Perhaps neither the real Jane nor the imaginary Mary is to be taken quite literally, but that Jane would have freely assented to a disbelief in the wisdom of marrying on a small income, however little she approved of Mary's "too positive admiration for wealth," is certain from all that { 41} we know of her opinions on the essentials of happiness.
Godmersham is in Kent, and it was in that spacious, well-provided house of her brother Edward, amid all the charms of parks and beechwoods, of home comforts and "elegances" that marked the life of the large landowner in those days, that she usually found herself most contented. Then was the time when the squire was not driven to find an income by letting his manor to a company promoter to whom the difference between an oak and an elm is scarcely known, and whose chief object in hiring a mansion in rural surroundings is to fill it with week-end parties who play bridge indoors on summer afternoons and leave the beauties of the gardens and the park to the peacocks and the deer.
With such a modern plutocrat Jane would have had little in common, but she would have had less with the modern Socialist. Landed property stood for everything stable and dignified in her days, and those critics of _Pride and Prejudice_ who unkindly emphasized the fact that Elizabeth Bennet only decided to marry Darcy after she had seen the glories of Pemberley and its park { 42} and gardens, while they implicitly libelled the girl, were not so unfair to the general sentiment of her period. Sir Walter Scott, by the way, was one of those who regarded Elizabeth Bennet's change of feeling towards Darcy as the result of her visit to the fine place in Derbyshire. Surely such a view connotes a failure to appreciate the humour of the conversation on this point between Jane Bennet and her sister. The elder girl asks the younger how long it is since she has felt any affection for Darcy, and Elizabeth replies: "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began; but I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." Even Jane Bennet, whose humour sense was not strongly developed, asks her to give a serious answer.
This much may be admitted, that the idea of marrying the curate never presented itself to any one of the maidens who brighten the novels of Jane Austen with their charms of mind and appearance. Elinor Dashwood seems to have regarded about £600 a year (with sure prospect of increase) as the minimum on which married life could hopefully be entered upon, and I fancy { 43} Jane would have agreed with her. The majority of novel-readers may still prefer the hero and heroine whose love will triumph over all obstacles of position, and opposition, of want of sympathy on the part of others or of sense on their own, and there have actually been readers who thought Lydia Bennet more "interesting" than Elizabeth! The prudence of the heroines may to some small extent account for the failure of Jane Austen's work to captivate the "great heart of the public." In any case her fame is far from universal. She has never been, and never will be, popular in the sense in which the men and women whose publishers cheerfully print first editions of a hundred thousand copies are popular. Her appeal, in her own lifetime, when her name was unknown, was not to "the general," and it is only much less restricted now because of the enormous increase in the reading public. Actually it is immensely greater; relatively, its increase is evidently small. One cannot, as in the case of some authors, describe her work as being enjoyed only by the cultured class, and neglected, because misapprehended, by the rest. True culture is always discriminating, even in the presence of its { 44} divinities. Mr. Anthony Hope said not long ago, referring to literary snobbishness: "There are certain companies in which to suggest, even with the utmost humility, that certain parts of Jane Austen's novels are less entertaining than other parts is thought considerably worse than drawing invidious distinctions between various passages of Holy Writ."