part a habit to be patiently acquired. And
just in proportion as it exists does life be-
come a divine and spiritual thing, material
facts becoming more and more the symbols
of mental, till often, with two souls that
have been loving students of one another,
the mere "touch of hand, or turn of head,"
is the perfectest seal and declaration of an in-
ward covenant which language is too pure a
work of thought to express. Now we may
consider this sympathy which we so much
want to get, as made up of a wise imagination,
love, self-knowledge, and experience. For
love it is which gives us first the will, and
then imagination gives us power and in-
sight, and experience and reflection give
us the empirical laws of this interpretation
by sympathy. Good will alone is not suf-
ficient; it yearns and is powerless. There
is, indeed, something very touching, we
have all felt it, in love that strives to sympa-
thise though it can understand but little (as
in the devotion of a lower human intelli-
gence to one it recognizes as higher, or even
in the sad, mute eyes of a dog, conscious of
his master's distress); but this love invari-
ably weakens and breaks us down, instead
of sustaining us. The "understanding
heart" is so much better than the heart. the elections of the heart.
Yet even this we too seldom find. For
how very much of selfishness, and pride,
and the blindness of pride, and the disease
of superficial curiosity, is required to ac-
count for the amazing equanimity with
which so many men endure all the sorrows
of their acquaintance, and of the world at
large! But with their imaginations stifled
under the pressure of over-much worldly
work, unwatered by the dew which falls
upon the heart in an hour of leisure and of
peace, or, it may be, made gross by indul-
gence in things sensual, how can we hope
that the unseen, the future, or the remote,
will possess any reality to the minds of men ?
Before men can sympathize, they must be
given the power, and acquire the percep-
tions of sight.

much should have remained for ever silent;
many lives should have passed out of the
world comparatively unutilized. That na-
ture, full of noble reserve and true womanli-
ness (we can acknowledge so much now)
which gave birth to Villette and Jane Eyre,
in what form but that of fictitious narrative
could it have declared itself? When Char-
lotte Bronté wrote in verse, she was scarcely
a poet. She would have shrunk, perhaps
too violently, from the anguish and exposure
of an autobiography. But for that branch
of literature to which, even in her childish
years (so clear was the true tendency), she
instinctively turned, a soul like hers, en-
dowed with quite unique gifts, and possess-
ing so rich though sorrowful an experience,
could never have made us partakers of its
wealth, could never even have fully real-
ized that wealth for itself. Those wild
lights, intense in their joyousness and in
their sadness, like the lights that we have
seen sometimes pass over a troubled sea on
a stormy day in June, could never have
gleamed forth for us; we should have known
somewhat less than we do know of the
secrets of self-conflict, the life in solitude,
and the mysterious affinities which guide.

But what has all this to do with novels? Much, indeed; for our novelist (but he must be a thoroughly good one) will help us here, inasmuch as he will afford culture to that dramatizing imagination spoken of above, inasmuch as he will lead us to self-knowledge, and will give us, in a form most interesting and impressive, the record of his own reflections and observations concerning mental conditions, how they express themselves, and how they are commonly misunderstood. And it ought not to be forgotten that, but for this mode of utterance, many voices from which we have learned

The novelist who could afford much culture in sympathy must, we have said, be a thoroughly good one; for the automatonmanufacturer does not teach men much about physiology, and those moral automatons, called men and women in the storybooks, are alike deficient of heart and brain and bowels, and execute their simple movements by aid of a few powerful springs in them, called motives and leading-passions, in a way altogether violent and mechanical. These are easy things to understand; but human beings are truly very hard things to understand, and are never to be quite made out. And yet, as Mr. Carlyle has taught us, there is no book so inept that it may not bring a lesson to somebody. Therefore, let these clothes-horse, speech-making heroes and heroines remain; they may be complex enough to give some reader a new hint regarding the constituents of character, among many simple folk there is so exceedingly rude a psychology, so exceedingly blank a chart of human nature. But it is not well that half-a-dozen principles of action should be resorted to as sufficiently explaining all the doings of men for the threescore years and ten. The consequence is strikingly evil; many an innocent look is interpreted as pride how else could it be accounted for? many an innocent saying as malice; characters are made

out too readily, many natural varieties are the difference is one of much importance, regarded as monstrous growths, apparent and of wide application. Jane Austen is inconsistencies of conduct are multiplied, pre-eminently the novelist who attains by and a false proportion is established between observation; George Eliot pre-eminently the recognized classes of emotions. How the novelist who attains by meditation. It much too large a place, for instance, is must not, of course, be supposed that either allotted, in most rural parishes with which possesses the one power to the exclusion of we are acquainted, to the truly important, the other. Jane Austen's quick, clear, and yet, truly, not all-important, emotion of faultless reading off of whatever she had heard love; while in the very same place this and seen into its mental equivalent was not being in love" is understood to compre- acquired without much previous reflection; hend only a few of its least highly organ- yet even here it was noticeable the reflection ized, and often most vulgar forms, popular- was of a strictly observative kind, and not of ly known as "setting-her-cap-at-him," that brooding kind which is allied to the creabeing-soft-on," and "desperately smitten," tive imagination; it was simply internal obserinstead of including at least the three hun- vation. In like manner George Eliot is no dred and fifty-four distinct species, which mere analyist or self-evolver. She is an the Germans have enumerated and classi- observer of wide range and exquisite delified. Fron all which facts we deduce the cacy, with an eye for some things Jane Ausconclusion that valuable additions to the ten never saw, or saw but dimly- the eddyelements of bucolic mental science may be ing flow of pleasant streams, the outlines made by even the simple demoniac-seraphic and colouring of trees, the light forms and school of fiction - by analysts less search- wayward caprices of clouds in spring, and ing and less profound than George Eliot, many other such things; and, lastly, little by observers not half so sensitive, so pains- children, both the angelical and the frotaking, or so honest as Jane Austen. ward.* And here it is worth noticing, by the way, the strange circumstance that a woman so amiable as Miss Austen should nowhere throughout her writings have shown a loving sympathy with children; they are rarely more than glanced at from a grown-up, comparatively uninterested point of view; they are troublesome little

There are two different ways by which the novelist attains that truth which is necessary to render his work of value in the culture of sympathy, and the two writers just named may be taken to illustrate the difference. Not only are the ways in which truth is attained different, the truth itself, and the resulting culture, are different also. No English writers have been more earnest or successful realists in literature than Jane Austen and George Eliot. Their books (to borrow the epithet Dr. Johnson applied to Reynolds) are amongst the most “invulnerable" books we read. They have a secret respect for truth, and will not be seduced from their calm self-possession to gain a dishonest effect, or make an unsound, telling point. A false touch would pain them (Jane Austen's sensibilities would suffer more, and George Eliot's conscience) though no one were to detect it but themselves. That sense of responsibility broods upon them, "which led the Greek to be as diligent in working out that part of the statue which would be hidden by the wall of the temple, as that part which would be exposed to the eye, because the gods would look upon them both."" They love their work, and therefore finish the details in an untiring way. They are free from the impatience and anxiety to shine, which possess the merely clever artist. They are great artists, and are therefore calm, sincere, never unscrupulously brilliant. But these writers work after different methods, and

*Is it possible that Miss Austen did see these things, and yet for some reason was silent about them? And if so, can we offer any conjecture as to what the reason may have been? In Mansfield Park occurs the following passage: "Their road was through a pleasant country; and Fanny, whose rides had never been extensive, was soon beyond her knowledge, and was very happy in observing all that was new, and admiring all that was pretty.. ing the appearance of the country, the bearings of the roads, the difference of soil, the state of the found entertainment that could only have been harvest, the cottages, the cattle, the children, she heightened by having Edmund to speak to of what she felt.

In observ

Miss Crawford had one of Fanny's delicacy of tastes, of mind, of feeling; she saw nature, inanimate nature, with little observation: her attention was all for men and women; her talents for the light and lively."

Was Miss Austen's attention, then, not all for men and women? From her earliest, though last published work, Northanger Abbey, we learn how she started in literature in open antagonism to the romantic school of fiction; how her tendencies were Is it deliberately set in opposition to that school. this inanimate nature" if Mrs. Radcliffe had not possible that she might have said more about said so much? All we can certainly affirm is, that if Miss Austen saw the external world, she saw it in the way of active observation, not in that effortless way in which the poetical spirits see, to whom the perception comes whole and unsought, and, if analyzed at all, is analyzed for the most part unconsciously, by the leadings of the sensations and sentiments which suffuse and mingle with it. She would have agreed with Matthew in thinking Wil liam somewhat of an idler, while he sat that morning, on the old gray stone, by Esthwaite lake.

bodies, of whom, as a general rule, the less' and Jaques. Who so regal as Shakspeare's we see the better; they are introduced in kings? Were they compounded, think order that a gleam may be thrown upon the you, from observations of a paltry James? character of mother, or aunt, or friend, or The modern writer who is commonly supvisitor, from a new point of reflection; their posed to have possessed the most of Shaksown little lives are left unconsidered; there is speare's spirit has fortunately made us acno Eppie, no Totty Poyser, no Maggie or Tom quainted with his method of working in an exTulliver. The truth probably is that Miss plicit declaration. "Knowledge of the world,” Austen's own was a very ordinary childhood, said Goethe to Eckermann, is inborn with and not one likely to attract the study of her the genuine poet, and he needs not much exmature mind; her powers were of a kind per- perience or varied observation to represent haps not usually much developed in early it. I wrote Goetz von Berlichingen as a life; but however this may be, they were not young man of two-and-twenty, and was assuch as would have made an interesting tonished ten years after at the truth of my childhood, since the gains they brought delineation." But Goethe was not subjective? would not have deposited themselves in the True, if you mean that his writings are impast, but be carried on to form part of personal, but most false if you mean to imadult thought and feeling. ply that he was not profoundly introspective.

of those delicate miniatures of our beautiful | best places, nor Thomas à Kempis and a mothers or grandmothers in youth a far very materialistic brother (a mere moralist) truer likeness than any of the grim, slaty the most favourable persons, for inducing faces which stare at one another in our the harmonious development of faculties modern albums. But, secondly, the devel- like hers. In the writings of Jane Austen opment of character in Miss Austen's novels there is earnest and faultless realism, and is not broad. The baronet, the officer, the the masterful quiet of conscious power; lawyer, the rector, the rector's wife, and all but there are in life higher realities than the young ladies, get through life, as most those she has considered, and they can be people do, in a very quiet way, between attained only by a different method. visits, drives, dances, dinners, " explorings," private theatricals, and an occasional elopement. There is no deep passion stirred, no lofty purpose embraced, the mandate of a higher than prudential wisdom (there is no occasion for it), no moment of rapturous self-devotion, no struggle against terrible temptation, no sound of the bitter cry (which, God knows, is often simple truth), "All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me." The essentially solitary motions of the soul are left quite unexpressed. Those passages of life which are not rich in social incidents, though they may be rich in spiritual progress or decline, are not detailed. Solitude, with Miss Austen, means usually retiring from society to one's bedroom or elsewhere, and thinking about it. A strong mind, a sweet temper, and a high sense of duty, may be developed without the life in solitude; but hardly a spiritual nature. And in Jane Austen's heroines we find all the former in a remarkable degree; but the latter we do not so much directly perceive, as infer from the grace and harmony of the character in its social movements, impressing us with the sense of a completeness, orderliness, and even balance in the powers of the soul—the Platonic dikaiosune which could not exist if any of the more important of them were absent or depressed. From Anne Elliot we learn much; but with all her weakness (the weakness of a nature full of unappropriated strength) we receive a more momentous spiritual impulse from Maggie Tulliver; not simply because the elements of her character were more massive, and of more regal power, but because we are brought immediately into contact with those elements which are especially life-giving, those which are most fully charged with the electric energy of the soul. And who will estimate lives by their apparent success or failure? Maggie's life was a failure, precisely because the forces in her nature were all so strong, her rich sensuousness, her profound emotions, her intense spiritual cravings. They were in conflict, not in harmony, it is true, and hence the weakness and the sorrow. But Dorlcote Mill and St. Oggs were not the

And now let us see how these two kinds of novels afford different kinds of culture to the reader. No one, with any openness of spirit, can read Jane Austen's novels without insensibly receiving the power, more or less, of sympathetic interpretation in the ordinary intercourse of social life. The instruction thus afforded is as if we were taken into the very places and company represented, and saw unfolded the inner meaning of all the natural and conventional symbolism before us. We are made thoughtfuller by this and tenderer; wiser, too, for we learn much about petty vanity and petty malice. We learn to de tect much latent self-flattery in the conversation of ourselves and of those around us. We come to discriminate the various social intonations (written or spoken) which, as in monosyllabic languages, determine the various significances of sounds that have no appreciable difference to the uneducated ear. We are taught to recognize the piece of shy love, or lurking selfishness, or delicate deceit, by a single twinkle in the sunlight, before it is aware of itself and retreats; and we thus gain in power, becoming masters of the situation. And we learn also a great deal about the little daily cares and anxieties and desires of others; we learn to understand their nature, and rightly to anticipate, divine, and make allowance for them. But George Eliot, not neglecting this, though doing it less thoroughly, teaches us higher things with the same truth. She too makes us wiser and tenderer — wiser and tenderer by showing us the entire history of certain wonderful human souls, making them declare themselves even when they are most alone, and making us accept and understand them even when they are taken in the toils of calamity or of sin. I sedulously disciplined my mind,' wrote Spinoza, neither to laugh at, nor bewail, nor detest the actions of men; but to understand them.' In the same spirit has George Eliot thought and written. And with her, the result of understanding men, notwithstanding all their poverty of intellect, and all their feebleness of will, as it must ever be, is love. A poor, diseased, dim-eyed,

miserly Silas Marner even has sight in his eyes and room on his breast for the golden curls of Eppie, and may be called father by his adopted child.

66

end beforehand. Naughty Harry will infallibly be torn by the lion, and the amiable brother will feast on cakes and apples. The boy who eats his neighbour's fruit is In the literature of power (to use the predestinated to the stomach-ache, which, happy terminology of De Quincey), the present or prospective, in a severer or a novel ranks next after the poem. It is, in slighter form, is a notable agent in the reboth, the high function of genius to repos- generation of the soul. We will not have sess with life and force those great practical lives manufactured to order. But sometruths which, from their very familiarity times it happens that a real life does speak and universal recognition, have become in- audibly to some one, whispering, it may be, operative in the soul. And here we must words of comfort and of joy, or uttering, it acknowledge a certain deficiency in the may be, terrible warning and denouncewritings of Jane Austen. The truths she ment; and will have its whole tale told; teaches are not the great elementary prin- nothing suppressed because it might startle ciples of existence; they are rather what the conventions and proprieties and pruderBacon would call the axiomata media of liv-ies; will have the entire life, the light and ing wisely. As a moralist she is not pro- the dark of it painted- the weakness, the founder than Addison, though on the same iron consequence, the bitter sorrow, and level she makes subtler and more original then -no more than this, no explanatory discoveries. She does not enter that region sermons, He that hath ears to hear let him where discoveries are impossible, because it hear." Such teaching is great, and often is deep within us, and as old as human sad, but always sound, and always has some reason," "because the laws which operate hope in it, because it is the teaching of truth there are few, well-known, and of import in and nature, and of a world which, after all, every time and place. Jane Austen does is not the devil's, but God's. not attempt to revive in us a sense of the There remains another of the more imstrength that comes by self-renunciation, of portant uses of fiction to notice, with which the moral operancy of suffering, of the in- this paper may conclude. And here Mr. destructible causative power existing in Mill has spoken so wisely and yet so warmly, every deed done, of the truth of that which that we may well be silent. "The time Coleridge has called the first axiom of hu- was," (Mr. Mill wrotes these words in 1838) man prudence · "that there is a wisdom "when it was thought that the best and most higher than prudence itself." But perhaps appropriate office of fictitious narrative was these grave principles cannot be effectively to awaken high aspirations, by the represenor suitably taught in a work of fiction? tation, in interesting circumstances, of charThe answer will be found in the works of acters conformable indeed to human nathat writer whom we have been comparing with Jane Austen, in which such principles as these control the movement of the narrative, and form the means of its evolution. And yet these are no novels-of-purpose, no temperance prize-tales, no apologues whose moral is the blessedness of the man that feareth the rubrics, or the joy that comes upon a parish (and especially upon one young female parishioner) from the presence of an evangelical curate. We know those novels-of-purpose at a glance; we are indignant with the man who would entice us into listening to his homily under pretence of amusing us; we see the sulphur in that treacle, pah! and will none of it. We have begun to doubt the reality of those stories that wind finely up with the orthodox piece of poetical justice, and much more to doubt the soundness of their ethical tendency. We do not think such teaching very interesting or very noble. We know the

ture, but whose actions and sentiments were of a more generous and loftier cast than are ordinarily to be met with by everybody in every-day life. But now-a-days nature and probability are thought to be violated if there be shown to the reader, in the personages with whom he is called upon to sympathize, characters on a larger scale than himself or than the persons he is accustomed to meet at a dinner or a quadrille party. Yet, from such representations, familiar from early youth, have not only the noblest minds in modern Europe derived much of what made them noble, but even the commoner spirits what made them understand and respond to nobleness. And this is education. It would be well if the more narrowminded portion both of the religious and of the scientific education-mongers would con-sider whether the books which they are banishing from the hands of youth were not instruments of national education to the full as powerful as the catalogues of physical facts and theological dogmas which they

1453.