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seemed rooted so much deeper down to | in February, 1805, she removed to Southhim. It had its origin in the life she ampton. There she remained for four led, the places she saw; and apart from years, when her mother, her sister Cashis love, he was possessed by a great longing to rescue her from this, to guide her by a teaching of which she knew nothing, for of many truths, the heathen in a savage land had as much knowledge as poor Robin. And the same compassión although in a lesser degree-he spread out towards Mr. Veriker, with whom Christopher never talked without realizing how impotent words are when, to those we say them to, they bear no meaning.

Mr. Veriker's sole anxiety as to death, was that he had to leave Robin. "I'm afraid I must make up my mind to throw up my hand," he would say, "and there, so far as I've found out, will be an end of the game- and of me." Then see ing that Christopher looked pained, he would add by way of consolation, "You talk to Robin about that, my good fellow, make her listen to what you've been telling me women are ever so much easier to convince about that sort of thing than men are."

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It never seemed to present itself to Mr. Veriker that Christopher was a man most certainly he never regarded him as one; he rather looked on him as some strange anomaly, some unaccountable being, possessing a pot of money, and not an idea of enjoying it! except in spending it on him and Robin, and that certainly he had done freely enough since he had been there; he was never tired of bringing them gifts, anticipating their wishes, providing them with pleasures. They had lived as much as was possible en prince since Christopher had come to Venice.

From Temple Bar.

JANE AUSTEN.

THE chronicle of Miss Austen's life is brief and simple. For twenty-five years from her birth on December 16, 1775, she lived in her father's family at the rectory of Steventon in Hampshire, making of course occasional visits to relatives and friends, some of which visits took her to Bath. In 1801, on the resignation of her father, she went with her family to Bath, and from thence, after Mr. Austen's death

sandra, and herself, took up their abode at Chawton in Hampshire, in a house belonging to Mr. Austen's second son. This continued to be her home till her last illness. She died in Winchester, whither she had gone for medical advice, on July 10, 1817. She made few friends beyond the circle of her own family, and it is not known that she was ever seriously in love.

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Her literary activity falls into two distinct sections. She began "Pride and Prejudice" in October, 1796, at the age of twenty, and finished it in August, 1797. "Sense and Sensibility was begun in November, 1797. Northanger Abbey" was composed in 1798. Then came a pause. During the nine years passed at Bath and Southampton, extending from her twenty-sixth to her thirty-fifth year, we do not know that she wrote anything except the short but striking history of "Lady Susan," a novel in letters, though it is probable that the fragment which Mr. Austen-Leigh entitles "The Watsons," was begun in these nine years. She published nothing till 1811; but from that date onwards, novel followed novel with great rapidity. "Sense and Sensibility," after undergoing revision, was published in 1811; "Pride and Prejudice" in 1813; "Mansfield Park" followed in 1814; "Emma" at the end of 1815; and "Persuasion " came out with "Northanger Abbey," after her death, in 1818.

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This silence may be explained by the discouragement which attended Miss Austen's first attempts to put her work in print. A proposal made by her father to Mr. Cadell for the publication of a novel comprising three volumes-about the length of Miss Burney's Evelina ("Pride and Prejudice ") was declined by return of post. The fate of " Northanger Abbey was still more humiliating. was sold in 1803 to a publisher in Bath for ten pounds, but "it found so little favor in his eyes that he chose to abide by his first loss rather than risk further expense by publishing such a work." "The Thorpes," "Tilneys," and "Catherine Morland" for ten pounds, and dear at the price! Afterwards, when four novels had been published, Jane wished to recover the copyright.

One of her brothers undertook the negotiation. He found the purchaser very willing to receive back his money and to resign all claim Novels by Jane Austen, with a biography, in six to the copyright. When the bargain was convolumes. Bentley and Son.

cluded, and the money paid, but not till then,

the negotiator had the satisfaction of inform- | Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton are selfish, uning him that the work thus lightly esteemed derbred men, whose thoughts are wholly was by the author of "Pride and Prejudice." | occupied with themselves. Dr. Grant, in "Mansfield Park," is a bon vivant, of whom we hear in connection with a roast turkey and the best means of turning a living to good account. The young men who are about to take orders, the Bertrams, Tilneys, and Ferrars, have common sense, and morals enough to enable them to fill the place of a country clergyman, and that is all. They never exhibit any peculiar fitness for their vocation, unless it be that they appear to be fit for nothing else. Jane knew this, and answered Mr. Clarke thus:

I am quite honored by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman_as you gave the sketch of in your note. But I assure you I am not. The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conscience and philosophy, of which I know nothversation must at times be on subjects of ing, or at least be occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions, which a woman who, like me, knows only her mother tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving. A classical education or, at any rate, a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be with all possible vanity the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.

Six novels, of which four only were published in her life, and a few fragments, do not make up a large bulk of work for one who wrote so rapidly and well as Miss Austen. It is true that she died in her forty-third year, but on the other hand she began to write at a very early age. She was barely twenty when she began "Pride and Prejudice," and she finished it in ten months. After a brief interval she is engaged upon a fresh work, "Sense and Sensibility," which is completed with equal rapidity. Thus before she was twenty-three she had written two of the best novels in the language. At this rate she might have filled our shelves, as recent novelists have filled them. But the great stimulus to over-production was wanting: there was no demand for her labor. No printer's boy waited to carry off her "copy," no editor insisted on another sheet to make up his forthcoming number. Unknown and in silence she created her wonderful stories. Mrs. Bennet lamented in vain; Mr. Collins made love and no one laughed. With nothing but her own taste to guide her, she produced work almost faultless in style; and wrote English which puts us to shame. She composed in the first instance for her own amusement - from her earliest child. hood writing rather than reading attracted her and therefore she wrote when and as she pleased. She altered, excised, re- The same gentleman, failing with his wrote, caring for nothing but the perfec- parson, suggested yet another subject. tion which satisfied her own judgment. "A historical romance, illustrative of the She steadily refused to travel beyond the august house of Coburg would just now circle within which she felt that her pow-be very interesting," he writes, on the ers ranged. In the last years of her life, when she became known as an authoress, she received various suggestions from friends that she should write a novel on this or that subject. Mr. Clarke, for instance, the librarian of Carlton House, requested her to "delineate the habits, character, and enthusiasm of a clergyman who should pass his time between the metropolis and the country, who should be something like Beattie's minstrel "Silent when glad, affectionate though shy,

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And in his looks was most demurely sad; And now he laughed aloud, yet none knew why."

What induced the man to make this request, it is hard to say; Jane's clergy men are far enough removed from such a type. The qualities which they distinctly have not, are earnestness and enthusiasm. |

occasion of the approaching marriage of Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold, whose chaplain and secretary he had recently become. It is difficult to believe that any man, even a chaplain, could have made such a proposal. What have history and the august house of Coburg to do with life in English villages and watering-places, with the ultra-genteel and demi-vulgar, the artful or artless young women, and somewhat flabby young men, whom Jane Austen knew from the heart outwards? She answers, humorously:

I am fully sensible that a historical romance founded on the House of Saxe-Coburg might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than..such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any motive than to save my

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life, and if it were indispensable to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure that I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No! I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I shall totally fail in any other.

This is from a letter dated April 1, 1816. In August she had finished "Persuasion." Who would exchange Anne Elliot for "a wilderness" of heroines of the "august house of Coburg"?

The same self-command and certainty of aim showed itself in her mode of composition:

She had no separate study to retire to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party. She wrote upon small sheets of paper, which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blottingpaper. There was, between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was opened; but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it give her notice when any one was coming. I have no doubt [her nephew and biographer continues] that I and my sisters and cousins, on our visits to Chawton, frequently disturbed this mystic process, without having any idea of the mischief we were doing: certainly we should never have guessed by any signs of impatience or irritability in the writer.

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Miss Austen read little; she seems to have shared Lamb's aversion to the acquirement of useful knowledge. He could read anything but the authors who form the necessary part of a gentleman's libraShe "detested quartos." "Ladies who read those enormous great, stupid, thick quarto volumes, which one always sees in the breakfast parlor there, must be acquainted with everything in the world." To write and create was her pleasure: her vein of original composition was so full and strong that she had no need to replenish it with reading. She knew French well and something of Italian, but we find little or no traces of either French or Italian literature in her works. Richardson she had carefully studied and knew minutely; she was so far influenced

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by his example that some of her earliest attempts seem to have been written in the form of letters 66 -as Lady Susan " still is. "Sense and Sensibility" was so composed, but was rewritten after the removal to Chawton in 1809. She is accurate in all her descriptions of ships and naval affairs; but her knowledge of these matters was derived from conversation and correspondence with her two youngest brothers, who were in the navy, rather than from any study of the subject in books. Not that she shrank from such reading: she mentions with pleasure an Essay on the Military Police, and Institutions of the British Empire," by Captain Pasley, "which I find delightfully written and highly interesting. I am as much in love with the author as ever I was with Clarkson or Buchanan. The first soldier I ever sighed for, but he does write with extraordinary force and spirit." Captain Pasley's book was an octavo. Her opinion of the far-famed " Spectator," the great thesaurus of sound English and sound morality, she has given us in Northanger Abbey," in a passage in which she makes a powerful claim for the novel as against other kinds of literature.

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"I am no novel-reader- I seldom look into novels-Do not imagine that I often read It is really very well for a novel." novels "And what are Such is the common cant. -?" "Oh! it is only a you reading, Miss novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference or momentary shame. It is only "Cecilia" or "Camilla or "Belinda; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of "The Spectator," instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the work and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied with any part of that voluminous publication, of which the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste.

This passage is the more interesting because it is perhaps the sole instance of irritation and severity to be found in Miss Austen's works.

So far as we know, her favorite authors were Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse, and Cowper in both. "She would sometimes say, in jest, that if ever she married at all, she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe."

The truth is that she estimated the knowledge which comes from life far

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above the knowledge which comes from | for a scene and a subject; the nearest books. In this learning she was herself village with its hall or parsonage was skilled as few have been, and she knew enough. It is seldom that we meet with the value of it. When Fanny Price appears at Mansfield Park, she is at a great disadvantage in all accomplishments as compared with her cousins, the Bertrams. "My cousin is really so very ignorant," says one Miss Bertram. "Do you know, we asked her last night what way she would go to get to Ireland! and she said she should cross to the Isle of Wight, and she calls it the island, as if there were no other island in the world. I am sure I should have been ashamed of myself if I had not known better long before I was so old as she is. I cannot remember the time when I did not know a great deal that she has not the least notion of yet. How long ago is it since we had to repeat the chronological order of the Kings of England with the dates of their accession, and most of the principal events of their reigns?"

"Yes," added the other, "and of the Roman Emperors as low as Severus, besides a great deal of the heathen mythology and all the metals, semi-metals, plants and distinguished philosophers."

As the story develops these young ladies, so precocious and well informed, make but a poor show beside the ignorant Fanny Price, for, "with all their promising talents and early information," "they were entirely deficient in the common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity, and humility." In this matter, we may take Fanny for a reflection of the authoress. Her knowledge, like all the best knowledge, came from within, not from without; she needed no books to open the world to her; she possessed that divine gift, "from worlds not quickened by the sun," which enables persons to see for themselves, and at first hand.

This want of knowledge derived from books has had a wholesome effect on her work. No author is so free from book-making- very few tell us so much that is strictly their own. Jane Austen is not the prophet of a superior culture or the slave of general ideas. She does not weary us with art or anatomy; she has nothing to say about evolution and the Jews. She plucks her wild flowers and plants them; whether beautiful or not, there they are, in their native soil, delineated with such fidelity and grace, with so thorough an insight into their habitats and life, such an exquisite discrimination of color and curve, as hardly another writer in the language has attained. This was her knowledge-she knew what was around her and close to her. She never sought in distant places or remote ages

this close connection between author and subject; but when we do, the result is of peculiar value. It is this which makes Wordsworth's poetry what it is. While his great contemporaries went attitudinizing through life," rapt in fictitious emotions, plunged in unreal sorrows, telling Eastern stories and painting the visions of a dream, he laid his hand on the country and the life nearest to him. And therefore his poetry is the English poetry of the early part of this century; for better or worse it is the poetry by which that generation will be known in the history of literature. In his later work, when he came to write "Don Juan," Byron got close to reality, but the reality was itself unreal, the fevered existence of a restless spirit, not a calm, self-controlled life. For this reason even "Don Juan" will wear out before the best parts of Wordsworth. The same reality breathes through Miss Austen's work. If we wish to know what life was like in the scenes she depicts, we turn to her; and we might ask with the ancient critic,

O life! O Menander !
Which of you two was the plagiarist?

In this respect she has perhaps only two rivals, Scott in his best novels, and Fielding. They also have the supreme gift of making literary and artistic the world in which they live. They have the humor which transforms like "heavenly alchemy" what would otherwise be commonplace, or even repellent; they are creative as Homer and Shakespeare are creative. Their range is wider, their touch more powerful than Jane Austen's; but in faithfulness of delineation and finish of work, she is more than an equal.

Yet while we commend the faithful realism of Jane Austen, we cannot deny, and she would not have denied, that her range is limited. The incidents of her novels are the incidents of common, every-day, social life: family conversations or gatherings, morning calls, dinners, balls, weddings, and the like things intensely real perhaps, but intensely prosaic. Regions familiar to later novelists are left untouched by her. In her works we shall look in vain for scenes such as the meeting of Maggie and Philip in the "Red Deeps;" of mother and daughter in Caroline Helstone's sick-room. She has nothing to tell us of rebellion and aspiration; of that ideal world which "after all

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is the world as we shall one day know it." | might have been written down from actual Wives weary of their husbands cannot life." This is true: they might have been turn to her for refuge, and in her pages so written, but we have not the least reamaidens will find little of the rapture and son to suppose that they were. If we bliss so prominent in the tender scenes of heard her characters speaking, they would recent novels. Jane's heroines say what undoubtedly say what she makes them they have to say unimpeded by kisses; say; but the characters are nevertheless even when the "illusion of the feelings "her own creation. From the fragments is at its strongest, they behave as rational creatures; at any rate we are spared the descriptions of their weakness or it may be that their joys are silent, too deep for words," as best befits a feeling which must wear through a lifetime. Whatever realism there is in uncontrolled passion, is not Jane's "realism." Nor can we find in her works brilliant descriptions of natural scenery. That she was not insensible to these things we see from more than one speech put in the mouth of Fanny Price, the most meditative of her characters, but her sensitiveness was never aided by imagination. Such a passage as this, in which Georges Sand describes the scenery of the Creuse, is beyond the reach of the English author

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ess:

C'est un mouvement gracieux de la bonne déesse; mais, dans ce mouvement, dans ce pli facile de son vêtement frais, on sent la force et l'ampleur de ses allures. Elle est là comme couchée de son long sur les herbes, baignant ses pieds blancs dans une eau courante et pure: c'est la puissance en repos; c'est la bonté calme des dieux amies. Mais il n'y a rien de mou dans ses formes, rien d'énervé dans son sourire. Elle a la souveraine tranquillité des immortels, et, toute mignonne et delicate qu'elle se montre, on sent que c'est d'une main formidablement aisée qu'elle a creusé ce vaste et délicieux jardin dans cet

horizon de son choix.

of real life she has given us a complete whole, just as a physiologist might restore a skeleton from a bone. The characters of real life are not so complete and concentrated as the characters of fiction, for the sufficient reason that we cannot know our acquaintance as the novelist knows his creations, or govern their actions and words at our will. And very many of the personages of real life are without any character at all, though they may supply the materials of a character to a great genius, who knows them better than they know themselves. They leave no distinct impression on us; a novelist cannot therefore write down what they say or describe what they do. The fragmentary photograph must be made into a picture, the dry bones must live, the dulness of country life must become a source of never-ending Austen removed from the mere imitation so far is the realism of Jane

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How this transformation is effected we learn from herself when she tells us that she can only depict those characters at whom she can laugh. Her gift is pre-eminently humor -a rare gift at any time, and perhaps peculiarly so just now, when a general earnestness seems likely to

make existence intolerable. For it is

truly melancholy to think how serious we have become; we have lost the power of laughing at ourselves or others, and all our energies are absorbed in universal criticism and the higher thought. Music,

The passion for nature which is sometimes prompted by inward dissatisfaction or despair, was unknown to Miss Austen."heavenly maid," is now an "educational Completely in harmony with the life around her, her attention was absorbed by that, and not absorbed only, but satisfied. Neither in her books, nor in her letters, do we find any trace of a heart ill at ease, of a spirit seeking rest and finding none. Such satisfaction is at once a source of strength and of weakness; it gives finish, but it necessitates limitation. When, therefore, we speak of the realism of Jane Austen, we do not mean that there are not a thousand and one things beyond her reach, and yet real; we mean that what she gives us, she gives without exaggeration, or deficiency, or adulteration.

Some have said: "Her conversations

force." Poetry to be classical must have "the note of seriousness; " and poets who have not this note, like Chaucer and Burns, must begin with shame to take the lower room, while elegiac Gray is permitted to go up higher. "A common greyness silvers everything." Nay, even the premier himself may perhaps owe his exalted position to his inability to appreciate the lighter aspects of life, while Lord Beaconsfield has fallen under the condemnation which a serious generation inevitably pronounces on a frivolous statesman of threescore years and ten. Humor itself has come to be regarded as something which postulates sadness. This was not the temper of Jane Austen.

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