The Classic Novelist by Alice Meynell

Jane Austen seldom begins a novel without a deliberate chapter-generally a family chapter. A masterly consciousness of her own authority gives her the right of control over her reader's impatience or slovenliness. The order of things is hers, not his, and he must wait her time for wit. Hers are what Jeremy Taylor, even at his prayers, calls ‘measures of address'. Her openings imply a firmer hold upon narrative than later novelists, with their verbless first sentences, their ‘he' and ‘she' for persons to be named later, thought to grasp at. The moderns would be much depressed were they required to open thus: ‘The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. ' We consent to read the dismal opening; we endure the pother of the unmusical words; we tolerate it all because we know that in a page or two the respectable Dashwoods will be deprived of some of the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. We know that Miss Austen will make of her personages good sport for her reader, her sense of derision being equal to that of her own kin, the original Philistines. For another example, would any later author, having a Mrs. Bennet to deride for our delight, consent to introduce her thus: ‘Mrs. Bennet was a woman of mean understanding'? But in this case Miss Austen's art loses nothing, even by the chill of that presentation.

That Jane works upon very small matters is hardly worth saying, and certainly not worth complaining of. Things are not trivial merely because they are small; but that which makes life, art, and work trivial is a triviality of relations. Mankind lives by vital relations; and if these are mean, so is the life, so is the art that expresses them because it can express no more. With Miss Austen love, vengeance, devotion, duty, maternity, sacrifice, are infinitely trivial. There is also a constant relation of watchfulness, of prudence. As the people in her stories watch one another so does Miss Austen seem to be watching them, and her curiosity is intense indeed; she realizes their colds-her female characters take a great many colds-so that one seems to hear her narrate the matter in a muffled voice, but not precisely because of her sympathy. That such close observation can work on without tenderness must be a proof of this author's exceeding cynicism.