Part 10

The novelist and her characters--Her sense of their reality--Accessories rarely described--Her ideas on dress--Her own millinery and gowns--Thin clothes and consumption--Domestic economy--Jane as housekeeper--"A very clever essay"--Mr. Collins at Longbourn--The gipsies at Highbury--Topography of Jane Austen--Hampshire--Lyme Regis--Godmersham--Bath--London.

On an earlier page a contrast between Balzac and Jane Austen has been suggested. One characteristic they had in common was the sense of the reality of their own creations. Madame de Surville, the sister of Balzac, has recorded how, when the affairs of the family were being discussed, he would say, "Ah, yes, but do you know to whom Felix de Vandenesse is engaged? One of the Grandville girls. It is an excellent marriage for him." Further than this an author's sense of the actuality of his own imaginings could hardly go, unless, indeed, like one modern author--if the {202} story is true, as it probably is not--he were to invite the figments of his brain to lunch!

Jane Austen was not quite so much obsessed by her inventions, though she spoke of the very novels themselves as personal entities. _Pride and Prejudice_ was "my own darling child," and of _Sense and Sensibility_ she writes, when it is passing through the press: "No, indeed, I am never too busy to think of _S. and S_. I can no more forget it than a mother can forget her sucking child; and I am much obliged to you for your inquiries." As for the characters, she loved to talk of them as living people, and was so fond of Elizabeth Bennet, for instance, that, as she wrote to Cassandra, she did not know how she should be "able to tolerate" those who did not like her.

She used to tell her nieces what happened to her imaginary people after the novels were ended, how Mary Bennet married her uncle's clerk, or her sister Kitty a clergyman, and how Mrs. Robert Ferrars's sister "never caught the doctor." One of the most delightful of her letters, as evidence of her happiness in her work, and of her half-serious consciousness of the reality of her creations, was written after a round of London picture {203} galleries. The portraits she looked for were not those of Knights, or Austens, or Leighs, but of beautiful women out of her own novels. They might be labelled Lady this or Mrs. that, but she should recognize them if they were portraits of her darling Elizabeth or her dearest Anne. She was disappointed. It is true that at the Gallery in Spring Gardens she found "a small portrait of Mrs. Bingley, excessively like her," and, moreover, "she is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her. I dare say Mrs. D. will be in yellow." For it was "Mrs. D."--the beloved Elizabeth Darcy (_née_ Bennet), whose face her creator and devoted admirer looked forward to seeing on some fashionable portrait-painter's canvas. Alas! at none of the shows was the desired picture to be found. "I can only imagine," writes the disappointed "friend," soothing her regrets with a reflection natural to her mind, "that Mr. D. prizes any picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. I can imagine he would have that sort of feeling--that mixture of love, pride, and delicacy."

{204}

Thus we can see that Jane knew exactly what her heroines were like, even if in their case, as in that of nearly all her characters, the reader is left to fill in details of colour and feature very much as he chooses. She was far more particular in describing the personal appearance of real people, and in her letters the handsome and the ugly are as clearly differentiated as the lively and the dull. "I never saw so plain a family"--she declares after calling on some people named Fagg--"five sisters so very plain! They are as plain as the Foresters, or the Franfraddops, or the Seagraves, or the Rivers, excluding Sophy. Miss Sally Fagg has a pretty figure, and that comprises all the good looks of the family." Sometimes she attributed the blame for ill-looks to a definite part of the genealogical tree. "I wish she was not so very Palmery," she says of one of her nieces, "but it seems stronger than ever, I never knew a wife's family features have such undue influence." The Mrs. Palmer of _Sense and Sensibility_ was not of that family. She was as pretty as she was foolish.

Even if it be true that Jane Austen only painted the life which she found immediately around her, {205} and that she would almost as soon have attempted to depict the interior of a Thibetan lamassary as of an English country-house of the kind Disraeli loved to paint, yet do her characters "typify nothing?" If Mrs. Elton, and Sir John Middleton, and Mary Musgrove are not types, then I do not see why Sir Charles Grandison, or Mrs. Proudie, or Mr. Tulliver should be regarded as types. Perhaps they should not, but then, what are types? Most of Jane Austen's people may be common; there may be, in the flesh, a hundred Lady Russells for one Lady Camper, and five hundred John Willoughbys for one Willoughby Patterne. That is only to say that humanity is richer in one type than in another.

Jane was a realist, though Realism, in the sense in which we apply the term in the criticism of living writers, has little place in her novels. She assumes that her readers--the men and women of her own age--are neither blind nor unaccustomed to the ordinary resources of contemporary civilization. When her characters dine, they may usually, for all we hear to the contrary, eat out of a common dish with the aid of their unassisted fingers, after the manner of the nomads of the Asiatic Steppes; {206} they may drink out of gourds like the Bushmen, while, after the custom of the Romans, they recline on raised couches in the attitude of Madame Récamier. We know that they sat round solid mahogany or oaken tables, covered with damask cloths during the meat and pudding service, that the silver was polished, and the glass bright, even though the supply of plates was perhaps not always equal to the number of courses; we have little doubt as to the kind of chairs whereon the diners sat, and we may wish we had more of them in our own dining-rooms.

As to the costumes of the men and women who sat on the chairs, we are usually left to dress them as we like, and there is little doubt that many a modern reader has mentally pictured Darcy wearing a tweed suit and a bowler hat, Charles Musgrove in a golfing-cap and loose knickerbockers, and Mr. Collins or Mr. Elton in a stiff "round-about" collar of the kind usually worn by the Anglican clergy of to-day. For the ladies, the whirligig of time has brought back the modes of a century ago. In spite of the cry for the equality of the sexes, there are, as the Lord Chancellor and other eminent authorities have laid down, marked {207} distinctions between the ways of women and of men. One of such distinctions may be found in the fact that the fashions of feminine dress move in a (very irregular and therefore theoretically impossible) circle, while those of masculine dress rarely cross the same point twice. Thus while, during the last few years, we have seen our sisters and aunts affecting "modes" that were in vogue in the periods of the Renaissance, the Directory, and the Empire, we have never seen our brothers and uncles abroad in the streets attired like the courtiers either of François _premier_ or of the First Consul. A woman need not despair of wearing, without being followed by a crowd, almost any costume of any period of woman's history. A man need not look for the day when he may walk in the parks in the garb of Raleigh or of Burke without attracting more attention than will be agreeable to the modesty of any one but an actor-manager or the European agent of some American world-industry. The Misses Bertram, of Mansfield Park, might go shopping in Regent Street to-day without any one remarking that their dress, or their coiffure, was seriously out of date. But we only know how they dressed because we know the date {208} of their birth, not because the author of a bit of their life-history has told us.

Who that has ever read _Weir of Hermiston_ can forget the description of the heroine as she first appeared to Archie in the kirk? It was in the very year (1814) in which Fanny Price's story was related, and of Mary Crawford, if not of Fanny, a tale of town finery as bright as that of Kirstie might have been told. We know how alluring Kirstie looked to Archie in her "frock of straw-coloured jaconet muslin, cut low at the bosom and short at the ankle," and "drawn up so as to mould the contour of both breasts, and in the nook between ... surely in a very enviable position, trembled the nosegay of primroses." Of some such charming pictures we get at least the preliminary sketches in Jane Austen's letters, but the finished works are never shown in the novels, and we may dress the pretty heroines to our own fancy so long as we keep to the style of their period, or, if our imaginations are feeble and our knowledge of Regency costume deficient, Mr. Brock will do the work for us in the more delightful of his coloured drawings, or Mr. Hugh Thomson in his lively illustrations in pen and ink.

{209}

This point--that the material factors of manners and habits are little noted by Jane Austen--will strike many readers, at first sight, as of quite trivial importance. But it is largely the reason why her novels have so modern an external air compared with those, let us say, of Scott, or even of Balzac, who only began to write when her short career was ending. If Jane Austen had described the conditions of life at Hartfield or Kellynch with the particularity with which Balzac describes the Grandets' house at Saumur, and the Guenics' at Guerande, or had given us such full accounts of the villagers on the estate of the Bertrams of Mansfield Park as Scott gave us of the smugglers and gipsies on the lands of the Bertrams of Ellangowan, we should see more clearly the changes that a hundred years have wrought in the habits of the English country.

Jane Austen was by no means indifferent to the cut and colour of her own clothing, however little she allowed her heroines to talk about theirs. But when we read of "Jane Austen frocks" for bridesmaids in the accounts of modern weddings, they are copied from the illustrations of Mr. Thomson or Mr. Brock, or else are so-called merely because {210} they are of the period of her novels, which is much the same thing. With the general subject of dress she deals as a novelist, we may almost say once for all, in a single paragraph of _Northanger Abbey_. The occasion was the dance at Bath which was to prove so momentous an event in Catherine's life.

"What gown and what head-dress she should wear on the occasion became her chief concern. She cannot be justified in it. Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim. Catherine knew all this very well; her great-aunt had read her a lecture on the subject only the Christmas before; and yet she lay awake ten minutes on Wednesday night debating between her spotted and her tamboured muslin; and nothing but the shortness of the time prevented her buying a new one for the evening. This would have been an error in judgment, great though not uncommon, from which one of the other sex rather than her own, a brother rather than a great-aunt, might have warned her; for man only can be aware of the insensibility of man towards a new gown. It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biassed by the texture {211} of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jackonet. Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better, for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter."

If we regard these as the author's considered opinions, expressed with a characteristic touch of _malice_, we shall probably agree that she is, on the whole, right. Were women to make a note, every time a man describes one of them as "well dressed," of what the subject of the remark was wearing, they would, I believe, find an overwhelming preponderance of votes in favour of well-fitting, plain, if not actually "tailor-made" costumes for the daytime, and simple though not conventual frocks for the evening, as compared with all the highly decorated "confections," covered with what one may call "applied art," whereon women spend so large a proportion of their allowances.

The letters to Cassandra make up to some extent for the deficiencies of the novels in a {212} matter so attractive to the author's admirers among her own sex, though the particulars given are almost always incomplete; that is to say, they depend on information which Cassandra possessed, but which is denied to us. Such a case is presented when we read: "Elizabeth has given me a hat, and it is not only a pretty hat, but a pretty _style_ of hat too. It is something like Eliza's, only, instead of being all straw, half of it is narrow purple ribbon. I flatter myself, however, that you can understand very little of it from this description. Heaven forbid that I should ever offer such encouragement to explanations as to give a clear one on any occasion myself! But I must write no more of this." The tantalizing thing is that while we know that this pretty hat was something like Eliza's, we have no idea what Eliza's was like, beyond the untrimmed fact that it was "all straw."

Then Cassandra is told by Jane, "I believe I _shall_ make my new gown like my robe, but the back of the latter is all in a piece with the tail, and will seven yards enable me to copy it in that respect?" Alas! that we cannot discover how the robe was made, except that "the back was all in a {213} piece with the tail." Often, of course, the news about dress is mixed up with other news, as when Jane writes: "At Nackington ... Miss Fletcher and I were very thick, but I am the thinnest of the two. She wore her purple muslin, which is pretty enough, though it does not become her complexion...." Once Jane's account of her own necessities in the way of dress is nearly followed by a sentence which not only contains evidence of her close acquaintance with Fielding's greatest novel, but also reminds us of Mr. Tom Lefroy. "You say nothing of the silk stockings; I flatter myself, therefore, that Charles has not purchased any, as I cannot very well afford to pay for them; all my money is spent in buying white gloves and pink persian.... After I had written the above, we received a visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his cousin George. The latter is really very well-behaved now; and as for the other, he has but _one_ fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove--it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which _he_ did when he was wounded."

Many of her references to dress are of the {214} partly serious, partly humorous kind which came naturally from her pen. "Flowers are very much worn," she writes from Bath in the summer of 1799, "and fruit is still more the thing. Elizabeth has a bunch of strawberries and I have seen grapes, cherries, plums, apricots. There are likewise almonds and raisins, French plums, and tamarinds at the grocers', but I have never seen any of them in hats." She had, in the Southampton days, a spotted muslin which she meant to wear out, in spite of its durability. "You will exclaim at this, but mine really has signs of feebleness, which, with a little care, may come to something." Then she has some "bombazins" with trains, which "I cannot reconcile myself to giving up as morning gowns; they are so very sweet by candlelight. I would rather sacrifice my blue one ... in short I do not know and I do not care."

A peep into the economy of Steventon parsonage is now and again offered. In 1796, "We are very busy making Edward's shirts, and I am proud to say that I am the neatest worker of the party. They say that there are a prodigious number of birds hereabouts this year, so that perhaps _I_ may kill a few."

{215}

Another bit of work that the want of the riches of Kent forced upon the poorer folks of Hampshire is shown to us when Jane writes: "I bought some Japan ink and next week shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend." In this case there is no difficulty of interpretation. Now-a-days there are simple "dips" wherewith young ladies whose allowances are small or who in any case wish to make the most of their money can change old straw hats into new, soiled white into black, or green, or heliotrope. It was not so a century ago, and when Jane wanted to turn her old white straw hat into a new black one, she must needs Japan it.

"I have read the 'Corsair,' mended my petticoat, and have nothing else to do," she writes from London in 1814, and on another day about the same time she informs her sister: "I have determined to trim my lilac sarsenet with black satin ribbon, just as my China crape is, six-penny width at the bottom, threepenny or four-penny at top." An even closer glimpse of Jane in her home is afforded by a letter in which she says--

{216}

"I find great comfort in my stuff gown, but I hope you do not wear yours too often. I have made myself two or three caps to wear of evenings since I came home, and they save me a world of torment as to hair-dressing, which at present gives me no trouble beyond washing and brushing, for my long hair is always plaited up out of sight, and my short hair curls well enough to want no papering."

Such references may remind us of Henry Tilney's astonishment that Catherine did not keep a journal of her doings. "How are your absent cousins to understand the tenor of your life...? How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion and curl of your hair to be described, in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal? My dear madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies' ways as you wish to believe me."

Jane Austen was not reduced, as was her own Mrs. Hurst, to playing with her bracelets and rings when there were no games or dances in progress. On such occasions, like Elizabeth Bennet, she took up some needlework, and amused herself by listening to the general conversation, and entering into it when opportunity offered. Like everything {217} done by her deft fingers, her fancy sewing is admirable, and her embroidery would be treasured by her family for its intrinsic beauty even if no such charming associations attached to it. There is a muslin scarf adorned by her needle which, to her true lovers, might seem a more precious relic than even her mahogany desk itself.

One little "interior" sketched by Jane, after a visit to a young wife who had just been blessed with a baby, is so illustrative of her own neat habits, and her ideas of the material needs of happiness, that, intimate as it is, it merits quotation: "Mary does not manage matters in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself. She is not tidy enough in her appearance; she has no dressing-gown to sit up in; her curtains are all too thin, and things are not in that comfort and style about her which are necessary to make such a situation an enviable one."

We have seen on an earlier page that Jane Austen provided warm garments for the village poor. On one occasion we know where she bought her flannel. In an entry (made at Basingstoke) which might form the text for a dissertation on prejudice and economy, she notes that: "I gave {218} 2_s._ 3_d._ a yard for my flannel, and I fancy it is not very good, but it is so disgraceful and contemptible an article in itself that its being comparatively good or bad is of little importance." Why this contempt for what, in spite of all patent substitutes, inflammable and otherwise, is still commonly esteemed one of the most harmless and necessary of materials? Marianne Dashwood included the wearing of a flannel waistcoat by Colonel Brandon among the several defects which made it impossible that she should ever be his wife, and when, for reasons not all unconnected with the "happy ending" of the novel, she agreed at last to marry him, it was in spite of the fact that this gallant officer had "sought the constitutional safeguard" of the much-despised garment. To Jane Austen and Marianne Dashwood flannel, it seems, was as entirely unpleasing a commodity as celluloid collars and cuffs are to most people of our own day.

The ravages of consumption, as the Baron de Frenilly reflects in his recently published memoirs, would have been far less terrible in those times if women had been less hostile to warm dresses and flannel petticoats. Fresh air and thick boots were {219} also to seek. The women could not walk ten yards on a wet day without the water coming through the thin soles of their dainty little shoes. Miss Bates was quite exceptional in wearing shoes with reasonable soles.

One more sumptuary extract must be quoted; it comes from a letter from London in 1814: "My poor old muslin has never been dyed yet. It has been promised to be done several times. What wicked people dyers are. They begin with dipping their own souls in scarlet sin." The last sentence brings its writer for the moment very near to modern fiction, a considerable proportion of which is mainly occupied with the vivid representation of the process in question as applied to the world in general.

After clothes, the table. Out of the works of some novelists you might draw up menus, or at least bills-of-fare, for a month. People who dwell in a bracing air, and take a great deal of exercise, could live very comfortably on a small selection from the dishes served up in the novels of Dickens, and those who like an even more simple cuisine could rely quite confidently on the meals described by Dumas _père_. There is plenty of {220} substantial fare, of course, in the Waverley novels, and as for the works of Harrison Ainsworth, they groan under the sirloins and haunches that were provided in those imaginary ages when in Merry England the spits were always turning in every castle and hall. The people of Jane Austen ate quite as much as was good for them. They had breakfast, lunch--or noonshine--dinner, supper, and tea, and everybody--always excepting Mr. Woodhouse and those whose spirits were temporarily depressed--came with an appetite to every meal, for all we know of the matter. No dinner is particularly described, but those who want to know what people ate and drank at the end of the eighteenth century may partly gratify their appetite from the references which inevitably occur. Except that there were not quite so many dishes on the table at once the meals differed little from that to which Swift introduces us in his dialogue between the company at Lady Smart's table. The Smarts, by the way, dined at three, which in Jane Austen's time was still about the hour for the small country-houses, though in the big houses it was five, marking the gradual advance from the ten o'clock in the morning of the {221} twelfth century to the eight o'clock in the evening or later of the twentieth.