Bickerstaff," and many "Clarindas" and "Sophronias" among their
friends. The age of the Regency may or may not have been as lax in its
morality as some of its detractors have declared, but that it was one
in which ladies could reasonably have been expected to blush over the
pages of the _Spectator_ is not easily to be believed.
The girls in the manor-houses and parsonages of those days formed their
literary tastes on native productions without going abroad for their
novels. They did not read French fiction as their grandmothers and
great-grandmothers had done, or as their cousins in town still did in
spite of such warnings as that of a contemporary critic who held it
scarcely possible to read French "without contracting some pollution,
so extensively and radically is its whole literature depraved." Times
had changed since Dorothy Osborne discussed the voluminous romances of
Calprenède and Mademoiselle de Scudéri with William Temple.
Another important branch of Jane's private and voluntary curriculum was
her reading not only in the "coarse" journalism of Steele and Addison
{56} and their colleagues, but in the various successors of the
_Spectator_ and the _Tatler_ which had their little days and died,
particularly during the reign of George II. Not only in the _Rambler_
and the _Idler_ of the great man whom she so highly respected, but in
the _World_, the _Mirror_, the _Lounger_, the _Connoisseur_, and other
less remembered publications of their class, you may come upon
characters and reflections and incidents which may have afforded
fruitful suggestions to one who, after the manner of genius, could turn
even the dulness of others into sparkling delight of her own.
Her favourite poet was Crabbe. She never met him, but she was so
charmed by his work that, as her nephew has recorded, she used jokingly
to say, "If she ever married at all, she could fancy being Mrs.
Crabbe." Her appreciation of such poems as _The Village_ and _The
Parish Register_ is suggestive. She herself made no attempt to
illustrate the "simple annals of the poor." Born in a family which was
itself a part of the landed gentry, in those days in its pride, she was
obviously conscious of a lofty barrier between her own class and the
peasantry. George Crabbe, on the other {57} hand, the son of lowly
folk, was born and nurtured in poverty, and he never forgot that he had
sprung from the sand-dunes of the East Coast. His pictures of the
poor, their sorrows and joys, fill the most delightful of his verses;
his ease in their society, his understanding of their minds and
characters mark him off as clearly from Jane Austen as--to take a very
modern instance--the admirable and sympathetic pictures of farm-life in
la Vendée offered in _La Terre qui meurt_ distinguish M. René Bazin
from M. Marcel Batilliat, who has dealt so feelingly with the decadence
of the château in _La Vendée aux Genêts_. Jane found in Crabbe
something that she missed in herself, a ready appreciation of all
classes.
She loved Cowper too, both in his poems and his prose. There was much
in _The Task_ that could not but please her, though the humour must
have struck her as being exceedingly mild, and the descriptions
over-laboured. Cowper, though kindly to the rural poor, and often
referring to their occupations, smiles derisively at those who pretend
to envy the labourer's lot and to regard his cottage, if properly
"rose-bordered," as preferable to any other kind of residence.
{58}
"So farewell envy of the _peasant's nest_!
If Solitude make scant the means of life,
Society for me! thou seeming sweet,
Be still a pleasing object in my view;
My visit still, but never mine abode."
Jane was wholly in accord with the sentiment of these lines. In some
verses--composed in 1807 for a family competition in producing rhymes
with "rose"--which, but for the rhyming, are a burlesque of Cowper's
style, we find a picture of a cottager, wherein, if the "poetry" be
naturally of small account, are lines that would mark it, without the
direct evidence of the name, as hers, and not Cassandra's or Mrs.
Austen's.
"Happy the lab'rer in his Sunday clothes!
In light-drab coat, smart waistcoat, well darn'd hose,
And hat upon his head, to church he goes;
As oft, with conscious pride, he downward throws
A glance upon the ample cabbage-rose,
Which, stuck in button-hole, regales his nose,
He envies not the gayest London beaux.
In church he takes his seat among the rows,
Pays to the place the reverence he owes,
Likes best the prayers whose meaning least he knows,
Lists to the sermon in a softening doze,
And rouses joyous at the welcome close."
There is a letter of January 1758 from Johnson to Bennet Langton which,
as Boswell remarks, shows its writer "in as easy and pleasant a state
of {59} existence, as constitutional unhappiness ever permitted him to
enjoy." I cannot help quoting it here as evidence of an affinity of
Johnson, in his happiest hours, with his constitutionally cheerful
admirer, Jane Austen--
"The two Wartons just looked into the town, and were taken to see
_Cleone_, where, David says, they were starved for want of company to
keep them warm. David and Doddy have had a new quarrel, and, I think,
cannot conveniently quarrel any more. _Cleone_ was well acted by all
the characters, but Bellamy left nothing to be desired. I went the
first night, and supported it as well as I might; for Doddy, you know,
is my patron, and I would not desert him. The play was very well
received. Doddy, after the danger was over, went every night to the
stage-side, and cried at the distress of poor Cleone. I have left off
housekeeping, and therefore made presents of the game which you were
pleased to send me. The pheasant I gave to Mr. Richardson, the bustard
to Dr. Lawrence, and the pot I placed with Miss Williams, to be eaten
by myself.... Mr. Reynolds has within these few days raised his price
to twenty guineas a head, and Miss is much employed in miniatures. I
know not anybody else whose prosperity has increased since you left
them."
{60}
If the date and the reference to the writer's relations with the
dramatist had been suppressed the letter might have been given as one
of Jane's own without arousing suspicion in any but a confirmed
"Boswellian." "David" is Garrick, of course, while "Doddy" is Dodsley,
author of the play, and the fortunate recipient of the Langton pheasant
is the author of _Clarissa_, another of Jane's favourites more than
thirty years after, when she had had time to be born and grow up.
Richardson, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth (after 1800),
Scott (as poet), Johnson, Crabbe, and Cowper, then, afforded the more
solid literary nourishment of Jane Austen. She had studied the
essayists of Queen Anne's time and their emulators, and was not
unfamiliar with Fielding, and she did not neglect the ordinary books
that came from the circulating libraries of the day. "Mrs. Martin,"
she writes of a bookseller in her neighbourhood who had started such a
library, "as an inducement to subscribe tells me that her collection is
not to consist only of novels, but of every kind of literature, etc.
She might have spared this pretension to _our_ family, who {61} are
great novel-readers, and not ashamed of being so; but it was necessary,
I suppose, to the self-consequence of half her subscribers."
Unhappily, this "high-class" venture was a total failure.
The novels supplied by "Mrs. Martin" and others, forerunners of those
which now go forth from the Strand and Oxford Street, are frequently
referred to in Jane's letters, and some of them, if we are so disposed,
we can read at the British Museum. There was, for example, Sarah
Burney's _Clarentine_, which Jane and her mother read for the third
time (in 1807), and "are surprised to find how foolish it is ... full
of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties"; there was
_Self-Control_, a book "without anything of nature or probability," but
which Jane feared might be "too clever," and that she might find her
own work forestalled by it; there was the _Alphonsine_ of Madame de
Genlis, which "did not do. We were disgusted in twenty pages, as,
independent of a bad translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a
pen hitherto so pure"; and there was _Margiarna_, which the Austens
were reading in the winter of 1809, at {62} Southampton, and "like very
well indeed. We are just going to set off for Northumberland to be
shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there must be two or three sets of
victims already immured under a very fine villain."
About the same time Cassandra tells of some romance which the
Godmersham circle has been devouring, and Jane replies--"To set up
against your new novel, of which nobody ever heard before, and perhaps
never may again, we have got _Ida of Athens_, by Miss Owenson, which
must be very clever, because it was written, as the authoress says, in
three months. We have only read the preface yet, but her Irish girl
does not make me expect much. If the warmth of her language could
affect the body it might be worth reading in this weather."
We shall not find much criticism of books either in the novels or the
letters. There is a passage in one of "Aunt Jane's" letters to her
niece Anna, written in 1814, in which her point of view on one
important question of style is clearly expressed. Anna, probably
inspired by her aunt's example--for the authorship of _Sense and
Sensibility_ and _Pride and Prejudice_ had leaked out {63} in the
family in spite of all precaution--had written a novel herself, and had
sent the MS. to Jane for kindly consideration and advice. The result
was not wholly encouraging--
"Your Aunt C. (Cassandra) does not like desultory novels, and is rather
afraid yours will be too much so, that there will be too frequently a
change from one set of people to another, and that circumstances will
be introduced of apparent consequence which will lead to nothing. It
will not be so great an objection to me if it does. I allow much more
latitude than she does, and think nature and spirit cover many sins of
a wandering story, and people in general do not care so much about it
for your comfort.... I have scratched out the introduction between
Lord Portman and his brother and Mr. Griffin. A country surgeon (don't
tell Mr. C. Lyford) would not be introduced to men of their rank, and
when Mr. P. is first brought in, he would not be introduced as the
Honourable. That distinction is never mentioned at such times, at
least I believe not."
Of a later novel of Anna's, which Jane "read to your Aunt Cassandra in
our own room at night, while we undressed," she tells the girl that
"Devereux Forester's being ruined by his vanity is extremely good, but
I wish you would not let {64} him plunge into a 'vortex of
dissipation.' I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the
expression; it is such thorough novel slang, and so old that I dare say
Adam met with it in the first novel he opened...."
Mrs. Austen had said, and Jane agreed with her, that Anna had allowed a
married couple in the novel to be too long in returning a visit from
the Vicar's wife, and Jane had ventured to expunge, as "too familiar
and inelegant," the "Bless my heart" in which Sir Thomas, one of the
characters, indulged. Jane's own Emma might say "Good God!" when she
pleased, but Anna's Sir Thomas might not even bless his heart!
A last criticism on Anna's book is worth quoting for its direct bearing
on the critic's own method. "You describe a sweet place, but your
descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too
many particulars of right hand and left."
Jane's estimate of her own manner of work is modest enough. "The
little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a
brush as produces little effect after much labour," she says. {65}
With this phrase of her own as a text she has been called a
"miniaturist," but if authors and artists are to be compared, there is
quite as much of the selection and the richness of a Gainsborough in
her work as of the minuteness of a Metzu or a Meissonier.
In her reply to the amazing proposal of the librarian at Carlton House
that she should compose an historical romance founded on the records of
the Saxe-Coburg family, she writes, not without a touch of her gentle
satire--
"I am fully sensible that (such a romance) might be much more to the
purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in
country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance
than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious
romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were
indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at
myself or at any other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had
finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on
in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am
convinced that I should totally fail in any other."
Her limitations of subject are clear to her own mind. Even of the
"domestic life in villages" {66} she would only deal with the side
where the daily bread was provided out of income, not out of retail
profits or weekly wages. It is a suggestive fact, to which I have
already alluded, that she never even tried to draw a peasant's family.
Her heroines may, on the rarest occasions, call at a cottage to inquire
after a sick child or leave a charitable gift, but of the conditions
under which the labouring classes lived, during the hard times of the
French wars, we learn nothing at all from her writings. The nearest
approaches to such subjects are the account of the Prices' home at
Portsmouth (a sordid interior which has been held, I think not
unjustly, to be as vivid in its suggestion of impecuniosity and
discomfort as anything written by Zola), and the similar, but far less
effective, picture of the Watsons' family life.
Her literary style seems to be spontaneous, and so, in comparison with
that of "stylists," it certainly is. She had stored her mind with good
literature while still in her teens, and no doubt most of her limpid
sentences flowed freely from her pen. But the consistent absence of
superfluous epithets and other redundancies is evidence that she had
consciously formed an ideal of {67} composition, and that she thought
out the means of producing her effects is clear from several passages
in her letters. To her niece who addressed her as "Dear Miss Darcy,"
and wanted her to answer in that character, Jane replied--"Even had I
more time I should not feel at all sure of the sort of letter that Miss
D. would write." She had studied her art till she could analyze its
qualities, as we may see from a letter written from Chawton in 1813.
Mrs. Austen had been reading _Pride and Prejudice_ aloud to Jane and
Martha Lloyd (who lived with the Austens), and Jane tells Cassandra
that--
"Though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot
speak as they ought. Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough,
and well satisfied enough. The work is rather too light and bright and
sparkling, it wants shade--to be stretched out here and there ... an
essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of
Buonaparte, or something that would form a contrast, and bring the
reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of
the general style."
Happily she did not provide the conventional "shade," which would have
been on a par with {68} the "brown tree" that, according to Sir George
Beaumont, was an indispensable feature of every properly composed
landscape painting. Shade, however, did appear in several chapters of
_Persuasion_, which, for a certain suggestion of melancholy, stands
apart from the other novels, though not as markedly as _Northanger
Abbey_ stands apart for its exuberant frivolity.
Macaulay declared of Fanny Burney's later style that it was "the worst
that has ever been known among men." Jane Austen's style, in its happy
hours, is so admirably adapted to its purpose that, while we may not
call it "the best," a term which advertisement has rendered meaningless
as a standard of excellence, it has never been surpassed as a means to
a desired end. It seems trite to say that the first point to consider
in any question of style is the intended result, but it is a point so
frequently overlooked that much criticism about art and letters, as
about politics or agriculture, is vitiated by the hopeless effort to
set up an abstract ideal applicable to all cases, like a universal
watch-key.
The result for which Jane Austen worked can scarcely be put in
question. She was impelled to {69} make her little world live in
fiction, not precisely as she saw it and heard it, but as she could
most attractively present it to minds possessing the indispensable
modicum of humour, without which the charm is lost at least as nearly
as the charm of a Turner sunset by a person whose optic nerve is
irresponsive to the red rays. Apart from her prevailing humour, the
modesty of her style is a continual beauty. There is none of that
florid eloquence which depends more on sound than sense for its effect,
nor of that forcing of strange phrases which in these days so often
passes for literary excellence. There is no preciosity about her
books; the narrative is easy, the incidents are probable; the dialogue,
with few exceptions, is natural, the bright people being differentiated
from the dull by their talk, and not, as in most novels, by the
author's assurances. If Mr. Meredith was right when he declared that
"it is unwholesome for men and women to see themselves as they are, if
they are no better than they should be," there must be many
"unwholesome" pages in Jane Austen's work for the tolerably large class
to which he referred. Neither in real life nor in the life of her
books did she "suffer fools gladly," {70} and so far as the men of her
creation are concerned she is on the whole more successful in
representing the foolish than the wise. Her chief failure is in the
realization of such a young man as one of her heroines would have been
likely to admire. Most of the younger men are sketchily drawn, and we
who are men would fain believe that she did not understand the nature
of a man's heart, seeing that she never found one worth accepting.
Knightley and Bertram seem to have been favourites of hers, but they
are not lively people, nor sufficiently wanting in priggishness. The
liveliest of them all is Henry Tilney, whatever his qualities of mind.
The Jane Austen touch is charmingly varied, and it is felt in some of
its happy strokes in the talk between this mercurial young rector and
the girl whose early-budding affections he so speedily returns.
"'Have you been long in Bath, madam?'
"'About a week, sir,' replied Catherine, trying not to laugh.
"'Really!' with affected astonishment.
"'Why should you be surprised, sir?'
"' Why, indeed!' said he, in his natural tone; 'but some emotion must
appear to be raised by {71} your reply, and surprise is more easily
assumed, and not less reasonable, than any other.'"
This bit of dialogue recalls a remark in a letter written by Jane to
Cassandra: "Benjamin Portal is here. How charming that is! I do not
exactly know why, but the phrase followed so naturally that I could not
help putting it down."
Mr. Collins is one of the most finished of Jane's studies of men. He
comes near to the impossible at times, but she makes him a living
creature. The speech in which he offers his hand and advantages to his
cousin Elizabeth has often been quoted, and its charms can never fade.
Only a page of it is necessary to tempt the reader to turn--again or
for the first time--to _Pride and Prejudice_ in order that he may find
the rest of the inimitable scene--
"My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for
every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example
of matrimony in his parish; secondly, that I am convinced it will add
very greatly to my happiness; and, thirdly, which perhaps I ought to
have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and
recommendation of the very noble lady whom {72} I have the honour of
calling patroness. Twice has she condescended to give me her opinion
(unasked too!) on this subject; and it was but the very Saturday night
before I left Hunsford--between our pools at quadrille, while Mrs.
Jenkinson was arranging Miss de Bourgh's footstool--that she said, 'Mr.
Collins, you must marry. A clergyman like you must marry. Choose
properly, choose a gentlewoman for my sake, and for your own; let her
be an active, useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to
make a small income go a good way. This is my advice. Find such a
woman as soon as you can, bring her to Hunsford, and I will visit her.'
Allow me, by the way, to observe, my fair cousin, that I do not reckon
the notice and kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as among the least
of the advantages in my power to offer. You will find her manners
beyond anything I can describe; and your wit and vivacity, I think,
must be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence
and respect which her rank will inevitably excite."
The immediate consequences of Elizabeth's refusal are delightfully
imagined and described. The moment Mrs. Bennet hears of it, she rushes
to her husband's room--
"'You must come and make Lizzy marry Mr. Collins, for she vows she will
not have him; and {73} if you do not make haste he will change his mind
and not have _her_.'
"Mr. Bennet raised his eyes from his book as she entered, and fixed
them on her face with a calm unconcern, which was not in the least
altered by her communication.
"'I have not the pleasure of understanding you,' said he, when she had
finished her speech. 'Of what are you talking?'
"'Of Mr. Collins and Lizzy. Lizzy declares she will not have Mr.
Collins, and Mr. Collins begins to say that he will not have Lizzy.'
"'And what am I to do on the occasion? It seems a hopeless business.'
"'Speak to Lizzy about if yourself. Tell her that you insist upon her
marrying him.'
"'Let her be called down. She shall hear my opinion.'
"Mrs. Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to the
library.
"'Come here, child,' cried her father as she appeared. 'I have sent
for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has
made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?' Elizabeth replied that it
was. 'Very well--and this offer of marriage you have refused?'
"'I have, sir.'
"'Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your
accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?'
{74}
"'Yes, or I will never see her again.'
"'An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you
must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see
you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you
again if you _do_.'"
There is nothing "commonplace" about this. What matter that the
characters are only middle-class and "respectable," if they can afford
material for such excellent wit?