The amusing parlour-game of Jane Austen topography is always being
played somewhere. A few years ago there was a correspondence in the
_Literary Supplement_ about the precise position of Emma’s Highbury on
the map. Some Austenites voted for Esher, others for Cobham, others
again for Bookham. There has been another correspondence about Mansfield
Park. Lady Vaux of Harrowden “identifies” it with Easton Neston, near
Towcester. Sir Francis Darwin and the Master of Downing are for Easton
in Huntingdonshire. People have consulted Paterson’s Roads about it. Mr.
Mackinnon, K.C., points out that it must have been about four miles north
of Northampton. But I like him best when he says, “I do not suppose any
actual park was in Jane Austen’s mind.” _Brigadier, vous avez raison!_
I do not suppose any actual place was in Jane Austen’s mind when she
assigned her personages a home or a lodging. You might as well try to fix
the number of the house in Gracechurch Street where Elizabeth’s uncle
lived. Are we not shown the “real” Old Curiosity Shop? And the “real”
Bleak House? And Juliet’s tomb at Verona? And the exact point of the
Cobb where Louisa Musgrove fell?
It is easy to see why Jane Austen lends herself more readily than most
writers to this topographical game. She was very fond of topographical
_colour_, giving not only real place-names to the neighbourhood of the
fictitious homes, but exact distances in miles. It was so many miles
from Highbury to Kingston market-place, and so many to Box Hill. Yet she
was always vague about the exact spot from which these distances were
calculated. For there her imagination had its home, it was her private
Paradise of Dainty Devices; she wanted a free hand there, unhampered by
maps, road books, and other intrusions from the actual world. In fact,
she did with real places just what Scott, say, did with historical
people, kept them to surround the imaginary centre of the tale. You
can “identify” Charles Edward, but not Waverley. You can “identify”
Nottingham, but not Mansfield Park.
It is a mercy that Jane Austen never describes houses—never describes
them, I mean, with the minute (and tedious) particularity of a Balzac—or
the topographical game would have been supplemented by an architectural
one, and we should have had the “real” Mansfield Park pointed out to us
from its description, like Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. Indeed,
she never, in the modern sense, describes anything, never indulges in
description for its own sake. She never even expatiated on the beauties
of nature, taking them for granted and, indeed, on at least one famous
occasion—when strawberries were being picked while the apple trees were
still in bloom at Donwell Abbey—rather mixing them up. Her descriptions
always had a practical purpose. If it rained in Bath, it was in order
that Anne might, or might not, meet Captain Wentworth. We know that Sir
Thomas’s “own dear room” at Mansfield Park was next to the billiard-room,
because the novelist wanted us to know how he came plump upon the ranting
Mr. Yates. But that detail, thank goodness, won’t enable us to “identify”
Mansfield Park.
Doesn’t it argue a rather matter-of-fact frame of mind—I say it with
all respect to the correspondents of the _Literary Supplement_—this
persistent tendency to “identify” the imaginary with the actual, the
geographical, the historical? There is a notable instance of it in the
Letters of Henry James. The novelist had described in “The Bostonians”
a certain veteran philanthropist, “Miss Birdseye.” Forthwith all Boston
identified the imaginary Miss Birdseye with a real Miss Peabody. “I am
quite appalled,” writes Henry James to his brother William, “by your note
in which you assault me on the subject of my having painted a ‘portrait
from life’ of Miss Peabody! I was in some measure prepared for it by
Lowell’s (as I found the other day) taking it for granted that she had
been my model, and an allusion to the same effect in a note from aunt
Kate. Still, I didn’t expect the charge to come from you. I hold that I
have done nothing to deserve it.... Miss Birdseye was conceived entirely
from my moral consciousness, like every other person I have ever drawn.”
It is odd that a man like William James, a professed student of the
human mind and its workings, should have made such a mistake. I remember
a saying attributed, years ago, to Jowett about the two brothers: one,
he remarked, was a writer of fiction and the other a psychologist, and
the fiction was all psychology and the psychology all fiction. Anyhow,
I think if any one had written to Jane Austen to tax her with Highbury
being Esher or Mansfield Park Easton Neston, she would have been able to
reply that they were conceived entirely from her moral consciousness.
And I fancy she would have smiled at her little trick of giving the
exact mileage from her imaginary centre to real places having “sold” so
many worthy people. Very likely she would have brought the topographical
game into the Hartfield family circle, as a suitable alternative for Mr.
Elton’s enigmas, charades, conundrums, and polite puzzles, or for Mr.
Woodhouse’s “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid,” which made him think of
poor Isabella—who was very near being christened Catherine, after her
grandmamma.
The truth, surely, is that this place-hunting, this seeking to “identify”
the imaginary with the actual map-marked spot, is only a part of the
larger misconception of imaginative work—the misconception which leads
to a perpetual search for the “originals” of an author’s personages,
especially when these personages have a full, vivid life of their
own. Jane Austen has often been compared to Shakespeare, ever since
Macaulay set the fashion. Well, it is naturally upon Shakespeare that
this misconception has wreaked its worst. Commentators have gravely
presented us with the “original” of Falstaff, of Sir Toby Belch, of
Dogberry—nay, of Iago. Surely, the only “originals” of these people were
Shakespeare himself? What were they but certain Shakespearean moods,
humours, intimate experiences, temptations felt, but resisted, impulses
controlled in actual life but allowed free play in imaginative reverie?
No one that I know of has been foolish enough to charge Jane Austen with
“copying” any of her characters from actual individuals, but, if you are
in quest of “identifications,” is it not possible to “identify” many of
them, the women at any rate—for, of course, her women bear the stamp
of authentic reality much more plainly than her men—is it not possible
to identify them with sides, tendencies, moods of Jane Austen herself?
Here, I know, I am at variance with a distinguished authority, from whom
it is always rash to differ. Professor Raleigh says:—“Sympathy with her
characters she frequently has, identity never. Not in the high-spirited
Elizabeth Bennet, not in that sturdy young patrician Emma, not even in
Anne Elliot of ‘Persuasion,’ is the real Jane Austen to be found. She
stands for ever aloof.” Pass, for Emma and Elizabeth! But the “even” in
the case of Anne gives me courage. We are not, of course, talking of
identity in regard to external circumstances. Jane Austen was not the
daughter of a Somersetshire baronet and did not marry a captain in the
navy. But that Jane only “sympathized” with the heart and mind of Anne
Elliot is to my thinking absurdly short of the truth. That the adventures
of Anne’s soul, her heart-beatings, misgivings and intimate reassurances
about Wentworth’s feeling for her had been Jane Austen’s own is to me as
certain as though we had the confession under her own hand and seal. The
woman who drew Anne’s timid, doubting, wondering love must have been in
love herself and in that way. One short sentence settles that for me.
The consciousness of love disposes Anne “to pity every one, as being
less happy than herself.” What lover does not know that secret feeling?
And if he had never loved, would he have guessed it by “sympathy”? (You
will find, by the way, the very same secret divulged by Balzac in one
of his love-letters to Mme. Hanska—among the feelings she inspires him
with is “I know not what disdain in contemplating other men.”) In the
face of this, what need to go ransacking Jane Austen’s Letters or Memoir
for evidence that she had a love affair? No, it is because there is most
of Jane Austen’s spiritual “identity” in Anne that “Persuasion” is the
sweetest, tenderest, and truest of her books. I apologize for having
wandered from Mansfield Park and Easton Neston and the other engaging
futilities of the parlour game.