Jane Austen - Natural Historian ( Originally Published 1919 )
JANE AUSTEN has often been praised as a natural historian. She
is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study man (as
Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been
domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of
the fireside. Nor is Jane Austen entirely a realist in her
treatment even of these. She idealizes them to the point of
making most of them good-looking, and she hates poverty to such
a degree that she seldom can endure to write about anybody who
is poor. She is not happy in the company of a character who has
not at least a thousand pounds. " People get so horridly poor
and economical in this part of the world," she writes on one
.occasion, " that I have no patience with them. Kent is the only
place for happiness ; everybody is rich there." Her novels do
not introduce us to the most exalted levels of the aristocracy.
They provide us, however, with a natural history of county
people and of people who are just