Austen's work assuredly is "commonplace." No novelist was ever less
troubled in the search for names. She merely took those of people she
had heard of or met, preferring the common to the unusual. Bennet,
Dashwood, Elliot, Price, Woodhouse--names that the modern "popular"
novelist would reject at sight, served her turn, a Darcy or a Tilney
being her highest flights in nomenclature. As for the Christian names,
they are of the most ordinary and are used over and over again. In
_Sense and Sensibility_, for example, three of the prominent characters
are named John--John Dashwood, John Middleton, and John Willoughby.
There are two {75} Catherines in _Pride and Prejudice_. Elizabeths,
Fannys, Annes, Marys, Henrys, Edwards, Roberts, "fill the bills," and
such a name as Frank Churchill seems recondite. It is much the same in
the letters, the truth being that the Gwladyses, and Evadnes, and
Marmadukes of those days were very rare, and almost unknown in rural
society. The burden which her sister Cassandra bore must have
strengthened Jane's determination that her heroes and heroines should
not have unusual names, and so we have our Elinors and Elizabeths, and
Fannys, with their Edwards and Edmunds, and Henrys. The Darcys are
almost the only exceptions that try the rule; "Fitzwilliam" and
"Georgiana" are more in the style of the ordinary novel of "high life."
So much for names. How are the men and women who bear them
"introduced" to us? When a Colonel Newcome, or an Alfred Jingle, or a
Sylvain Pons comes upon the scene, we hear a good deal about his
personal appearance, his manner of dress, his bearing, and those who
introduce him have a huge circle of men and women to bring before us
with similar formalities. Jane Austen, like a casual hostess at a
modern {76} dance, leaves us, as often as not, to make acquaintance in
any way we can. Scott, with his wealth of character-studies among high
and middle and low, his kings and cavaliers and covenanters and
crofters, was the most generous giver of types among Jane Austen's
contemporaries; Maria Edgeworth in depicting the gentry and peasantry
of Ireland, and John Galt the small shop-keepers and their customers in
the Scottish country-towns, managed to present us to a large circle of
new acquaintances, of various classes and occupations. Jane had no use
for characters, or centres of social life, that required to be
specially described for a particular purpose. Only in one of her
novels (_Sense and Sensibility_) is the busy life of London made the
subject of any but the most casual description, and even then it is but
the transference of the country people to town, and of the two or three
towns-people back to their London houses from their country visits that
is effected. (The general life of the metropolis, its theatres, parks,
and bustle are left, to all intent, unnoticed. Yet, as we know from
many passages in her letters, Jane during her visits was a keen
spectator of the pageantry of life in a city which, she {77} jestingly
declared, played havoc with her character. "Here I am once more in
this scene of dissipation and vice," she writes from Cork Street in
August 1796, "and I begin already to find my morals corrupted." And in
the next month she sends this little message to Mr. Austen: "My father
will be so good as to fetch home his prodigal daughter from town, I
hope, unless he wishes me to walk the hospitals, enter at the Temple,
or mount guard at St. James'." She was not "prodigal"--save in gloves
and ribbons--but she enjoyed the delights of the country-cousin in
town. She went very often to the play, so often at times as to be
weary of it. _The Hypocrite_ (Bickerstaff's "alteration" of Cibber's
"adaptation" of _Tartuffe_) "well entertained" her, Dowton and Mathews
being the chief actors; and she saw Liston, Miss Stephens, Miss
O'Neill, and Kean at the outset of his fame. "The Clandestine
Marriage" was a favourite piece, and on one occasion she notes that her
nieces, whom she sometimes took to the theatre, "revelled last night in
Don Juan, whom we left in hell at half-past eleven." Such joys,
however, did not move her mind enough to seduce {78} her from the
country as a source of inspiration for her work.
"_All_ lives lived out of London are mistakes more or less
grievous--but mistakes," said Sydney Smith, adapting, consciously or
not, the saying of Mascarille to the _Précieuses_: "Pour moi, Je tiens
que hors de Paris, il n'y a point de salut pour les honnetes gens."
The life of Jane Austen, whose humour the author of the _Plymley
Letters_, the father and uncle of a hundred diverting anecdotes, so
greatly enjoyed, may serve to show the weakness of such unreserved
generalization. Her subjects were found in the restful backwaters of
life, not in the crowded centres where mankind is more and more
bewildered by the failure of wisdom to keep pace with the advance of
knowledge.
It is one of Jane's qualities as a writer that she shows little
hospitality to the stock phrases of ordinary people. Lord Chesterfield
told his son: "If, instead of saying that tastes are different, and
that every man has his own peculiar one, you should let off a proverb,
and say, that 'What is one man's meat is another man's poison.' ...
everybody would be persuaded that you had {79} never kept company with
anybody above footmen and housemaids." Proverbial philosophy finds
little encouragement from Jane, who places it in the mouths of her
least agreeable characters, and one may believe, after reading her
books and her letters, that she agrees with her own Marianne Dashwood,
who, when Sir John Middleton has dared to suggest that she will be
"setting her cap" at Willoughby, warmly replies: "That is an
expression, Sir John, which I particularly dislike. I abhor every
commonplace phrase by which wit is intended; and 'setting one's cap' at
a man, or 'making a conquest,' are the most odious of all. Their
tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever
be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity." The
offending Sir John "did not much understand this reproof," but he
"laughed as heartily as if he did." Elizabeth Bennet's use of the
saying, "Keep your breath to cool your porridge," gives us a worse
shock than it can have given to Darcy, so unexpected is it from the
mouth of a Jane Austen heroine. When one of Cassandra's letters had
diverted Jane "beyond moderation," and she added: "I could die of {80}
laughter at it," she felt the banality of the phrase as keenly as
Marianne would have done, and saved herself with "as they used to say
at school."
Whatever the words and phrases she employed, it can never be held that
she "spoke well" according to the test proposed by Catherine Morland
when she said to Henry Tilney, "I cannot speak well enough to be
unintelligible," a remark which Mr. Tilney hailed with delight as "an
excellent satire on modern language." Its origin may be found in that
first volume of _The Mirror_ which Catherine's mother brought
down-stairs for her edification, where we are told that "many great
personages contrive to be unintelligible in order to be respected."
A peculiarity of Jane Austen's vocabulary and manner is her fondness
for negatives in "un," such words as "unabsurd," "unpretty,"
"unrepulsable," "unfastidious," "untoward," and "unexceptionable"--a
pet fancy of hers, which occurs, I am told, at least eight times in
_Emma_ alone--being as common in her novels as "halidome" and "minion"
in the older romances of Wardour Street. Some day, perhaps, a lost
novel of hers, written during the apparently idle years {81} of her
residence at Bath, will be identified by the prevalence of "uns" in its
text.
In clarity of meaning her style is usually of the purest, and there is
reason to think that her few obscurities are as often due to
carelessness as to defective art. Not that she was exempt from all the
weaknesses that she discovers for our amusement in the generality of
her sex. Henry Tilney's appreciation of women as letter-writers can
hardly have been imagined without at least a moment's reflection by the
author over her own achievements--
"'I have sometimes thought,' says Catherine, doubtfully, 'whether
ladies _do_ write so much better letters than gentlemen. That is, I
should not think the superiority was always on our side.'
"'As far as I have had opportunity of judging,' replies Tilney, 'it
appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is
faultless, except in three particulars.'
"'And what are they?'
"'A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a
very frequent ignorance of grammar.'
"'Upon my word, I need not have been afraid of disclaiming the
compliment! You do not think too highly of us in that way.'
{82}
"'I should no more lay it down as a general rule that women write
better letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw
better landscapes. In every power, of which taste is the foundation,
excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.'"
Deficiency of subject has not been charged against Jane's published
letters, but they have often been charged with deficiency of serious
interest. Her works certainly do exhibit an occasional looseness of
grammar, mostly due to bad punctuation. The faulty construction of
Lucy's letters (_Sense and Sensibility_) is noted by the author, but
while Jane would not have been likely to regard "Sincerely wish you
happy in your choice" as a proper way of beginning a sentence, her own
delinquencies with respect to commas are sometimes no less grave than
those of Mrs. Robert Ferrars. She would have felt no serious sympathy
with Cyrano's declaration concerning his literary compositions--
"... Mon sang se coagule
En pensant qu'on y peut changer une virgule."
Her blood was too cool to be frozen by the printer's fancies in
punctuation.
{83}
In an old number of the _Cambridge Observer_ the curious student may
find some suggested emendations of Jane Austen's text by Mr. A. W.
Verrall, many of them being concerned with what are probably printers'
errors. Those which deal with punctuation need not reflect on the
printer as prime offender. The author was a woman. Mr. Verrall's
ingenious suggestion that when Jane Austen is made to say that William
Price's "direct holidays" might justly be given to his friends at
Mansfield Park (his own family seeing him frequently at Portsmouth,
where his ship was lying), she really wrote "derelict holidays," has
little to commend it, "direct" so evidently, I think, being used to
differentiate his actual leave from his ordinary leisure hours when on
service. But there are two emendations, typical of many which might be
suggested (Mr. Verrall has probably noted them for the edition which he
ought to undertake in time for the centenary), which are entirely
acceptable. Fanny Price is made to say to Mr. Rushworth, on the
occasion when Maria Bertram and Crawford gave that unfortunate person
the slip in his own garden, "They desired me to stay; my {84} cousin
Maria charged me to say that you would find them at that knoll, or
thereabouts." Mr. Verrall justly observes that no one had desired
Fanny to stay, and she would be the last girl to utter "an irrelevant
falsehood." He holds that "she really did on this occasion, for
kindness' sake, say something 'not quite true,'" and it was: "They
desired me to say--my cousin Maria charged me to say, that you would
find them at that knoll, or thereabouts."
Again, when in describing the discussion over Mrs. Weston's proposed
dance, Jane Austen is made to say (in _Emma_), "The want of proper
families in the place, and the conviction that none beyond the place
and its immediate environs could be attempted to attend, were
mentioned," the author's words were, in Mr. Verrall's opinion, "tempted
to attend." Like Shakespeare's, the MSS. of Jane Austen's masterpieces
are to seek, so that what she wrote we cannot prove. The probability
that in these two cases, as in others, the author omitted to notice in
proof the errors of the printer is more likely, on the whole, than that
her pen had slipped badly, and that her "copy" had never been carefully
read over. She {85} cared little for such slips, however, as we know
from a letter written after _Pride and Prejudice_ was published,
wherein she says: "There are a few typical errors, and a 'said he' or
'said she' would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear,
but 'I do not write for such dull elves,' as have not a great deal of
ingenuity themselves." "Typical," of course, is here used in its
obsolete sense of "typographical."
The negative bond of union referred to above between Jane Austen and
the only English writer whom some of her eminent admirers have allowed
to take precedence of her--that the MSS. of both have
disappeared--suggests the passing reflection that in these days when
Shakespeare is not allowed to hold the title to his plays without
challenge, when Anne and Emily Brontë are accused of being (so far as
the public is concerned) mere pseudonyms of their sister Charlotte,
when George Henry Lewes has been given the credit for George Eliot's
novels, and the speeches of eminent statesmen are said to be written by
their wives, it is rather surprising that no one in search of a
striking subject for a magazine article has attacked the claims of Jane
Austen to a place among English {86} authors. There is no evidence in
the memoirs of her time that any distinguished person ever found
himself in her company, her name did not appear on the title-pages of
any books, she was almost unknown outside a small provincial circle,
and in that circle no one seems to have had any idea that there was
anything specially remarkable about her. Is it likely that such an
obscure little body should have written such admirable books? Is it
not much more likely that they were the work of Madame d'Arblay, or
that in these peaceful compositions Mrs. Radcliffe found rest and
recreation after the fearful strain on her delicate nervous system
involved in the production of her "_èpouvantable_" melodramas? Jane
Austen lays claim to some of the novels in her letters, it is true,
but, since Ben Jonson's references to Shakespeare, and all other
contemporary evidence in favour of the Stratford actor's authorship of
the plays have been explained away to the complete satisfaction of
those who dispute his claims, it would be no very difficult task to
persuade a number of earnest souls that Jane Austen's letters are not
really evidence of her authorship of the novels. As for her nearest
relations, they were {87} not in the real secret. The secret they are
supposed to have kept during her life was that she wrote the novels,
but if so, where are the MSS.? Why did not her admiring brothers
treasure those most precious relics? Two of her MSS. (in addition to
the opening chapters of her final effort in fiction) her family did, as
a fact, preserve, those of _Lady Susan_ and _The Watsons_, and these
(here italic type becomes necessary) _are so inferior to the six novels
acknowledged, soon after her death, as hers_, that it is easy (if we
like) to find it _difficult to believe that they are from the same
pen_! The real secret was that she did not write those six novels.
This fascinating theory is freely offered to whomsoever it may please
to follow it up.
We gain many vivid glimpses of Jane Austen's views of life in her
novels, and _Northanger Abbey_ holds a place apart from the others, not
only for its many pages of burlesque, but as the vehicle by which so
many of the author's reflections are conveyed, in a bright wrapping, to
her appreciative readers. Let me give one or two examples--
"The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already
set forth by the capital pen {88} of a sister author; and to her
treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that
though, to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in
females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a
portion of them too reasonable, and too well-informed themselves, to
desire anything more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not
know her own advantages--did not know that a good-looking girl, with an
affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting
a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward."
The sister author is Fanny Burney. The opinion of men, the "trifling"
or the "reasonable," is Jane Austen's. In Henry Tilney's remarks upon
Catherine's extraordinary fears concerning his father's conduct to Mrs.
Tilney we may discover something of Jane's view of the general
condition of society in her time.
"Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you
have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the
country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English:
that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense
of the probable, your own observation of {89} what is passing around
you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws
connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a
country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a
footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary
spies; and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest
Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"
Of Jane Austen as humourist there is no need to write specifically at
any length. Almost every extract given from her novels, whatever the
point to be illustrated, shows her in that capacity. It is impossible
for long to separate her humour from the rest of her qualities. Yet
there are people who see no humour in her, and actually like her novels
in spite of their "seriousness "!
An American author, Mr. Oscar Adams, wrote a book about her some years
ago in order "to place her before the world as the winsome, delightful
woman that she really was, and thus to dispel the unattractive, not to
say forbidding, mental picture that so many have formed of her." Who
were these "many" people? Evidently they existed (either without or
within the author's own circle) or there would have been no reason {90}
to write a book for their conversion. They were probably those worthy
persons--we have all met a few of them ourselves--who read _Emma_, and
_Pride and Prejudice_, and the rest, without noticing that a malicious
little sprite is for ever peeping between the lines. Imagine a reader
who regards all Mr. Bennet's remarks as sober statements of considered
opinion, and you will understand how Jane Austen might seem formidable.
Though she is never so ruthless to her characters as Mr. Bennet is to
his wife, Jane is herself a member of his family. Perhaps "ruthless"
is the wrong word. You might apply it to a boy who throws pebbles at a
donkey, but if the object of his attack was a rhinoceros, the boy would
suffer more than the pachyderm. To the slings and arrows of her
husband's outrageous humour Mrs. Bennet was less sensible than was
Gulliver to the darts of the Lilliputians. Gulliver did feel a
pricking sensation, whereas Mrs. Bennet was merely annoyed that Mr.
Bennet did not always agree with her mood of the moment. In his
critical introduction to _Pride and Prejudice_ Professor Saintsbury
forcibly says, in reply to those who resent the presence of such a
husband as Mr. Bennet, that {91} Mrs. Bennet was "a quite irreclaimable
fool; and unless he had shot her or himself there was no way out of it
for a man of sense and spirit but the ironic." The most unpleasant
aspect of Mr. Bennet's sarcasms is not that they hurt his wife, which
they could not, but that they were heard by his five daughters, three
of whom at least were more or less able to understand them.
Jane Austen the novelist, then, may truly be "forbidding" to readers
who take her _au pied de la lettre_. Such readers are in the position
of Catherine Morland listening to Henry Tilney's imaginary account of
the antiquities and mysteries of Northanger Abbey. She went there and
painfully discovered the truth, while they can no more hope to discover
it than a man with one eye can hope to see things as they appear to his
fellows who have two. Still, he is a king among the blind, and the
readers who find pleasure in Jane Austen as an entirely serious author
are to be counted happy as compared with those who cannot read her at
all.
It has been said by Mr. Goldwin Smith that there is no philosophy
beneath the surface of Jane Austen's novels "for profound scrutiny to
bring {92} to light," her characters typifying nothing, because "their
doings and sayings are familiar and commonplace. Her genius is shown
in making the familiar and commonplace intensely interesting and
amusing." Such justification as may be discovered for the charge that
the subjects of the novels are commonplace is chiefly negative in kind.
It is not that we may find in real life innumerable people as
distinctive and entertaining as the principal characters of these
stories, but that Jane does not introduce us to dramatically unusual
scenes or persons. There are no houses like Dotheboys Hall or
Ravenswood Tower, no incidents like the flight of Jos Sedley from
Brussels or the arrest of Vautrin, no strange creatures like Mr.
Rochester or Jonas Chuzzlewit, no scenes like those in Fagin's kitchen
or Shirley's mill. She was immediately followed by a humourist whose
scenes and characters are as unusual as hers were familiar. He is
almost unknown to the great fiction-devouring public, and little read
in comparison even with Jane Austen, with whom he has some strong
affinities as well as antipathies. Thomas Love Peacock was never, so
happily inspired--or so happy perhaps--as when he was "ironing" the
{93} insincerity or the unreasonable prejudice of the "well-to-do"
class. There is, among the parsons of Jane Austen's creating, none who
is more gloriously diverting than Dr. Ffolliot in _Crotchet Castle_,
and it is pleasant to imagine Mr. Collins as curate to that militant
theologian. The talk of the young women in Peacock's modern novels is
better "informed" and much less natural than that of Elizabeth Bennet,
or Emma, or Anne, and as for the men, while Mr. Tilney or Mr. Darcy
might not have found it difficult to hold their own with most of the
lovers in Peacock's novels, his intellectuals--Milestone, McQueedy, and
the rest--would have found no one to refute their arguments among the
company at Netherfield or at Mansfield Park. Peacock allows his
satirical hobby-horse to run wild over the bramble-covered desert of
British prejudice, while Jane Austen never leaves go of the rein. The
result is that while he frequently makes us laugh at the absurdities of
his Scythrops and Chainmails, whose performances we know to be
burlesque, she makes us chuckle by her silver-shod satire of the class
which she had studied from childhood. There are some who read Jane
Austen and cannot read {94} Peacock, and the reverse is also true.
Those who can read both are never likely to be in want of pleasure on
winter evenings so long as mind and eyes are left.
It is certain that no one familiar with either author could mistake a
page written by one of them for a page by the other. Jane Austen's
people, in spite of the humour with which the atmosphere is charged,
are always possible--except, some of her most intimate admirers say,
for Mr. Collins--while Peacock was never to be deterred from breaking
through the fence which borders the pathway of probability. Only such
readers as the prelate who declined to believe some of the incidents in
_Gulliver's Travels_ could be expected to regard _Melincourt_ or
_Nightmare Abbey_ as veracious narratives. For all that Peacock, whose
first novel, _Headlong Hall_, appeared in the year (1816) in which Jane
Austen's last (published) work was done, was her immediate successor as
a satirist of the follies and foibles of English men and women, and he
was succeeded in turn by the splendid Thackeray, whose most obvious
difference from Jane Austen lies in his frequent indulgence in
sentimental reflections.
{95}
Jane was amused by the suggestions for improving her work, or for the
plots of fresh novels, given to her from time to time, and among the
papers found after her death was one endorsed "Plan of a novel
according to hints from various quarters," the names of some of these
human "quarters" being given in the margin. There were to be a
"faultless" heroine and her "faultless" father driven from place to
place over Europe by the vile arts of a "totally unprincipled and
heartless young man, desperately in love with the heroine, and pursuing
her with unrelenting passion." Wherever she went somebody fell in love
with her, and she received frequent offers of marriage, which she
referred to her father, who was "exceedingly angry that he should not
be the first applied to." The "anti-hero" again and again carried her
off, and she was "now and then starved to death," but was always
rescued either by her father or the hero! For even the mildest
varieties of the plots thus burlesqued Jane had no use, unless to laugh
at them.
{99}
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.