6

on life); and her brave recognition of her faults, when confronted with their results, conduces largely to the relief with which we hail the solution of the tangle, and laugh out loud over 'Such a heart, such a Harriet'! The remark is typical, both of Emma and of Emma's author. For this is the ripest and kindliest of all Jane Austen's work. Here alone she can laugh at people, and still like them; elsewhere her amusement is invariably salted with either dislike or contempt. Emma' contains no fewer than four silly people, more or less prominent in the story; but Jane Austen touches them all with a new mansuetude, and turns them out as candidates for love as well as laughter. Nor is this all that must be said for Miss Bates and Mr Woodhouse. They are actually inspired with sympathy. Specially remarkable is the treatment of Miss Bates, whose pathos depends on her lovableness, and her lovableness on her pathos, till she comes so near our hearts that Emma's abrupt brutality to her on Box Hill comes home to us with the actuality of a violent sudden slap in our own face. But then Miss Bates, though a twaddle, is by no means a fool; in her humble, quiet, unassuming happiness, she is shown throughout as an essentially wise woman. For Jane Austen's mood is in no way softened to the second-rate and pretentious, though it is typical of Emma' that Elton's full horror is only gradually revealed in a succession of tiny touches, many of them designed to swing back sympathy to Emma; even as Emma's own bad behaviour on Box Hill is there to give Jane Fairfax a lift in our sympathy at her critical moment, while Emma's repentance afterwards is just what is wanted to win us back to Emma's side again, in time for the coming catastrophe. And even Elton's broad handsome face,' in which 'every feature works,' pales before that of the lady who was, in short, so very ready to have him.' He called her Augusta; how delightful!'

Jane Austen herself never calls people she is fond of by these fancy names, but reserves them for such female cads or cats as Lydia Bennet, Penelope Clay, Selina Suckling, and the charming Augusta Hawkins.' It is characteristic, indeed, of her methods in Emma,' that, though the Sucklings never actually appear, we come to know them (and miss them) as intimately as if they did.

Jane Austen delights in imagining whole vivid sets of people, never on the stage, yet vital in the play; but in 'Emma' she indulges herself, and us, unusually lavishly, with the Sucklings at Maple Grove, the Dixons in Ireland, and the Churchills at Enscombe. As for Frank, he is among her men what Mary Crawford is among her women, a being of incomparable brilliance, moving with a dash that only the complicated wonderfulness of the whole book prevents us from lingering to appreciate. In fact, he so dims his cold pale Jane by comparison that one wonders more than ever what he saw in her. The whole Frank-Jane intrigue, indeed, on which the story hinges, is by no means its most valuable or plausible part. But Jane Fairfax is drawn in dim tones by the author's deliberate purpose. She had to be dim. It was essential that nothing should bring the secondary heroine into any competition with Emma. Accordingly Jane Fairfax is held down in a rigid dulness so conscientious that it almost defeats another of her raisons d'être by making Frank's affection seem incredible.

Emma

But there is very much more in it than that. is to behave so extremely ill in the Dixon matter that she would quite forfeit our sympathy, unless we were a little taught to share her unregenerate feelings for the ' amiable, upright, perfect Jane Fairfax.' Accordingly we are shown Jane Fairfax always from the angle of Emma; and, despite apparently artless words of eulogy, the author is steadily working all the time to give us just that picture of Jane, as a cool, reserved, rather sly creature, which is demanded by the balance of emotion and the perspective of the picture. It is curious, indeed, how often Jane Austen repeats a favourite composition; two sympathetic figures, major and minor, set against an odious one. In practice, this always means that, while the odious is set boldly out in clear lines and brilliant colour, the minor sympathetic one becomes subordinate to the major, almost to the point of dulness. The respective positions of Emma, Jane, and Mrs Elton shed a flood of light back on the comparative paleness of Eleanor Tilney, standing in the same minor relation to

* Remember, also, that Jane Austen did herself personally hate everything that savoured of reserve and disingenuousness, 'trick and littleness.'

Catherine, as against Isabella Thorpe; and the trouble about 'Sense and Sensibility' is that, while Marianne and Elinor are similarly set against Lucy, Elinor, hypothetically the minor note to Marianne, is also, by the current and intention of the tale, raised to an equal if not more prominent position, thus jangling the required chord, so faultlessly struck in Northanger Abbey,' and in Emma' only marred by the fact that Jane Fairfax's real part is larger than her actual sound-value can be permitted to be.

Sentimentality has busied itself over the mellowing influences of approaching death, evident in ‘Persuasion.' The only such evidences are to be found in its wearinesses and unevennesses, and in the reappearance of that bed-rock hardness which only in 'Lady Susan' stands out so naked. Jane Austen herself felt its faults more strongly than subsequent generations have done. She was depressed about the whole book. And what she meant, however much one may disagree, is plain. Persuasion' has its uncertainties; the touch is sometimes vague, too heavy here, too feeble there-Mrs Smith is introduced with too much elaboration, Anne Elliot with too little; balance is lost, and the even, assured sweep of Emma' changes to a fitful wayward beauty. This is at once the warmest and the coldest of Jane Austen's works, the softest and the hardest. It is inspired, on the one hand, by a quite new note of glacial contempt for the characters she doesn't like, and, on the other, by an intensified tenderness for those she does. The veil of her impersonality wears thin; Persuasion' is no Comedy, like Emma,' and contains no woven pattern of Austenian irony. The author allows herself to tell her tale almost openly, and, in her strait treatment of Lady Russell and the Dowager Viscountess, shows very plainly her own characteristic attitude towards the artificial claims of rank-with such decision, indeed, that one wonders why, with Persuasion' to his hand, Mr Goldwin Smith should have been at pains to note a mere flash of 'radical sympathy' in 'poor Miss Taylor' (where, in point of fact, there is no trace of it).

• The first version of the book was called Elinor and Marianne `; which quite clearly, coming from Jane Austen, shows that Elinor was meant to be the dominant figure.

As for Mrs Clay, she is introduced with so much more emphasis than her ultimate place in the story warrants, that it looks as if she had originally been meant to play a much larger part in it. And worst of all is the violent and ill-contrived exposure of William Elliot, which is also wholly unnecessary, since we are expressly told that not even for Kellynch could Anne have brought herself to marry the man associated with it. In fact, the whole Clay-Elliot imbroglio that cuts the non-existent knot at the end of the book is perhaps the clumsiest of Jane Austen's coups de théâtre, though not deliberately false as that of Mansfield Park.

And yet, when everything is said and done in criticism, those who love 'Persuasion' best of all Jane Austen's books have no poor case to put forward. For 'Persuasion' is primarily Anne Elliot. And Anne Elliot is a puzzling figure in our literature. She is not a jeune fille, she is not gay or happy, brilliant or conspicuous; she is languidly, if not awkwardly brought on the stage, unemphasised, unemphatic. And yet Anne Elliot is one of fiction's greatest heroines. Gradually her greatness dawns. The more you know of her, the more you realise how perfectly she incarnates the absolute lady, the very counterpart, in her sex, of the Kaλokayalòs among men. And yet there is so little that is obvious to show for all this. For the book is purely a cry of feeling; and, if you miss the feeling, you miss all. It sweeps through the whole story in a vibrating flood of loveliness; yet nothing very much is ever said. Jane Austen has here reached the culminating point in her art of conveying emotion without expression. Though 'Persuasion' moves very quietly, without sobs or screams, in drawing-rooms and country lanes, it is yet among the most emotional novels in our literature.

Anne Elliot suffers tensely, hopelessly, hopefully; she never violates the decencies of silence, she is never expounded or exposed. And the result is that, for such as can feel at all, there is more intensity of emotion in Anne's calm (at the opposite pole to Marianne's 'sensibility') than in the wildest passion-tatterings of Maggie Tulliver or Lucy Snowe; and that culminating little heartbreaking scene between Harville and Anne (quite apart from the amazing technical skill of its contrivance)

towers to such a poignancy of beauty that it takes rank with the last dialogue of mother and daughter in the 'Iphigeneia,' as one of the very sacred things of literature that one dares not trust oneself to read aloud. And any other ending would be unbearable. So completely, in fact, do Anne and her feelings consume the book that the object of them becomes negligible. Wentworth, delightful jolly fellow that he is (with his jolly set of sailor-friends, whom Anne so wanted for hers), quite fades out of our interest, and almost out of our sight.

་

It is not so with the rest of the people, however. I have had curious testimony to their singular actuality. A great friend of mine, a man who never opens a book by any chance, if a newspaper be to hand, finding himself shut up for weeks in a tiny Chinese town on the borders of Tibet, was driven at last, in sheer desperation of dulness, to Jane Austen. I watched the experiment with awe and anguish. I might have spared myself. Emma' baffled him indeed, but Pride and Prejudice' took him by storm. And then, to my terror, he took up Persuasion'; for surely of all her works, the appeal of 'Persuasion is the most delicate and elusive. But again I might have spared my fears. 'Persuasion' had the greatest success of all; for days, if not weeks, my friend went mouthing its phrases, and chewing the cud of its felicities. That Sir Walter,' he would never weary of repeating, 'he's a nib!' And when I tried to find out what had so specially delighted him in 'Persuasion,' he suddenly and finally summed up the whole of Jane Austen and her work:- Why, all those people, they're -they're real!'

REGINALD FARRER.