violets which her biographer tells us abound beneath the south wall of
Steventon church. It was impossible that she should have the experiences
of Miss Bronte or Madame Sand, and without some experience the most
vivid imagination cannot act, or can act only in the production of mere
chimeras. To forestall Miss Braddon in the art of criminal
phantasmagoria might have been within Jane's power by the aid of strong
green tea, but would obviously have been repugnant to her nature. We
must not ask her, then, for the emotions and excitements which she could
not possibly afford. The character of Emma is called commonplace. It is
commonplace in the sense in which the same term might be applied to any
normal beauty of nature--to a well-grown tree or to a perfectly
developed flower. She is, as Mr. Weston says, "the picture of grown-up
health." "There is health not merely in her bloom, but in her air, her
gait, her glance." She has been brought up like Jane Austen herself, in
a pure English household, among loving relations and good old servants.
Her feet have been in the path of domestic and neighbourly duty, quiet
as the path which leads to the village church. It has been impossible
for strong temptations or fierce passions to come near her. Yet men
accustomed to the most exciting struggles, to the most powerful emotions
of parliamentary life, have found an interest, equal to the greatest
ever created by a sensation novel, in the little scrapes and adventures
into which her weakness betrays her, and in the process by which her
heart is gradually drawn away from objects apparently more attractive to
the robust nature in union with which she is destined to find strength
as well as happiness.
With more justice may Jane Austen be reproached with having been too
much influenced by the prejudices of the somewhat narrow and somewhat
vulgarly aristocratic, or rather plutocratic, society in which she
lived. Her irony and her complete dramatic impersonality render it
difficult to see how far this goes; but certainly it goes further than
we could wish. Decidedly she believes in gentility, and in its intimate
connection with affluence and good family; in its incompatibility with
any but certain very refined and privileged kinds of labour; in the
impossibility of finding a gentleman in a trader, much more in a yeoman
or mechanic. "The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I
feel I can have nothing to do; a degree or two lower, and a creditable
appearance, might interest me; I might hope to be useful to their
families in some way or other; but a farmer can need none of my help,
and is, therefore, in one sense, as much above my notice as in every
other he is below it." This is said by Emma--by Emma when she is trying
to deter her friend from marrying a yeoman, it is true, but still by
Emma. The picture of the coarseness of poverty in the household of
Fanny's parents in "Mansfield Park" is truth, but it is hard truth, and
needs some counterpoise. Both in the case of Fanny Price and in that of
Frank Churchill, the entire separation of a child from its own home for
the sake of the worldly advantages furnished by an adoptive home of a
superior class, is presented too much as a part of the order of nature.
The charge of acquiescence in the low standard of clerical duty
prevalent in the Establishment of that day is well founded, though
perhaps not of much importance. Of more importance is the charge which
might be made, with equal justice, of acquiescence in somewhat low and
coarse ideas of the relations between the sexes, and of the destinies
and proper aspirations of young women. "Mr. Collins, to be sure, was
neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his
attachment to her must be imaginary; but still he would be her husband.
Without thinking highly either of men or matrimony, marriage had always
been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated
young women of small fortune; and, however uncertain of giving
happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want. This
preservative she had now attained; and at the age of twenty-seven,
without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good-luck of it."
This reflection is ascribed to Charlotte Lucas, an inferior character,
but still thought worthy to be the heroine's bosom friend.
Jane's first essays in composition were burlesques on the fashionable
manners of the day; whence grew "Northanger Abbey," with its anti-
heroine, Catharine Morley, "roving and wild, hating constraint and
cleanliness, and loving nothing so much as rolling down the green slope
at the back of the house," and with its exquisite travestie of the
"Mysteries of Udolpho." But she soon felt her higher power. Marvellous
to say, she began "Pride and Prejudice" in 1796, before she was twenty-
one years old, and completed it in the following year. "Sense and
Sensibility" and "Northanger Abbey" immediately followed; it appears,
with regard to the latter, that she had already visited Bath, though it
was not till afterwards that she resided there. But she published
nothing--not only so, but it seems that she entirely suspended
composition--till 1809, when her family settled at Chawton. Here she
revised for the press what she had written, and wrote "Mansfield Park,"
"Emma" and "Persuasion." "Persuasion," whatever her nephew and
biographer may say, and however Dr. Whewell may have fired up at the
suggestion, betrays an enfeeblement of her faculties, and tells of
approaching death. But we still see in it the genuine creative power
multiplying new characters; whereas novelists who are not creative, when
they have exhausted their original fund of observations, are forced to
subsist by exaggeration of their old characters, by aggravated
extravagances of plot, by multiplied adulteries and increased carnage.
"Pride and Prejudice," when first offered to Cadell, was declined by
return of post. The fate of "Northanger Abbey" was still more
ignominious: it was sold for ten pounds to a Bath publisher, who, after
keeping it many years in his drawer, was very glad to return it and get
back his ten pounds. No burst of applause greeted the works of Jane
Austen like that which greeted the far inferior works of Miss Burney.
_Crevit occulto velut arbor oevo fama_. A few years ago, the verger
of Winchester cathedral asked a visitor who desired to be shown her
tomb, "what there was so particular about that lady that so many people
wanted to see where she was buried?" Nevertheless, she lived to feel
that "her own dear children" were appreciated, if not by the vergers,
yet in the right quarters, and to enjoy a quiet pleasure in the
consciousness of her success. One tribute she received which was
overwhelming. It was intimated to her by authority that His Royal
Highness, the Prince Regent, had read her novels with pleasure, and that
she was at liberty to dedicate the next to him. More than this, the
Royal Librarian, Mr. Clarke, of his own motion apparently, did her the
honour to suggest that, changing her style for a higher, she should
write "a historical romance in illustration of the august house of
Cobourg," and dedicate it to Prince Leopold. She answered in effect
that, if her life depended on it, she could not be serious for a whole
chapter. Let it be said, however, for the Prince Regent, that underneath
his royalty and his sybaritism, there was, at first, something of a
better and higher nature, which at last was entirely stifled by them.
His love for Mrs. Fitzherbert was not merely sensual, and Heliogabalus
would not have been amused by the novels of Miss Austen.
Jane was never the authoress but when she was writing her novels; and in
the few letters with which this memoir is enriched there is nothing of
point or literary effort, and very little of special interest. We find,
however, some pleasant and characteristic touches.
"Charles has received L30 for his share of the privateer, and expects
L10 more; but of what avail is it to take prizes if he lays out the
produce in presents to his sisters? He has been buying gold chains and
topaz crosses for us. He must be well scolded."
"Poor Mrs. Stent! It has been her lot to be always in the way; but we
must be merciful, for perhaps in time we may come to be Mrs. Stents
ourselves, unequal to anything and unwelcome to everybody."
"We (herself and Miss A.) afterwards walked together for an hour on the
Cobb; she is very conversable in a common way; I do not perceive wit or
genius, but she has sense and some degree of taste, and her manners are
very engaging. _She seems to like people rather too easily."_
Of her own works, or rather of the characters of her own creation, her
Elizabeths and Emmas, Jane speaks literally as a parent. They are her
"dear children." "I must confess that I think her (Elizabeth) as
delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able
to tolerate those who do not like _her_ at least I do not know."
This is said in pure playfulness; there is nothing in the letters like
real egotism or impatience of censure.
At the age of forty-two, in the prime of intellectual life, with "Emma"
just out and "Northanger Abbey" coming, and in the midst of domestic
affection and happiness, life must have been sweet to Jane Austen. She
resigned it, nevertheless, with touching tranquillity and meekness. In
1816, it appears, she felt her inward malady, and began to go round her
old haunts in a manner which seemed to indicate that she was bidding
them farewell. In the next year, she was brought for medical advice to a
house in the Close of Winchester, and there, surrounded to the last by
affection and to the last ardently returning it, she died. Her last
words were her answer to the question whether there was anything she
wanted--_"Nothing but death."_ Those who expect religious language
in season and out of season have inferred from the absence of it in Jane
Austen's novels that she was indifferent to religion. The testimony of
her nephew is positive to the contrary; and he is a man whose word may
be believed.
Those who died in the Close were buried in the cathedral. It is
therefore by mere accident that Jane Austen rests among princes and
princely prelates in that glorious and historic fane. But she deserves
at least her slab of black marble in the pavement there. She possessed a
real and rare gift, and she rendered a good account of it. If the censer
which she held among the priests of art was not of the costliest, the
incense was of the purest. If she cannot be ranked with the very
greatest masters of fiction, she has delighted many, and none can draw
from her any but innocent delight.
PATTISON'S MILTON
[Footnote: "English Men of Letters. Edited by John Morley Milton. By
Mark Pattison B.D., Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford." London,
Macmillan, New York: Harper & Bros., 1879]
John Bright once asked a friend who was the greatest of Englishmen and
the friend hesitating answered his own question by saying, "Milton,
because he above all others, combined the greatness of the writer with
the greatness of the citizen." Professor Masson in his Life and Times of
Milton, has embodied the conception of the character indicated by this
remark, but he has run into the extreme of incorporating a complete
narrative of the Revolution with the biography of Milton, so that the
historical portion of the work overlays instead of illuminating the
biographical, and the chapters devoted specially to the life seem to the
reader interpolations, and not always welcome interpolations, in an
intensely interesting history of the times. But now comes a biographer
in whose eyes the life of Milton the citizen is a mere episode, and not
only a mere episode but a lamentable and humiliating episode, in the
life of Milton the poet. Milton's life, says Mr. Pattison "is a drama in
three acts. The first discovers him in the calm and peaceful retirement
of Horton, of which 'L'Allegro,' 'Il Penseroso,' and 'Lycidas' are the
expression. In the second act he is breathing the foul and heated
atmosphere of party passion and religious hate, generating the lurid
fires which glare in the battailous canticles of his prose pamphlets.
The three great poems--'Paradise Lost,' 'Paradise Regained,' and
'Samson Agonistes'--are the utterance of his final period of solitary
and Promethean grandeur, when, blind, destitute, friendless, he
testified of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, alone
before a fallen world." As to the struggle to which Milton, with
Cromwell, Vane Pym, Hampden, Selden, and Chillingworth, gave his life,
it is in the eyes of his present biographer, an ignoble "fray," a
"biblical brawl," and its fruits in the way of theological discussion
are nothing but "garbage." To write his Defence of the English People
Milton deliberately sacrificed his eyesight, his doctor having warned
him that he would lose his one remaining eye if he persisted in using it
for book work. "The choice lay before me," he says, "between dereliction
of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight. In such a case I could not
listen to the physician, not if AEsculapius himself had spoken from his
sanctuary; I could not but obey that inward monitor, I know not what,
that spoke to me from Heaven. I considered with myself that many had
purchased less good with worse ill, as they who gave their lives to reap
only glory, and I thereupon concluded to employ the little remaining
eyesight I was to enjoy in doing this, the greatest service to the
common weal it was in my power to render." Mr. Pattison has quoted this
passage, and no doubt he silently appreciates the heroism which breathes
through it; but the "supreme duty" of which it speaks appears to him
only a "prostitution of faculties" and a "poor delusion." Milton, he
thinks, ought to have kept entirely aloof from the brawl and remained
quiet either in the intellectual circles of Italy or in the delicious
seclusion of his library at Horton, leaving liberty, truth, and
righteousness to drown or to be saved from drowning by other hands than
his. In "plunging into the fray" the poet miserably derogated from his
superior position as a literary man, and the result was a dead loss to
him and to the world. We are sure that we do not state Mr. Pattison's
view more strongly than it is stated in his own pages.
The views of all of us, including Professor Masson, on such a question
are sure to be more or less idiosyncratic, and those of the present
biographer have not escaped the general liability. They seem, at least,
aptly to represent a mood prevalent just now among eminent men of the
literary class in England, particularly at the universities. These men
have been tossed on the waves of Ritualism, tossed on the waves of the
reaction from Ritualism; some of them have been personally battered in
both controversies; they have attained no certainty, but rather arrived
at the conclusion that no certainty is attainable; they are weary and
disgusted; such of them as have been enthusiasts in politics have been
stripped of their illusions in that line also, and have fallen back on
the conviction that everything must be left to evolve itself, and that
there is nothing to be done. They have withdrawn into the sanctuary of
critical learning and serene art, abjuring all theology and politics,
and, above all, abjuring controversy of all kinds as utterly vulgar and
degrading, though, as might be expected, they are sometimes
controversial and even rather tart in an indirect way, and without being
conscious of it themselves. Mr. Pattison's air when he comes into
contact with the politics or theology of Milton's days is like that of a
very seasick passenger at the sight of a pork chop. Nor does he fail to
reflect the Necessarianism of the circle. "That in selecting a
scriptural subject," he says, "Milton was not, in fact, exercising any
choice, but was determined by his circumstances, is only what must be
said of all choosing." Criticism fastidiously erudite, a study of art
religiously and almost mystically profound, are fruits of this
intellectual seclusion of chosen spirits from the coarse and ruffling
world for which that world has reason to be grateful. It is not likely
Milton would have chosen a writer of this school as his biographer, but
few men would choose their own biographers well.
Milton has at all events found in Mr. Pattison a biographer whose
narrative is throughout extremely pleasant, interesting and piquant, the
piquancy being enhanced for those who have the key to certain sly hits,
such as that at "the peculiar form of credulity which makes perverts (to
Roman Catholicism) think that everyone is about to follow their
example," which carries us back to the time when the head of
Tractarianism having gone over to Rome, was waiting anxiously, but in
vain, for the tail to join it. The facts had already been collected by
the diligence of Professor Masson, but Mr. Pattison uses them in a style
which places beyond a doubt his own familiarity with the subject.
Through the moral judgments there runs, as we think, and as we should
have expected, a somewhat lofty conception of the privileges of
intellect and of the value of literary objects compared with others, but
with this qualification the reflections will probably be deemed sensible
and sound. The unfortunate relations between Milton and his first wife
are treated as we think all readers will say, at once with delicacy and
justice. The literary criticisms are of a high order and such as only
comprehensive learning combined with trained taste could produce,
whether you entirely enter into all of them or not (and criticism has
not yet been reduced to a certain rule) you cannot fail to gain from
them increase of insight and enjoyment. They are often expressed in
language of great beauty:
"The rapid purification of Milton's taste will be best perceived by
comparing 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' of uncertain date but written
after 1632 with the 'Ode on the Nativity,' written 1629. The Ode,
notwithstanding its foretaste of Milton's grandeur, abounds in frigid
conceits, from which the two later pieces are free. The Ode is frosty,
as written in winter within the four walls of a college-chamber. The two
idyls breathe the free air of spring and summer and of the fields around
Horton. They are thoroughly naturalistic; the choicest expression our
language has yet found of the first charm of country life, not as that
life is lived by the peasant, but as it is felt by a young and lettered
student, issuing at early dawn or at sunset into the fields from his
chamber and his books. All rural sights and sounds and smells are here
blended in that ineffable combination which once or twice perhaps in our
lives has saluted our young senses, before their perceptions were
blunted by alcohol, by lust or ambition, or diluted by the social
distractions of great cities."
This will not be found to be a _purpureus pannus_. Nor does it much
detract from the grace of the work that of the "asyntactic disorder" of
which Mr. Pattison accuses Milton's prose, some examples may be found in
his own. Grammatical irregularities in a really good writer, as Mr.
Pattison undoubtedly is, often prove merely that his mind is more intent
on the matter than on the form.
"Paradise Lost" is the subject of a learned, luminous, and to us very
instructive dissertation. It is truly said that of the adverse criticism
which we meet with on the poem "much resolves itself into a refusal on
the part of the critic to make that initial abandonment to the
conditions which the poet demands: a determination to insist that his
heaven, peopled with deities, dominations, principalities, and powers,
shall have the same material laws which govern our planetary system."
There is one criticism, however, which cannot be so resolved, and on
which, as it appears to us the most serious of all, we should have liked
very much to hear Mr. Pattison. It is said that Lord Thurlow and another
lawyer were crossing Hounslow Heath in a post-chaise when a tremendous
thunder-storm came on; that the other lawyer said that it reminded him
of the battle in "Paradise Lost" between the devil and the angels, and
that Thurlow roared, with a blasphemous oath, "Yes, and I wish the devil
had won." Persons desirous of sustaining the religious reputation of the
legal profession add that his companion jumped out of the chaise in the
rain and ran away over the heath. For our part, we have never found
nearly so much difficulty in any of the incongruities connected with the
relations between spirit and matter, or in any confusion of the
Copernican with the Ptolemaic system, as in the constant wrenching of
our moral sympathies, which the poet demands for the Powers of Good, but
which his own delineation of Satan, as a hero waging a Promethean war
against Omnipotence, compels us to give to the Powers of Evil. Perhaps a
word or two might have been said about the relations of "Paradise Lost"
to other "epics." It manifestly belongs not to the same class of poems
as the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," or even the "AEneid." Dobson's Latin
translation of it is about the greatest feat ever performed in modern
Latin verse, and it shows by a crucial experiment how little Milton
really has in common with Virgil. "Paradise Lost" seems to us far more
akin to the Greek tragedy than to the Homeric poems or the "AEneid." In
the form of a Greek drama it was first conceived. Its verse is the
counterpart of the Greek iambic, not of the Greek or Latin hexameter.
Had the laborious Dobson turned it into Greek iambics instead of turning
it into Latin hexameters, we suspect the real affinity would have
appeared.
Looking upon the life of Milton the politician merely as a sad and
ignominious interlude in the life of Milton the poet, Mr. Pattison
cannot be expected to entertain the idea that the poem is in any sense
the work of the politician. Yet we cannot help thinking that the tension
and elevation which Milton's nature had undergone in the mighty
struggle, together with the heroic dedication of his faculties to the
most serious objects, must have had not a little to do both with the
final choice of his subject and with the tone of his poem. "The great
Puritan epic" could hardly have been written by any one but a militant
Puritan. Had Milton abjured the service of his cause, as his biographer
would have had him do, he might have given us an Arthurian romance or
some other poem of amusement. We even think it not impossible that he
might have never produced a great poem at all, but have let life slip
away in elaborate preparation without being able to fix upon a theme or
brace himself to the effort of composition. If Milton's participation in
a political battle fought to save at once the political and spiritual
life of England was degrading, Dante's participation in the faction
fight between the Guelphs and Ghibellines must have been still more so;
yet if Dante had been a mere man of leisure would he have written the
"Divina Commedia"? Who are these sublime artists in poetry that are
pinnacled so high above the "frays" and "brawls" of vulgar humanity? The
best of them, we suppose (writers for the stage being out of the
question) is Goethe. Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron were all distinctly
poets of the Revolution, or of the Counter-Revolution, and if you could
remove from them the political element, you would rob them of half their
force and interest. The great growths of poetry have coincided with the
great bursts of national life, and the great bursts of national life
have hitherto been generally periods of controversy and struggle.
Art itself, in its highest forms, has been the expression of faith. We
have now people who profess to cultivate art as art for its own sake;
but they have hardly produced anything which the world accepts as great,
though they have supplied some subjects for _Punch_. "He that
loseth his life shall preserve it." Milton was ready to lose his
literary life by sacrificing the remains of his eyesight to a cause
which, upon the whole, humanity has accepted as its own; and it was
preserved to him in a work which will never die. Mr. Pattison points to
a short poem written by Milton when his pen was chiefly employed in
serving the Commonwealth as indication that Milton "did not inwardly
forfeit the peace which passeth all understanding." Why should a man
forfeit that peace when he is doing with his whole soul that which he
conscientiously believes to be his highest duty?