Jane Austen - Page 2

their eccentricities. After they are dead the world sometimes canonizes
them and carves on their tombs the word "Savior."

Do I then plead the cause of ignorance? Well, yes, rather so. A little
ignorance is not a dangerous thing. A man who reads too much--who
accumulates too many facts-gets his mind filled to the point of
saturation; matters then crystallize and his head becomes a solid thing
that refuses to let anything either in or out. In his soul there is no
guest-chamber. His only hope for progress lies in another incarnation.

And so a certain ignorance seems a necessary equipment for the doing of a
great work. To live in a big city and know what others are doing and
saying; to meet the learned and powerful, and hear their sermons and
lectures; to view the unending shelves of vast libraries is to be
discouraged at the start. And thus we find that genius is essentially
rural--a country product. Salons, soirees, theaters, concerts, lectures,
libraries, produce a fine mediocrity that smiles at the right time and
bows when 't is proper, but it is well to bear in mind that George Eliot,
Elizabeth Barrett, Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen were all country
girls, with little companionship, nourished on picked-up classics, having
a healthy ignorance of what the world was saying and doing.

* * * * *

It is over a hundred years since Jane Austen lived. But when you tramp
that five miles from Overton, where the railroad-station is, to Steventon,
where she was born, it doesn't seem like it. Rural England does not change
much. Great fleecy clouds roll lazily across the blue, overhead, and the
hedgerows are full of twittering birds that you hear but seldom see; and
the pastures contain mild-faced cows that look at you with wide-open eyes
over the stone walls; and in the towering elm-trees that sway their
branches in the breeze crows hold a noisy caucus. And it comes to you that
the clouds and the blue sky and the hedgerows and the birds and the cows
and the crows are all just as Jane Austen knew them--no change. These
stone walls stood here then, and so did the low slate-roofed barns and the
whitewashed cottages where the roses clamber over the doors.

I paused in front of one of these snug, homely, handsome, pretty little
cottages and looked at the two exact rows of flowers that lined the little
walk leading from gate to cottage-door. The pathway was made from
coal-ashes and the flowerbeds were marked off with pieces of broken
crockery set on edge. 'T was an absent-minded, impolite thing to do--to
stand leaning on a gate and critically examine the landscape-gardening,
evidently an overworked woman's gardening, at that.

As I leaned there the door opened and a little woman with sleeves