The Wonder of England

To while away the irksome drive to my second job and back--an hour and more in each direction--I listened to Austen's Pride and Prejudice, read by Irene Sutcliffe, after five or six years away from Austen, excepting perhaps Persuasion--and was dumbfounded by the brilliance, the majestic assurance, of this great novelist. Never did I feel that her characters had been "worked up" from other writers' characters, or the pages of a chronicle, as in Scott or Hawthorne; never did I feel that they had been wheezed into existence for an idea's sake, as in Radcliffe or Shelley (he or she). For pages--quarter-hours--at a time, I found myself delighted by her apt deployment of dialogue or situation, half-forgetting that Austen, more than animating Bennets and Darcys, had created the whole--scenes, settings, houses, and parks. How deftly, in her comic deflation of moral certainties, she created the space in which true moral development might be shown; how wittily, judiciously, sparingly, she interjected her own little moralia. I have often thought--and this fresh encounter did nothing to change my mind--that Austen's writing was the last harvest of the eighteenth century; that she was, just as I think she must have hoped, a spiritual daughter to Richardson and Johnson. But how much finer, to our taste; how much more laughter. Richardson's eye for situation, without his frenzied fascination with sexuality; Johnson's wisdom, without his sententious gloom. Generating interest from crime and sex, always the first resort of the writer, is comparatively easy--without apparent effort, Austen understood the gravity, the symbolic power, of those little actions that determine the happiness of men and women. How faint and half-hearted most novelists look beside her! How fortunate we are, in the English language, to catch her singular prose, her signature tunes, first-hand!