[17] The frankness of the ingenious creator of Mr. Jorrocks should be imitated by 99 per cent. of English novelists. "The following story," says he of _Ask Mamma_, "does not involve the complication of a plot. It is a mere continuous narrative."
Now, this was all changed. It is doubtful whether if _Northanger Abbey_ had actually appeared in 1796 it would have been appreciated--Miss Austen, like other writers of genius, had, not exactly as the common but incorrect phrase goes, to create the taste for her own work, but to arouse the long dormant appetite which she was born to satisfy. Yet, looking back a hundred years, it seems impossible that anybody of wits should have failed at once to discover the range, the perfection, and the variety of the new gift, or set of gifts. Here all the elements come in: and something with them that enlivens and intensifies them all. The plot is not intricate, but there is a plot--good deal more, perhaps, than is generally noticed, and more than Miss Austen herself sometimes gave, as, for instance, in _Mansfield Park_. It is even rather artfully worked out--the selfish gabble of John Thorpe, who may look to superficial observers like a mere outsider, playing an important part _twice_ in the evolution. There is not lavish but amply sufficient description and scenery--the Bath vignettes, especially the Beechencliff prospect; the sketch of the Abbey itself and of Henry's parsonage, etc. But it is in the other two constituents that the blowing of the new wind of the spirit is most perceptible. The character-drawing is simply wonderful, especially in the women--though the men lack nothing. John Thorpe has been glanced at--there had been nothing like him before, save in Fielding and in the very best of the essayists and dramatists. General Tilney has been found fault with as unnatural and excessive: but only by people who do not know what "harbitrary gents" fathers of families, who were not only squires and members of parliament, but military men, could be in the eighteenth century--and perhaps a little later. His son Henry, in common with most of his author's _jeunes premiers_, has been similarly objected to as colourless. He really has a great deal of subdued individuality, and it _had_ to be subdued, because it would not have done to let him be too superior to Catherine. James Morland and Frederick Tilney are not to be counted as more than "walking gentlemen," Mr. Allen only as a little more: and they fulfil their law. But Isabella Thorpe is almost better than her brother, as being nearer to pure comedy and further from farce; Eleanor Tilney is adequate; and Mrs. Allen is sublime on her scale. A novelist who, at the end of the eighteenth century, could do Mrs. Allen, could do anything that she chose to do; and might be trusted never to attempt anything that she could not achieve. And yet the heroine is perhaps--as she ought to be--the greatest triumph of the whole, and the most indicative of the new method. The older heroines had generally tried to be extraordinary: and had failed. Catherine tries to be ordinary: and is an extraordinary success. She is pretty, but not beautiful: sensible and well-natured, but capable, like most of us, of making a complete fool of herself and of doing complete injustice to other people; fairly well educated, but not in the least learned or accomplished. In real life she would be simply a unit in the thousands of quite nice but ordinary girls whom Providence providentially provides in order that mankind shall not be alone. In literature she is more precious than rubies--exactly because art has so masterfully followed and duplicated nature.