Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/26

Rh Take, reader, that quiet, unassuming gentleman with whom you exchanged a few mercurial trivialities in the omnibus this morning, touching the weather and the adjourned debate; take that elderly burgess who called on you about some railway shares, and left you without having said (never mind whether he heard) one smart thing in the course of twenty minutes’ unbroken conversation—at which absence of piquancy and Attic salt neither you were surprised nor he a whit ashamed; take that semi-sleepy clergyman, whose homily you listened to yesterday morning with such phlegmatic politeness, and who (it is your infallible conviction) is guiltless of the power to say or do anything clever, original, or even unusual; take that provincial attorney, who bores you so with his pedantries and platitudes whenever you are vegetating in a midland county with your country cousins; take, also, that well-intentioned, loquacious old maid with whom you walked home yesterday from morning service, and who discoursed so glibly and so illogically about an infinity of very finite things; and take those good-natured, unexceptionable misses with whom and their mamma you drink tea this evening, without any fear of the consequences:—take these, and as many more as you please of a similar fabric—people who never astonished you, never electrified you with revelations of strange experiences, never made your each particular hair to stand on end by unfolding a tale of personal mystery, never affected the rôle of Wandering Jews, or Sorrowing Werters, or Justifiable Homicides, or Mysterious Strangers, or Black-veiled Nuns; take, we say, a quantum suff. of these worthy prosaists, and set up in type their words and actions of this current day, and you have a fair specimen of the sort of figures and scenes pictured on Miss Austen's canvas. The charm is, that they are so exquisitely real; they are transcripts of actual life; their features, gestures, gossip, sympathies, antipathies, virtues, foibles, are all true, unexaggerated, uncoloured, yet singularly entertaining. We do not mean that we, or you, reader, or even that professed and successful novelists now living, could produce the same result with the same means, or elicit from the given terms an equivalent remainder. Herein, on the contrary, lies the unique power of Jane Austen, that where every one else is nearly sure of failing, she invariably and unequivocally triumphs. What, in other hands, would be a flat, insipid, intolerable piece of impertinent dulness, becomes, at her bidding, a sprightly, versatile, never-flagging chapter of realities. She knows how far to go in describing a character, and where to stop, never allowing that character to soar into romance or to sink into mere twaddle. She is a thorough artist in the management of nature. Her sketches from nature are not profusely huddled together in crude and ill-assorted heaps—the indiscriminate riches of a crowded portfolio, into which genius has recklessly tossed its manifold essays, all clever, but not all in place; but they are selected and arranged with the practised skill of a disciplined judgment, and challenge the scrutiny of tasteful students of design.

Miss Austen has not even yet, we submit, reaped her rightful share of public homage. Both Sir Walter Scott and Archbishop Whately—the one in 1815, the other in 1821—saw and proclaimed her distinguished merits in the pages of the "Quarterly Review." Sir Walter observes, that, keeping close to common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life, she has produced sketches of such spirit and