there is an even more complete dearth of men or women distinguished for
their individual gifts or achievements. Sir John Middleton fills his
too hospitable mansion with an endless supply of guests who keep his
maid-servants hard at work in preparing spare bedrooms, that were
occupied the night before, for fresh arrivals in the afternoon. He
hardly allows {120} time to speed the parting guests before he must
turn to welcome their successors. But no statesman, or traveller, or
professor, not so much as a rising politician or a poet, crosses those
ever-open doors. They do not come, for one reason--and it seems a
sufficient one--because they scarcely exist for the author, or if they
do, the people who eat mutton and drink port and Madeira around the
mahogany tables at Netherfield, or Barton, or Uppercross, know and care
nothing whatever about them and their performances. "Each thinks his
little set mankind" is as true of the characters in Jane Austen's books
as in a sense it is true, one is sometimes inclined to think, of their
author. The Morlands, and Musgroves, and Woodhouses, and Bennets have
never travelled, unless an occasional visit to London may count as
travel. They have been into some neighbouring county, they have been
perchance to Bath. They have not so much as been to Paris. Emma had
never seen the sea. Twenty years earlier it would have been different.
Darcy at any rate would have known something of France had he been
twenty years older. From the outbreak of the Revolution till the first
exile of {121} Napoleon, France was not a likely place for any but the
most adventurous of squires to choose for a pleasure-trip, nor, after
the rise of Napoleon's star, were the accessible parts of the Continent
very attractive for any but soldiers of fortune and spies. Thus, not
only are the conversations which Jane Austen offers devoid of any such
elements of interest as are introduced, for example, by the appearance
of Byron in _Venetia_, or of Shelley in _Nightmare Abbey_, but the
opportunities of lively talk offered by reminiscences of foreign
manners and scenes are not allowed to the author. On the other hand,
we do not meet with any of those egotistical travellers who, as a
contemporary of Jane Austen's declared, "If you introduce the name of a
river or a hill, instantly deluge you with the _Rhine_, or make you
dizzy with the height of _Mont Blanc_."
In any case, however much the fact may be due to want of opportunities
for enlarging her knowledge, Jane, literature apart, took very little
interest in anything outside the social and family life of her own
class in the country. Her published correspondence has been described
as "trivial" (as her novels have been, for that is what {122} Madame de
Staël meant by "_vulgaire_," and not "vulgar," as Sir James Mackintosh
and others have supposed), and, in comparison with such contemporary
letters as Byron's or Lamb's, her accounts of her dances and her
bonnets are certainly weak tea for serious readers. They are, however,
exactly such letters as she might have been expected to write. Her
satire gives them an agreeable tartness which somehow suggests the
syllabubs which were so common a feature of the supper-tables of her
time. It is all, one may reasonably suppose, like the common talk of
the drawing-room in a manor-house on an afternoon when the men are
hunting or shooting--the choice of a winter frock, the prospects of a
ball at some territorial magnate's, the errors of cooks and housemaids,
the fatuity of this young man who is so rich, and the silliness of that
young woman who is so pretty--enlivened by Jane's wit.
The dances, whether full-dress balls or merely "small and early hops"
were among the favourite pleasures of Jane Austen. If you have read
her letters you will feel that she is present when Fanny Price dances
so prettily at Mansfield Park, or when Darcy declines to dance with
Elizabeth because though she is "tolerable," she is {123} "not handsome
enough" to tempt him. "I danced twice with Warren last night, and once
with Mr. Charles Watkins, and to my inexpressible astonishment I
entirely escaped John Lyford. I was forced to fight hard for it,
however. We had a very good supper, and the greenhouse was illuminated
in a very elegant manner." Such bits of news are common at all periods
of Jane's correspondence. For example: "The ball on Thursday was a
very small one indeed, hardly so large as an Oxford smack;" and again,
"Our ball on Thursday was a very poor one, only eight couple, and but
twenty-three people in the room"--just as it was when they got up the
scratch dance at the Bertrams, "the thought only of the afternoon,
built on the late acquisition of a violin player in the servants' hall."
On another occasion, at a public hall at the county town--
"The Portsmouths, Dorchesters, Boltons, Portals, and Clerks were there,
and all the meaner and more usual etc., etcs. There was a scarcity of
men in general, and a still greater scarcity of any that were good for
much. I danced nine dances out of ten--five with Stephen Terry, T.
Chute, and James Digweed, and four with {124} Catherine. There was
commonly a couple of ladies standing up together, but not often any so
amiable as ourselves."
Jane, from all we know of her, would almost as soon dance with another
girl as with a man--it was the dancing she loved, and watching the
behaviour of others, their flirtations, their love-making, their airs
and affectations.
Emma Woodhouse, the day after a dance at Highbury, might have sent to
her sister in Brunswick Square just such an account as Jane Austen to
her sister at Godmersham--
"There were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very
handsome." One of the girls seemed to her: "A queer animal with a
white neck. Mrs. Warren, I was constrained to think a very fine young
woman, which I much regret. She danced away with great activity. Her
husband is ugly enough, uglier even than his cousin John; but he does
not look so _very_ old. The Miss Maitlands are both prettyish, very
like Anne, with brown skins, large dark eyes, and a good deal of nose.
The General has got the gout, and Mrs. Maitland the jaundice."
A ball to which Jane Austen went in 1808--her {125} thirty-fourth
year--was "rather more amusing" than she expected. "The melancholy
part was to see so many dozen young women standing by without partners,
and each of them with two ugly naked shoulders. It was the same room
in which we danced fifteen years ago. I thought it all over, and in
spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that
I was quite as happy now as then. We paid an additional shilling for
our tea." This letter is but one of many bits of evidence that no
memory of a Captain Wentworth troubled Jane's own life. The "shame"
such a woman could have felt in being "older" one can scarcely imagine,
and the context shows it was not seriously felt.
The most pathetic dancing incident in the novels was the impromptu
affair at Uppercross (in _Persuasion_), where Anne saw her old lover
apparently losing his heart elsewhere. "The evening ended with
dancing. On its being proposed, Anne offered her services, as usual;
and though her eyes would sometimes fill with tears as she sat at the
instrument, she was extremely glad to be employed, and desired nothing
in return but to be unobserved." She did not know that Wentworth, who
was making so merry with {126} the Musgrove girls, was faithful all the
time to his old love--herself. We might doubt whether the author knew
it until later on in the story, were it not that the idea of ending a
novel without the marriage of the principal maiden to the man she liked
best would have been entirely foreign to Jane Austen's method. So
Frederick Wentworth danced with the Musgroves, and Anne played for
their delight.
The dance most fully described was that given by the Westons at the
"Crown," when Mr. Elton behaved so abominably to Harriet Smith, and Mr.
Knightley showed himself a _preux chevalier_ and saved Emma's lovely
_protégée_ from the humiliation of being the only "wallflower." In
describing how Elizabeth at Netherfield, Catherine at Bath, Harriet at
Highbury, and Fanny at Mansfield Park idly watched the dancing because
no man had asked them to join it, Jane, pretty girl and excellent
dancer as she was, spoke from personal experience. Once at any rate,
when "in the pride of youth and beauty," she was able to write, after a
dance at a neighbouring house--
"I do not think I was very much in request. People were rather apt not
to ask me till they {127} could not help it; one's consequence, you
know, varies so much at times without any particular reason. There was
one gentleman, an officer of the Cheshire, a very good-looking young
man, who, I was told, wanted very much to be introduced to me; but as
he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it,
we never could bring it about."
She would not, if she could help it, dance with bad partners. "One of
my gayest actions," she writes after a ball, "was sitting down two
dances in preference to having Lord Bolton's eldest son for my partner,
who danced too ill to be endured."
It is in connection with one of the Westons' parties that Mr. Woodhouse
makes his sage observations on the eternal question of ventilation.
When Frank Churchill says that the fresh air difficulty will be settled
by their dancing in a large room, so that the windows need not be
opened, because "it is that dreadful habit of opening the windows,
letting in cold air upon heated bodies, which does the mischief," Mr.
Woodhouse cries--
"'Open the windows! but surely, Mr. Churchill, nobody would think of
opening the windows at Randalls. Nobody could be so imprudent! I
never heard of such a thing. Dancing with open windows! I am sure
neither your father nor {128} Mrs. Weston (poor Miss Taylor that was)
would suffer it.'
"'Ah! sir--but a thoughtless young person will sometimes step behind a
window-curtain, and throw up a sash, without its being suspected. I
have often known it done myself.'
"'Have you, indeed, sir? Bless me! I never could have supposed it.
But I live out of the world, and am often astonished at what I hear.'"
The conversation of this valetudinarian quietist is always diverting.
He suggests that Emma should leave the Coles' party before it is half
over, as it is so bad to be up late. "But, my dear sir," cried Mr.
Weston, "if Emma comes away early it will be breaking up the party."
"And no great harm if it does," said Mr. Woodhouse. "The sooner every
party breaks up the better."
Advancing maturity did not do much to spoil Jane's love of dances.
From Southampton, in 1809, she wrote: "Your silence on the subject of
our ball makes me suppose your curiosity too great for words. We were
very well entertained, and could have stayed longer but for the arrival
of my list shoes to convey me home, and I did not like to keep them
waiting in the cold."
[Illustration: A letter of Jane Austen's]
{129}
If Jane tells Cassandra about her own dances, she is ever ready in
return for news of Cassandra's. "I shall be extremely anxious to hear
the event of your ball, and shall hope to receive so long and minute an
account of every particular that I shall be tired of reading it.... We
were at a ball on Saturday I assure you. We dined at Goodnestone and
in the evening danced two country dances and the Boulangeries." This
French dance, by the way, was on the unwritten programme at Mr.
Bingley's ball, in _Pride and Prejudice_. It seems to have had its
birth in the Revolution, when the bakers, men and women together, kept
themselves warm by joining hands and dancing up and down the streets.
After Jane Fairfax had sung herself hoarse at the Coles' party--
"The proposal of dancing--originating nobody exactly knew where--was so
effectually promoted by Mr. and Mrs. Cole that everything was rapidly
clearing away, to give proper space. Mrs. Weston, capital in her
country dances, was seated, and beginning an irresistible waltz; and
Frank Churchill, coming up with most becoming gallantry to Emma, had
secured her hand, and led her up to the top, (where) she led off the
dance with genuine spirit and enjoyment."
{130}
The waltz was a novelty still in those days, and seems here to be
classed as a country dance. It had been imported from Germany, where
Mozart had done much to forward its triumph, after Jane Austen had
written her earlier novels, and I cannot remember any other reference
to it in her work. It was at first considered an "improper" dance, and
one need not be surprised that a generation which had danced nothing
more intimate than the "boulangeries" was at first a little flustered
by the new fashion. Sheridan, watching the dancers in a ball-room,
repeated the following lines of his own composition, which aptly
suggest the contrast between the old dancing and the new as it struck
the eyes of our great-grand-aunts about the time when Emma danced at
the "Crown" and Jane Austen at Goodnestone.
"With tranquil step, and timid, downcast glance,
Behold the well-paired couple now advance.
In such sweet posture our first parents moved,
While, hand in hand, through Eden's bowers they roved,
Ere yet the Devil, with promise fine and false,
Turn'd their poor heads, and taught them how to waltz."
Little wonder, when a waltz was regarded as forbidden fruit, if Edmund
Bertram, Fanny, and Sir Thomas were shocked at the very idea of
play-acting by the family and guests at Mansfield Park. {131} Not that
there were wanting plenty of quiet souls who were in nowise personally
distressed at the "impropriety" of the waltz on their own account, just
as, in the other matter of amateur theatricals, and the choice of a
play, when Lady Bertram asked her children not to "act anything
improper," it was not because she had any personal objection to offer,
but because "Sir Thomas would not like it."
The Bertrams' ill-fated theatricals, and the waltz which Mrs. Weston
played, serve to emphasize the place which Jane Austen fills as an
historian of the transition from the formal prudery of the sceptical
eighteenth century to the broader liberties of the scientific
nineteenth. "What is become of all the shyness in the world?" she asks
her sister in 1807; "shyness and the sweating sickness have given way
to confidence and paralytic complaints." Morals change but little as
compared with _moeurs_. The girls who act in private theatricals every
winter and dance twenty waltzes a night half the year round are no whit
less virtuous than their great-grandmothers who were shocked at the
waltz, and caught cold in clothes which were so thin that, as a close
observer has recorded, you could "see the gleam of their {132}
garter-buckles" through the silks and kerseymeres as they danced, and
altogether so suitable for a classical revival that a contemporary poet
was moved to utter the quatrain--
"When dressed for the evening the girls now-a-days,
Scarce an atom of dress on them leave;
Nor blame them, for what is an evening dress
But a dress that is suited to Eve."
Thus the mother of mankind is accused by one poet of having danced the
first waltz, and held responsible by another for the airy fashions of
the Récamier period.
One of the principal differences of etiquette, we may note before
passing on, between the customs of the ball-room a century ago and now,
was that in the days when John Lyford was eluded with so much
difficulty a girl danced two successive dances with the same partner as
a matter of course, so that neither an imaginary John Thorpe nor a real
John Lyford could be got rid of by the promise of one dance.
The scraps from the letters, given on the last few pages, help us to
realize how clearly Jane Austen's own life is at times reflected in her
books.
{135}
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_.
"The moral lessons of this lady's novels," wrote Archbishop Whately in
his _Quarterly_ article of 1821, "though clearly and impressively
conveyed, are not offensively put forward, but spring incidentally from
the circumstances of the story." So inoffensively, indeed, are they
offered to our notice, that Dr. Whately himself seems to have been
unable to discover them at all. "On the whole," writes the Archbishop,
"Miss Austin's (_sic_) works may safely be recommended, not only as
among the most unexceptionable of their class, but as combining, in an
eminent degree, instruction with amusement, though without the direct
effort {136} at the former, of which we have complained, as sometimes
defeating its object."
The most obvious "moral" of Jane Austen's novels is that if you are a
heroine you need not trouble yourself about your future. You are
certain to marry a worthy man with an income sufficient for a
comfortable existence. He may be endowed with something less than a
thousand a year, like Edward Ferrars, with a couple of thousand like
Captain Wentworth, or with the ten thousand a year which made Darcy
appear so admirable to Mrs. Bennet. In any case you will not have to
eat bread-and-scrape or go without a fire in your bedroom. The
Country-house Comedy of Jane Austen is full of morals if you are in
need of them, but it was not written to improve you, only to amuse
you--and its maker. If you must have a clear moral for each story,
after the manner of tracts, you may take them thus. _Pride and
Prejudice_ conveys the useful lesson that the person you most dislike
in one month may be the one you will very sensibly give your affection
to in the next; _Sense and Sensibility_ that when the bad man falls
into the pit he has dug for himself, the good man comes by his own;
_Emma_ that the {137} man whose society is most necessary to a woman's
quiet contentment is the man she ought to marry; _Mansfield Park_ that
a simple, unaffected girl who gains the second place in a man's
affections may win the prize through the disqualification of her more
brilliant rival; _Persuasion_ that nothing is more likely to revive an
old passion than to see its object warmly admired by some other
eligible party; _Northanger Abbey_ that a tuft-hunting father may be
induced to receive a daughter-in-law of no importance by the kindly
influence of a son-in-law of superior rank. As for _Lady Susan_, the
moral of that unpleasing story is that if a worldly _mater pulchra_ is
the rival in love of an ingenuous _filia pulchrior_ she will probably
lose the battle after much suffering on either side; and from _The
Watsons_ we may see that if a girl is educated above her family she
will find it hard to be happy beside the domestic hearth. All these
are plain workable morals. Whether the author of the novels would have
endorsed them we cannot certainly know, but it is more than probable
she would not.
We need not suppose that Jane Austen was ignorant of the coarseness of
conversation, the {138} hard-drinking, the wild gambling, the moral
laxity of a large section of society that are so frequently exhibited
in the records of the age, in spite of the improvement in manners. But
we can hardly help laughing at the objection taken to her novels even
by some of her contemporaries, that they were "indelicate"! The
"indelicacy" was usually found in the views of marriage held and
expressed by the heroines and their families. The love-affairs of
these country maidens were not often, we must admit, such as to steal
away their beauty sleep or spoil their appetites for breakfast. Mrs.
Jennings' kindly endeavour to cure a girl's disappointment in love by a
variety of sweetmeats and olives, and a good fire, was perhaps not
wholly unjustified by experience. In those days, when no profession
save that of governess was open to women, when nursing the sick was
regarded as an occupation specially suitable for those of a low class,
when no door opened from the drawing-room on to the professional stage,
and when the very idea of a "female" as secretary to a man of affairs
or of business would have been condemned as "improper," marriage was
undoubtedly viewed by most people as the only aim {139} of a young
woman, "the pleasantest preservative from want," as Charlotte Lucas
regarded it, and, moreover, the average age of brides was much lower
than it is now-a-days. To avoid being a governess by attracting the
admiration of a man who could afford a wife was the hope, at least, of
most poorly endowed girls, and even if matrimony is not viewed with so
much sentiment and reserve by Jane Austen's heroines as by the
excessively squeamish Evelina, we may be inclined to prefer the
"indelicacy" of Jane Austen to the elaborate, delicacy of Fanny Burney.
Scott himself, by an ingenious paradox, has been accused--as a
novelist--of immorality, and _Quentin Durward_ in particular described
as "one of the most immoral novels that has even been written," because
its romance expresses nothing. The interest a boy takes in its
romantic passages "depends on the fact that he dreams himself to be in
similar circumstances; he must treat the novel subjectively, and it is
the subjective use of the imagination which does all the damage. It is
in reading such books as this that a bad habit of mind is begun, and
_Quentin Durward_ is more immoral for a boy of fourteen than a
translation of the most {140} shockingly indecent French novel." Well
may the anonymous writer of this unexpected criticism add: "There are
paradoxes to be met everywhere, and most of all in the question of
morality." This particular kind of immorality has not yet, so far as I
know, been charged against Jane Austen. She cannot be justly accused
of writing romance which "expresses nothing," but she certainly leaves
plenty of opportunity for young readers to exercise their imaginations,
and thus begin a "bad habit of mind."
The view of marriage as a profession, with or without ardent affection,
is not the only thing that has shocked the delicacy of many of Jane
Austen's readers. Serious objection has been taken to her introduction
of episodes of an "improper" nature. How is the charge supported?
Lydia Bennet, a vulgar, badly brought-up girl still in her teens,
infatuated with the red coats of the militia officers, insists on going
away with Wickham, and lives with him as his mistress until, by the
generous aid of Darcy, and the determination of the Gardiners--her
uncle and aunt--"a marriage is arranged" and does "shortly take place."
This episode, say the stern critics, was (1) unnecessary to the plot,
{141} and (2) if it was necessary, it is too much insisted on and
developed. That it is an essential part of the little plot, worked in
to exhibit the best side of Darcy's character, which before has only
been seen in its least attractive light, seems to me obvious, and I
agree with Professor Saintsbury's opinion that it brings about the
_dénouement_ with complete propriety. Lydia's entire indifference to
the moral aspect of her conduct is and was unusual in a girl of sixteen
and of her class, but her character from first to last is consistently
drawn, and the contrast between the selfishness of Wickham and Lydia,
who care nothing for any one's happiness except their own, and not even
for each other's, and the sympathy of heart and variety of temperament
which bring Elizabeth and Darcy together is admirably drawn.
Then we are asked to be shocked at the illustration of the bad
character and selfish cruelty of Willoughby given to Elinor Dashwood by
the very worthy and very dull Colonel Brandon in _Sense and
Sensibility_. It is a painful story. Willoughby, the faithless lover
of Marianne Dashwood, had seduced an impressionable girl whom Brandon,
out of affection for the memory of her {142} mother, herself ruined by
a scoundrel, had practically adopted, and whom such scandal-mongers as
Mrs. Jennings declared to be the Colonel's own child. "Why drag in
this nasty story?" ask the objectors, and above all, "why allow the
Colonel to pour it into the ears of a young girl like Elinor?" That it
comes unfortunately from Brandon, who is a rival--hopeless as it had
seemed--of Willoughby for Marianne's affection, and that in the
middle-class society of to-day a well-bred man would not tell such a
tale to a girl if he could find any other means of achieving an
imperative object is undeniable.