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If I was having trouble seeing the importance of the world that Austen was putting in front of me, in other words, it wasn’t entirely my fault. Like all the great teachers, I now saw, she made us come to her. She had momentous truths to tell, but she concealed them in humble packages. Her “littleness” was really an optical illusion, a test. Jesus spoke in parables so his disciples would have to make an effort to understand him. The truth, he knew, cannot be grasped in any other way. Austen reminded me, I realized, of something that Plato said about his great mentor Socrates, who also taught by
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as with Mozart or Rembrandt, the highest art lies in concealing art.
“Wisdom is better than Wit,” she told her favorite niece around this time, “& in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.”
The emphasis, as it always was when Austen wrote about children, was on character. Not beauty or creativity or even intelligence, but conduct and temperament and the capacity for empathy and feeling.
Austen’s heroines, I discovered that summer, had their mistakes pointed out to them over and over again, only it never did them any good. They didn’t grow up until something terrible finally happened. When maturity came to them, it came through suffering: through loss, through pain, above all, through humiliation.
“Till this moment I never knew myself.”
For it is never enough to know that you have done wrong: you also have to feel it.
“Life is a comedy for those who think,” said Horace Walpole, “and a tragedy for those who feel.”
A romantic is someone who thinks that if their heart is in the right place, it doesn’t matter where their brain is.
