simplicity seems to us commonplace, and its truth foolish. And in the same way a book that is no more nor less than an exact reflection of life, which does not attempt to group people with an eye to stage-effect, or to put speeches into their mouths which invite applause, repels us by its very fidelity. Beyond doubt many readers will be similarly affected by Jane Austen. But upon reflection they will begin to discover how wonderful a gift this is, which can gaze on life with so unembarrassed an eye and report its vision with so perfect an exactitude. After a while the bit of blue sky and grey down charm us. The quiet and simple tones of colour soothe and delight us.
"The genius of Jane Austen lies in this perfect and even severe simplicity. Her characters evolve themselves without any aid of dramatic episodes. Her plot is as natural and inevitable as a problem in mathematics. Everything is fitted together with the most delicate contrivance, with the art that effectually conceals art. From first to last the atmosphere is exquisitely lucid, the style distinct and firm, the figures, in spite of the old-fashioned stiffness of their phrase and gait, so vital that they are more real to us than many of the people we have dined with. We feel, not that we have read a book, but that we have been magically transported into the eighteenth century, and have breathed its air and lived its life.
"Like all great artists, Jane Austen is thus in a sense an historian as well as an artist. ... It is often deplored that professional historians, who are capable enough of describing the pageantries of a court, the contests of politicians, the sumptuous lives of the rich, or even the miserable conditions of life among the disinherited and the criminal, appear incapable of producing any accurate picture of the average kind of life lived by those distinguished by neither great wealth nor great poverty, by neither uncommon learning nor uncommon ignorance. Jane Austen gives us incidentally just the sort of details about the lives of average people which the historian omits and the sociologist demands. We can leave to the historian the Napoleonic drama which was played out amid the terror and applause of Europe in the closing years of the eighteenth century. If there is no echo of its trampling hosts in the pages of Jane Austen, there is something equally valuable to us who survey the whole period with infinite curiosity there is a picture of England itself, the England of the dull average, from whose stubborn pride was evolved the force that brought the drama to a close. Yet it is an England that seems so far away as to appear almost unrecognisable. The heroines of Jane Austen's pages travel by post-chaise, think fifty miles a prodigious journey, and an excursion to Derbyshire a serious adventure. Gracechurch Street is a locality where a wealthy merchant may fitly reside; but the proud Darcy, who has an estate in Derbyshire, would never think of penetrating so plebeian a neighbourhood. Clergymen speak with bated breath and whispering humbleness of their patrons, and livings are left by will to family favourites. People have a way of talking like copybooks; and the proprieties, especially in relation to women, are defined and strict. It is looked upon as a monstrous thing that Elizabeth Bennet should walk three miles on a country road, and her critics exclaim:
""To walk three miles, or whatever it is, above her ankles in dirt, and alone, quite alone! What could she mean by it? It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country-town indifference to decorum. She really looked almost wild!""
"The comparison between Jane Austen and Shakespeare, suggested by both Macaulay and Mr. Goldwin Smith, is ingenious, and, within the limits drawn by these great critics, just; but Thackeray affords us a closer comparison. The spirit of Jane Austen is entirely the spirit of Thackeray.
"There is the same criticism of life; the hatred of shams, and the quick irony that pierces and exposes them; the delightful turns of expression, the caustic word which is not readily forgotten, and the humour, half genial and half sardonic, by which the facts of life are illumined. The only difference is that, while Thackeray was really angry with snobs, Jane Austen is too conscious of their absurdities to be irritated over them. Thackeray can be very bitter; but Jane Austen gives her most caustic criticisms a flavour of humour which robs them of ill-nature. When it becomes a question of pathos, Thackeray out-distances Jane Austen completely; but probably that is due simply to the fact that in 1850 writers did not deem it necessary to disguise their tenderer feelings, and in 1811 they did.
"A woman who carefully concealed the fact that she was a writer, and wished only to be loved and trusted for her womanliness, would not be likely to uncover the depths of her heart even in books. Jane Austen was trained in the tradition that regarded any display of deep feeling as unwomanly, and the real reticence and modesty of her nature made the expression of pathos as difficult as it was undesirable. But on her humour she put no restraint save that of kindliness, and keen as is her irony it is impossible to accuse her of cynicism. In this also she resembles Thackeray, who concealed beneath the assumed savageness of the satirist the softest and most human of hearts."
" ... When she was very ill, and near death, she would not use the sofa —sofas in those days were rare —because she was afraid if she did so her mother might scruple to use it. She made shift with a couple of chairs, and persuaded her mother that they were more comfortable. It is a little touch, but a tender and pathetic one) and it shows the woman. ... Today every summer brings numerous pilgrims to her grave, and her latest and most brilliant critic has said, "On her was bestowed, though in a humble form, the gift which has been bestowed on Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Scott, and a few others —the gift of creative power."
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September 13, 2021 - September 14, 2021.
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