Jane Austen: Poet

I must confess to a little uneasiness.  Except for a long-standing, slow-burning admiration for Jane Austen’s writing, for ‘the achieve of, the mastery of the thing’, I have nothing much to guide me.  I have not even written a book on Jane Austen; so who can say where I stand in the critical spectrum, between the ultra-violet Janeites and the infra-red Austenists?  There is, I know, a vast ocean of scholarship and criticism, puff-cheeked and sea-monster-haunted, in which Jane’s work swims; but I have not studied the Sailing Directions that could have warned me of the sly currents and deceptive landfalls, and have neglected the Notices to Mariners with their record of the latest wrecks, the unlighted lights, the demolished seamarks, the unswept mine-fields.  I feel like one who has been bidden to dine in the Captain’s Room at Lloyd’s, having no gold ring in the ear.  But I recall that Jane had two naval brothers, that she admired both of them very much, and that both became admirals even though they had had less first-hand acquaintance with Pacific Island cannibals than Fanny Burney’s midshipman brother had; and pray therefore for the impassivity of Joshua Slocum who – after his chronometer had gone over the side and his goat had eaten his charts – completed his voyage around the world alone, with no navigational aids beyond an alarm clock and a map torn from a school atlas.

I have, however, tried a little to see whether anybody else thought Jane Austen was a poet; but in vain.  I had high hopes of one recent book that had distilled from all critical approaches a multi-planal technique of analysis that would provide the last word – or almost the last word – on Mansfield Park.  I peeped inside, but most of what I saw was about Marx and Freud and sociology, which I found unnecessarily distasteful.  So I closed that book, and turned to Mr Southam’s ingenious collection called The Critical Heritage.  There I found a letter written by George Henry Lewes to Charlotte Brontë in 1848; this seemed a little closer to the mark.  Defending Jane Austen as ‘one of the greatest artists ... that ever lived’, Lewes went on to say, (a little incautiously, as it turned out) that ‘Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no “sentiment”, ... no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry’.  Charlotte replied with proper indignation: ‘Can there be a great artist without poetry?  What I call ... a great artist ... cannot be destitute of the divine gift.  But by poetry, I am sure, you understand something different to what I do’.  It is not easy to see what Lewes meant here by ‘poetry’; he says it is what Shakespeare had, and that in place of that we must put Jane Austen’s ‘daring prose’.  But Miss Brontë is not much more lucid: poetry, she says, is passion and rapture, a power so divine that it had elevated George Sand’s coarse masculinity and had been able to convert Thackeray’s ‘corrosive poison into purifying elixir’.[i]  Having no acquaintance with corrosive poisons and very little with coarse masculinity, I have had to search my own heart; for Richard Simpson has said emphatically that Jane is no poet, and even Miss Lascelles, in declaring that Jane was no symbolist, may have meant that in her view too Jane was no poet.

Most of what we have of Jane Austen’s verse is a sort of polished doggerel, and was not intended to be anything else; even when she came to utter her grief at the untimely death of Anne Lefroy, a niece beloved and almost as gifted as Jane herself, the verse, though noble in sentiment, is flat and rhetorical in execution – in the undesirable sense it is at once too ‘poetical’ and too ‘prosaic’.  Perhaps those who have said that Jane was no poet dismissed as of no serious account what (if anything) they knew of her verse, and could find in her novels none of those Icarus-passages of opulent emotive prose that sometimes get printed in italics, nor anything haunted (as Dickens sometimes is) by the submerged run of the blank verse line or the sonorous rhythms of the Authorised Version of the Bible.  Nevertheless, I should still like to suggest that Jane Austen is a poet.

Jane Austen is supremely a writer of prose.  As Coleridge knew, and Wordsworth echoed, the antithesis of prose is not poetry, but verse; the antithesis of poetry is science.  Yeats’s tone-deafness steered him away from the contemporary cult of trying to write ‘musical’ verse, and brought him to an unmatched sense of the integrity of language – significant words rhythmically disposed, passionate hieratic utterance keyed to the inventive rhythms of the speaking voice.  In the same way, Jane Austen’s incapacity for composing strong or eloquent verse seems to have endowed her with an incorruptible sense of the integrity of prose, the translucent rhythms of the speaking voice in the other harmony, the peculiar signature of breath and intelligence that identifies a person speaking and the state of mind that from moment to moment informs the voice.  Miss Lascelles noticed that in some of Jane Austen’s prose there is ‘an impression of speed and simplicity not alien from the temper of verse.’[ii]  Her ear gave her an accurate intuition; I wish she had carried the hint a little further.  If we reject the proposition that Jane Austen is a poet, we might be tempted to accept the doctrine that she is some sort of scientist – a microscopically objective recorder of a limited range of human behaviour; a very odd thing to say of a writer whose work is rather like Mozart, without the Requiem.

I am impressed by the fact that Jane Austen’s characters are autonomous to such a degree that they have in our minds a life of their own, so that we can discuss them with great patience and refinement of perception – and with very little quarrelling – as though they were living persons (which of course they are).  That she was able to do that was a marvellous achievement; and that it should be so accounts, I suppose, for the inexhaustible pleasure we find in talking to each other about her people, confident that any obtuseness or lack of a delicate insight on our part will be corrected by the real presence of the persons themselves as we discover and rediscover them in our reading.  But I have a suspicion (reinforced by Professor Hardy’s theme and by some of the things Professor Litz had said) that her achievement is even more remarkable than that, and feel that we should try to search out the compass of it – difficult though that may be when the achievement is apparently effortless, and the products of it have an impervious seamlessness.

I should like to suggest that Jane Austen is a poet in two senses: (a) in her craftsmanship in language; and (b) in the conduct of the action within each novel.  In the first sense, we need to consider fine-grained detail with an ear alert to the dynamics of language; in the second, we are concerned with the disposition of forces within the whole universe of a novel, particularly that mutual definition of plot and character the product of which Aristotle called drama, the thing done, or what I may elsewhere – to distinguish it from the ‘action’ that is sheer motion – also call ‘pure action’; the one sense discloses itself on a small scale, the other on a large scale.  The evidence for each is of a particular kind, each different from the other.  Yet both kinds or functions interact upon each other and can be seen to be poetic because both reside at the heart, or at the roots, of imaginative activity.

I shall not evolve my argument according to the convention that pretends that the conclusion follows necessarily from the evidence.  The conclusion of a critical argument is always implicit in the premises, and in the selection and ordering of evidence that the premises direct.  So I beg your indulgence to begin (as Aristotle says) ‘with first things’ – in this case with what I mean by ‘poet’, ‘poetry’, and ‘imagination’.  What I now have to say may be a bit dense, but I’ll do the best I can with a topic too simple to be anything but unmanageable.  The fact that Jane Austen may not have thought of these things in this way is, I think, neither here nor there.

I take it that imagination is not a ‘faculty’, but rather an integrated and potent state of the self – a realising condition, in which the self and the world are made real.  I take it, correspondingly, that the word ‘poetry’ refers basically to a state of language, a condition qualitatively discernible but not analytically definable – or not yet; a state of language that is noticeably lucid, vivid, nervous, inventive, economical, often translucent, capable of swift movement.  Incorrigibly a matter of words (and not dominantly of musical sounds), poetry is informed – or declares itself – by the inventive rhythms of a mind unfolding what cannot be known except in the uttering of it.  The rhythms and tone are the indelible marks of energy and of the quality of impulse.  To put it another way: poetry is language in the process of symbolising.  By ‘symbolising’ I do not mean so much that poetry typically produces ‘symbols’ – those distinguishable images that tiresomely invite us to prodigies of allegorical exposition; rather that ‘symbolising’ generates (or simply is) ‘symbolic events’, verbal events that are strongly resonant, in which words tend to assume tactual qualities and complex – even contradictory – upper partials of implication.  Under the condition of poetry, language becomes ‘musicalised’; it discovers – without renouncing the integrity of language – something like the condition of music, showing typically (as language otherwise seldom does) a capacity for swift unprepared change, modulation, variation, transition, and also a capacity for stillness and composure.  In this state the logic of thought and grammar is not necessarily dismissed, but language tends to gravitate to a more primitive state, having an active commerce with the senses, and relying upon the intrinsic relations of collision and parataxis (the metaphorical function) and the pure physical interaction of the elements of language as spoken and listened to.  ‘Symbolising’ is the antithesis of ‘describing’; ‘describing’ is language in a scientific mode.

A ‘poet’, then, may be seen not simply as a manufacturer of verses, or of magniloquent strings of words, but – if we may trust the Greek root of the word – a maker, and specifically a maker in words.  The art of poetry is a rather physical and forthright business, not devoid of intelligence, but having much to do with craftsmanship and the craftsman’s respect for his materials.  The gift is a supremely human one, not divine (except as far as some would hold that all our gifts are of divine origin).  We are not actually capable of creating; we select and arrange what is given to us (though the source may be obscure or totally unknown); a poet allows and encourages promising elements – words and rhythms usually – to assume form, to move in an ordered manner.  On the whole, the more intense the poetry, the less mellifluous it is.  As David Jones had said, a poet has to use what is around the place, and he can make true poetry only of what he knows and loves.  The need to know makes a poet an accurate and patient observer; his love prevents his knowing from stopping short in description.  ‘Naming’ – the affectionate telling over of things as a liturgy of wonder – is one of the richest subordinate resources of poetry.

A novelist needs a talent for telling a story that a lyrical poet does not need; and his choice of the harmony of prose, and the lengths that prose may drive him to, make demands on him that an epic poet, or perhaps even a writer of formal history, would not encounter.  Yet whatever imaginative universe the novelist may encompass or seek to encompass, the reality and command of it will stand or fall by the quality of his making, and the quality of his wording.  The whole thing has to be made in words – not least the characters.  The ‘better’ the wording – that is, the more exactly proper to what in the end proves to have been necessary – the more the novel becomes (like a poem) self-subsistent and self-declarative, depending least upon the person of the novelist even though it must all occur in his mind and will be coloured by it; and probably depending very little upon the author’s personal wounds and longings.  But language is an unruly servant, especially if roughly handled, being no passive instrument.  In the end it will have its way of all imperious masters, will stick out an impish tongue at whatever orotund spaces in the rhetoric it has been forced to set echoing, and at any emotional over-indulgence it has been obliged to collude in.  Good writing, of whatever kind, seems always to have come into existence as its own utterance, speaking in a conceivable voice, finding its wording as an act of grace.  If I think of a novelist as a ‘poet’, I think of one (certainly) who lives in an imaginative universe that is rooted in life and the ways of human life; but his universe is also haunted by words, shaped by utterances.  If these seem large claims, Jane Austen may be allowed her say – even though it comes from an early book and a hilarious setting.

‘And what are you reading, Miss - ?’  ‘Oh!  it is only a 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 humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.  (NA, p. 38)

Jane Austen, as far as I know, made no claim for herself as a poet: and I am not trying to show that she was something that she had no idea of being.  My concern is simply to allow us to enter into the unique universes of her imagining, and to dwell there if we wish.  There would certainly be some danger in expanding the concept of poetry to embrace everything effectively conducted in words (? Newton’s Principia Mathematica, for example).  But the danger of extending ‘poetry’ some way into the usually acknowledged realm of prose seems to me easier to accept than the distortions that occur when we try to define the novel as though it were absolutely distinct from all other imaginative makings-in-words.  Many have called Jane Austen a great artist; I have no quarrel with that.  But ‘artist’ is an elusive term, and ‘poet’ – if we insist on the word’s having an indissoluble connection with language – may serve us better in trying to draw a bounding line around the specific qualities of Jane Austen’s work.

That should provide some sort of setting for the first sense of the word ‘poet’.  Now, to take a fresh nip and consider the second sense.

Whateley, Macaulay, and Lewes, all at an early date, ascribed to Jane Austen an exceptional flair for drawing characters, for discriminating them one from another, and presenting them ‘dramatically’ – that is, in speaking-parts; the ‘fools’ (or ‘noodles’, as Lewes liked to call them) they found especially praiseworthy, as though they somehow served a function only loosely connected with the novels in which they found themselves.[iii]  So impressed were they with Jane Austen’s ability in drawing characters that they said it was ‘Shakespearean’, and Lewes called her a ‘Prose Shakespeare’.  Richard Simpson, himself a Shakespearean scholar, courteously noticed that it was Heywood who had some time earlier been called the ‘Prose Shakespeare’, but he agreed that ‘Miss Austen much more really deserves the title.’  Lewes however had reservations – Jane Austen, he said, sometimes speaks ‘through the personae’, she lacks passion, she has no interest in the picturesque.  Simpson had reservations too: ‘within her range her characterization is truly Shakespearian; but she has scarcely a spark of poetry.’[iv]  Having made an important observation, they let the virtue of it slip through their fingers: they seem to have said no more than that at character-drawing she is very good indeed, almost as good as Shakespeare, but of course she really is not so big or grand or poetical as he was – and she did write in prose, you know.  If her ‘Shakespearean’ quality is to be taken as a specific indication, we can give it more point by noticing what Coleridge found impressive about Shakespeare.  He rejoiced as much as anybody else in the variety and life-likeness of Shakespeare’s characters, and marvelled at the copiousness of his invention.  But two things that struck him just as forcibly were these: that none of Shakespeare’s characters seemed in any way a projection of Shakespeare himself, and were not drawn naturalistically from the life; and that Shakespeare was never guilty of ‘ventriloquism’, of speaking deceptively through his characters in his own person.  These, I am sure, are also specific qualities in Jane Austen, and we have taken a step forward.

Again, it is a pity to let the just claim for Jane Austen’s ‘dramatic’ power dissolve into no more than a statement that she could call forth a wide variety of life-like characters and let them talk themselves into existence.  Certainly she did that – triumphantly – but what else?  Edward Muir, in his account of the kind of novel he calls ‘dramatic’, takes us a long step forward, not least because here he is writing about Jane Austen and not about Shakespeare.

There is in her novels, in the first place, a confinement to one circle, one complex of life, producing naturally an intensification of action; and this intensification is one of the   essential attributes of the dramatic novel.  In the second place, character is to her no longer a thing merely to delight in. ... It has consequences.  It influences events; it creates difficulties and later, in different circumstances, dissolves them. ... The balance of all the forces within the novel creates and moulds the plot.  There is no external framework, no   merely mechanical plot; all is character, and all is at the same time action. ...

Where this plot [in Pride and Prejudice] differs from the plot of a novel of action is in its strict interior causation. ... The correspondence in a novel of this kind between the action and the characters is so essential that one can hardly find terms to describe it without appearing to exaggerate; one might say that a change in the situation always involves a change in the characters, while every change, dramatic or psychological, external or internal, is either caused or given its form by something in both.[v]

This account of Jane Austen’s procedure sounds very much like a direct application of Aristotle’s view of tragedy to the conduct of prose fiction.  The sources of individual action are internal; a man becomes what he does; the plot is a function of the characters, the characters are continuously changed by the plot but also determine it; the overt plot and the characters – what is done by whom, to whom, and why – is not the end (or purpose) of the piece but an aspect of what defines the intricate and finely traced arc of pure action, allows the configuration of action to be traced out in physically discernible and humanly intelligible terms.  Aristotle’s view of tragedy is dynamic and radical; there is nothing in it to support the weak behaviourist assumption of a ‘tragic flow’; there is no place in it for the arbitrary intervention of the gods of fate; it is inflexibly human; the protagonist is not called a ‘hero’; least of all does the Poetics itself support the notion that Aristotle provided (as the Italians seem to have thought and as many thoughtless instructors continue to suppose) a checklist of the required ingredients for cooking a tragedy.  In any case, a cockpit check tells us whether it is safe to fly; it does not tell us that we are flying, or how well.  Aristotle emphatically and repeatedly affirms the indivisible dynamic relation between plot and character.  In the fragmentary form in which the Poetics has come down to us, he pays much more attention to plot than to character – not because he was thinking of a kind of play different from Shakespeare’s or from ours, but because he saw both plot and character as operating as instrumental rather than as an end.  His central perception was of an action – a drama, a ‘pure action’ – that plot and character together delineate: the drama traced out by the whole play was what made tragedy specifically tragic.  What he had to say about the specific drama of comedy is lost to us, but that doesn’t bother me much at the moment.

To those of us who are in the habit of thinking of the ‘action’ in a novel or play or film as the overt (and preferably sensational) things that the people do or have done to them, the internality of Aristotle’s view of the nature and sources of tragedy will probably seem a bit esoteric.  But Aristotle’s view of dramatic action is all of a piece with his ethical view of the sources of human action.  And Coleridge, in all his reflections upon moral and dramatic values, also insists upon the internality, the self-originating nature, of action; we cannot without damage go behind the statement ‘I act’; it is always an ‘I’ acting, decisively and irreversibly; restraint from action can therefore be an act.  He is acutely aware of the bond between action and passion, between doing and being done to, and of the correlation of action and passion in any one person.  That actions are literally coloured by what informs them – be it will, desire, impulse, or lyrical self-realisation – he is in no doubt; and it is upon these axioms of the nature of human action that his judgement of plays and novels (among many other things) turns; on these grounds he chose Fielding above Richardson, and admired Tom Jones as inordinately as anybody ever has.  For Coleridge, as I am sure would be the case for Jane Austen if she ever ventured into philosophical discourse, ‘moral’ and ‘aesthetic’ are not mutually exclusive terms; he remembered that the root of the word ‘aesthetics’ is not ‘beauty’ or ‘artistic form’, but ‘feeling’ and ‘perception’.  If Coleridge sometimes gets into difficulties with the exposition of these intangible home-truths, it is largely because he rejected the whole regressive logic of ‘motives’, ‘drives’, and compulsions; like Aristotle he saw ‘cause’ in the fulfilment of the end.  It may take a little effort to adopt a non-behavioural view of character and plot, but I think that we are ill-advised not to try.

As a preliminary proposition, then, I suggest that Jane Austen’s novels can fruitfully be regarded as ‘poems’, in some such sense as I have already unfolded.  As long as a novel is considered to be a genuine imaginative construction, the ‘fictions’ of the novel – whether the doings and happenings, the episodes, places or persons – will be apprehended as ‘real’ rather than actual, as of universal rather than general import; and we shall expect to see fictional particulars transformed (through the virtue of their particularity) into aspects of universal human values.  The test of ‘reality’ is not whether the episodes and persons represent – or could conceivably represent – actual events and persons, but whether the symbolic transformation into real persons and places and events occurs or not.  (Plausibility is a matter of internal judgement, not of sociological generalisation.)  Symbolic transformation, I suppose, occurs in the author’s mind; but it must occur in physical terms in the body of the book, in the wording and ordonnance of it and not simply in what the words depict.  What the actors can be seen to do and suffer is not the end or purpose of the writing, firmly though the actors may command our attention; these are the physical aspects of what allows the arc of pure action, the drama, to be traced out in a discernible manner.

Jane Austen was evidently a conscious, perceptive, and highly skilled craftsman: in her work, in spite of her exuberance, nothing seems ever to depend upon accident or improvisation; her writing, like her most memorable young ladies, is clear-eyed and of a fine complexion. She said herself, playfully but truly, that ‘An artist cannot do anything slovenly’ (Letters, p. 30).  She found her mastery by choosing firm foundations for her style and by writing a great deal from the age of fifteen onward, first of all writing for her family, an audience that shared her sense of fun.  From very early on, when she was writing she was listening, judging, refining, attuning, until her pen – which she was incapable of handling clumsily – responded, with the sensitiveness of a gold-leaf electrometer, to that fertile indirection of the mind that (at a loss for terms) we sometimes call ‘imagination’, and sometimes ‘thought’, and sometimes ‘intention’.  Among the six novels that she published there is no performance that can justly be called juvenile or tentative.

The first sense in which Jane Austen’s writing can be seen as ‘poetic’, her verbal craftsmanship or wordsmithery (her particular achievement being of the order of what Coleridge called ‘logodaedaly’ or ‘sleight of words’), falls within the field of what is usually called ‘style’.  Her style has been examined perceptively by more than one scholar, but not (I think) definitively; and to think of her as a poet is bound to put a sharper and more selective edge than has been customary upon the inquiry into her style.

In saying that Jane Austen is a ‘poet’ in her handling of words, I do not mean that she writes continuously in a manner that we should agree was noticeably ‘poetic’.  She has at her disposal the full scope of prose, from plain factual narrative and description to the most refined resources of tone, implication, allusive nuance, pace, and emphasis.  None of this falls outside the theoretical limits of poetry – if we accept for ‘poetry’ post-Johnsonian criteria that Jane Austen herself might have had consciously in mind.  Being a poet, she reserves the privilege of making her language ‘poetical’ only when it needs to be; writing in prose, and not insisting to herself that she is a poet, she has the immense advantage of not feeling all the time on her shoulders the oppressive weight of singing-robes.  And yet, even though her language may not be always and recognisably ‘musicalised’, it seems always to be on the fringes of the musical, capable of moving in and out of the musical state with an effortless rapidity that we associate with the musical state itself.  Having established for herself a very small range of rhetorical effects, the slightest variation of tone, pace, or activity is immediately noticeable; and we become aware of an undercurrent of verbal possibilities that – breaking the surface and disappearing again – engage us with shocks of delight and recognition.  For example, we have the general impression that the staple of Jane Austen’s prose is the short, crisp, translucent sentence; but she is no Hemingway.  The length and structure of her sentences adapt themselves instantly to local and particular need; whether it is the sinewy suppleness of syntax that can embrace the exact shade of an ironic aside or the lizard-turn of an epigram; or unfold comfortably and at length, as in the long, fervent, almost helter-skelter, self-unfolding sentence in which she measures out the breadth and depth of Fanny Price’s love for her sailor brother William (MP, pp. 235-5).  With her pen, Jane Austen is as dainty as a needle-worker, as purposeful as an axeman.

Let us begin with small things, because Jane Austen, like any poet worth his salt, has a passion for precision.  Miss Lascelles notices the force of her ‘pregnant abstractions’ (of Johnsonian lineage)[vi] – Miss Bates’s ‘desultory good will’ (E, p. 239; cf. ‘ignorant good will’ in Yeats’s Easter 1916), the basket and big bonnet that constitute for Mrs Elton the ‘apparatus of happiness’ (E, p. 358), and how Sir Walter and his two ladies step forward to greet Lady Dalrymple ‘with all the eagerness compatible with anxious elegance’ (P, p. 184).  In such phrases the adjective ceases to act as a mere modifier: like a barber meditatively stroking the razor across the palm of his hand, it gives the final honing touch to the edge of humour or irony, multiple implications suddenly build up and hover over the phrase.  The pregnant abstraction had its gradations.  When Anne walks up to the Lodge ‘in a sort of desolate tranquility’, or Mary Musgrove, at the prospect of visiting Kellynch after the Crofts have taken possession of it, is ‘in a very animated, comfortable state of imaginary agitation’ (P, pp. 36, 48), the phrases are not much more than sharply descriptive; when we read of Mrs Allen’s ‘busy idleness’ (NA, p. 67), or of ‘the business of love-making’ that happily relieves the company of Mr Collins’s presence (P&P, p. 129), or of the ‘short parley of compliment’ between Henry Crawford and Mr Yates (MP, p. 132) something more conspiaratorial is afoot.  When Mr Collins, in the early morning, bent upon proposing (fruitlessly) to Elizabeth Bennet, escapes from Longbourn House ‘with admirable slyness’ (P&P, p. 121), the phrase resonates; and so it does (but this time with a mocking hint of a cosmic perspective) when Edmund corrects Mary’s extravagant estimate of the distance they have walked – ‘for he was not yet so much in love as to measure distance, or reckon time, with feminine lawlessness’ (MP, p. 94).  These short phrases, that come suddenly into view and hover for an instant like a dragonfly or a humming-bird and are gone, may stand for irrepressible flashes of humour; but they are also symptoms of strong poetic potential that hums like a fiddle-string below the surface of her apparently decorous prose.  The underlying process here is true metaphor: the collision of elements none of which will give up any part of its integrity.  The gift for metaphor is peculiarly the poet’s gift, and cannot be learned.  That it was part of Jane Austen’s habit of mind can be seen in her letters, and the effect is not always funny.  For example, ‘Single Women have a dreadful propensity for being poor – which is one very strong argument in favour of Matrimony’ (Letters, p. 483); she says of Mrs Cooke who is perhaps dying of an inflammation of the lungs induced by a chill taken in church that ‘her mind [is] all pious composure, as may be supposed’ (Letters, p. 245); when her brother is afflicted by the death of his wife, Jane writes to Edward Cooper, hoping that he will not send her brother ‘one of his letters of cruel comfort’ (Letters, p. 222).  When she herself is about to venture the journey to Winchester to be treated for her mortal illness, she describes herself as ‘a very genteel, portable sort of an Invalid’ (Letters, p. 494).

In this, we are considering not simply a verbal locution or ‘figure of speech’ but a commanding process radical to poetry itself – the metaphorical process that secures and enriches the interaction not only of single words, but of elements within sentences, of sentences within paragraphs, and the collusive interaction of elements of much larger scale if they can be constructed with strong enough identity.  Not only do Jane Austen’s sentences adapt themselves exquisitely to their syntactical needs, but they also characteristically give the impression of shaping energy contained within deftly chosen limits – which is another indelible mark of poetic practice.  On the writer’s part this calls up the auditory imagination; on the reader’s part it calls up, not simply an alertness to the interactions of the words themselves, but also the sense of musical phrasing.  If the metaphorical process gives active substance (as it does at crucial points in Wordsworth’s poems) to words that would otherwise be vague abstractions, the sense of phrasing, of musical inflection, gives body to the most minute movements of mind.  Speaking in her own person, she can say of a Mr Wildman who (despite Fanny’s advocacy) could see nothing in Jane’s novels: ‘I particularly respect him for wishing to think well of all young Ladies; it shews an amiable & a delicate Mind’ (Letters. p. 487).

Jane Austen’s impeccable sense of phrasing is a more distinctive mark of her style than her use of the isolable pregnant phrase; and she can impart this to the entirely different voice of one of her characters – for example, Mr Bennet speaking to Elizabeth:

‘Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then. ... Now is your time.  Here are officers enough at Meryton to disappoint all the young ladies in the country.  Let Wickham be your man.  He is a pleasant fellow, and would jilt you creditably.’  (P&P, pp. 137-8)

She says of Mr Collins that ‘The stupidity with which he was favoured by nature, must guard his courtship from any charm that could make a woman wish for its continuance’ (P&P, p. 122); and of Mrs Allen that she was ‘one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them’ (NA, p. 20).  In these there is a hovering understatement reinforced by a sequence of double negatives actual or implied – an effect that is scarcely to be discerned in a logical analysis of the wording.  When Elinor thinks of Willoughby –

She felt that his influence over her mind was heightened by circumstances which ought not in reason to have weight; by that person of uncommon attraction, that open,        affectionate, and lively manner which it was no merit to possess; and by that still ardent love for Marianne, which it was not even innocent to indulge.  (S&S, p. 333)

We catch a lighter timbre in the account of Catherine Morland –

... in many other points she came on exceedingly well; for though she could not write sonnets, she brought herself to read them; and though there seemed no chance of her throwing a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the pianoforte, of her own composition, she could listen to other people’s performance with very little fatigue.  (NA, p. 16)

The representation of Edmund’s scrupulous hesitation in confronting his father with what he knows will be a pretty shaky excuse for not stopping the theatrical high jinks that he himself disapproved of as strongly as he knew his father would – this is managed with superlative allusiveness.

Edmund’s first object the next morning was to see his father alone, and give him a fair statement of the whole acting scheme, defending his own share in it as far only as he could then, in a soberer moment, feel his motives to deserve, and acknowledging with perfect ingenuousness that his concession had been attended with such partial good as to make his judgment in it very doubtful.  (MP, p. 187)

As has often been noticed, a favourite device of Jane Austen’s – learned no doubt from Dr Johnson – is the antithesis.  Antithesis can easily pass over into metaphorical process, and for Jane Austen often does; and with meditative ease and stylistic assurance she can extend an antithesis in great variety of shape and range of complexity to give form to some of her most brilliantly constructed sentences.  For example, the account of John Dashwood at the beginning of Sense and Sensibility.

He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed: but he was, in general, well respected; for he conducted himself with propriety in the discharge of his ordinary duties.  Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable than he was: - he might even have been made amiable himself; for her was very young when he married, and very fond of his wife.  But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself; - more narrow- minded and selfish.  (S&S. p. 5)

Sometimes she will extend an antithesis (as perhaps here) to a third term, like an Alexandrine reaching out for its sixth foot; and with a playful flick at the tip of the tail turn the antithesis into an outrageous zeugma.  For example, in Mansfield Park –

Tom Bertram must have been thought pleasant, indeed, at any rate; he was the sort of young man to be generally liked, his agreeableness was of the kind to be oftener found agreeable than some endowments of a higher stamp, for he had easy manners, excellent spirits, a large acquaintance, and a great deal to say ...  (MP, p. 47)

Or in the response to Mrs Churchill’s death in Emma –

The great Mrs. Churchill was no more.

It was felt as such things must be felt.  Every body had a degree of gravity and sorrow; tenderness towards the departed, solicitude for the surviving friends; and, in a        reasonable time, curiosity to know where she would be buried.  (E, p. 387)

The antithesis may be diffused, as in an aside in Sense and Sensibility:

Lady Middleton was equally pleased with Mrs. Dashwood.  There was a kind of cold hearted selfishness on both sides, which mutually attracted them; and they sympathised with each other in an insipid propriety of demeanor, and a general want of understanding. (S&S, p. 229)

Elsewhere it may be infused with something like the plausible realism of Mistress Quickly’s brainless inconsequence:

[Mrs. Allen’s] vacancy of mind and incapacity for thinking were such, that as she never talked a great deal, so she could never be entirely silent; and therefore, while she sat at her work, if she lost her needle or broke her thread, if she heard a carriage in the street, or saw a speck upon her gown, she must observe it aloud, whether there were any one at   leisure to answer her or not.  (NA, p. 60)

The model for startling anticlimax can be seen in the juvenile ‘Memoirs of Mr. Clifford’:

... he was a very rich young Man & kept a great many Carriages of which I do not recollect half.  I can only remember that he had a Coach, a Chariot, a Chaise, a Landeau, a Landeaulet, a Phaeton, a Gig, a Whiskey, an italian Chair, a Buggy, a Curricle & a wheelbarrow.  (VI, p. 43)

In its mature development, this figure can have the effect of a small land-mine, cunningly concealed, with a long-burning fuse.  Of Mrs Palmer –

The openness and heartiness of her manner, more than atoned for that want of recollection and elegance, which made her often deficient in the forms of politeness; her    kindness, recommended by so pretty a face, was engaging; her folly, though evident, was not disgusting, because it was not conceited; and Elinor could have forgiven every thing but her laugh.  (S&S, p. 304)

Or of Sir Walter Eliot –

Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character; vanity of person and of situation.  He had been remarkably handsome in his youth; and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man.  Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did; nor could the valet of any new made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society.  He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion.  (P, p. 4)

By a similar process a plain gnomic statement can be suddenly shifted from the world of eternal truisms to the universe of eternal verities, achieving a sort of meditative grandeur.

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material. (E, p. 431)

There is a salutary reminder for us in what she said to her beloved niece Fanny Knight: ‘Wisdom is better than Wit, & in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side’ (Letters, p. 410).  It may be this recognition that imparts a tinge of elegiac sobriety to the closing paragraph of the last letter we have from Jane Austen’s pen – at parting, a little smiling gesture in recognition of her love of life.

You will find Captain ––– a very respectable, well-meaning man, without much manner, his wife and sister all good humour and obligingness, and I hope (since the fashion allows it) with rather longer petticoats than last year.  (Letters, p. 498)

We cannot doubt that much of what imparts electrical vitality to Jane Austen’s style was her delight in effortless virtuosity, in catching by an impossible fraction of a hair’s-breadth the savour of a nuance of implication.  I do not wish to venture into the discrimination of minute syntactical categories, and leave to the ingenuity of keener taxonomists than myself the following extracts from her letters.

Mr. Heathcote met with a genteel little accident the other day in hunting; he got off to lead his horse over a hedge or a house or a something, & his horse in his haste trod upon his leg, or rather ancle I believe, & it is not certain whether the small bone is not broke. (p. 85)

I hope it is true that Edward Taylor is to marry his cousin Charlotte.  Those beautiful dark Eyes will then adorn another Generation at least in all their purity.  (p. 87)

I give you joy of our new nephew, & hope if he ever comes to be hanged, it will not be till we are too old to care about it.  (p. 272)

[Mr. Blackall] was married at Clifton to a Miss Lewis, whose Father had been late of Antigua.  I should very much like to know what sort of a Woman she is.  He was a piece of Perfection, noisy Perfection himself which I always recollect with regard. ... I would wish Miss Lewis to be of a silent turn & rather ignorant, but naturally intelligent & wishing to learn; - fond of cold veal pies, green tea in the afternoon, & a green window blind at night.  (p. 317)

Miss H[arding] is an elegant, pleasing, pretty-looking girl, about nineteen, I suppose, or nineteen and a half, or nineteen and a quarter, with flowers in her head and music at her finger ends.  (p. 282)

We plan having a steady Cook, & a young giddy Housemaid, with a sedate, middle aged Man, who is to undertake the double office of Husband to the former & sweetheart to the latter.  – No Children of course to be allowed on either side.  (pp. 99-100)

Old Philmore was buried yesterday, & I, by way of saying something to Triggs, observed that it had been a very handsome Funeral, but his manner of reply made me suppose that it was not generally esteemed so.  I can only be sure of one part being very handsome, Triggs himself, walking behind in his Green Coat.  (pp. 488-9)

A consideration of what looked like a small figure of speech has tendrilled out to embrace most of the nervous web of Jane Austen’s prose style – a style so highly charged with energy that the very restraint with which it is commanded makes us aware of a steady (though often submerged) high potential for felicity.  Whatever characteristic turn of phrase we may choose, we may find variant examples of it in abundance, but not uniformly distributed either within single novels, or from novel to novel.  She can call up these resources whenever occasion demands, with every gradation from plain declaration to high-spirited nonsense, from sharp irony to sombre reflection; or she can refrain from using any of them, so that the alternations from use to restraint become a principle of structure that identifies each of the novels in its own way.  Her rendering of individual direct speech (with very few exceptions) is – in identity, tone, and pace – flawless.  After Sense and Sensibility she never again tried to reproduce idiosyncratic phrasing of pronunciation as she did for the pretentious speech of the ‘ignorant and illiterate’ Lucy Steele; and if the failure of General Tilney turns upon Jane’s failure to find his own voice for him, that too is in an early book.  I admire particularly her secure handling of the arcane liturgical usage of naval persons.  About her uncanny skill in discovering, without recourse to idiosyncrasy, the precise and recognisable identity of voice for each of her persons, nothing need be said: most of the admirers of Jane Austen’s novels are so absorbed in her characters that they could probably, on request, produce the precise inflexion of any one of them.  As though it were not enough to be able to induce her characters to speak in their own persons, she can make transitions from her own narrative to the indirect speech of her characters, or to the thought of her characters, so effortlessly that it is often difficult to decide in a particular passage whether or not it is her own comment that we are reading.  Even when she does speak in her own person, as she often does, that too is usually so deftly ‘placed’ that it feels less like an intrusion of the omniscient author than a strain in a half-oracular counterpoint of disembodied and wise intelligence.

Another mark of her overarching poetic instinct is to be seen in her handling of detail, economically and vividly, so that actual things at times glow under her eye – a process that I have called ‘naming’, which, in the perceiving as in the writing, turns upon the vitality of concreteness – what Henry James admirably called ‘solidity of specification’.  The detail of the contents of Fanny Price’s east room in Mansfield Park is an outstanding instance; so too is the detail of Harriet’s pathetic little love-trove in Emma.  Jane recognised the process in actual life when Fanny Knight told her how strangely moved she was, when she went to her lover’s room after he had gone away and saw there his ‘dirty Shaving Rag’ – Jane cried: ‘... exquisite! – Such a circumstance ought to be in print.  Much too good to be lost’ (Letters, p. 412).  For she knew that simple items, told over, almost liturgically, apparently at random, can – in a novel, as in ‘life’ – be coloured by the consciousness of the person who names them.  These items, remaining simply what they are and nothing else, can yet vibrate with an aura of implication in the very act of their being so named, so told over, so noted with solid specification.  (There is a heart-rending instance of this process in James Agee’s Lee Us Now Praise Famous Men – in the catalogue of what he found in one room of the share-cropper’s house after the family had gone out to work.)  This is very different from ‘describing’ (in any accepted use of that term) as Jane shows when she criticised Anna Austen’s novel: ‘You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked.  You give too many particulars of right hand & left’ (Letters, p. 401; cf. p. 78).  Describing is a matter of exhausting delineation: naming is a matter of selective and allusive symbolising: in painting, we see the coincidence of the two perhaps in Canaletto or Vermeer.

But the process of ‘naming’ applies not only to objects but to the whole sub-symbolic indication of places and of the things contained within them, not simply providing a physical setting in which action can occur, but evoking obliquely from the outset the relations of persons to things, places, and other persons, and also establishing the disposition of the persons in physical space and in psychic space.  For Jane Austen, the action more often than not unfolds crucially in the enclosedness of a house, a room.  We could probably not draw an accurate plan of any of the houses or rooms; yet we feel sure that we could probably move about in them confidently in the dark, as persons familiar and hospitably received.  Outstanding instances of the discovery of living figures in a domestic space are to be seen in Mansfield Park, where we hear the lovers talking quietly to each other in a room where others are present, a room large enough that they are not overheard, yet intimate enough that at any moment they may be drawn into any of the other rings of conversation that we are aware – as the lovers are – are reverberating at the same time; in the staircase encounter between Fanny and Edmund that Virginia Woolf admired; in the closing scene of Persuasion, the evocativeness of which could scarcely have been guessed from the first draft.

I am inclined to think that this same process of ‘naming’ that evocatively expands from objects to the relation of persons to objects, to a domestic space and the persons related there, applies also to the way Jane Austen draws – and draws forth – her characters: they have, at best, a ‘solidity of specification’ that allows them to disclose themselves as living, capable of going on surprising us, because they contain within themselves the reason why they are what they are and not otherwise.  Like the objects vividly perceived, they have their own peculiar aura of presence.  In the same way that we imagine that we could move about in any of Jane Austen’s darkened houses, we find in our imagination that the people of her imagining grow in substance, weight, and complexity far beyond the particular limits that her economical art has assigned to them in her novels.  They have the tactual solidity that can also, in the condition of poetry, be physically imprinted in words.

In Mansfield Park, for a time, the sisters Julia and Maria became so sundered from one another that ‘there was no outward fellowship between them’; ‘They were two solitary sufferers, or connected only by Fanny’s consciousness’ (MP, p. 163).  The unifying force in Jane Austen’s writing is the unity of her consciousness, subtle, patient, watchful, profound enough to imprint in her memory the most delicate shades of feeling, the most fugitive and ambivalent of emotions.  One of Edward’s younger daughters recalled how her aunt Jane ‘would sit quietly working [i.e. doing needlework] beside the fire in the library, saying nothing for a good while, and then would suddenly burst out laughing, jump up and run across the room to a table where pens and paper were lying, write something down, and then come back to the fire and go on quietly working as before.’  On this passage, Miss Lascelles makes this comment:

She must have developed to a remarkable degree her faculty for living (when she chose) apart in her imagined world – and, further, for keeping the regions of that world distinct in her imagination.  To be engaged at once on Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park – and that while still correcting the proofs of Sense and Sensibility – and to preserve entire the peculiar atmosphere of each – this is an achievement which shows that she could project her imagination into one or another of these fragile bubble worlds, and let it dwell there.[vii]

Yet the worlds of Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion are not bubbles; they are (like Coleridge’s nightmares) foot-thick realities, though gossamer-fine.  An imagined world, poetically speaking, is a world fully realised.  Jane’s secretiveness in securing the integrity of her imagined worlds, even from the loving solicitude of her favourite sister Cassandra, is a clear sign of the substance of those worlds: they were vulnerable, but not evanescent; not until they had found their final and proper body in words could they stand alone in our world.  But the words that could be at once living and impregnable did not come to her easily or quickly.  To begin with she had been sheltered by the responsive merriment she was lucky enough to find within her own populous family circle.  The early novels – Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice – though transformed from what they must first have been by the genius that came to her suddenly at Chawton, still rely upon the family convention, but less and less, and least of all in Pride and Prejudice.  The ease and confidence given her as a writer by her family made her a much more daring writer than any of her contemporaries, especially her female contemporaries: she had discovered how to be lucky in writing, how to give full and risky rein to her exceptional gifts of intelligence, deep feeling, and verbal virtuosity.  She found how to land on her feet like a cat, and became confident that her verbal reflexes would not betray her daring.  She could say to herself, ‘You are comfortable because you are under command’ (E, p. 368).

To insist too much upon Jane Austen as a comic writer – even though she is often extremely funny – is to distract attention from the emotional depth and moral scope of her mature work.  At times in the early novels she may be tempted into a shrewd nip of sarcastic or satirical comment; but that is not her true bent.  Irony – that rarest of all gifts in a writer, a manner that nobody can fabricate – is a habit of her way of seeing, encompassing compassion and grief as well as humour.  If irony, in the early novels, is often not much more than a figure of speech, in the mature novels it is the mark of Jane’s steady presence behind her pen.  Le style est l’homme.  She is at once a most self-effacing writer, and – as a presence – most pervasive: an unassuming voice, a central reverberating timbre.  In this, she is indeed Shakespearean, Chaucerian.  For she wrote with the gravity of a born humourist, out of a life that had known its own peculiar sorrows and immedicable desolations.

As for Jane Austen’s conduct of overarching drama and the interaction of plot and character, I must be content with a few general observations – because I feel that I may be sickening for a book on Jane Austen.  In this there are copious possibilities for disagreement; but Jane never hesitated to take chances, and I think we should honour her instinct.  One thing, however, needs to be noted at the outset: the firm singleness of her angle of vision, imparting unquestionable authority to her omniscience; she never resorts to the comfortable convenience of the zoom-lens or the undisciplined confidence-trickery of fluid camera-movement.

In spite of the singleness and rapidity of her progress as a writer, I find in reading the novels that the first three stand in one group – Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice – and Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion in another.  Mansfield Park is, I think, her great masterpiece: here all the forces are so beautifully disposed, the energy so exquisitely distributed, that even the manifestations of her poetic style (never ornate) scarcely break the surface.  I shall therefore in a swift summary try to bring into focus the two poetic senses that I had distinguished at the outset.

Northanger Abbey is informed (to some extent, but not as much as we should like) by that same mode of joyous parody and exuberant burlesque that makes most of the juvenilia in Chapman’s volume VI a delight to savour.  She may have learned much from the prose style of Dr Johnson and the essayists, and a little from William Cowper; but in this book we meet the gift of a sunny and generous humour that, once fully assimilated into her whole tone of voice and way of seeing, was to become the hallmark of her sanity and penetration.  Northanger Abbey is a parody of many things, but above all a parody of a certain kind of novel and of the emotional response that was expected to such novels.  It is good fun in places, but the high spirits fail to establish their own centre of gravity and become (fatally, for this novel) entangled with ‘life’; this makes functional demands of General Tilney that, because of the indistinctness of his nature in the early part of the book, he cannot fulfil – even though he provides one of the most astonishing reversals of expectation in the whole of Jane Austen’s writing.  At best Northanger Abbey is a sort of Donna Quixote, without Sancho Panza or Rosinante; and Catherine Morland is silly rather than crazy.  Nevertheless, if we are searching out the quality and disposition of Jane Austen’s verbal-poietic resources, this book rewards careful attention, for many of the effects lie on the surface.

Sense and Sensibility, although it may have been transformed from an original written in the burlesque manner, is her first attempt at a serious ‘novel’.  Witty, incisive, at times ironic, at times tender, it makes both play and capital of current expectations about a novel, and particularly about a woman’s novel.  The resources of a supple and disciplined prose style are here – flexible, epigrammatic if need be, capable of responding to a light touch and of moving with unpredictable swiftness.  Her love of parody and a habit of self-mockery have made her a daring, as well as a cunning, navigator; she is finding how to dispose her strongest effects in understatement and obliquity, thereby not only establishing her rhetorical palette for much mature use, but also drawing the reader from the position of observer to the quiet attentiveness of a confidante.  Irony and reticence combine in an undercurrent of active intelligence and emotional precision; everything is on a small scale, the texture exquisite, the tone muted.  Yet for all that can be said in praise of detail and effects, the mastery is not yet assured.  There are thin passages, places where inner tension flags and we find ourselves reading – at times (near the end) – out of respect rather than delight.  The drawing of Marianne is perhaps tinged more with satire than with irony, the theme is more parabolic than the action can take in its stride, the story an expanded version of antithesis with the elements drawn to life size.  She seems to have a point to make, not so much about society as about the relation between art and life.  Sense and Sensibility is not usually regarded as a defective novel; yet it does, in many ways difficult to define, fall short of self-sustaining perfection.  It may be a question of her difficulty of combining at one stroke a variety of talents already highly developed.  For all the signs of her genius are present: exhilaration, subtlety of effect, confident delight in the exercise of powers greater than the book calls for, the composure that goes with a knowledge deeper and more comprehensive than is allowed to appear on the surface, a habit of reticence that is much less a figurative device than the ironic exercise of intellectual good manners.

Pride and Prejudice opens con brio, with a crackling dramatic panache that Sense and Sensibility had not prepared us for.  Even though the manuscript original of this book is earlier than the original of Sense and Sensibility, the book declares, from the very outset, a higher order of accomplishment and assurance.  In every way, the advance of Pride and Prejudice is impressive, especially in the drawing of the complementary persons of Jane and Elizabeth.  If at first Darcy seems, as a gruffer version of that fool Collins, unassimilable to the emotional probabilities of the story, he is in the end satisfactorily transformed into a man worthy to receive Elizabeth’s hand; and Jane and Elizabeth are drawn with a depth that prevents the book from settling into the fable-with-a-moral that the title tempts us to expect.  The only sign of uncertainty is in her failure to master what practically every novelist that came after her also failed to master – the self-conscious and disturbing awareness that she was writing a novel, that certain things were expected of a novel and of its story; even if she were to refrain from doing what was expected, she could not escape that expectation.  Rewritten as a single impulse from the version that Cadell had rejected fifteen years earlier, Pride and Prejudice is justly esteemed among the small handful of best English novels.  Distracted, it may be, by a certain publicity of intent, it is too deceptively effortless to encourage imitation, and is much too adult to be recommended to school-children.  If Jane Austen had stopped writing there, she would be seen to have triumphed.  But she could do even better than that; and did so, at once, in Mansfield Park.

To enjoy Pride and Prejudice we accept on trust certain moral conventions with ironic reservation, and with amused detachment observe a microtome slice of the comédie humaine so thin that – perhaps because of its very thinness – speaks for a central issue in life, marriage and money; we are allowed to entertain the possibility that the mark of parochial barbarism would be to pretend that the issue of marriage and money is a trivial one.  In Mansfield Park something rather more compelling happens.  Whether or not we accept the conventions, and whether or not we ‘identify’ with any of the persons in the story, is – as with most fully realised works of art – curiously irrelevant.  We are drawn into an action of ineluctable internal power and logic, self-determinate, self-consistent; an action at once simple and complex which, without ever losing its way or checking its momentum, is held in an exquisite balance of composed forces, like the slow movement of a posthumous quartet.  A finely articulated universe of feeling and implication grows out of the roots of the life peculiar to it, and reflects back upon life with a strong and penetrating light.  There are stylistic and managerial similarities with the novels that came before, and with the two that were to follow; but Mansfield Park stands apart as different in kind, ordered from within as none of the others is.  The clear identity of each volume gives the book exceptional interior strength and vitality.  I have difficulty in reading it as a comedy.  How she came upon this universe, constructed it, and sustained it, we cannot say; it should not have been possible – or at least no more possible than to trace out the figure of tragedy itself.  The book seems to have depended upon a very fragile imaginative poise; when she turned at once to write Emma she had lost it.

Jane Austen, like Milton, did not like to repeat herself; after each novel she moved forward to venture something that she had not attempted before.  Much of the actual writing of Emma is, in detail, apparently more accomplished and of deeper implication than the general run of Mansfield Park; she explores, as she had not dared earlier, the intricate and paradoxical inner goings-on of a woman in love; from her love of symmetry, of correspondence and antithesis, of converging and diverging movements, she evolves a pattern almost geometrical in its disposition of internal forces; and with unruffled forthrightness she presents a group of people who from their first utterances give omen of the persons we are to find them to be.  Yet the book as a whole is comparatively static, and I do not find Emma’s threefold self-imposed ordeal of self-discovery enough of a moral escalation to make the book – as with protective zeal we might have hoped – a sort of Emma Agonistes.  The luminous integration has gone slightly adrift; not breaking into disorder (for she was incapable of that), but to the subtle undermining of the total dramatic effect that can bring probability and necessity into one identity.  Though there is more striking incident in this book than in anything earlier, Emma is deficient in commanding action, and feels like a fiction in a way that only Northanger Abbey does.  Her sheer love of exercising her powers of dramatic invention even leads her at times into slight over-indulgence: some speeches of Miss Bates, though unsurpassed in autonomous vivacity, dislocate the swift apperception of the position Miss Austen has adopted, and interrupt ‘the wonderful velocity of thought.’  Emma is much admired, and rightly so; yet the closing chapter is the one place in all her novels where I feel that she is writing a little perfunctorily, with less respect for her reader than is her use; as though it could be said for the author, rather than for the actors, that all passion is spent.

Persuasion, in its smaller mass, is – like Emma – comparatively static, a study rather than a drama.  The book was probably intended to be as it is; it is, of its kind, very fine, and is more trenchantly human than Emma.  A dark emotional tone enfolds the central person (despite her vividness) and spreads through every incident and even into the landscape that Jane Austen is alleged to be insensitive to.  The darkness feels as though it sprang from some deep personal source, an acute awareness of how some casual incident or circumstance – that nobody could have recognised as crucial and that could have been rescued only by exceptional vigilance or by grace – can prove to be a sorrowful, even irreversible, turning-point in a life; how in life (as Rilke says of art) there are no classes for beginners.  Anne’s strength and sombre patience is surely Jane’s; and if the reversal of Captain Wentworth’s regard seems artificially delayed for the purposes of the plot, and Mrs Smith’s privileged information is so complete and accessible as to make her seem a very mundane dea ex machina, we can accept all that in gratitude for the disclosure of a heart and mind that we had often caught glimpses of in novels more high-spirited and apparently more superficial.  In testing the veracity of our own perception we may say that for Jane Austen the turning-point in the history of her heart came about, not through misunderstanding or through accident of occasion, but through death.  The darkness may come from life; but the mastery of a pervasive emotional tension flowing (in the novel) from a single experiencing centre, is itself a poetic achievement brought about through command of tonal consistency and the craftsmanship of a spare and finely modulated score.  If Jane Austen can be seen as Mozartian, it is in her character that Persuasion should be her Clarinet Quintet.

Nothing would be more agreeable than to savour the details of Mansfield Park.  But I must use despatch and can notice only in general terms some of the poetical features that strike me as essential to the unassuming but masterly conduct of this book.  The opening chapter is forthright, abrupt, with an occasional asperity of tone that had not been heard even in Pride and Prejudice; it is stylised, urgent, without agreeable obliquity, setting the situation as swiftly and emphatically as possible.  The opening is not much less formalised and impatient that the opening of King Lear; what is to happen must be seen at once to need to happen according to inner necessity.  And when we come to the end, the book closes with corresponding despatch, yet with something of the elegiac recognition of sheer necessity, not fading back into life but rounding this universe of her imagining to a close without regret.  ‘I only intreat every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire’ (p. 470).  Within the boundaries of the abrupt opening and closing of the story, Jane Austen moves with consummate ease so that for the most part we cannot tell the dancer from the dance.  All those problems of technique, in securing both the autonomy of characters and the vocal omniscience of the author – problems that seem to have filled the hearts of other novelists with dismay or turned them at times to grotesque extremes of ingenuity – she manages them all (as Virginia Woolf said with an entirely different import) with ‘the swift composure of a fish’.  For example, she can, without preparation, begin a monologue which is answered by a second speaker; and gradually we are aware of others present, and of the place, and the disposition of emotional forces at play there, and a whole complex tissue of relations unfolds.  This is a feat that I had been led to suppose was Henry James’s unique prerogative.  Again, the strict constraints that she interposes to shape the energy of invention impart momentous dramatic weight with small effort.  When, after the collapse of the Lovers’ Vows, Henry Crawford tells his sister that ‘My plan is to make Fanny Price in love with me. ... I cannot be satisfied without Fanny Price, without making a small hole in Fanny Price’s heart’ (p. 229) the effect is as shocking as if he were announcing a plan for cold-blooded rape.

I must not multiple examples.  I wish to add only that in the poetic conduct of her language in Mansfield Park, and in her realising of a stylised plot in probable action, I am reminded of the unconstrained lyrical force of Cézanne’s painting, in which naturalistic fidelity, a profound sense of underlying physical structure, and a purely abstract rendering of colour, mass, and space combine in the felicity of an axiom.  And in Mansfield Park I am often reminded too of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste, constructed as it is upon one nerveless little five-note tune: space, brilliant, inventive, eloquent.

But there is one other suggestion I have to make.  It is universally accepted that Jane Austen is a ‘comic’ writer: she makes us laugh; she traces out (it is said) the foibles, follies, and self-deceptions of a society strictly limited in locale and class.  The standard scheme for comedy however, whether on the stage or in a novel, is that it places more or less unchanging figures against a variable and changing social background.  And Jane Austen’s novels (though they are not all the same) do not match that scheme.  In them, the people change within the confines of inflexible social convention, moral prescript, and amatory mechanism; they have an acute, almost obsessive, internality; they are enclosed and confined.  Edwin Muir (in the chapter from which I have already quoted) said that ‘the dramatic novel need not be tragic, and the first novelist who practised it with consummate success in England – Jane Austen – consistently avoided and probably was quite incapable of sounding the tragic note.’[viii]  I wonder, however, whether we are correct in identifying ‘the tragic note’ as necessarily dark, disastrous, desolating.  Is there no other way of bringing a sense of pity-and-fear to a state of exaltation – the pleasure peculiar to tragedy?  Aristotle tells us that there were tragedies that had a prosperous outcome – by which I take it that he did not mean ‘dark’ tragedies with a happy ending, because for Aristotle the end is always implicit in the beginning.  He evidently knew such tragedies, but none has come to us among the few survivors from the Greek theatre.  Aristotle, with his intense concentration on the peculiar configuration of the tragic action and the integrity of it – the single figure the whole play traces – recognised that there were works that traced the specific arc of tragic action under the guidance of stories or plots that were not intrinsically disastrous.  Is it possible that Jane Austen may have achieved such a fear; not in all her books, to be sure, but in Mansfield Park?

I began by declaring my wonder at an achievement in language so marvellous that no term more trifling that ‘poetry’ could hope to encompass it.  I have also hinted that in the dramatic conduct of her novels there may still be depths to be plumbed.  Happy the critic of Jane Austen.  She has given us plenty to think about, but, with impeccable decorum, she confronts us, not with problems and puzzles, but with marvels; her art is never importunate.  If my praise seems excessive, I can reply only with the disclaimed she gave to a man whose coarse pomposity amused and disgusted her: ‘I must make use of this opportunity to thank you, dear Sir, for the very high praise you bestow on my ... novels.  I am too vain to wish to convince you that you have praised them beyond their merits’ (Letters, p. 442).  And if we ask how she did it, the reply seems to be given in Emma: ‘What did she say? – Just what she ought, of course.  A lady always does.’