glad to take his guest into the drawing-room again, and when tea was
over, glad to invite him to read aloud to the ladies. Mr. Collins
readily assented, and a book was produced; but on beholding it (for
everything announced it to be from a circulating library), he started
back, and begging pardon, protested that he never read novels. Kitty
stared at him, and Lydia exclaimed. Other books were produced, and
after some deliberation he chose _Fordyce's Sermons_. Lydia gaped as
he opened the volume, and before he had, with very monotonous
solemnity, read three pages she interrupted him with--
"'Do you know, mamma, that my Uncle Phillips talks of turning away
Richard; and if he does, Colonel Forster will hire him? My aunt told
me {230} so herself on Saturday. I shall walk to Meryton to-morrow to
hear more about it, and to ask when Mr. Denny comes back from town.'
"Lydia was bid by her two eldest sisters to hold her tongue; but Mr.
Collins, much offended, laid aside his book, and said--
"'I have often observed how little young ladies are interested by books
of a serious stamp, though written solely for their benefit. It amazes
me, I confess; for certainly, there can be nothing so advantageous to
them as instruction. But I will no longer importune my young cousin.'
"Then turning to Mr. Bennet, he offered himself as his antagonist at
backgammon. Mr. Bennet accepted the challenge, observing that he acted
very wisely in leaving the girls to their own trifling amusements."
The mephistophelian delight of the father in the unconscious absurdity
of his sententious guest, the rudeness of the younger daughters, and
the attempts of the elder girls to enforce the observance of ordinary
good manners, could not well be realized with finer effect, and no
description of accessories would heighten it.
It is not only material accessories and necessaries, furniture, dress,
and so on that are slighted by Jane Austen. Incidents that are of
positive {231} value to her plan are not allowed to linger a moment
after they have served the turn. The adventure of Harriet Smith (in
_Emma_) with the gipsies, ending in her rescue by Frank Churchill,
fills just half a page. It would have filled a chapter in a novel by
Scott or Dickens. One possible reason for this brevity is clear
enough. The author knew little about gipsies, they were to her merely
low ruffians and drabs, horse-stealers and pilferers, and of their
fascination for the student of character she had no idea at all. There
were hundreds and hundreds of genuine Romany about the country in those
days. Borrow was not yet at work, and few people had taken the trouble
to discover what manner of mind the "Egyptians" possessed, and how they
spent their time when they were not robbing henroosts or swindling
housemaids. Scott felt something of the mysterious charm of this
ancient and nomadic race, but he was romantic, and romance, in Jane
Austen's way of thinking, was very nearly a synonym for absurdity. So
it is, therefore, that the gipsies in the Highbury lane appear for half
a page, speak no word that is reported, and then vanish from our ken.
The author implies that they hurried {232} away to avoid prosecution.
Perhaps she was almost as glad to see the last of them as were the
inhabitants of Highbury. Thus is a fine opportunity for a
"picturesque" scene thrown away. Undeveloped as it is, the adventure
stands absolutely alone in the novels as the sole occasion whereon any
of the characters has reason to fear violence at the hands of
ill-disposed persons. It was only in imagination that Catherine
Morland was carried off by masked men, though a spirited illustration
of Mr. Hugh Thomson's did once mislead a too hurried critic into
regarding the affair as an event in the heroine's life.
There are, in fact, very few digressions in these books. Fielding
"digressed" by whole chapters at a time, Sterne's digressions filled
more space than his tale in his one "novel." Jane Austen keeps to the
road, and leaves the by-lanes unexplored. It is a pleasant road, old,
and bordered here and there with attractive-looking houses into which
we may enter by her kindly introduction, but if we wish to go off to
that hamlet on the right, or that coppice on the left, we must go
alone. She will sit on a stile till we return to pursue the direct
route. It is to her {233} effort to avoid all but the essential
factors in achieving her object that the general absence of landscape
and topographical detail of all kinds in her work is to be attributed.
In the case of a Dickens, a Balzac, a Hardy or a Meredith, you can
constantly identify the places where the scenes are laid. In Lincoln's
Inn Fields you can watch Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows; at Rochester you
can see the very room where Mr. Pickwick slept; at Nemours you can gaze
at the house where The Minoret-Levraults (in _Ursule Mirouet_) lived;
at Woolbridge you can find the manor house where the unhappy Tess
passed her bridal night. Down in Surrey you can take a photograph of
the Crossways House which was almost the whole fortune of Diana, at
Seaford you can see the "Elba Hall" of _The House on the Beach_
sheltering beneath the downs, and as in these instances so in scores of
others. But in connection with the Austen novels, save for the London
streets and squares, there are only Bath and Lyme Regis and Portsmouth
where one can truly feel sure that such or such an incident in one or
other novel "occurred" on this very spot.
If, however, there is no special "Jane Austen {234} country" to be
traced out by the diligent seeker for visible associations, there are
scattered spots where her presence is still to be felt. At Steventon,
where the earlier works were produced, the house of the Austens no
longer stands, having given place long since to a rectory on the other
side of the valley, more convenient and comfortable than that wherein
the father wrote his sermons and the daughter her novels--sermons and
novels which at the time seemed equally likely to achieve enduring
fame. Only the well and the pump remain to mark the site. The
surroundings are not all new--how should they be in a thinly populated
parish? There are still farms and cottages that were old before Jane
was born. The church is in better trim, but, externally at least, it
is much the same.
Probably with scenery as with men and women Jane Austen did not usually
draw from models, and when she did, she gave the models their own
names. The one real bit of description of a place named in her work is
the account of the environs of Lyme Regis, which is so obviously
written from personal interest that some of her biographers have
supposed that her own {235} experiences during her visits there had
included a Captain Wentworth or at least a Captain Benwick.
"A very strange stranger it must be," she writes, "who does not see
charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it
better. The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high
grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet
retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among
the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide,
for sitting in unwearied contemplation; the woody varieties of the
cheerful village of Up Lyme; and, above all, Pinny, with its green
chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and
orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have
passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the
ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is
exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the
far-famed Isle of Wight--these places must be visited, and visited
again, to make the worth of Lyme understood."
This was quite an exceptional digression from the thoughts and
conversation of Jane Austen's characters. One of those letters which
Leslie Stephen and others have thought so "trivial," but {236} which
are so characteristic in their spirit, was written from Lyme by Jane to
Cassandra, on September 14, 1804--
"I continue quite well; in proof of which I have bathed again this
morning..... I endeavour, as far as I can, to supply your place, and
be useful and keep things in order. I detect dirt in the water
decanters, as fast as I can, and keep everything as it was under your
administration.... The ball last night was pleasant.... Nobody asked
me for the two first dances; the two next I danced with Mr. Crawford,
and had I chosen to stay longer might have danced with Mr. Granville
... or with a new odd-looking man who had been eyeing me for some time,
and at last, without any introduction, asked me if I meant to dance
again."
It is impossible to leave Lyme Regis without recalling how Tennyson,
when he was shown the place where the Duke of Monmouth was supposed to
have landed, cried: "Don't talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth! Show me
the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell!"
Jane's intimacy with places was chiefly confined to Steventon,
Godmersham, Chawton, Southampton, Bath, and their neighbourhood. It is
not a {237} day's walk or an hour's motoring from Steventon to Chawton,
where, after the long interval of comparative inactivity, the later
novels were "born." At Chawton, according to one of her later
biographers, the "cottage" where she lived and worked has disappeared.
This is happily not true. It is true that it is now turned to other
uses than that of sheltering a parson's widow and her daughters. It
has been divided internally, and now forms a couple of labourers'
cottages and a village club, where tired toilers who have never read a
line of the books that were written under that roof discuss the merits
and defects of the tobacco tax and the Old Age Pensions Act. Chawton
House itself shows little structural change, and the park is scarcely
altered since Jane walked across from the Cottage to take tea with her
relations at the great house.
At either of these villages, Steventon the birthplace of Jane herself
and of _Pride and Prejudice_ and _Mansfield Park_, and Chawton where
_Persuasion_ and _Emma_ came into being, you may find scenes which you
will associate with this or that story or incident, but nowhere are you
likely to feel the influence of locality more strongly in {238}
connection with either author or novels than at Godmersham, the home of
her brother Edward, where, until long after her death, her relations
dwelt amid their own broad acres. The place, with other property, came
to Edward Austen from Mr. and Mrs. Knight, who had adopted him, and
whose name he ultimately took. There is no more typically English seat
in the typically English county of Kent. The small sylvan village, the
old church above the Stour river, offer no special attractions for
tourists, and Godmersham House itself is one of the plainest even among
the country seats of the early Georgian age. Its one external charm is
its unpretentiousness. It has not even the huge classic portico on
which so many of the country houses of its period depend for
"impressiveness." Plain, commodious, well-placed, the house is lovely
for us only in that it sheltered for many a week, from year to year,
the author of _Pride and Prejudice_. It is just such a house as Sir
John Middleton filled with visitors at all seasons, or Mr. Darcy showed
to his future bride and her Uncle and Aunt Gardiner.
If the house itself is without external beauty, the park surrounding it
is delightful. The {239} sparkling river flows through the midst of
great elms and oaks beneath which mingled herds of deer, sheep, and
oxen browse in the peaceful security of the golden age. As you sit on
the low wall of the lichen-covered bridge you see nothing that can have
changed in character since Jane Austen sat there and thought over the
doings of her dear heroines. One can almost hear the rumble of the
barouche that brought her mother and herself from the coach at Ashford
to the Hall at Godmersham, and if that high-hung carriage were suddenly
to turn the corner beside the big elm near the gate one would scarcely
be astonished. This park and this house, this river, the old trees,
the thatched cottages, the lanes and brooks all speak of the days when
Bingley came for Jane Bennet, and Henry Tilney for Catherine Morland.
If there is anything in the influence of place, Godmersham was part
author of the novels. The spirit of Jane Austen abides in the
delicious air of this quiet and unspoilt valley, where, when the wind
blows strongly from the south-east, the salt of the sea-breeze mingles
with the perfumes of the grass and the wood smoke as pleasantly as the
Attic wit of {240} Jane Austen mingles with the sweetness of her
heroines and the thousand delights of her dialogue.
These are the chief country scenes of Jane's life. As to the towns, we
know more or less of her associations with Bath, Southampton, and
Winchester, as well as London. At Bath she used to stay in early youth
with her uncle and aunt, and she lived there for four years with her
parents. The fruits of her experience there may be enjoyed in
_Northanger Abbey_ and _Persuasion_, though her lack of the
topographical instinct is suggested by the absence of evident interest
in the buildings of Bath. We learn as much about the place from the
_Pickwick Papers_, which merely touch there on their way, or from the
allusions of the characters in _The Rivals_, where the events are of a
few days, as we do from chapters that cover long periods of residence
in one of the most beautiful, and still, in spite of the
disproportionate and architecturally discordant hotel, the least
injured cities of England. Souvenirs of the personal association of
Jane Austen with Bath are almost as plentiful as those of Johnson with
Fleet Street. The house in Sydney Place where the {241} Austens lived
during most of the time between Mr. Austen's resignation and his death
is the only one that bears a tablet to Jane's memory. But in Queen
Square, whence several of her letters are dated, in Gay Street, in the
Green Park, in the Paragon, the rooms she occupied with her relations
at one time or another remain very much as they were in her day, and
externally the buildings are unaltered, one and all being built of the
local stone which gives so notable a character to the Georgian
architecture of the city. In Camden Place where the Elliots rented
"the best house," in Pulteney Street where Catherine stayed with the
Allens, in Westgate Buildings where Anne cheered Mrs. Smith's lonely
days, there has been little change since _Northanger Abbey_ and
_Persuasion_ were written. There is probably no town in the world
associated with the work of a famous person of even so near a period
which has altered less in appearance than Bath since 1805.
At Southampton the mother and daughters lived, after the father's
death, in a house in that secluded part of the town which stands
between the High Street and the old walls above the {242} "Water."
There is a bit of those walls which abuts on the spot where the
Austens' house stood, and it is one of the places where we may feel
confident that we are walking where Jane often walked, and gazing out
over a scene which was familiar to her in almost all save the funnels
of the steam yachts and the distant view of the train on its way to
Bournemouth or to London.
In London itself there are many spots that will always recall Jane
Austen to her devoted friends and her lovers. In Henrietta Street
(Covent Garden), in Hans Place, in Cork Street, we know that she
herself stayed. Many of the characters in _Sense and Sensibility_--the
only novel in which we hear much of London--are associated with
familiar streets. Edward Ferrars stayed in Pall Mall, the Steele girls
in Bartlett's Buildings, Mrs. Jennings in Berkeley Street, the John
Dashwoods in Harley Street. The Gardiners (_Pride and Prejudice_)
lived in Gracechurch Street.
The day has not yet come when public bodies could be sufficiently
affected by imaginative literature to place memorials on the houses
where fictitious personages have been supposed to dwell. {243} In
Paris the memorial to Charlet is an admirable group of a grenadier and
a gamin--typical characters from his work, and a musketeer guards the
monument of Dumas. The gods forbid that any sculptor should be
commissioned to give us life-size figures of Emma, Elizabeth, Anne, and
Fanny to sit around a statue of Jane Austen. But when next the London
County Council contemplates the placing of plaques on the former
residences of departed worthies they might consider whether--of course
with the consent of the freeholder and the leaseholder--her name might
not be placed on the house in Henrietta Street, once her brother
Henry's home, where so many of her letters were written. She tells of
the convenient arrangement of its rooms for the comfort of herself and
her nieces, and from its door she went to the neighbouring church, or
the theatres, which were within a few minutes' walk. It is not likely
that any political prejudice would cause even the most advanced
Progressive on the Council to object to the name of so very mild a Tory
being thus honoured. As to the more probable objection that she did
not "reside" there, but was only a visitor, one may plead that as there
is {244} a plaque on a newly-erected tube station recalling the
"residence" of Mrs. Siddons, and that a tablet proclaims that Turner
"lived" in a house built thirty years after his death, there would be
no great straining of logic in admitting the claim of a house in which
Jane Austen did undoubtedly write, and sleep, and talk. The front was
cemented in the middle of the last century, and the ground-floor is now
used for business purposes, but otherwise the house is little changed
since the Austens were there.
{247}
VII
INFLUENCE IN LITERATURE
Jane Austen's genius ignored--Negative and positive instances--The
literary orchard--Jane's influence in English literature.
The author of a book bearing the title _Great English Novelists_,
published just ninety-one years after Jane Austen's death, does not
include her in his selection. He deals with eleven authors--Defoe,
Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Scott, Lytton, Disraeli,
Dickens, Thackeray, Meredith. The very fact that he stops short at
eleven, instead of making a round dozen, suggests that he really could
not think of any other novelist worthy to be credited with greatness.
It will be observed that all the team are men. Without quibbling as to
whether they are all "English," or all "great," or even all "novelists"
in the ordinary sense of the word, we may legitimately suppose that the
author is one of those to whom Jane Austen makes {248} no strong
appeal. The peculiarity of her position among English novelists could
not well be more pointedly emphasized than in the fact that while
Macaulay placed her next to Shakespeare as a painter of
character-studies, a critic should be found--and he is by no means
isolated--who can choose eleven great representatives of English
fiction without adding her as a twelfth. In the same week in which the
book just referred to was published, came a portfolio of twelve
photogravures entitled _Britain's Great Authors_. Scott, Thackeray,
Dickens, of course, were among them, and of right, but not Jane Austen.
Perhaps even more suggestive is the statement of a clever woman-writer
the other day that Jane Austen's novels are merely "memorials," books
which no gentleman's (or lady's) library should be without, but which
are for show rather than for use.
Her name may never be among those that are painted round the
reading-rooms of National Libraries, nor included by many
school-children in examination lists of eminent authors. Hers is too
delicate a product to attract the man or woman "in the street." There
is a bouquet about it that is lost on the palate which enjoys the
"strong" {249} fiction of the material phase through which humanity is
now passing--passing perhaps more briefly than most of us imagine.
It has been the endeavour of this book to show Jane Austen as she lives
in her writings, and to suggest some at least of the many directions in
which those writings may be explored, and thus, if so may be, to bring
new members into the large but comparatively restricted circle wherein
she is regarded, not always as the first of English novelists, but at
least as second to none in the quality of her work. Sappho enjoys
undying fame with only a few fragments of verse still to her credit,
Omar for his one poem transformed by another mind, Boccaccio for a
volume of short stories, Boswell for one biography, Thomas à Kempis for
one devotional manual. Sparsity of performance, it is evident, is no
bar to enduring fame. Jane Austen's work, indeed, was not sparse.
There are, undoubtedly, novelists who have passed the record of Balzac
with his forty novels and scores of short stories, but their books for
the most part suggest the interminable succession of poplars along so
many a high road of France. Some of the trees have more foliage than
others, some are {250} more green or more blue in tone, a little more
tortuous, or robust, but in spite of all trivial differences _plus ça
change plus c'est la même chose_. If this arboreal parallel may be
pursued, may we not compare the work of Jane Austen with a group of
apple-trees in a sunny corner of some vast orchard? There are eight
Austen trees in the literary orchard. Two of them are stunted and bear
a poor crop of a sort little better than crabapples. The other six are
of several kinds, but all of fine quality and producing delicious fruit
of varying sweetness. Countless thousands of novels have been
published since Jane Austen's were given to the world, and many of them
have been unseemly, and of evil influence. But the taste of countless
writers and readers has been sweetened by the fruit of her delightful
mind, of the passing of whose fragrant harvest through English
literature it is not too much to say, as Jane herself said of Anne
Elliot's walk through Bath: "It was almost enough to spread
purification and perfume all the way."
{251}
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
1811. _Sense and Sensibility_. [Completed in 1798. Commenced many
years earlier in the form of letters, under the title _Elinor and
Marianne_.]
1813. _Pride and Prejudice_. [Completed in 1797. Originally entitled
(in MS.) _First Impressions_.]
1814. _Mansfield Park_. [Written in 1811-14.]
1816. _Emma_. [Written in 1811-16.]
1818. _Northanger Abbey_ and _Persuasion_. [_Northanger Abbey_
(mostly written in 1798) was sold to a Bath bookseller for £10 in 1803.
He laid it aside, and it was bought back by Henry Austen, _at the same
price_, after _Sense and Sensibility_ and _Pride and Prejudice_ had
appeared. _Persuasion_, as originally completed (in 1816) had only
eleven chapters, but the author was not satisfied with Chapter X, and
replaced it by the present Chapters X and XI. The cancelled chapter is
included in Mr. Austen Leigh's memoir. It brings about the
re-engagement of Anne and Wentworth in a different, and certainly less
admirable, manner.]
{252}
1871. _Lady Susan_, _The Watsons_, and some extracts from the novel on
which Jane was at work until four months before her death. [These are
all included in Mr. Austen Leigh's book. The MS. of _Lady Susan_,
written before Jane was of age, was given by Cassandra Austen to her
niece Fanny (Lady Knatchbull), who consented to its publication. As
for the incomplete novel known as _The Watsons_, written about 1802,
Jane was not responsible for the naming of it, and had laid it aside
several years before _Mansfield Park_ was written. The work from which
she was compelled by illness to cease in March 1817 had not, in the
twelve chapters we possess, reached a point when its plan could be
foretold with reasonable confidence.]
1884. _Letters of Jane Austen_, edited by her great-nephew, the first
Lord Brabourne. [These, which, with few exceptions were addressed to
Cassandra Austen, belonged to Lady Knatchbull, to whom some of them
were written. Many of Jane's letters were destroyed by Cassandra as
being too private to pass into other hands.]
Mr. J. E. Austen Leigh's _Memoir_ of his aunt is not only to be highly
valued for its biographical details, but for its many anecdotes of Jane
Austen, and for the letters which fill a good many gaps in the other
published correspondence.
{253}