494
PARTISAN REVIEW
to be the novel that is least representative of Jane Austen's peculiar
attractivene~.
For those who admire her it is likely to make an
occasion for
embarra~ment.
By the same token, it is the novel which
the depreciators of Jane Austen may cite most tellingly in justification
of their antagonism.
About this antagonism a word must be said. Few writers have
been the object of an admiration so fervent as that which is given
to Jane Austen. At the same time, she has been the object of great
dislike. Lord David Cecil has said that the people who do not like
Jane Austen are the kind of people "who do not like sunshine and
unselfishne~,"
and Dr. Chapman, the distinguished editor of Jane
Austen's novels and letters, although he dissents from Lord David's
opinion, has speculated that perhaps "a certain lack of charity"
plays a part in the dislike. But Mark Twain, to take but one example,
manifestly did not lack charity or dislike sunshine and unselfishness,
and Mark Twain said of Jane Austen that she inspired in him an
"animal repugnance." The personal intensity of both parties to the
dispute will serve to suggest how momentous, how elemental, is the
issue that Jane Austen presents.
The
animality
of Mark Twain's repugnance is probably to be
taken as the male's revulsion from a society in which women seem
to be at the center of interest and power, as a man's panic fear at
a fictional world in which the masculine principle, although repre–
sented as admirable and necessary, is prescribed and controlled by
a female mind. Professor Garrod, whose essay, "Jane Austen, A
Depreciation," is a
summa
of all the reasons for disliking Jane Austen,
expresses a repugnance which is very nearly as feral as Mark Twain's;
he implies that a direct sexual insult is being offered to men by a
woman author who "describes everything in the youth of women
which does not matter" in such a way as to appeal to "that age in
men when they have begun to ask themselves whether anything
matters." The sexual protest is not only masculine-Charlotte Bronte
despised Jane Austen for representing men and women as nothing
but ladies and gentlemen.
The sexual objection to Jane Austen is a very common one,
even when it is not made explicit. It is not valid, but it must be
taken into serious account. But then there is Emerson with his char–
acteristic sexual indifference, his striking lack of animality, and
