Last year I set out to read the novels of Jane Austen. I thought I had read one of them in my teens, but I turned out to be wrong about that—or perhaps my memory has faded even more than I suppose. My ignorance of Austen is evidence of a misspent youth, at least as far as English literature is concerned. I got caught up early on in the Greek and Latin classics and neglected those nearer to my own time. I don’t exactly repent. I still wouldn’t trade Euripides for Jane Austen, but I’m immensely glad finally to have made her acquaintance.

What did I find so engrossing about her novels? The people. One gets glimpses inside characters formed in a society that prized maturity and civility—by which I mean the quality of being an active participant in one’s own life and that of the people around one. That doesn’t mean that Austen’s characters are uniformly civil themselves. Indeed, it seems to take a certain number of rather uncivil people—the sort who are not trustworthy or considerate or responsible—to help make the story unwind. But her protagonists are in general people who have a sense of right and wrong and take some responsibility for their decisions, including the ones that turn out to be wrong-headed.

In this regard, her novels form a contrast with some more recent one’s I’ve read. There seems to be a certain tendency for novelists of the present day to create characters who don’t assume much responsibility for their actions or seem to be much aware of how they wrong others. Sometimes this takes the form of a life directed primarily by alcohol or other drugs. Sometimes it just seems as if, by the very culture in which they live, they have lost the notion of human civility.

There are respectable people, in these novels, too, but they tend to be foils, for the most part, and often they are presented as repressed, dull, constricted, perhaps a trifle simple. They would never do for main characters. The fascination is rather with the person who is more or less aimless and helpless in the face of his or her needs and neuroses.

Euripides, of course, does something similar. His protagonists tend to be victims of the trouble fate brings on them (often with their own cooperation). But, as Aristotle observed, the tragic protagonist has to be a person of great stature to begin with—not just respectable but heroic and larger than life. They come pre-equipped, as it were, with a certain civil standing. I can’t think of the principal characters in, say, The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, or Freedom by Jonathan Franzen as tragic. In fact, I could never get deeply interested in them, despite having dutifully read all the way to the end. (Oops! There I go being respectable.)

With Austen, by contrast, I find myself in the company of complex human beings, struggling to maintain a degree of human civility and responsibility in a context that often makes this difficult. In Austen’s world, the problem they face is typically the pressure laid on the young to marry for the sake of family interests. But her principal characters are never merely the victims of this pressure. They participate actively in negotiating their way through the cultural terrain. The happy ending is a nice conclusion to their efforts, but the real pleasure of the novel is to see them living out a rich, though not untroubled, human existence.

It’s not just novels that exhibit this current collapse of civil personhood. Jon and I recently quit attending a local theater company of which I had been a long-standing subscriber. The choice of plays had changed radically. They were mostly new—neither a good nor a bad thing in itself. Some of them had garnered awards. And I can accept that a company inevitably changes with time and a change of leadership.

The problem was that the plays were boring. Few of them rose above the level of soap opera. Each differed from the one before and the one after only in having a change of window dressing: racial prejudice in one case, poverty in another, bias against overweight people in a third. People suffered, sometimes in ingeniously plotted ways, and made others suffer. But none of the characters had the basic gravitas to qualify them as civil human beings, and it became difficult to take their woes seriously. No excellence on the part of the actors could make me care about such flat characters.

By now, the reader may be thinking, “He must be very old-fashioned.” Quite possibly. After all, I chose ancient literature as my college major. However that may be, I have at least found myself engaged and enlarged by living a while with the denizens of Jane Austen’s novels. I emerge from my reading with a sense that it is indeed possible to be a civil human being—that human beings are not merely condemned to be shapeless lumps bounced around by incidental factors. Civility is not only possible; it’s much more interesting.