Part 11

Plain roast and boiled joints of mutton, pork, beef and veal, chickens, game in season, sweetbreads, meat pies, boiled vegetables, suet puddings, apple-tarts, jellies and custards were the ordinary food of the well-to-do. Port and Burgundy were their principal drinks, but probably the port was not usually such as is chiefly sold now-a-days. It was less fortified, nearer to the natural wine, which is itself more like a Burgundy than the port of modern commerce. Wine of any sort is scarcely mentioned in Jane Austen's works. One of the few exceptions I can recall is that--of unnamed species--offered to Mrs. and Miss Bates at the Woodhouses', which the host advised them to mix freely with water, advice they successfully managed to avoid taking, thanks to the good offices of Emma. Jane Austen herself seems to have been fond of wine. In her thirty-eighth year she writes: "As I must leave off being young, I find many _douceurs_ in being a sort of _chaperon_, for I am put on the sofa near the fire, and can drink as much wine as I like." On a much earlier occasion, when she was herself under {222} chaperonage, she had written: "I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne. I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hands to-day. You will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to this venial error." With our full knowledge of Jane's habit of playful exaggeration we may be certain that her "too much" was nothing to shake our heads over, and that the "error" was indeed "venial."

Jane gives us sufficient evidence of the simplicity with which the Austens' own table was furnished. From Steventon parsonage, in 1798, she thus refers to one of the doctor's professional visits to her mother. "Mr. Lyford was here yesterday; he came while we were at dinner, and partook of our elegant entertainment. I was not ashamed at asking him to sit down to table, for we had some pease-soup, a sparerib, and a pudding. He wants my mother to look yellow and to throw out a rash, but she will do neither."

Years later, from Chawton, she writes that: "Captain Foote dined with us on Friday, and I fear will not soon venture again, for the strength of our dinner was a boiled leg of mutton, underdone even for James."

{223}

Jane herself did the housekeeping when her mother was indisposed and Cassandra away, and she prided herself on her success, though she detested the necessity of great economy. Her ideas on the eternal servant question are not, we may be sure, quite faithfully expressed when she writes: "My mother looks forward with as much certainty as you can do to our keeping two maids; my father is the only one not in the secret. We plan having a steady cook and a young, giddy housemaid, with a sedate, middle-aged man, who is to undertake the double office of husband to the former, and sweetheart to the latter. No children, of course, to be allowed on either side." The simple life of the parsonage is more accurately reflected in a comparison between the house of the Austens and that of the Knights at Godmersham. "We dine now at half-past three, and have done dinner, I suppose, before you begin. We drink tea at half-past six. I am afraid you will despise us. My father reads Cowper to us in the morning, to which I listen when I can. How do you spend your evenings? I guess that Elizabeth works, that you read to her, and that Edward goes to sleep." Jane declares that she "always takes care to provide such things as please (her) own {224} appetite," which she considers "the chief merit in housekeeping." Ragout of veal and haricot mutton seem to have been specially attractive to her.

Picnics we hear of--one in particular, of course, at Box Hill--and the Middletons were always getting them up. Cold pies and cold chickens, and no doubt cold punch, were provided in plenty on those happy occasions.

French cookery was not so much appreciated in England in those days as it had been twenty or thirty years earlier, before the Revolution. The bread of our then hostile neighbours across the Channel was, however, not infrequently copied in the bakehouse, as was the Boulanger dance in the ball-room. Mrs. Morland reproached Catherine for talking so much at breakfast about the French bread at Northanger, but the poor little girl who had been so shamefully treated by General Tilney, and sadly missed the attentions of his younger son, replied that she did not care about the bread, and it was all the same to her what she ate. Mrs. Morland could only attribute the girl's obvious unhappiness to the contrast afforded by their humble parsonage to the glories of {225} the Tilney mansion, "There is a very clever essay in one of the books up-stairs, upon much such a subject," says this anxious mother, "about young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance--_The Mirror_, I think. I will look it out for you some day or other, because I am sure it will do you good." Catherine tried to be cheerful, but presently relapsed into languor and weariness; and Mrs. Morland went off to seek for the "very clever essay." As Henry Tilney arrived before she returned with it, its efficacy as a prophylactic for listlessness and discontent was never put to the test. I will take the risk of inducing the "listlessness and discontent" of the present reader by devoting a page to this moral souvenir of Jane Austen's infancy and of her own literary diversions.

The "very clever essay" is dated March 6, 1779, and is in the form of a letter from John Homespun, a "plain country gentleman, with a small fortune and a large family," two of whose daughters had been allowed--his opposition having been overcome--to spend the Christmas holidays with a "great lady" whom they had met at the house of a relation. They went with sparkling {226} eyes and rosy cheeks, they came back with "cheeks as white as a curd, and eyes as dead as the beads in the face of a baby." Their father sees no reason to wonder at the change when he hears the girls, with new-found affectations of speech and manner, describe the habits of their new friends.

"Instead of rising at seven, breakfasting at nine, dining at three, supping at eight, and getting to bed by ten, as was their custom at home, my girls lay till twelve, breakfasted at one, dined at six, supped at eleven, and were never in bed till three in the morning. Their shapes had undergone as much alteration as their faces. From their bosoms (_necks_ they called them), which were squeezed up to their throats, their waists tapered down to a very extraordinary smallness; they resembled the upper half of an hour-glass. At this, also, I marvelled; but it was the only shape worn at ----. Nor is their behaviour less changed than their garb. Instead of joining in the good-humoured cheerfulness we used to have among us before, my two _fine_ young ladies check every approach to mirth, by calling it _vulgar_. One of them chid their brother the other day for laughing, and told him it was monstrously ill-bred.... Would you believe it, sir, my daughter _Elizabeth_ (since her visit she is offended if we call her {227} _Betty_) said it was _fanatical_ to find fault with card-playing on Sunday; and her sister _Sophia_ gravely asked my son-in-law, the clergyman, if he had not some doubts of the soul's immortality?"

Mr. Homespun declares that the moral plague among the worldly rich should be dealt with by Government "as much as the distemper among the _horned cattle_."

Happily Catherine Morland had not caught this particular disease of all--it was only the plague of love that troubled her innocent soul, and the medicine was provided without the interference of a Government inspector.

From such a deliberate departure from the straight path I come back to the subject of the economy of accessories in Jane Austen's novels. When the French bread at Northanger led me astray, I was writing about domestic economy, costumes and cookery. Why _should_ the dresses be described or the dishes be named? We are concerned with the sayings and doings of squires and parsons and their wives and daughters, not with the achievements of cooks and milliners. This would be quite a fair criticism, but it is none {228} the less certain that an author who tells you what people eat and drink and wear does enable you to realize more fully the contrast between the present and the period with which the novel is concerned. That is our business, however, not his. He is an artist, not an historian. There is a common practice on the stage of "furbishing up" old plays by cutting out obsolete references and introducing topical touches. The comedies of Robertson may be "freshened" considerably to meet the taste of thoughtless play-goers, by giving Captain Hawtrey a motor-car and Jack Poyntz a magazine-rifle. The "moral" of these present pages is merely this, that with a few such slight changes as making post-chaise read motor and coach read train, and retarding the dinner from three or five to eight or half-past, cutting out the occasional "elegants," and otherwise changing a word here and there in the dialogue, long scenes from any one of Jane Austen's novels could be acted without material alteration, in the costume of to-day, with no serious offence to the unities. The absence of physical detail in her narrative is no artistic defect. Mr. Collins's first evening at Longbourn, for instance, is so vividly represented that {229} we gain the impression of having been in the room, though of its size and shape, and furniture, or of the appearance and costume of its occupants, we are told little or nothing--

"Mr. Bennet's expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment, maintaining at the same time the most resolute composure of countenance, and except in an occasional glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner in his pleasure.

"By tea-time, however, the dose had been enough, and Mr. Bennet was 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.