likely to make on the girls of Jane Austen would be the reverse of
Whately's. It would be that her chief defect in depicting woman's
character was that she almost invariably did force the reader to spin
from his own conjectures when the "mysteries of the heart" were the
subject of her pages. The truth is divided, I think, between the
Archbishop and the supposed modern critic. Jane's heroines are true
women, admirably portrayed, but they only represent a certain
proportion of their sex. It could never be suspected of Elizabeth, or
Elinor, {163} or Anne, or Fanny that there was Southern blood in her
veins. There might have been a few drops--no more--in Marianne's. The
feelings of the author are reflected in her most attractive characters.
She might have married, again and again, of that there can be small
doubt; and while for herself she shared Dorothy Osborne's opinion as to
the essentials of conjugal happiness, I fancy that she would also have
agreed with Dorothy's brother that "all passions have more of trouble
than satisfaction in them, and therefore they are happiest that have
least of them." That, indeed, as we have already seen, was very much
the fault that Miss Brontë found in her as a novelist.
Anne Elliot comes nearer than any of her fellow-heroines to Dorothy
Osborne's ideal of the changelessness of affection, the true union of
hearts, but, save for her involuntary tears at the Musgroves', she kept
her feelings under the most perfect control, and never, we may be sure,
tried to beat her convictions into the heads of her silly family, or
even of her faithful friend Lady Russell.
There were, we may fairly believe, not a few who would like to have
been Jane's chosen mate. {164} One such unhappy being seems, as we
read, to be the actor in the little bit of serious comedy related, with
lively exaggeration, in a letter written when she was twenty-five years
old. "Your unfortunate sister was betrayed last Thursday into a
situation of the utmost cruelty. I arrived at Ashe Park before the
party from Deane, and was shut up in the drawing-room with Mr. Holder
alone for ten minutes. I had some thoughts of insisting on the
housekeeper or Mary Corbett being sent for, and nothing could prevail
on me to move two steps from the door, on the lock of which I kept one
hand constantly fixed."
Elizabeth Bennet was not more uncomfortable when her mother took Kitty
up-stairs after breakfast in order that Mr. Collins might have what he
called "The honour of a private audience" with the elder girl. "Dear
ma'am," Elizabeth cried, "do not go. I beg you will not go. Mr.
Collins must excuse me. He can have nothing to say to me that anybody
need not hear. I am going away myself." But her mother's, "Lizzy, I
_insist_ upon your staying and hearing Mr. Collins," compelled her to
remain, with results for which we must ever be grateful to {165} Mrs.
Bennet. It is not clear, however, that Mr. Holder was a suitor for
Jane. We are left in doubt both as to his hopes and his demerits.
There is a little matter connected with the _Quarterly's_ two articles
in praise of Jane which is perhaps worth noting here. Gifford, who was
editor when both appeared, was so warm a supporter of the Prince Regent
that Hazlitt--one of Gifford's "beasts"--wrote in an open letter to
him: "When you damn an author, one knows that he is not a favourite at
Carlton House." Now the Prince is said to have been so fond of Jane
Austen's novels that he kept a set in each of his residences, and it is
unquestionable that, in consequence of a suggestion that was
"equivalent to a command," she dedicated Emma to him. "You will be
pleased to hear," she wrote on April 1, 1816, to John Murray the First,
who published the book, "that I have received the Prince's thanks for
the _handsome_ copy I sent him of 'Emma.' Whatever he may think of
_my_ share of the work, yours seems to have been quite right."
In the same letter she expresses her disappointment at the "total
omission of 'Mansfield Park'" {166} in the _Quarterly's_ review of her
work in the preceding autumn. As to that review, it is a curious fact
that until Lockhart's "Life of Scott" appeared, Whately, who wrote the
1821 article, was credited with the authorship of the earlier review,
and it is still to be found against his name in the British Museum
catalogue, not from the ignorance of the cataloguers, but because he
appears as author on the title-page of a reprint of the article issued
at Ahmedabad in 1889.
{169}
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.
It is a commonplace of those who refuse to recognize the claims of
woman to equal treatment in spheres of activity where man has long held
a monopoly, to ask what great thing has woman done in any walk of life?
One may talk in reply of Sappho, of Joan of Arc, of George Sand, of
George Eliot, of Florence Nightingale, and two or three others, and the
retort, if the greatness of these be admitted, is that they are the
exceptions that "prove" the rule. It is difficult, impossible perhaps,
to upset the man who denies that anything of "the greatest" in art, or
literature, or science has been achieved by a woman. The list {170} of
women who have left an abiding fame as poets, or novelists, or painters
is soon exhausted, and there is not a name that can, without reserve,
be placed among the Rembrandts and Turners, the Goethes and Miltons,
the Newtons and Darwins of mankind. Maybe this deficiency is largely
due to lack of opportunity. Since the gates were partly opened to
woman, within the lifetime of those who are still not old, she has done
enough to change the opinions of many who held that rocking the cradle
was a sufficiently active share in the ruling of the world for the sex
that produced the Maid of Orleans and the Lady with the Lamp. Such
justly conspicuous success as Madame Curie has attained in chemistry,
or Mrs. Garrett Anderson in medicine, or Mrs. Scharlieb in surgery, has
compelled the admission that even if woman were by nature unfitted to
reach the highest levels of intellectual achievement, she at least
could not be excluded from the learned professions on the ground of
inadequate mental equipment.
"Nature's old Salic law," said Huxley, "will not be repealed, and no
change of dynasty will be effected." Jane Austen, at any rate, did not
{171} desire to repeal it. She was among the most feminine of the
women writers who have left an enduring reputation. It is something of
a paradox, therefore, that the quality on which her fame chiefly rests
is one which is rare among women, and in which most of those women who
have attained success in literature have been conspicuously
lacking--satirical humour. Apart from physical disabilities, want of
humour is woman's heaviest handicap in the conflict of life. Humour is
the principal ingredient of the philosophic temperament. Woman has
courage in adversity, she can suffer intensely without complaint, but
she rarely possesses the power of laughing at her own misfortunes.
It has been said, and the saying might not easily be gainsaid, that
none of the great jokes of the world was made by a woman. There are
perhaps fifty great jokes--spoken jokes, of course, are meant, not
those generally humourless things known as "practical jokes"--and the
good stories that are told and received as novelties are, save in the
rarest instances, merely new editions of some wheeze which was already
ancient when it was told to a circle of mead-drinkers round a fire
{172} the smoke whereof--or some of it--escaped through the roof. It
is, there is reason to believe, no mere figure of speech that
originally most of the basic jokes were told round the galley fire of
the Ark during the long dark evenings after the animals had been fed,
the decks swept down, and the women had retired to their quarters.
Thus may we account for the otherwise inexplicably large proportion of
sea-faring and animal tales among the mirth-provoking yarns of man. A
woman might never make a joke, and yet have a keen sense of humour,
while, on the other hand, she might make many jokes, and have no sense
of humour at all. Most of the jokes that have any element of freshness
are alive with fun, and not with humour. Who is more humourless than
the notoriously funny man?
Jane Austen is not often funny and seldom makes jokes in her novels.
Her humour is of the essential kind, which is so nearly akin to wit
that it is often almost identical with it. Wit and humour, after all
definitions, are brothers who might be taken for one another by those
who do not notice that the one has colder hands than the other.
{173}
If you want to laugh heartily you must not trust to Jane's novels for a
stimulant. Her characters laugh but little among themselves, and are
the cause of intellectual joy rather than of physical contractions in
those who read about them.
When, after a re-reading of the novels, we sit and think over their
delights, many are the admirable bits of character-drawing that come to
mind. After we have thought of the heroines, the "good" people, in the
common meaning of the word, do not come back to us so readily as those
who, if not "bad," are decidedly faulty. The Westons, the Gardiners,
the Harvilles, the Crofts, Lady Russell, the John Knightleys, we recall
when we jog our memories. After Elizabeth, and Emma, and Anne, it is
the appallingly tactless Mrs. Bennet, the odiously snobbish Mrs. Elton,
the race-proud Lady Catherine, the entirely selfish Mr. Collins, the
lazy and thoughtless Lady Bertram, the mean and tyrannical Mrs. Norris,
the fatuous Sir Walter Elliot, these and their like, who throng into
view. No writer--not even Thackeray--has realized the female snob more
knowingly than Jane Austen in Mrs. Elton, whose {174} constant
reference of all matters of taste to the standard presented by "Maple
Grove" and the "barouche-landau" renders her as diverting to us as she
was insufferable to Emma Woodhouse. A woman like this, who is never
betrayed into an unselfish action or a noble aspiration, is happily not
a common object in real life, but there are enough of Mrs. Elton's
great-granddaughters about the world to exculpate Jane from the charge
of undue exaggeration. Emma herself has been called a snob, and only
the other day was described as "perpetually acting with bad taste."
But Emma's disdain for Robert Martin, and her opinion of the
degradation of marrying a governess, were due to prejudices of
convention, which thought--under Knightley's influence--dispelled.
Mrs. Elton was a snob at heart, who revelled in her own vulgarity of
instinct.
If the snob is portrayed to perfection in Mrs. Elton, the
valetudinarian is no less happily presented in Mr. Woodhouse--"My dear
Emma, suppose we all have a little gruel"--and for a picture of an
empty-headed, frivolous wife married to a rational and bearish husband,
the Palmers, in _Sense and Sensibility_, have few equals. As for {175}
Miss Bates, she is without a serious rival as an inconsequential
babbler, and though we may be, and ought to be, as angry with Emma for
her rudeness at the Box Hill picnic as was Mr. Knightley himself, we
must admit that years of Miss Bates's disjoined garrulity were some
set-off against that gross breach of charity and good manners. Lady
Catherine de Bourgh has been placed by some critical readers among Jane
Austen's obvious caricatures. Is she not an entirely credible, if
happily rare, type? She is seen in a strong light in her attempt to
bully Elizabeth into a promise not to marry Darcy--
"'With regard to the resentment of his family,' says Elizabeth at last,
'or the indignation of the world, if the former _were_ excited by his
marrying me, it would not give me one moment's concern--and the world
in general would have too much sense to join in the scorn.'
"'And this is your real opinion!' replies Lady Catherine. 'This is
your final resolve! Very well. I shall now know how to act. Do not
imagine, Miss Bennet, that your ambition will ever be gratified. I
came to try you. I hoped to find you reasonable; but, depend upon it,
I will carry my point.'
"In this manner Lady Catherine talked on till {176} they were at the
door of the carriage, when, turning hastily round, she added--
"'I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet. I send no compliments to your
mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously
displeased.'
"Elizabeth made no answer, and without attempting to persuade her
ladyship to return into the house, walked quietly into it herself."
Thus ends one of the great scenes of Jane Austen, a bit of duologue
which gives us the natures and capacities of two remarkable people, a
charming, clear-headed, self-reliant girl, and a blustering, stupidly
proud old woman.
Sir Walter Elliot is the companion figure, more highly-coloured, of
Lady Catherine. This man, a vain fop who has not sense enough to
govern his own affairs, regards professional men as contemptible, if
necessary, adjuncts of society, and, at a time when only the splendid
services of our sailors had saved England from disaster he thus babbles
about the navy--
"Yes; it is in two points offensive to me, I have two strong grounds of
objection to it. First, as being the means of bringing persons of
obscure {177} birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours
which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of; and, secondly, as
it cuts up a man's youth and vigour most horribly; a sailor grows old
sooner than any other man. I have observed it all my life. A man is
in greater danger in the navy of being insulted by the rise of one
whose father his father might have disdained to speak to, and of
becoming prematurely an object of disgust himself, than in any other
line. One day last spring, in town, I was in company with two men,
striking instances of what I am talking of,--Lord St. Ives, whose
father we all know to have been a country curate, without bread to eat:
I was to give place to Lord St. Ives,--and a certain Admiral Baldwin,
the most deplorable-looking personage you can imagine; his face the
colour of mahogany, rough and rugged to the last degree; all lines and
wrinkles, nine grey hairs of a side, and nothing but a dab of powder at
top. 'In the name of heaven, who is that old fellow?' said I to a
friend of mine who was standing near (Sir Basil Morley). 'Old fellow!'
cried Sir Basil, 'it is Admiral Baldwin. What do you take his age to
be?' 'Sixty,' said I, 'or perhaps sixty-two.' 'Forty,' replied Sir
Basil, 'forty, and no more.' Picture to yourselves my amazement: I
shall not easily forget Admiral Baldwin. I never saw quite so wretched
an example of what a sea-faring life can do; but to a degree, I know it
is the same with them all: they are all knocked about, and {178}
exposed to every climate, and every weather, till they are not fit to
be seen. It is a pity they are not knocked on the head at once, before
they reach Admiral Baldwin's age."
There have been such fools as Sir Walter Elliot, but as a type he is
overdrawn. Jane loved the navy so much that her anger with those who
disparaged it gave her pen speed and added colour to the ink.
Anne's cousin William Elliot, whose attentions to her help to revive
Wentworth's affection, is more closely studied by the author than any
of her "heroes."
"Everything united in him; good understanding, correct opinions,
knowledge of the world, and a warm heart. He had strong feelings of
family attachment and family honour, without pride or weakness; he
lived with the liberality of a man of fortune, without display; he
judged for himself in everything essential, without defying public
opinion in any point of worldly decorum. He was steady, observant,
moderate, candid; never run away with by spirits or by selfishness,
which fancied itself strong feeling; and yet, with a sensibility to
what was amiable and lovely, and a value for all the felicities of
domestic {179} life, which characters of fancied enthusiasm and violent
agitation seldom really possess."
Anne, however, was not long in discovering grave defects in this
outwardly model person. She saw that while he was
"rational, discreet, polished, he was not open. There never was any
burst of feeling, any warmth of indignation or delight, at the evil or
good of others. This, to Anne, was a decided imperfection. Her early
impressions were incurable. She prized the frank, the open-hearted,
the eager character beyond all others. Warmth and enthusiasm did
captivate her still. She felt that she could so much more depend upon
the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a
hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose
tongue never slipped.
"Mr. Elliot was too generally agreeable. Various as were the tempers
in her father's house, he pleased them all. He endured too well, stood
too well with everybody."
Those who accuse Jane Austen of hardness have sometimes relied on her
treatment of Mrs. Musgrove's sorrow over her ne'er-do-well son, long
after his death, to support this charge. Anne and Wentworth, whose
mutual liking was just {180} beginning to bloom again, were "actually
on the same sofa, for Mrs. Musgrove had most readily made room for him;
they were divided only by Mrs. Musgrove. It was no insignificant
barrier, indeed. Mrs. Musgrove was of a comfortable, substantial size,
infinitely more fitted by nature to express good cheer and good humour
than tenderness and sentiment; and while the agitations of Anne's
slender form, and pensive face, may be considered as very completely
screened, Captain Wentworth should be allowed some credit for the
self-command with which he attended to her large fat sighings over the
destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for." And then the
author stops in her narrative to observe that "Personal size and mental
sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large, bulky figure
has as good a right to be in deep affliction as the most graceful set
of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming
conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain--which taste cannot
tolerate--which ridicule will seize."
She thus bluntly expresses what almost every satirist merely implies,
but she underrates her own powers. The ordinary writer might or might
not {181} be able to describe the grief of "a large, bulky figure"
without offence to the ordinary "taste." Genius could assuredly do
this thing. Shakespeare, with whom Whately, Macaulay and Tennyson
compared Jane Austen, made one of his greatest characters "fat and
scant of breath," but when Hamlet says to his friend, "Thou woulds't
not think how ill all's here about my heart," we do not find it
"ridiculous" that this "too, too solid flesh" should be joined with a
mind weighted with such poignant sorrow. In any case, whether she
mistrusted her own powers, or wanted Mrs. Musgrove to be slightly
ridiculous, which seems more likely, Jane did not here strive to
achieve what she pointedly tells us it would be beyond reason to expect.
The character of Emma is described with unusual fulness, but the
description is placed in the mouth of George Knightley, her candid
admirer, who was perhaps not guiltless of the fault which Fainall
attributed to Mirabell, of being "too discerning in the failings of his
mistress." Mrs. Weston ("Miss Taylor that was") has said that Emma
means to read with Harriet Smith--
{182}
"'Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years
old,' replies Mr. Knightley. 'I have seen a great many lists of her
drawing-up, at various times, of books that she meant to read regularly
through--and very good lists they were, very well chosen, and very
neatly arranged--sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other
rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen--I remember thinking it
did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time, and I
dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done
with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never
submit to anything requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of
the fancy to the understanding. Where Miss Taylor failed to stimulate,
I may safely affirm that Harriet Smith will do nothing. You never
could persuade her to read half so much as you wished. You know you
could not.'
"'I dare say,' replied Mrs. Weston, smiling, 'that I thought so _then_;
but since we have parted, I can never remember Emma's omitting to do
anything I wished.'
"'There is hardly any desiring to refresh such a memory as _that_,'
said Mr. Knightley, feelingly; and for a moment or two he had done.
'But I,' he soon added, 'who have had no such charm thrown over my
senses, must still see, hear, and remember. Emma is spoiled by being
the cleverest of her family. At ten years old she had the {183}
misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister
at seventeen. She was always quick and assured; Isabella slow and
diffident. And ever since she was twelve, Emma has been mistress of
the house and of you all. In her mother she lost the only person able
to cope with her.'"
An unhappy condition of most of Jane's heroines is that they are of
necessity ashamed of their nearest relations. Anne Elliot felt this
trouble keenly, when at length she and Wentworth decided to take the
happiness which she had refused years before--
"Anne, satisfied at a very early period of Lady Russell's meaning to
love Captain Wentworth as she ought, had no other alloy to the
happiness of her prospects than what arose from the consciousness of
having no relations to bestow on him which a man of sense could value.
There she felt her own inferiority keenly. The disproportion in their
fortune was nothing; it did not give her a moment's regret; but to have
no family to receive and estimate him properly, nothing of
respectability, of harmony, of good will, to offer in return for all
the worth and all the prompt welcome which met her in his brothers and
sisters, was a source of as lively pain as her mind could {184} well be
sensible of under circumstances of otherwise strong felicity."
One can readily understand her regret. Her father was a fool, her
elder sister Elizabeth a slave of convention, with few rational ideas
of her own, and her younger sister a neurotic egotist, who grudged to
others the simplest pleasures if she did not feel able or disposed to
share them.
Fanny Price was ashamed of the slovenly home at Portsmouth to which
Henry Crawford so inopportunely penetrated. Elizabeth Bennet's mother
was, of course, more nearly "impossible" even than Lady Catherine had
so pointedly suggested, for her defects were far worse than those of
obscure birth. This terrible woman, who kept her elder daughters
constantly on the rack by her fatuous chatter, who always said the
wrong thing, who had no desire for her children's welfare but to marry
them to anybody, with money if possible, or without it rather than not
at all, made one of her usual quick changes when she heard the
surprising news of Elizabeth's engagement to Darcy--
{185}
"She began at length to recover, to fidget about in her chair, get up,
sit down again, wonder, and bless herself.
"'Good gracious! Lord bless me! only think! dear me! Mr. Darcy! Who
would have thought it! And it is really true? Oh, my sweetest Lizzy!
how rich and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what
carriages you will have! Jane's is nothing to it--nothing at all. I
am so pleased--so happy! Such a charming man!--so handsome! so
tall--Oh, my dear Lizzy! pray apologize for my having disliked him so
much before. I hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear Lizzy! A house
in town! Everything that is charming! Three daughters married! Ten
thousand a-year! Oh, Lord! what will become of me? I shall go
distracted.'
"This was enough to prove that her approbation need not be doubted; and
Elizabeth, rejoicing that such an effusion was heard only by herself,
soon went away. But before she had been three minutes in her own room,
her mother followed her.
"'My dearest child,' she cried, 'I can think of nothing else! Ten
thousand a-year, and very likely more! 'Tis as good as a lord! And a
special license. You must and shall be married by a special license.
But, my dearest love, tell me what dish Mr. Darcy is particularly fond
of, that I may have it to-morrow.'
"This was a sad omen of what her mother's behaviour to the gentleman
himself might be; and {186} Elizabeth found that, though in the certain
possession of his warmest affection, and secure of her relations'
consent, there was still something to be wished for."