July 12, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
^^3 
Life and Letters 
By J. C. Squire 1 
Jane Austen's 
Centenary 
JANE AUSTEN died on July iSth, a hundred years, 
ago, at the age of forty-one. She began writing early ; 
Pride and Prejudice, " a mature work, was finished 
when she was twenty- one. But novel-writing was, 
to her, in a sense a recreation, like another : and she left only 
four long books, two short ones, and two fragments. These 
mean so much to her admirers that one of them has seriously 
suggested that a man's worth can be estimated once and for 
all by his ability to appreciate her. She had a. most " un- 
eventful " life, and we know very little about it. Yet those 
who like her feel that they know her more .intimately than 
any other writer. To those who have not read her, she is ■ 
^ merely a woman with a name like a governess, who lived at 
the same period as Maria Edgeworth (another of the same 
sort) and wrote books with titles such as Emma and Sense and 
Sensibility, which stamp them as moral treatises of the worst 
and most edifying kind. But to those who know her she is 
unique, a delightful secret, a secret shared by thousands of 
people. 
• ♦***' 
Miss Austen lived— as an author— in greater seclusion 
^ perhaps than any other English writer. She knew no 
celebrities and corresponded with none : her name did not 
appear on her title-pages: and her fame did not become 
considerable until after her death. During the last year 
or two of her life her books sold fairly well, and she received, 
with equanimity, two tokens of appreciation. The Quarterly 
published a considerable review of her work, and the Prince 
Regent's Librarian, writing on behalf of his illustrious em- 
ployer, asked for the dedication of Emma. Miss Austen 
assented, and inscribed the book to the Regent : upon which 
the Librarian, encouraged, wrote again, suggesting that the 
'' author's gifted pen might properly be employed upon " an 
historical romance illustrative of the august House of 
Coburg," which was about to be united, by a holy bond, with 
the Royal House of England. It is not easy to persuade 
oneself "that George IV. was Jane Austen's only point of 
contact with the great world : it is absolutely impossible to 
imagine what a German historical novel by her would have 
been like. She could not imagine it either : she explamed 
to the Librarian that she could not undertake any story m 
which it would be improper to laugh. Treatii^es with a serious 
object were not in her line. " I think," she said, " I may 
boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most un- 
learned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an 
authbress." 
» • • ♦ * 
This is, of course, an exaggeration : and even had it been 
literally true at that date, she would have lost her proud 
pre-eminence ten thousand times over by now. She was 
fairly widely read in history and literature : and amongst 
her other accomphshments, as her nephew proudly relater; 
were embroidery of the most masterly kind, spillikins, and 
cup-and-ball, at which she once caught the baU a hundred 
times running. One would expect this : she was a human 
being before she was a woman of intellect : and her pro- 
pensity for entering into the occupations and amusements of 
her circle is of a piece with her preference to write about the 
worid she lived in rather than about the myriad worids she 
did not live in. Her brain was good enough for anything, 
but she did not employ it in speculation or controversy or 
the promiscuous acquisition of facts. One remembers the 
education of the two Misses Bertram, who thought them-- 
selves so superior to Fanny Price : 
" How long ago it is, aunt, since we used to repeat the 
chronological older, of the Kings of England, with the dates 
of their accession, and most of the principal events of their 
reigns I " _ 
"Yes," added the other; "and of the Roman Emperors 
as low as Severus ; besides a great deal of the human 
mythology, and all the metala, semi-metals, ■ planets, and 
distinguished pliilosophers." ' 
There has -been no critic so desperate as to suggest that she 
was the product of the French Revolution. Her complete 
"detachment from the Great War, which raged throughout 
her writing career, has often been mentioned. She hoped 
her brothers or characters in the Navy might pick up a httle 
. prize-money : and there her interest ceased. She and her 
family and her neighbours and her heroines were in Chawton 
or Meryton, Bath or Lyme Regis : and those arenas w?ere 
quite large enough for the display of the general affections 
and particular idiosyncrasies of men arid wdmen. She 
limited her art still further :' she dealt only with her own 
social class, and its outskirts. She must have known farmers 
and cottagers well enough : , but they never appear as 
characters in her books. It is evident, therefore, that her 
limitations of subject were as much a matter of deliberate 
choice as of opportunity. The genteel families of a country 
town, the officers of a militia regiment, the local clergy, a great 
landlord or two, and a sprinkling of governesses and- sailor 
sons on leave : these materials she found quite sufficient for 
her picture of life. 
England has had few such finished artists. There is only 
one conspicuous weakness in her books. It is not true that 
she could draw women, but not men : her subsidiary men are 
as good as her subsidiary women. But her heroes are shadowy 
and unsatisfactory compared with her heroines. All her 
novels were written from the heroine's standpoint. In 
Pride and Prejudice the author may almost, be said to look 
at the world through 'Elizabeth Bennet's eyes: in all the 
other books she is standing, as it were, at the side of her 
heroines. She knows them intimately : she never troubles 
to give us the inner history of the young men with whom 
they are in love. All the other persons around them are 
illuminated and made familiar by the laiVip of comedy that 
is turned on them. This operation cannot be wholeheartedly 
performed on the young lovers ; and even the most im- 
pressive of them, Mr. Knightley, and the nicest of them. 
Commander Wentworth, arc rather vague and unexplored. 
We can deduce the rest of Mr. Bennet from what Miss Austen 
shows us : Darcy's personality has great blanks like the old 
maps of Africa. We have to assume that Darcy, since Miss 
Austen thought him worthy of Elizabeth Benhst, was an 
exceptionally fine man : but we know very little about him 
except that when the plot necessitates it he behaves like a 
pig and when the plot necessitates it he behaves like a 
chivalrous gentleman. This weakness, however, is remark- 
ably little inconvenience to the reader. We are prepared ta 
take these young men at Miss Austen's valuation : the hearts 
of the women are quite sufficiently, exposed to make the love- 
stories interesting ; and in any case the love-affairs are not 
the only props of the books. Their first interest lies in the 
vision they give us of the everyday life of ordinary families, 
in the inexhaustible interest drawn from the apparently 
humdrum by a woman of genius. Her people are the people 
we know. The Georgian setting- of harpsichords, muddy 
roads, Chippendale, hahas and Empire dresses, does not make 
them archaic : it merely makes clearer their permanent 
modernity, the endurance of types of character, of human 
" humours," impulses, small deceptions and generosities, 
and mannerisms of speech and gesture. There must have 
been Miss Eltons, Sir Walter Elliots and Miss Bfiteses in 
Athens : they must exist in Samarkand : and one might quite 
conceivably forget whether one had read about Mary Bennet 
and her mother in a book or met them at Cheltenham. There 
they all are, scores of them. We know little directly of their 
souls : nor do we of most people with whom we dine or drink 
tea. But few of them — Collins and Lady Catherine, one 
admits, are Dickens characters — are less real than our 
acquaintances. And, through Miss Austin, we get far more 
amusement out of them than we do out of our acquaintances. 
For Miss Austen had sharper eyes than we. 
Nobody has excelled her interiors, or invented such 
exquisite beginnings and endings. She gejs one intrigued 
in the first sentence, yet without the least effort. 
And no great writer of Enghsh has kept his English up with 
so little apparent effort. The quiet tunc of her sentences is 
never broken, yet never gets dull. She always uses the right 
word, yet never with the appearance of having searched for 
,it, and the felicities of her humour are inexhaustible. " Mr. 
Knightley seemed to be trying not to smile ; and succeeded, 
without difficulty, upon Mrs. Elton's beginning to talk to 
him." They are usually as quiet as that : they produce warm 
flickering smiles as one" passes. It is hopeless to attempt to 
illustrate them here : or to show how discriminating is her 
sarcasm and how sweet and sympathetic is the spirit under- 
neath it. She was in the line of Addison and Goldsmith, 
uniting immense sense with great sensibihty. Amid the 
tropical forest of the Romantic movement, she flourished, 
the most perfect flower of the Eighteenth Centurv. 
