Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/28

 Rh dons a piece of bijouterie, be assured that it is no paste jewellery, and that Birmingham was not its birthplace. The fresh bloom upon her cheek comes from fresh air and sound health, not from the rouge-pot or any cognate source. Between this novel-writer and the conventional novel-writer, what a gulf profound! Alike, but oh, how different!

Fault has been found with Miss Austen, and with considerable show of justice, on account of the prodigious amount of love-making in her tales. Love is the beginning, middle, and end of each and all. Page the first and page the last are occupied with the conjugation of the verb amo. Every new chapter is like a new tense, every volume a mood, of that all-absorbing verb. She plunges at once in medias res (see, for example, the first sentence in "Pride and Prejudice"), and confines herself to the working out the proposed equation with wonderful singleness of purpose. Now, where this topic is so uniformly and protractedly debated—where this one string is so incessantly harped on, it becomes a question whether, with all her admirable qualities freely recognised, Miss Austen's writings are of that healthy type which is calculated to benefit the world. We may well admit, with one of the authors of "Guesses at Truth," that ordinary novels, which string a number of incidents and a few commonplace pasteboard characters around a love-story, teaching people to fancy that the main business of life is to make love, and to be mode love to, and that, when it is made, all is over, are little or nothing else than mischievous; since it is most hurtful to be wishing to act a romance of this kind in real life—most hurtful to fancy that the interest of life lies in its pleasures and passions, not in its duties. But then Miss Austen's are not ordinary novels; her's are not pasteboard characters; and, with all her devotion to the task of delineating this master-principle, she, too, teaches that it is not the main business of life—she, too, contends that duty is before pleasure and passion, sense before sensibility. If languishing demoiselles appear in her works, whose pantheism is made up of wedding-prophecies, marriage-bells, and bride-cake, it is only that they may be roundly ridiculed—tarred and feathered, as a warning to their sisterhood—nailed up as scarecrows, with every attendant circumstance of derision. Miss Austen's estimate of love in its true form is as far as can be from that of sickly sentimentalism or flighty sehoolgirlishness. She honours it only when invested with the dignity, intensity, and equable constancy of its higher manifestations—where it comprehends and fulfils its wide circle of duties, and is as self-denying as it is self-respecting. There is a righteous intolerance of the mawkish trash which constitutes the staple of so many love-tales; and one cannot but admire Horace Walpole, for once, when he stops impatiently at the fourth volume of "Sir Charles Grandison,” and confesses: "I am so tired of sets of people getting together, and saying, 'Pray, miss, with whom are you in love,' &c., &c." And we grant that Miss Austen is a little too prodigal of scenes of love-making and preparations for match-making; but let us at the same time insist upon the marked difference between her descriptions and those of the common herd of novelists, with whom she is unjustly confounded; the fact being, that her most caustic passages, and the hardest hits and keenest thrusts of her satire, are directed against them and their miss-in-her-teens’