Charing
                       House
London
                             George Allen
CHISWICK PRESS:--CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON
[Illustration:

                          _To J
There is much more difference as
to their best work than in the case of those others who are loved “by
allowance” by convention, and because it is felt to be the right and
proper thing to love them
And in the sect--fairly large and yet
unusually choice--of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be
found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the
novels
On the other hand,
I, for my part, declare for_ Pride and Prejudice _unhesitatingly
The plot, though not elaborate, is almost
regular enough for Fielding; hardly a character, hardly an incident
could be retrenched without loss to the story
The elopement of Lydia
and Wickham is not, like that of Crawford and Mrs
Rushworth, a_ coup de
théâtre; _it connects itself in the strictest way with the course of the
story earlier, and brings about the denouement with complete propriety
All the minor passages--the loves of Jane and Bingley, the advent of Mr
Collins, the visit to Hunsford, the Derbyshire tour--fit in after the
same unostentatious, but masterly fashion
To me this humour seems to possess a
greater affinity, on the whole, to that of Addison than to any other of
the numerous species of this great British genus
Spectator,” and in
Jane Austen’s genius there was, though nothing mannish, much that was
masculine
But the likeness of quality consists in a great number of
common subdivisions of quality--demureness, extreme minuteness of touch,
avoidance of loud tones and glaring effects
Also there is in both a
certain not inhuman or unamiable cruelty
Addison and in Miss Austen there is, though a
restrained and well-mannered, an insatiable and ruthless delight in
roasting and cutting up a fool
But another_ Spectator _letter--that of the damsel
of fourteen who wishes to marry Mr
Musgrove’s self-deceiving regrets over
her son
And in that sense Miss Austen certainly was one
She may even
have been one in the further sense that, like her own Mr
Bennet, she
took an epicurean delight in dissecting, in displaying, in setting at
work her fools and her mean persons
I think she did take this delight,
and I do not think at all the worse of her for it as a woman, while she
was immensely the better for it as an artist._

_In respect of her art generally, Mr
And I am not so certain that I should
myself use the word “narrow” in connection with her
If her world is a
microcosm, the cosmic quality of it is at least as eminent as the
littleness
She does not touch what she did not feel herself called to
paint; I am not so sure that she could not have painted what she did not
feel herself called to touch
Even Scott
required hill and mountain and ballad, even Coleridge metaphysics and
German to enable them to chip the classical shell
The one was humanity, and the other was art
Take almost any
Frenchman, except the late M
de Maupassant, and watch him laboriously
piling up strokes in the hope of giving a complete impression
You get
none; you are lucky if, discarding two-thirds of what he gives, you can
shape a real impression out of the rest
But with Miss Austen the
myriad, trivial, unforced strokes build up the picture like magic
Nothing is false; nothing is superfluous
When (to take the present book
only) Mr
Collins changed his mind from Jane to Elizabeth “while Mrs
Bennet was stirring the fire” (and we know_ how _Mrs
Bennet would have
stirred the fire), when Mr
Collins is really_ great; _far greater than anything Addison
ever did, almost great enough for Fielding or for Swift himself
It has
been said that no one ever was like him
Collins was impossible or non-existent at
the end of the eighteenth century
It is very interesting that we
possess, in this same gallery, what may be called a spoiled first
draught, or an unsuccessful study of him, in John Dashwood
The
formality, the under-breeding, the meanness, are there; but the portrait
is only half alive, and is felt to be even a little unnatural
Collins is perfectly natural, and perfectly alive
Collins could not have been so satisfactorily
exhibited if his creatress had not adjusted so artfully to him the
figures of Mr
Bennet and of Lady Catherine de Bourgh
Collins himself, has been charged with exaggeration
There is,
perhaps, a very faint shade of colour for the charge; but it seems to me
very faint indeed
Darcy, and even
Miss Elizabeth herself, were, I am inclined to think, rather hard on him
for the “impropriety” of his conduct
His wife was evidently, and must
always have been, a quite irreclaimable fool; and unless he had shot her
or himself there was no way out of it for a man of sense and spirit but
the ironic