Part 2

She seems to have been more nearly understood among the clergy and squires, and other members of her family, than most humourists in their immediate circles. The common experience of the genius in childhood and youth, if biographers are to be credited, is for the delicate shoots of his intelligence to be nipped by domestic frosts; but if there had been any freezing in the Austen family, it was more likely to be produced by the chill of Jane's own satirical remarks than by any harm that the convention and narrowness of others could do to a mind so well defended as hers. There are few traces of any such wintry weather having occurred at Steventon or Chawton. Jane was certainly beloved, greatly and deservedly, in her home. She was, no doubt, a little {31} lonely, as genius, one may suppose, must always be, and as those who are blest, or curst, with a strong sense of the absurd must be whether they be geniuses or not. Her sister was her closest friend, but Jane's published letters to Cassandra, read in the light of the novels, suggest a reserve in discussing her inmost thoughts with that devoted spirit which seems hardly compatible with the closest concordance of ideas, in spite of the completest concordance of affection and a high respect on Jane's part for Cassandra's sound sense and critical judgment. Very different is the tone of the letters of that other pretty humourist, Dorothy Osborne, to William Temple. In Dorothy's case there was a perfect confidence in the entire sympathy and comprehension of the recipient. This factor apart, how much there is in common between the two dear women. The one was dead more than eighty years before the other was born, but in all the history of womanhood is there any pair in which the smiling philosophy that is the salt of the mind is more fairly divided? Jane Austen lives still in Elizabeth Bennet and in Emma Woodhouse; Dorothy Osborne only in her sweet self. The one had {32} no passion but her work--and it was a quiet, unconsuming passion. The other had no passion but her love, and it was never able to overmaster her intelligence. "In earnest," she wrote, "I am no more concerned whether people think me handsome or ill-favoured, whether they think I have wit or that I have none, than I am whether they think my name Elizabeth or Dorothy." It was not quite true in her case, nor would it have been in Jane's, but it contains no more exaggeration than is allowed to any woman of sense, and it was as true of the one as of the other.

Love has lately been defined by a ruthless analyzer of feelings as "a specific emotion, exclusive in selection, more or less permanent in duration, and due to a mental fermentation in itself caused by a law of attraction." Jane Austen had never read such an explanation of love as this, yet her views on the most powerful of the mixings of animal and spiritual instincts are usually more placid than would please the fancies of maidens who sleep with bits of wedding-cake beneath their pillows. That passionate love "is woman's whole existence" is not exemplified by Jane's favourite heroines. Emma or Elizabeth did not {33} so regard it, even if Anne Elliot did lose some of her good looks and Catherine Morland her appetite when their hopes of particular bridegrooms seemed likely to be disappointed. Elizabeth would not have worried greatly over Darcy if he had not come back for her, and Emma would have been as happy at Hartfield without a husband as she had always been, so long as Knightley was friendly.

We cannot imagine that Jane Austen could ever have written to any man, as Dorothy Osborne wrote to Temple of a love which she could not make her family understand: "For my life I cannot beat into their heads a passion that must be subject to no decay, an even perfect kindness that must last perpetually, without the least intermission. They laugh to hear me say that one unkind word would destroy all the satisfaction of my life, and that I should expect our kindness should increase every day, if it were possible, but never lessen."

The conjugal instinct was not strongly developed in Jane; and, although she seems to have been very fond of children, and especially of her nephews and nieces, it may be assumed with some {34} confidence that the maternal instinct also found little place in her nature.

Marianne Dashwood, emotional, fastidiously truthful--she left to her elder sister "the whole task of telling lies when politeness required it"--romantically fond of scenery and poetry as any of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines, stands out among the girls of Jane's imagining as the only one who outwardly exhibits the conventional signs of passionate affection for a lover, Catherine's and Fanny's emotions being more suggestive of maiden fancies, of "the flimsy furniture of a country miss's brain," than of the yearnings of a Juliet or a Roxane.

Nevertheless the idea that the Austen people are cold-blooded is warmly opposed in an appreciative little essay published in America a few years ago by Mr. W. L. Phelps. "Let no one believe," he writes, "that Jane Austen's men and women are deficient in passion because they behave with decency: to those who have the power to see and interpret, there is a depth of passion in her characters that far surpasses the emotional power displayed in many novels where the lovers seem to forget the meaning of such words as honour, {35} virtue, and fidelity." It may be that, like Richard Feverel on a certain occasion, the Henrys and Edwards, the Emmas and Annes are "too British to expose their emotions." But Lucy Feverel, one of the purest and truest women in fiction, shows passion so that no special "power to see and interpret" is requisite on the reader's part, and the same note is true of many of the charming heroines drawn by the masters of imagination.

At any rate Jane allowed her heroines as much passion and sentiment as--so far as we can discover--she experienced herself. The one known man who seems to have come near to being regarded as her accepted lover was Thomas Lefroy, who lived to be Chief Justice of Ireland.

"You scold me so much," she writes, in her twenty-first year, to Cassandra, "in the nice long letter which I have this moment received from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I _can_ expose myself, however, only _once more_, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we _are_ to have a {36} dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you. But as to our having ever met, except at the three last balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs. Lefroy a few days ago."

No coquettish "reigning beauty" was ever more easy as to the fate of her lovers, or less likely to suffer at their hands, than this Hampshire maiden, whose fine complexion, hazel eyes, and well-proportioned figure attracted so much admiration, and whose sweet voice and lively conversation completed the conquest of those whom she cared to entertain.

"Tell Mary," she writes to her sister (also in 1796), "that I make over Mr. Heartley and all his estate to her for her sole use and benefit in future, and not only him, but all my other admirers into the bargain wherever she can find them, even the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me, as I mean to confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't care six-pence."

{37}

This agreeable Irishman, to whom, in later years, we find references in the records of the Edgeworth family, was speedily to pass out of Jane's young life. Very soon she has to write: "At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea. William Chute called here yesterday. I wonder what he means by being so civil."

We need not picture her as stopping her writing while she wiped the tears from her streaming eyes. "We went by Bifrons," she says on another occasion, "and I contemplated with a melancholy pleasure the abode of him on whom I once fondly doted." She never did "dote" on any man, so far as can be discovered or reasonably surmised, to any greater extent than her favourite Emma may be said to have "doted" on Frank Churchill. Emma's feelings about the man who was secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax at the time, are thus analyzed by Jane Austen--

"Emma continued to entertain no doubt of her being in love. Her ideas only varied as to the {38} how much. At first she thought it was a good deal; and afterwards but little. She had great pleasure in hearing Frank Churchill talked of; and, for his sake, greater pleasure than ever in seeing Mr. and Mrs. Weston; she was very often thinking of him, and quite impatient for a letter, that she might know how he was, how were his spirits, how was his aunt, and what was the chance of his coming to Randalls again this spring. But, on the other hand, she could not admit herself to be unhappy, nor, after the first morning, to be less disposed for employment than usual.... 'I do not find myself making any use of the word _sacrifice_,' said she. 'In not one of all my clever replies, my delicate negatives, is there any allusion to making a sacrifice. I do suspect that he is not really necessary to my happiness. So much the better. I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do. I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry to be more.'"

Save for Willoughby's burst of misplaced enthusiasm over Marianne, Frank Churchill's description of Jane Fairfax to Emma is the warmest bit of love-painting in the Austen comedy--

"She is a complete angel. Look at her. Is not she an angel in every gesture? Observe the turn of her throat. Observe her eyes, as she is looking up at my father. You will be glad to {39} hear (inclining his head, and whispering seriously) that my uncle means to give her all my aunt's jewels. They are to be new set. I am resolved to have some in an ornament for the head. Will not it be beautiful in her dark hair?"

Such raptures as these are rarely permitted to the Austen lovers. In their affairs of the heart, as in the general conduct of their lives, plain living and quiet thinking reflect the simple habits of the people among whom Jane passed her own smoothly-ordered life.

To the simplicity of that life we owe one of her peculiar charms. If she had been the famous, sought-after literary woman who is the necessary complement of a dinner-party in a house of cultured luxury, and whose name is found in the index of every volume of contemporary reminiscences, she would not have been half so attractive to the type of mind that most enjoys her novels. Yet when all possible allowance has been made for her lightness of expression her own predilections were certainly for the conditions of "opulent leisure" rather than of decent comfort, for the amenities of Mansfield Park and Pemberley rather than for those of Fullerton Rectory or the {40} Dashwoods' cottage. "People get so horridly poor and economical in this part of the world," she wrote from Steventon to her sister at Godmersham, "that I have no patience with them. Kent is the only place for happiness; everybody is rich there."

This was written early in her life. In the year before she died, writing to her niece Fanny, she said: "Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony, but I need not dwell on such arguments with _you_, pretty dear."

Contempt for poverty is expressed by several characters in her work. "Be honest and poor, by all means"--says Mary Crawford to Edmund Bertram--"but I shall not envy you; I do not much think I shall even respect you. I have a much greater respect for those that are honest and rich."

Perhaps neither the real Jane nor the imaginary Mary is to be taken quite literally, but that Jane would have freely assented to a disbelief in the wisdom of marrying on a small income, however little she approved of Mary's "too positive admiration for wealth," is certain from all that {41} we know of her opinions on the essentials of happiness.

Godmersham is in Kent, and it was in that spacious, well-provided house of her brother Edward, amid all the charms of parks and beechwoods, of home comforts and "elegances" that marked the life of the large landowner in those days, that she usually found herself most contented. Then was the time when the squire was not driven to find an income by letting his manor to a company promoter to whom the difference between an oak and an elm is scarcely known, and whose chief object in hiring a mansion in rural surroundings is to fill it with week-end parties who play bridge indoors on summer afternoons and leave the beauties of the gardens and the park to the peacocks and the deer.

With such a modern plutocrat Jane would have had little in common, but she would have had less with the modern Socialist. Landed property stood for everything stable and dignified in her days, and those critics of _Pride and Prejudice_ who unkindly emphasized the fact that Elizabeth Bennet only decided to marry Darcy after she had seen the glories of Pemberley and its park {42} and gardens, while they implicitly libelled the girl, were not so unfair to the general sentiment of her period. Sir Walter Scott, by the way, was one of those who regarded Elizabeth Bennet's change of feeling towards Darcy as the result of her visit to the fine place in Derbyshire. Surely such a view connotes a failure to appreciate the humour of the conversation on this point between Jane Bennet and her sister. The elder girl asks the younger how long it is since she has felt any affection for Darcy, and Elizabeth replies: "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began; but I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." Even Jane Bennet, whose humour sense was not strongly developed, asks her to give a serious answer.

This much may be admitted, that the idea of marrying the curate never presented itself to any one of the maidens who brighten the novels of Jane Austen with their charms of mind and appearance. Elinor Dashwood seems to have regarded about £600 a year (with sure prospect of increase) as the minimum on which married life could hopefully be entered upon, and I fancy {43} Jane would have agreed with her. The majority of novel-readers may still prefer the hero and heroine whose love will triumph over all obstacles of position, and opposition, of want of sympathy on the part of others or of sense on their own, and there have actually been readers who thought Lydia Bennet more "interesting" than Elizabeth! The prudence of the heroines may to some small extent account for the failure of Jane Austen's work to captivate the "great heart of the public." In any case her fame is far from universal. She has never been, and never will be, popular in the sense in which the men and women whose publishers cheerfully print first editions of a hundred thousand copies are popular. Her appeal, in her own lifetime, when her name was unknown, was not to "the general," and it is only much less restricted now because of the enormous increase in the reading public. Actually it is immensely greater; relatively, its increase is evidently small. One cannot, as in the case of some authors, describe her work as being enjoyed only by the cultured class, and neglected, because misapprehended, by the rest. True culture is always discriminating, even in the presence of its {44} divinities. Mr. Anthony Hope said not long ago, referring to literary snobbishness: "There are certain companies in which to suggest, even with the utmost humility, that certain parts of Jane Austen's novels are less entertaining than other parts is thought considerably worse than drawing invidious distinctions between various passages of Holy Writ."

With those who regard Jane Austen's work as equally excellent in every part, no patience is possible. The reader who finds it easy to get as much enjoyment from _Sense and Sensibility_ or _Northanger Abbey_ as from _Pride and Prejudice_ or _Mansfield Park_ must be blessed with a comfortable absence of discrimination. Those who see no degree of superiority in the presentation of the characters of Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot as compared with Elinor Dashwood and Catherine Morland might be expected to regard Blanche Amory and Mrs. Jarley as the equals respectively of Becky Sharp and Mrs. Gamp.

Such uncritical admiration as Mr. Anthony Hope referred to is even more annoying than the tone in which I have heard a distinguished writer speak of Jane Austen as "that woman"--the {45} mildest of the contemptuous terms that Napoleon applied to Madame de Staël. The author who spoke of Jane Austen so slightingly admitted her power of presenting a "bloodless" and trivial society in a life-like manner. No such recognition of power is allowed to her by an American critic of to-day, who says of her work "it may be called art, but it is a poor species of that old art which depended for its effect upon false similitudes." It is hard to believe that the writer of this astonishing opinion had read many pages of the author he thus condemned to a place among the third-rates.

{49}

II

EQUIPMENT; AND METHOD

Literary influences--Jane Austen's defence of novelists--The old essayists--Her favourite authors--Some novels of her time--Criticism of her niece's novel--Sense of her own limitations--Her method--Humour--Familiar names--Some characteristics of style--Suggested emendations--A new "problem" of authorship--A "forbidding" writer--"Commonplace" and "superficial"--Thomas Love Peacock--Sapient suggestions.

"I believe there is no constraint to be put upon real genius; nothing but inclination can set it to work," was one of the many sensible, if unoriginal, observations of the monarch in whose reign Jane Austen was born and died. But the inclination itself is usually started by external suggestions, and it is a mere truism that most books are written because others have appeared before them. Macaulay declared that but for Fanny Burney's example Jane Austen would never have been a novelist. Some of her early attempts at a complete novel did indeed take the epistolary {50} form which was common in the preceding age, and was the method of her admired Richardson, who, I think, fired her ambition quite as much as Miss Burney. It would also seem that Mrs. Radcliffe's wild romances had induced in Jane the desire to do something that should please by the absence of every quality that had made them popular.

I doubt if there is any author of any period to whom the most famous remark of Buffon could be more justly applied than to Jane Austen. "_Le style est la femme même_" is a conviction which becomes more and more firm as one reads her novels and her letters, and reflects over their relationship. Her simple life and her limited opportunities, her genius being granted, are a sufficient explanation of her work. Part of that life, and a part more important, in proportion to the rest, than it would have been in the case of one who had lived less remote from the world of thought and action, was the reading of favourite books. _Clarissa_, _Sir Charles Grandison_ and _Pamela_ influenced her strongly, but she avoided more than she took from them in the formation of her style. Miss Burney she now and then laughs at a little, {51} as when, after John Thorpe has said to Catherine (who confesses she has never read _Camilla_): "You had no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul, there is not," Jane Austen adds that "the justness" of this critique "was unfortunately lost on poor Catherine." But where she loved she laughed. She appreciated her sister-novelist's work very highly, and she writes of a young woman whom she met at a neighbour's house: "There are two traits in her character which are pleasing--namely, she admires Camilla, and drinks no cream in her tea."

Scott's poetry, of course, Jane read and enjoyed. Three of his most popular novels--_Waverley_, _Guy Mannering_, and _The Antiquary_--appeared during her lifetime, and their authorship, like that of her own works, was not avowed until after her death. How wide-open was the "secret" of their origin from the very first, years before Scott's acknowledgment, we may see in one of Jane's letters of 1814, where she says: "Walter Scott has no business to write novels; {52} especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people. I do not like him, and do not mean to like _Waverley_ if I can help it, but I fear I must." She herself declared, half jestingly, that she wrote for fame and not for profit. Neither, in any but shallow measure, was granted to her whilst she lived. She did not, like Robert Burns, "pant after distinction," nor was she of the "pushing" type. The offering-up of self-respect in the cause of self-interest was the least possible of sacrifices with her.

The machine-made horrors of Ann Radcliffe--"_la reine des épouvantements_" as she has been aptly called, in spite of her retiring disposition--were as familiar to Jane as were those, far less _pouvantable_, of Ainsworth to the girls of a later generation. The Radcliffe novels were published between Jane's fourteenth and twenty-third years, when she was most open to romantic influences, but however much she may have shuddered over them in her teens, she laughed at them in her twenties, and it is certainly to the desire to satirize the melodramatic sensations of the school of fiction {53} which they represent that we chiefly owe _Northanger Abbey_, a pleasant mixture of a serious love-story and a burlesque, a motto for which might have been found in a sonnet of Shakespeare:

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red: * * * * * I grant I never saw a goddess go,-- My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground."

It is in this novel that, leaving her characters for a page or two to take care of themselves, the author thus refers to the sorrows of the novel-making craft, and expresses her high appreciation of the work of Miss Burney and of Miss Edgeworth--