The New Lifetime Reading Plan

What fascinates in Coleridge is that, along with his genius for the fairy tale (these poems, though not for children, belong to the literature of the fairy tale), he possessed a speculative mind of the rarest power. He wrote on metaphysics, politics, theology. Never reducing his insights to a system, he nonethe- less remains a psychologist of most original gifts. And as a liter­ary critic of the romantic school he has no peer in the lan­guage.

When you think of Coleridge you may quite naturally think also of Poe. Neither was able to manage practical life. Both had minds that worked as well in the area of ratiocination as in that of dreams. But there the parallel more or less ends. Poe's erudition was spotty, Coleridge's incredibly vast ("I have read everything"). Poe's mind was acute, Coleridge's brooding, pen- etrating, and hungry for vast unities. Poe was an interesting minor failure. Coleridge was a fascinating major failure. But he was so fascinating and so major that even as a failure he bulks larger than his admired friend Wordsworth, who finished work he never should have started and ended as poet laureate, while Coleridge died in poverty.

C.F.

66

JANE AUSTEN

1775-1817

Pride and Prejudice, Emma

By common consent Jane Austen is what Virginia Woolf [111] calls her: "the most perfect artist among women." True enough. But today we might well question Virginia Woolfs well-intentioned qualification. Jane Austen is simply a great artist. Some critics, usually male, emphasize her genius for small-scale but deadly accurate domestic comedy as feminine rather than masculine, or point to the circumstance that she lived right through ali of the Napoleonic wars without men- tioning them in her work. But in the very long run ali of us,

male and female, might agree that a profound insight into the perennial human comedy is more valuable than the most con- scientious observation of historical events.

Miss Austen, as it somehow seems proper to call her, was the daughter of a rural rector, and one of a large family. Though her own circumstances were always modest, she was well connected with the middling-rich landed gentry of south­ern England, and it is their traits and worldly interests that she reflects in her novйis. Though there is some evidence of a frus- trated love affair, she never married. During ali the years of her brief life she lived quietly with her family, writing her nov­йis in the midst of the domestic come-and-go, for years on end not even boasting a room of her own. Her social life was pleas- ant, active, genteelly restricted. While her genius generally is a sufficiently bewildering phenomenon, it is particularly hard to figure out how she could have known so much about human life when she saw so little of it. But great artists, as Henry James [96] pointed out, need only a suggestion, a donnйe, and they are off and running.

Among other qualities, Jane Austen had one many modern novelists lack: She knew her own mind. Her novйis are not (like those, let us say, of Thomas Wolfe) experiments in self- discovery and self-education. She knew precisely what inter- ested her—"those little matters," as Emma puts it, "on which the daily happiness of private life depends." She knew that the private lives of her special world turned not on high ideais, intense ambitions, or tragic despairs, but mainly on money, marriage (sometimes but not always complicated by love), and the preservation of a comfortable division between social classes. The activities of these limited people she viewed as a comedy, more or less as a highly intelligent, observant, articu- late maiden aunt might view the goings-on of a large family. Jane Austen is sensible, rational in the eighteenth-century manner, ironical, humorous. She would think little of philoso- phers and perhaps not much of poets.

What gives Miss Austen her high rank, despite her restricted subject matter, is the exquisite rightness of her art, the graceful neat forms of her stories, the matchless epigram- matic phrasing of her unremitting wit. She has little passion, no mystery, and she prefers to avert her face in a well-bred way from the tragedy that lies on the other side of the comedy she understands so well. She was born to delight readers, not to shake their souls.

There is no agreement as to her best book. Pride and Prejudice has perhaps had the most readers, but Emma, I think, is a more searching as well as a gayer story; so I have suggested these two. If you have read them, try Mansfield Park or Persuasion or Sense and Sensibility. They are ali pure Miss Austen, a writer so charming that it seems clumsy to call her a classic.

C.F.

67

STENDHAL

1783-1842

The Red and the Black