[Frontispiece: Jane Austen]
JANE AUSTEN
AND HER
COUNTRY-HOUSE COMEDY
BY
W. H. HELM
AUTHOR OF "ASPECTS OF BALZAC," ETC.
EVELEIGH NASH
FAWSIDE HOUSE
LONDON
1909
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
TO
MY MOTHER
"I concluded, however unaccountable the assertion might appear at first
sight, that good-nature was an essential quality in a satirist, and
that all the sentiments which are beautiful in this way of writing,
must proceed from that quality in the author. Good-nature produces a
disdain of all baseness, vice, and folly; which prompts them to express
themselves with smartness against the errors of men, without bitterness
towards their persons."--STEELE, _Tatler_, No. 242.
NOTE
The author is much indebted to the Hon. C. M. Knatchbull-Hugessen, and
also to Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd., for permission to make extracts
from the _Letters of Jane Austen_.
CONTENTS
I
DOMINANT QUALITIES
Jane Austen's abiding freshness--Why she has not more
readers--Characteristics of her work--Absence of passion--Balzac, Jane
Austen, and Charlotte Brontë--Jane in her home circle--Her tranquil
nature--Her unselfishness--Compared with Dorothy Osborne--Prudent
heroines--Thoughtless admiration
II
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD
Literary influences--Jane Austen's defence of novelists--The old
essayists--Her favourite authors--Some novels of her time--Criticism of
her niece's novel--Sense of her own limitations--Her
method--Humour--Familiar names--Some characteristics of
style--Suggested emendations--A new "problem" of authorship--A
"forbidding" writer--"Commonplace" and "superficial"--Thomas Love
Peacock--Sapient suggestions
III
CONTACT WITH LIFE
Origins of characters--Matchmaking--Second marriages--Negative
qualities of the novels--Close knowledge of one class--Dislike of
"lionizing"--Madame de Staël--The "lower orders"--Tradesmen--Social
position--Quality of Jane's letters--Balls and parties
IV
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM
Dr. Whately on Jane Austen--"Moral lessons" of her novels--Charge of
"Indelicacy"--Marriage as a profession--A "problem" novel--"The
Nostalgia of the Infinite"--The "whitewashing" of Willoughby--Lady
Susan condemned by its author--_The Watsons_--Change in manners--No
"heroes"--Woman's love--The Prince Regent--_The Quarterly Review_
V
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST
What has woman done?--"Nature's Salic law"--Women deficient in
satire--Some types in the novels--The female snob--The
valetudinarian--The fop--The too agreeable man--"Personal size and
mental sorrow"--Knightley's opinion of Emma--Ashamed of relations--Mrs.
Bennet--The clergy and their opinions--Worldly life--Absence of
dogma--Authors confused with their creations
VI
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL
The novelist and her characters--Her sense of their
reality--Accessories rarely described--Her ideas on dress--Her own
millinery and gowns--Thin clothes and consumption--Domestic
economy--Jane as housekeeper--"A very clever essay"--Mr. Collins at
Longbourn--The gipsies at Highbury--Topography of Jane
Austen--Hampshire--Lyme Regis--Godmersham--Bath--London
VII
INFLUENCE IN LITERATURE
Jane Austen's genius ignored--Negative and positive instances--The
literary orchard--Jane's influence in English literature
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INDEX
FRONTISPIECE . . . . . . _By Violet Helm._
A LETTER OF JANE AUSTEN'S
{13}
JANE AUSTEN
AND HER
COUNTRY-HOUSE COMEDY
I
DOMINANT QUALITIES
Jane Austen's abiding freshness--Why she has not more
readers--Characteristics of her work--Absence of passion--Balzac, Jane
Austen, and Charlotte Brontë--Jane in her home circle--Her tranquil
nature--Her unselfishness--Compared with Dorothy Osborne--Prudent
heroines--Thoughtless admiration.
The year 1775, which deprived England of her American colonies, was
generous to English art and literature. Had it only produced Walter
Savage Landor, or even no better worthy than James Smith of the
_Rejected Addresses_, it would not have done badly. But these were its
added bounties. Its greater gifts were Turner, Charles Lamb and Jane
Austen. Could we be offered the choice of re-possessing the United
States, or losing the very memory of these three, which alternative
would we choose?
{14}
It is difficult to appreciate the lapse of time since Jane Austen was
at work. We are now within a few years of the centenary of her death.
She had been laid beneath that black slab in Winchester Cathedral
before the first railway had been planned, or the first telegraph wire
stretched from town to town, or the first steamship steered across the
Atlantic. Yet the must of age has not settled on her books. The
lavender may lie between their pages, but it is still sweet, and there
is many a successful novelist of our own times whose work is already
far more out of date than hers.
This perennial timeliness of atmosphere is no necessity of genius.
Fielding and Scott remain a delight for succeeding generations, because
they possess the essential quality of humanity, but the life which they
offer us is largely remote from our own, foreign to our experience.
Jane Austen invites us to enjoy a change of air among people with most
of whom we may soon feel at ease, finding nothing in their conversation
that will disturb our equanimity. If you are one of Jane Austen's
lovers, you come back to her novels for a holiday from the noise and
whirl of modern {15} fiction, as you would come from a great city to
the countryside or the coast village for rest and restoration.
The failure of her books to attract the mass of novel-readers is due in
the first place to a lack of "exciting" qualities. No syndicate that
knew its business would offer them for serial purposes; they have no
breathless "situations," and their strong appeal is to the calmer
feelings and the intellect, not to the passions and the prejudices. In
one respect only has she anything in common with the popular novelists
of our day. Her set of characters is even more limited than theirs.
The virtuous heroine, the handsome hero, the frivolous coquette, the
fascinating libertine, the worldly priest, are to be encountered in her
pages, but the wicked nobleman and the criminal adventuress find no
places there. What is often overlooked, however, by those who speak of
Jane Austen's few characters, is that no two of them have quite the
same characteristics of mind. They are differentiated with admirable
art. Even so, the types are few, and the smallness of the field which
she cultivated has been frequently adduced as a bar to her inclusion
among the {16} masters of English fiction. She has the least range of
them all. When one thinks of the host of strongly-marked types in
Scott, in Dickens, in Thackeray, of the diversity of scenes and
incidents which fill the pages of their books, her few squires and
parsons and unemployed officers, with their wives and daughters, who
live out their days in Georgian parlours and in shrubberies and parks,
make a poor enough show in the dramatic and spectacular way.
No particular passion dominates the life of any one of her leading
personages. Avarice, which has afforded such notable figures to almost
every great novelist, in her world is only represented by meanness;
lust and hate are nowhere strongly emphasized, even love is rarely
permitted to suggest the possibility of becoming violent. There are no
Pecksniffs, Quilps, Père Grandets, nor Lord Steynes; no Lady Kews, Jane
Eyres, nor Lisbeth Fischers. Only into the hearts of her younger women
does Jane Austen throw the searchlight of complete knowledge, lit by
her own feelings, and tended with self-analysis, and her heroines still
leave a large part of virtuous womankind unrepresented.
{17}
Balzac, describing the origins of his play _La Marâtre_ to the manager
who produced it, said: "We are not concerned with an appalling
melodrama wherein the villain sets light to houses and massacres the
inhabitants. No, I imagine a drawing-room comedy where all is calm,
tranquil, pleasant. The men play peacefully at the whist-table, by the
light of wax candles under little green shades. The women chat and
laugh as they do their fancy needlework. Presently they all take tea
together. In a word, everything shows the influence of regular habits
and harmony. But for all that, beneath this placid surface the
passions are at work, the drama progresses until the moment when it
bursts out like the flame of a conflagration. That is what I want to
show."
The scene described is Jane Austen's--the quiet parlour, the
card-players, the women chatting, and working with their coloured
silks, the tea-tray, the shaded candles, the general air of ease and
tranquillity. We find it at Mansfield Park with the Bertrams, at
Hartfield with the Woodhouses, and, in spite of Lydia and her "mamma,"
at Longbourn with the Bennets. But the _dénouement_ to which Balzac
looked for his {18} effect has no attraction for Jane Austen.
Catherine Morland, at Northanger Abbey, imagines some such tragedy
smouldering into life below the surface of quiet habitude as Balzac
discovers in his horrid war of step-daughter and step-mother, and Jane
Austen herself laughs with Henry Tilney at this impressionable country
maiden whom he mocks while he admires.
Balzac and Jane Austen both strove to depict life, to show the motives
and instincts of men and women as the causes of action; in his case of
an energetic and passionate type, wherein the primary instincts are
freely exercised, in her case, of a simple, orderly kind, which allows
but little scope for the display of violence or the elaboration of
plots. There are exceptions, of course, which for fear of the precise
critic must at least be illustrated. Balzac has his quiet Pierrettes
and Rose Cormons, who suffer as patiently and far more poignantly than
an Elinor Dashwood or a Fanny Price; Jane Austen has her dissolute
Willoughbys and disturbing Henry Crawfords, and also her Maria
Rushworths and Mrs. Clays, who throw their bonnets over the windmills
with even less regard for their reputations than a Beatrix de {19}
Rochefide or a Natalie de Manerville. When a lapse from virtue on the
part of any of her characters was, on some rare occasion, necessary to
her plan, Jane Austen did not allow any prudish reserve to stand in the
way, but it may be said no less unreservedly that she never introduced
vice where her story could do quite as well without it, and it is never
the central motive of her novels. It is, then, not alone for the
narrowness of her field that her title to greatness has often been
disputed. Many persons whose literary tastes are marked by
understanding and catholicity refuse to acknowledge the genius of so
peaceful a novelist. Because of the absence of passion and sentiment
in Jane Austen's works, the author of _Jane Eyre_ would not recognize
in her the great artist that Scott and Coleridge believed her to be.
"The passions," wrote Miss Brontë, "are perfectly unknown to her; she
rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood. Even
to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but
distant recognition--too frequent converse with them would ruffle the
smooth elegance of her progress." The three novelists here brought
into momentary {20} association, the creators of _Eugénie Grandet_,
_Emma_, and _Jane Eyre_ represent three distinctive forces in fiction.
Charlotte Brontë, disillusioned with the world, of which she knew very
little, and angry at its follies and injustices, sat alone and poured
out her feelings in her books; Balzac, hungry for fame, wrote furiously
all night by the light of a dip, stimulating his fiery imagination with
the strong coffee which was the irresponsible author of many of his
most astonishing chapters; Jane Austen, taking her meals and her rest
regularly, sat at her little desk in the parlour where her mother and
sister were sewing or writing letters, and placidly turned her
observations and reflections into manuscript. Her hazel eyes, we may
be certain, never rolled in any kind of frenzy, her brown curls were
never disturbed by the spasmodic movements of nervous hands. Great
artist as she was, she had no greater share of the "artistic
temperament" than many a popular novelist who "turns out" two or three
serial stories at a time by the simple process of shuffling the
situations, changing the scenery, and re-naming the characters. If she
had been touched by the strong emotion of a Charlotte Brontë, or the
{21} burning imagination of a Balzac, she might have produced work
which would have set the world on fire, instead of merely infusing keen
happiness into responsive minds and compelling their love and
admiration. That is only to say that if she had been somebody else she
would not have been herself. It is peace, not war, that she carries to
us. Even her irony is not of the sardonic kind, and in her work the
"master spell" is so daintily mingled that the bitter ingredients seem
to have disappeared in the making.
Respect and admiration and sympathy in a high degree have been given by
millions of minds, not always emotional, to many authors, but Jane
Austen is loved as few have been. The love is inspired by her works,
and she shares it with Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne
Elliot. Milton, in a line which is as clear in meaning as it is foggy
in construction, speaks of Eve as "the fairest of her daughters." Jane
Austen is regarded by the generality of her lovers as the most
delightful of her own heroines, and not merely as the woman who brought
them into existence.
Could we have loved her so much if we had {22} lived with her at
Steventon Rectory or at Chawton Cottage? What she was at home I think
we know much better from her own letters than from her brother Henry's
panegyric, which, in spite of its obvious sincerity of intention, too
nearly resembles the memorial inscriptions of his own period to be
regarded with quite as much confidence as respect. "Faultless
herself," he wrote, "as nearly as human nature can be, she always
sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive, or
forget." "Always" is a word which--as Captain Corcoran discovered of
its reverse--can hardly ever be used without considerable reservations.
We know, from her own pen, that Jane--we call one unwedded queen
"Elizabeth," why should we not call another "Jane"?--did not "always"
show so much tenderness for the faults of others, and when we remember
the endless variety of human nature we cannot but regard this
ascription of "faultlessness" by an affectionate brother as of little
more evidential value than Mrs. Dashwood's opinion (in _Sense and
Sensibility_) of the "faultlessness" of Marianne's lovers. It is no
disparagement to Henry Austen to say that his little {23} memoir is
more convincing as a record of his own character than of his sister's.
Their nephew, Mr. Austen Leigh, who wrote the fullest and most
admirable account of Jane Austen, was still in his teens when she died.
Apart from these sparse reminiscences we know practically nothing about
her except from her own novels and letters, but from them we may learn
almost as much of the mind of this delightful woman as any loving
relation could have told us. It may be possible for an author to write
an artificial novel without betraying his own nature to any positive
extent, but such novels as Jane Austen's cannot so be produced; it is
possible to write letters which, apart from the penmanship, offer no
evidences of character; but a pair of devoted sisters, however
different their ability or their philosophy of life, could not
correspond during twenty years without displaying much of the workings
of their minds.
Some of Jane's literary admirers think that she was lively and
talkative, others that she was prone to silence in company. Probably
both views are correct. It depended on the company. Among those who
could appreciate her fun and her wit, her harmless quips and quizzing,
she was {24} full of vivacity; among those who raised their eyebrows at
her impromptu verses and missed the points of her piquant remarks on
persons and incidents she was speedily content, within the bounds of
good manners, to observe rather than to join in the comedy of
conversation. We need not unreservedly believe her brother's assurance
that "she never uttered either a hasty, a silly, or a severe
expression," but we may, from all we know of her, be fairly confident
that she had a control over her tongue which few such gifted humourists
have possessed. As for her temper, it was said in her family that
"Cassandra had the _merit_ of having her temper always under command,
but that Jane had the _happiness_ of a temper that never required to be
commanded."
That her nature was not, in any marked degree, what is commonly called
"sympathetic" we may see from many passages in her letters, and her
novels afford ample corroboration. There was no avoidable hypocrisy
about her. In this at least she is the counterpart of Elizabeth or
Anne. "Do not be afraid of my encroaching on your privilege of
universal goodwill. You need not. There are {25} few people whom I
really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of
the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms
my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the
little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit
or sense." In a letter from Jane Austen to Cassandra there would have
been nothing to surprise us in this passage, which is actually taken
from the remarks of Elizabeth Bennet to her sister on the subject of
Bingley's long silence after the Netherfield ball.
If Jane Austen did not cry over misfortunes which did not affect her,
neither did she pretend to ignore the affectations and weaknesses even
of her nearest relations. Can it be supposed, for instance, that she
was in the least degree blinded to the shortcomings of a beloved mother
of whom she could, on various occasions, write such news as that she
"continues hearty, her appetite and nights are very good, but she
sometimes complains of an asthma, a dropsy, water in her chest, and a
liver disorder"?
A daughter and sister and friend whose attention was so closely
devoted, however {26} unobtrusively, to the study of character in a
narrow circle, would in most cases be "a little trying," but when the
observer was endowed with a keen sense of the absurd, and an irony
which, however weak in caustic, was strong in veracity, it might be
supposed that she would be an _enfant terrible_ of that mature kind
which in our own days is commoner than the nursery variety. In her
case, the supposition would be ill-founded. She was at once too
well-bred, and too kind-hearted, to let her special powers of wounding
take exercise on gentle hearts. But falsehood of any sort was
abhorrent to her, and as a consequence she was inclined, in communing
with her sister, to show herself a little intolerant even of those
amiable pretences of sorrow for common ailments and small troubles
which are so soothing to weak humanity. She rejected, for example, the
idea of commiserating with any one on account of a cold or a headache,
unless there were feverish symptoms!
Of the "vacant chaff well-meant for grain" of which Tennyson sings so
sadly, Jane brought little to market. She would express to Cassandra
her sympathy with their acquaintances under great {27} disasters and
trivial misfortunes with the same penful of ink. What she wrote to her
sister--of her devotion for whom, from earliest childhood, her mother
said, "If Cassandra was going to have her head cut off, Jane would
insist on sharing her fate"--is far more free than what she uttered in
the family circle. Few have realized better the value of the unspoken
word, or given their relations less opportunity to remind them of the
evils of indiscretion.
If she was unemotional and, in the ordinary sense of the word,
unsympathetic, she is not to be blamed for this lack of the qualities
with one of which she so amply endowed Marianne and with the other
Elinor Dashwood. We can no more make ourselves emotional or
sympathetic than we can make ourselves fair or dark, or rather, we can
only alter our ways as we can alter our complexions, by artifice. The
outward show of sympathy which is not felt is one of the commonest of
hypocrisies, perhaps inevitable at times from very charity. Happily it
is not a necessary part of that ultimate barrier which, even in the
truest friendships and the deepest love, makes it as impossible for one
human being to see the {28} whole of another's heart as it is
impossible to see more than a little of the "other side" of the moon.
We cannot help being more or less unfeeling, but we can subdue our
selfishness in action. Almost everything that can be learned about
Jane Austen strengthens the conviction that she was one of the least
selfish of women.
In her last illness the fidelity of her spirit is constantly shown, and
her affection becomes more unreserved in its utterance. There is one
letter wherein, after speaking of Cassandra, she says, in a phrase
curiously suggestive of Thackeray: "As to what I owe her, and the
anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, I can only
cry over it, and pray God to bless them more and more."
That she was by nature "meek and lowly," as one of her American adorers
declares, I cannot believe, but if she preferred the spacious rooms and
well-spread board of her brother's mansion to the common parlour and
boiled mutton-and-turnips of her father's rectory, she did not grizzle
over her state, nor did she allow her conscious superiority of
intelligence to claim distinction in her home. One of the few glimpses
(apart from {29} her own writings) that we have of her in her family
relations is when, in the closing year of her life, her illness having
begun to weaken her body, she was obliged to lie down frequently during
the day. There was only one sofa at Chawton Cottage, and although Mrs.
Austen, in spite of the many ailments she had formerly complained of,
was a tolerably healthy old lady, the stricken daughter made herself a
couch by putting several chairs together, and declared that she
preferred it to the sofa which her mother commonly occupied. Sofas, we
must remember, were at least as rare then as oak-panelled walls are
now. It was in those days that Cobbett regretted that the sofa had
ever been introduced into his country, and he no doubt, according to
his habit, held the Prime Minister responsible for the aid to
effeminate indulgence of which his contemporary Cowper sang.
Jane's discontent with the comparative poverty of her surroundings was
not translated into ill temper. There are many reasons for believing,
and few indeed for doubting, that she tried to do her duty in that
state of life to which she was born, and from which she was not
destined to {30} emerge into the more varied pleasures and pains of a
larger world. What if, among those whom she trusted, she could not
resist expressing the lively thoughts suggested to her acute wit by the
acts or utterances of her friends. She was the pride of her family,
and its sunshine, even if her rays were more akin to the sun as we know
him on a fine spring day at home than as we seek him on the Côte d'Azur.
She seems to have been more nearly understood among the clergy and
squires, and other members of her family, than most humourists in their
immediate circles. The common experience of the genius in childhood
and youth, if biographers are to be credited, is for the delicate
shoots of his intelligence to be nipped by domestic frosts; but if
there had been any freezing in the Austen family, it was more likely to
be produced by the chill of Jane's own satirical remarks than by any
harm that the convention and narrowness of others could do to a mind so
well defended as hers. There are few traces of any such wintry weather
having occurred at Steventon or Chawton. Jane was certainly beloved,
greatly and deservedly, in her home. She was, no doubt, a little {31}
lonely, as genius, one may suppose, must always be, and as those who
are blest, or curst, with a strong sense of the absurd must be whether
they be geniuses or not. Her sister was her closest friend, but Jane's
published letters to Cassandra, read in the light of the novels,
suggest a reserve in discussing her inmost thoughts with that devoted
spirit which seems hardly compatible with the closest concordance of
ideas, in spite of the completest concordance of affection and a high
respect on Jane's part for Cassandra's sound sense and critical
judgment. Very different is the tone of the letters of that other
pretty humourist, Dorothy Osborne, to William Temple. In Dorothy's
case there was a perfect confidence in the entire sympathy and
comprehension of the recipient. This factor apart, how much there is
in common between the two dear women. The one was dead more than
eighty years before the other was born, but in all the history of
womanhood is there any pair in which the smiling philosophy that is the
salt of the mind is more fairly divided? Jane Austen lives still in
Elizabeth Bennet and in Emma Woodhouse; Dorothy Osborne only in her
sweet self. The one had {32} no passion but her work--and it was a
quiet, unconsuming passion. The other had no passion but her love, and
it was never able to overmaster her intelligence. "In earnest," she
wrote, "I am no more concerned whether people think me handsome or
ill-favoured, whether they think I have wit or that I have none, than I
am whether they think my name Elizabeth or Dorothy." It was not quite
true in her case, nor would it have been in Jane's, but it contains no
more exaggeration than is allowed to any woman of sense, and it was as
true of the one as of the other.
Love has lately been defined by a ruthless analyzer of feelings as "a
specific emotion, exclusive in selection, more or less permanent in
duration, and due to a mental fermentation in itself caused by a law of
attraction." Jane Austen had never read such an explanation of love as
this, yet her views on the most powerful of the mixings of animal and
spiritual instincts are usually more placid than would please the
fancies of maidens who sleep with bits of wedding-cake beneath their
pillows. That passionate love "is woman's whole existence" is not
exemplified by Jane's favourite heroines. Emma or Elizabeth did not
{33} so regard it, even if Anne Elliot did lose some of her good looks
and Catherine Morland her appetite when their hopes of particular
bridegrooms seemed likely to be disappointed. Elizabeth would not have
worried greatly over Darcy if he had not come back for her, and Emma
would have been as happy at Hartfield without a husband as she had
always been, so long as Knightley was friendly.
We cannot imagine that Jane Austen could ever have written to any man,
as Dorothy Osborne wrote to Temple of a love which she could not make
her family understand: "For my life I cannot beat into their heads a
passion that must be subject to no decay, an even perfect kindness that
must last perpetually, without the least intermission. They laugh to
hear me say that one unkind word would destroy all the satisfaction of
my life, and that I should expect our kindness should increase every
day, if it were possible, but never lessen."
The conjugal instinct was not strongly developed in Jane; and, although
she seems to have been very fond of children, and especially of her
nephews and nieces, it may be assumed with some {34} confidence that
the maternal instinct also found little place in her nature.
Marianne Dashwood, emotional, fastidiously truthful--she left to her
elder sister "the whole task of telling lies when politeness required
it"--romantically fond of scenery and poetry as any of Mrs. Radcliffe's
heroines, stands out among the girls of Jane's imagining as the only
one who outwardly exhibits the conventional signs of passionate
affection for a lover, Catherine's and Fanny's emotions being more
suggestive of maiden fancies, of "the flimsy furniture of a country
miss's brain," than of the yearnings of a Juliet or a Roxane.
Nevertheless the idea that the Austen people are cold-blooded is warmly
opposed in an appreciative little essay published in America a few
years ago by Mr. W. L. Phelps. "Let no one believe," he writes, "that
Jane Austen's men and women are deficient in passion because they
behave with decency: to those who have the power to see and interpret,
there is a depth of passion in her characters that far surpasses the
emotional power displayed in many novels where the lovers seem to
forget the meaning of such words as honour, {35} virtue, and fidelity."
It may be that, like Richard Feverel on a certain occasion, the Henrys
and Edwards, the Emmas and Annes are "too British to expose their
emotions." But Lucy Feverel, one of the purest and truest women in
fiction, shows passion so that no special "power to see and interpret"
is requisite on the reader's part, and the same note is true of many of
the charming heroines drawn by the masters of imagination.
At any rate Jane allowed her heroines as much passion and sentiment
as--so far as we can discover--she experienced herself. The one known
man who seems to have come near to being regarded as her accepted lover
was Thomas Lefroy, who lived to be Chief Justice of Ireland.
"You scold me so much," she writes, in her twenty-first year, to
Cassandra, "in the nice long letter which I have this moment received
from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I
behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking
in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I _can_ expose
myself, however, only _once more_, because he leaves the country soon
after next Friday, on which day we _are_ to have a {36} dance at Ashe
after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young
man, I assure you. But as to our having ever met, except at the three
last balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at
about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran
away when we called on Mrs. Lefroy a few days ago."
No coquettish "reigning beauty" was ever more easy as to the fate of
her lovers, or less likely to suffer at their hands, than this
Hampshire maiden, whose fine complexion, hazel eyes, and
well-proportioned figure attracted so much admiration, and whose sweet
voice and lively conversation completed the conquest of those whom she
cared to entertain.
"Tell Mary," she writes to her sister (also in 1796), "that I make over
Mr. Heartley and all his estate to her for her sole use and benefit in
future, and not only him, but all my other admirers into the bargain
wherever she can find them, even the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to
give me, as I mean to confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for
whom I don't care six-pence."
{37}
This agreeable Irishman, to whom, in later years, we find references in
the records of the Edgeworth family, was speedily to pass out of Jane's
young life. Very soon she has to write: "At length the day is come on
which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this
it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea.
William Chute called here yesterday. I wonder what he means by being
so civil."
We need not picture her as stopping her writing while she wiped the
tears from her streaming eyes. "We went by Bifrons," she says on
another occasion, "and I contemplated with a melancholy pleasure the
abode of him on whom I once fondly doted." She never did "dote" on any
man, so far as can be discovered or reasonably surmised, to any greater
extent than her favourite Emma may be said to have "doted" on Frank
Churchill. Emma's feelings about the man who was secretly engaged to
Jane Fairfax at the time, are thus analyzed by Jane Austen--
"Emma continued to entertain no doubt of her being in love. Her ideas
only varied as to the {38} how much. At first she thought it was a
good deal; and afterwards but little. She had great pleasure in
hearing Frank Churchill talked of; and, for his sake, greater pleasure
than ever in seeing Mr. and Mrs. Weston; she was very often thinking of
him, and quite impatient for a letter, that she might know how he was,
how were his spirits, how was his aunt, and what was the chance of his
coming to Randalls again this spring. But, on the other hand, she
could not admit herself to be unhappy, nor, after the first morning, to
be less disposed for employment than usual.... 'I do not find myself
making any use of the word _sacrifice_,' said she. 'In not one of all
my clever replies, my delicate negatives, is there any allusion to
making a sacrifice. I do suspect that he is not really necessary to my
happiness. So much the better. I certainly will not persuade myself
to feel more than I do. I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry
to be more.'"
Save for Willoughby's burst of misplaced enthusiasm over Marianne,
Frank Churchill's description of Jane Fairfax to Emma is the warmest
bit of love-painting in the Austen comedy--
"She is a complete angel. Look at her. Is not she an angel in every
gesture? Observe the turn of her throat. Observe her eyes, as she is
looking up at my father. You will be glad to {39} hear (inclining his
head, and whispering seriously) that my uncle means to give her all my
aunt's jewels. They are to be new set. I am resolved to have some in
an ornament for the head. Will not it be beautiful in her dark hair?"
Such raptures as these are rarely permitted to the Austen lovers. In
their affairs of the heart, as in the general conduct of their lives,
plain living and quiet thinking reflect the simple habits of the people
among whom Jane passed her own smoothly-ordered life.
To the simplicity of that life we owe one of her peculiar charms. If
she had been the famous, sought-after literary woman who is the
necessary complement of a dinner-party in a house of cultured luxury,
and whose name is found in the index of every volume of contemporary
reminiscences, she would not have been half so attractive to the type
of mind that most enjoys her novels. Yet when all possible allowance
has been made for her lightness of expression her own predilections
were certainly for the conditions of "opulent leisure" rather than of
decent comfort, for the amenities of Mansfield Park and Pemberley
rather than for those of Fullerton Rectory or the {40} Dashwoods'
cottage. "People get so horridly poor and economical in this part of
the world," she wrote from Steventon to her sister at Godmersham, "that
I have no patience with them. Kent is the only place for happiness;
everybody is rich there."
This was written early in her life. In the year before she died,
writing to her niece Fanny, she said: "Single women have a dreadful
propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour
of matrimony, but I need not dwell on such arguments with _you_, pretty
dear."
Contempt for poverty is expressed by several characters in her work.
"Be honest and poor, by all means"--says Mary Crawford to Edmund
Bertram--"but I shall not envy you; I do not much think I shall even
respect you. I have a much greater respect for those that are honest
and rich."
Perhaps neither the real Jane nor the imaginary Mary is to be taken
quite literally, but that Jane would have freely assented to a
disbelief in the wisdom of marrying on a small income, however little
she approved of Mary's "too positive admiration for wealth," is certain
from all that {41} we know of her opinions on the essentials of
happiness.
Godmersham is in Kent, and it was in that spacious, well-provided house
of her brother Edward, amid all the charms of parks and beechwoods, of
home comforts and "elegances" that marked the life of the large
landowner in those days, that she usually found herself most contented.
Then was the time when the squire was not driven to find an income by
letting his manor to a company promoter to whom the difference between
an oak and an elm is scarcely known, and whose chief object in hiring a
mansion in rural surroundings is to fill it with week-end parties who
play bridge indoors on summer afternoons and leave the beauties of the
gardens and the park to the peacocks and the deer.
With such a modern plutocrat Jane would have had little in common, but
she would have had less with the modern Socialist. Landed property
stood for everything stable and dignified in her days, and those
critics of _Pride and Prejudice_ who unkindly emphasized the fact that
Elizabeth Bennet only decided to marry Darcy after she had seen the
glories of Pemberley and its park {42} and gardens, while they
implicitly libelled the girl, were not so unfair to the general
sentiment of her period. Sir Walter Scott, by the way, was one of
those who regarded Elizabeth Bennet's change of feeling towards Darcy
as the result of her visit to the fine place in Derbyshire. Surely
such a view connotes a failure to appreciate the humour of the
conversation on this point between Jane Bennet and her sister. The
elder girl asks the younger how long it is since she has felt any
affection for Darcy, and Elizabeth replies: "It has been coming on so
gradually, that I hardly know when it began; but I believe I must date
it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." Even Jane
Bennet, whose humour sense was not strongly developed, asks her to give
a serious answer.
This much may be admitted, that the idea of marrying the curate never
presented itself to any one of the maidens who brighten the novels of
Jane Austen with their charms of mind and appearance. Elinor Dashwood
seems to have regarded about £600 a year (with sure prospect of
increase) as the minimum on which married life could hopefully be
entered upon, and I fancy {43} Jane would have agreed with her. The
majority of novel-readers may still prefer the hero and heroine whose
love will triumph over all obstacles of position, and opposition, of
want of sympathy on the part of others or of sense on their own, and
there have actually been readers who thought Lydia Bennet more
"interesting" than Elizabeth! The prudence of the heroines may to some
small extent account for the failure of Jane Austen's work to captivate
the "great heart of the public." In any case her fame is far from
universal. She has never been, and never will be, popular in the sense
in which the men and women whose publishers cheerfully print first
editions of a hundred thousand copies are popular. Her appeal, in her
own lifetime, when her name was unknown, was not to "the general," and
it is only much less restricted now because of the enormous increase in
the reading public. Actually it is immensely greater; relatively, its
increase is evidently small. One cannot, as in the case of some
authors, describe her work as being enjoyed only by the cultured class,
and neglected, because misapprehended, by the rest. True culture is
always discriminating, even in the presence of its {44} divinities.
Mr. Anthony Hope said not long ago, referring to literary snobbishness:
"There are certain companies in which to suggest, even with the utmost
humility, that certain parts of Jane Austen's novels are less
entertaining than other parts is thought considerably worse than
drawing invidious distinctions between various passages of Holy Writ."
With those who regard Jane Austen's work as equally excellent in every
part, no patience is possible. The reader who finds it easy to get as
much enjoyment from _Sense and Sensibility_ or _Northanger Abbey_ as
from _Pride and Prejudice_ or _Mansfield Park_ must be blessed with a
comfortable absence of discrimination. Those who see no degree of
superiority in the presentation of the characters of Elizabeth Bennet
and Anne Elliot as compared with Elinor Dashwood and Catherine Morland
might be expected to regard Blanche Amory and Mrs. Jarley as the equals
respectively of Becky Sharp and Mrs. Gamp.
Such uncritical admiration as Mr. Anthony Hope referred to is even more
annoying than the tone in which I have heard a distinguished writer
speak of Jane Austen as "that woman"--the {45} mildest of the
contemptuous terms that Napoleon applied to Madame de Staël. The
author who spoke of Jane Austen so slightingly admitted her power of
presenting a "bloodless" and trivial society in a life-like manner. No
such recognition of power is allowed to her by an American critic of
to-day, who says of her work "it may be called art, but it is a poor
species of that old art which depended for its effect upon false
similitudes." It is hard to believe that the writer of this
astonishing opinion had read many pages of the author he thus condemned
to a place among the third-rates.
{49}
II
EQUIPMENT; AND METHOD
Literary influences--Jane Austen's defence of novelists--The old
essayists--Her favourite authors--Some novels of her time--Criticism of
her niece's novel--Sense of her own limitations--Her
method--Humour--Familiar names--Some characteristics of
style--Suggested emendations--A new "problem" of authorship--A
"forbidding" writer--"Commonplace" and "superficial"--Thomas Love
Peacock--Sapient suggestions.
"I believe there is no constraint to be put upon real genius; nothing
but inclination can set it to work," was one of the many sensible, if
unoriginal, observations of the monarch in whose reign Jane Austen was
born and died. But the inclination itself is usually started by
external suggestions, and it is a mere truism that most books are
written because others have appeared before them. Macaulay declared
that but for Fanny Burney's example Jane Austen would never have been a
novelist. Some of her early attempts at a complete novel did indeed
take the epistolary {50} form which was common in the preceding age,
and was the method of her admired Richardson, who, I think, fired her
ambition quite as much as Miss Burney. It would also seem that Mrs.
Radcliffe's wild romances had induced in Jane the desire to do
something that should please by the absence of every quality that had
made them popular.
I doubt if there is any author of any period to whom the most famous
remark of Buffon could be more justly applied than to Jane Austen.
"_Le style est la femme même_" is a conviction which becomes more and
more firm as one reads her novels and her letters, and reflects over
their relationship. Her simple life and her limited opportunities, her
genius being granted, are a sufficient explanation of her work. Part
of that life, and a part more important, in proportion to the rest,
than it would have been in the case of one who had lived less remote
from the world of thought and action, was the reading of favourite
books. _Clarissa_, _Sir Charles Grandison_ and _Pamela_ influenced her
strongly, but she avoided more than she took from them in the formation
of her style. Miss Burney she now and then laughs at a little, {51} as
when, after John Thorpe has said to Catherine (who confesses she has
never read _Camilla_): "You had no loss, I assure you; it is the
horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it
but an old man's playing at see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul,
there is not," Jane Austen adds that "the justness" of this critique
"was unfortunately lost on poor Catherine." But where she loved she
laughed. She appreciated her sister-novelist's work very highly, and
she writes of a young woman whom she met at a neighbour's house: "There
are two traits in her character which are pleasing--namely, she admires
Camilla, and drinks no cream in her tea."
Scott's poetry, of course, Jane read and enjoyed. Three of his most
popular novels--_Waverley_, _Guy Mannering_, and _The
Antiquary_--appeared during her lifetime, and their authorship, like
that of her own works, was not avowed until after her death. How
wide-open was the "secret" of their origin from the very first, years
before Scott's acknowledgment, we may see in one of Jane's letters of
1814, where she says: "Walter Scott has no business to write novels;
{52} especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit
enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths
of other people. I do not like him, and do not mean to like _Waverley_
if I can help it, but I fear I must." She herself declared, half
jestingly, that she wrote for fame and not for profit. Neither, in any
but shallow measure, was granted to her whilst she lived. She did not,
like Robert Burns, "pant after distinction," nor was she of the
"pushing" type. The offering-up of self-respect in the cause of
self-interest was the least possible of sacrifices with her.
The machine-made horrors of Ann Radcliffe--"_la reine des
épouvantements_" as she has been aptly called, in spite of her retiring
disposition--were as familiar to Jane as were those, far less
_pouvantable_, of Ainsworth to the girls of a later generation. The
Radcliffe novels were published between Jane's fourteenth and
twenty-third years, when she was most open to romantic influences, but
however much she may have shuddered over them in her teens, she laughed
at them in her twenties, and it is certainly to the desire to satirize
the melodramatic sensations of the school of fiction {53} which they
represent that we chiefly owe _Northanger Abbey_, a pleasant mixture of
a serious love-story and a burlesque, a motto for which might have been
found in a sonnet of Shakespeare:
"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
* * * * *
I grant I never saw a goddess go,--
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground."
It is in this novel that, leaving her characters for a page or two to
take care of themselves, the author thus refers to the sorrows of the
novel-making craft, and expresses her high appreciation of the work of
Miss Burney and of Miss Edgeworth--
"Let us not desert one another--we are an injured body. Although our
productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than
those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of
composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or
fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers; and while the
abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the history of England, or
of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of
Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the _Spectator_, and a
chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens,--there seems
almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and {54} undervaluing
the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which
have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. 'I am no
novel-reader.--I seldom look into novels.--Do not imagine that '_I_
often read novels.--It is really very well for a novel.' Such is the
common cant. 'And what are you reading, Miss----?' 'Oh! it is only a
novel!' replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with
affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'It is only _Cecilia_, or
_Camilla_, or _Belinda_;' or, in short, only some work in which the
greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough
knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties,
the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in
the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged
with a volume of the _Spectator_, instead of such a work, how proudly
would she have produced the book, and told its name! though the chances
must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous
publication of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a
young person of taste; the substance of its papers so often consisting
in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and
topics of conversation, which no longer concern any one living; and
their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable
idea of the age that could endure it."
{55}