Emma.

OF Jane Austen's Emma, Walter Allen writes in The English Novel, "It is the high point of Miss Austen's comedy"; Lord David Cecil accounts it "Austen's profoundest comedy"; Harold Bloom declares it "Austen's masterpiece." The Janeites, to be sure, are an excitable lot. So E. M. Forster begins a review, "I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen." "As a master of her craft," Cecil avers, "she outshines them all." Again: "So far from being a manufacturer of literary snuff-boxes, [she] is one of the few supreme novelists of the world." And, to top it all, "There are those who do not like her; as there are those who do not like sunshine or unselfishness. But the very nervous defiance with which they shout their dissatisfaction shows that they know they are a despised minority."

"There are in the world no compositions which approach nearer to perfection," Lord Macaulay raved. Hilaire Belloc awarded Austen an "alpha plus . . . because she has excelled in the quality of proportion -- which is another way of saying in telling the truth." He compared her art to "an inlay of silver upon pale wood" --presumably not the wood of literary snuff-boxes. Others have been less enthusiastic. To Charlotte Bront -- , Austen was "very incomplete and rather insensible"; to Emerson, "vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention." Mark Twain went further: "To me, Poe's prose is unreadable -- like Jane Austen's. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on a salary, but not Jane's."

Actually, if nervous defiance applies to anyone, it is rather to Austen's champions. So Dorothy Van Ghent has written, "It is wronging an Austen novel to expect of it what it makes no pretense to rival -- the spiritual profundity of the very greatest novels. But if we expect artistic mastery of limited materials, we shall not be disappointed." That is relatively calm; Cecil is overwrought. While admitting that "Austen's imaginative range was, in some respects[!], a very limited one," he nonetheless makes a virtue of the author's "exclud[ing] from her books all aspects of life that cannot pass through the crucible of her imagination." True enough, but how much can one exclude and still be a major novelist?

The problem with Emma -- both the novel and the movie written and directed by the American Douglas McGrath -- is the smugness of the heroine. Or perhaps of the narrator. In Critical Un- derstanding, Wayne C. Booth shrewdly observes, "Nobody was ever so marvelous as the implied author of Emma." Heroine or author-narrator, someone exudes a little too much priggishness and snobbery for me to swallow. Of course, we are to perceive these as defects, as Emma herself eventually realizes; but maybe meddlesome priggishness and snobbishness are harder to accept from a protagonist than murder and rapine.

The problem is compounded by the casting of the American Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma. An actress of charm, tact, and talent could reconcile us to Emma's (and Jane Austen's) smugness. The paltry Miss Paltrow has none of the above, and mostly mugs and postures. Instead of playing subtly against the grain, she minces and attitudinizes with it. Even so, thanks to viewers' and reviewers' benightedness and to media megahype, thin gruel is touted as milk and honey.

In what may be the best short discussion of Austen ("Regulated Hatred," in Scrutiny, March 1940), D. W. Harding argues persuasively: "In Jane Austen's treatment the natural order of things manages to reassert the heroine's proper pre-eminence without the intervention of any human or quasi-human helper. In this respect she allies the Cinderella theme to another fairy-tale theme which is often introduced -- that of the princess brought up by unworthy parents but never losing the delicate sensibilities which are an inborn part of her."

Harding shows how with Emma Austen progresses beyond that stage: the heroine is less superior, and her parents are less inferior. For me, the problem remains; Emma is what Oscar Wilde lampooned about Victorian novels: "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means." That is certainly what Austen's fiction means: a plain and obscure spinster's written revenge on an uncaring world. Austen punishes her enemies and rewards her friends. But the biggest plum always falls to her fictional alter ego: she marries the best man (here suggestively named Mr. Knightley) and lives happily ever after. Audiences lap it up; that rather than any literary merit explains Austen's success in the current cinema.

Yet this fearful symmetry leaves the works so predictable. McGrath's film version, like other such adaptations, can only make the predictability even greater: a film must cut to the chase faster than a leisurely paced novel, and cannot curtain the outcome behind so many descriptions, digressions, convolutions, and subplots. McGrath has adapted reasonably well, but he has directed with a number of contemporary cinematic tricks that feel anachronistic. Thus he will intercut an embellished account of a charitable expedition to the hovel of a starving family with quick -- and embarrassingly funny -- flashbacks to what actually happened. This is too jazzy -- and too obvious -- for Austen.

The British supporting cast does mainly well. Jeremy Northam offers a credibly dashing Knightley, as opposed to the incredibly dashing Darcy of Laurence Olivier in the Hollywood Pride and Prejudice. His transitions from irony to exasperation, from hauteur to involvement, are finely judged and smoothly executed. As Mr. Elton, the smarmy parson, Alan Cumming is exemplary. During the chaise ride in which he discovers that Emma's interest was solely in matching him up with the no-account Harriet Smith, and that his amorous advances to herself repelled her, Cumming's eruption of thwarted passion and injured self-regard is a masterpiece of comic-pathetic bravura. The gorgeous Greta Scacchi, sadly showing her age, is winningly warm as Emma's beloved governess; Polly Walker, in the here shortchanged part of Jane Fairfax, makes up for truncation with great beauty and personal appeal. Edward Woodall does nicely by what is left of farmer Martin, Harriet's devoted suitor.

As the presumptuous chatterbox Mrs. Elton, Juliet Stevenson is comically bone-chilling; as the pitiful bore Miss Bates, Emma Thompson's sister, Sophie, overacts amusingly. Toni Collette's Harriet is properly befuddled and frustrated; only Ewan McGregor, good in a very different role in Trainspotting, is weak as the heartthrob Frank Churchill. Austen describes him as "very good-looking," and she specifies his "height"; neither applies to the callow and stubby actor. Ian Wilson's cinematography is uneven, but the score by Rachel Portman, incorporating period tunes, proves her yet again one of our finest soundtrack composers.