Part 4

"Mr. Bennet raised his eyes from his book as she entered, and fixed them on her face with a calm unconcern, which was not in the least altered by her communication.

"'I have not the pleasure of understanding you,' said he, when she had finished her speech. 'Of what are you talking?'

"'Of Mr. Collins and Lizzy. Lizzy declares she will not have Mr. Collins, and Mr. Collins begins to say that he will not have Lizzy.'

"'And what am I to do on the occasion? It seems a hopeless business.'

"'Speak to Lizzy about if yourself. Tell her that you insist upon her marrying him.'

"'Let her be called down. She shall hear my opinion.'

"Mrs. Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to the library.

"'Come here, child,' cried her father as she appeared. 'I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?' Elizabeth replied that it was. 'Very well--and this offer of marriage you have refused?'

"'I have, sir.'

"'Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?'

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"'Yes, or I will never see her again.'

"'An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you _do_.'"

There is nothing "commonplace" about this. What matter that the characters are only middle-class and "respectable," if they can afford material for such excellent wit?

In one respect, judged by the present standard in fiction, Jane Austen's work assuredly is "commonplace." No novelist was ever less troubled in the search for names. She merely took those of people she had heard of or met, preferring the common to the unusual. Bennet, Dashwood, Elliot, Price, Woodhouse--names that the modern "popular" novelist would reject at sight, served her turn, a Darcy or a Tilney being her highest flights in nomenclature. As for the Christian names, they are of the most ordinary and are used over and over again. In _Sense and Sensibility_, for example, three of the prominent characters are named John--John Dashwood, John Middleton, and John Willoughby. There are two {75} Catherines in _Pride and Prejudice_. Elizabeths, Fannys, Annes, Marys, Henrys, Edwards, Roberts, "fill the bills," and such a name as Frank Churchill seems recondite. It is much the same in the letters, the truth being that the Gwladyses, and Evadnes, and Marmadukes of those days were very rare, and almost unknown in rural society. The burden which her sister Cassandra bore must have strengthened Jane's determination that her heroes and heroines should not have unusual names, and so we have our Elinors and Elizabeths, and Fannys, with their Edwards and Edmunds, and Henrys. The Darcys are almost the only exceptions that try the rule; "Fitzwilliam" and "Georgiana" are more in the style of the ordinary novel of "high life."

So much for names. How are the men and women who bear them "introduced" to us? When a Colonel Newcome, or an Alfred Jingle, or a Sylvain Pons comes upon the scene, we hear a good deal about his personal appearance, his manner of dress, his bearing, and those who introduce him have a huge circle of men and women to bring before us with similar formalities. Jane Austen, like a casual hostess at a modern {76} dance, leaves us, as often as not, to make acquaintance in any way we can. Scott, with his wealth of character-studies among high and middle and low, his kings and cavaliers and covenanters and crofters, was the most generous giver of types among Jane Austen's contemporaries; Maria Edgeworth in depicting the gentry and peasantry of Ireland, and John Galt the small shop-keepers and their customers in the Scottish country-towns, managed to present us to a large circle of new acquaintances, of various classes and occupations. Jane had no use for characters, or centres of social life, that required to be specially described for a particular purpose. Only in one of her novels (_Sense and Sensibility_) is the busy life of London made the subject of any but the most casual description, and even then it is but the transference of the country people to town, and of the two or three towns-people back to their London houses from their country visits that is effected. (The general life of the metropolis, its theatres, parks, and bustle are left, to all intent, unnoticed. Yet, as we know from many passages in her letters, Jane during her visits was a keen spectator of the pageantry of life in a city which, she {77} jestingly declared, played havoc with her character. "Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice," she writes from Cork Street in August 1796, "and I begin already to find my morals corrupted." And in the next month she sends this little message to Mr. Austen: "My father will be so good as to fetch home his prodigal daughter from town, I hope, unless he wishes me to walk the hospitals, enter at the Temple, or mount guard at St. James'." She was not "prodigal"--save in gloves and ribbons--but she enjoyed the delights of the country-cousin in town. She went very often to the play, so often at times as to be weary of it. _The Hypocrite_ (Bickerstaff's "alteration" of Cibber's "adaptation" of _Tartuffe_) "well entertained" her, Dowton and Mathews being the chief actors; and she saw Liston, Miss Stephens, Miss O'Neill, and Kean at the outset of his fame. "The Clandestine Marriage" was a favourite piece, and on one occasion she notes that her nieces, whom she sometimes took to the theatre, "revelled last night in Don Juan, whom we left in hell at half-past eleven." Such joys, however, did not move her mind enough to seduce {78} her from the country as a source of inspiration for her work.

"_All_ lives lived out of London are mistakes more or less grievous--but mistakes," said Sydney Smith, adapting, consciously or not, the saying of Mascarille to the _Précieuses_: "Pour moi, Je tiens que hors de Paris, il n'y a point de salut pour les honnetes gens." The life of Jane Austen, whose humour the author of the _Plymley Letters_, the father and uncle of a hundred diverting anecdotes, so greatly enjoyed, may serve to show the weakness of such unreserved generalization. Her subjects were found in the restful backwaters of life, not in the crowded centres where mankind is more and more bewildered by the failure of wisdom to keep pace with the advance of knowledge.

It is one of Jane's qualities as a writer that she shows little hospitality to the stock phrases of ordinary people. Lord Chesterfield told his son: "If, instead of saying that tastes are different, and that every man has his own peculiar one, you should let off a proverb, and say, that 'What is one man's meat is another man's poison.' ... everybody would be persuaded that you had {79} never kept company with anybody above footmen and housemaids." Proverbial philosophy finds little encouragement from Jane, who places it in the mouths of her least agreeable characters, and one may believe, after reading her books and her letters, that she agrees with her own Marianne Dashwood, who, when Sir John Middleton has dared to suggest that she will be "setting her cap" at Willoughby, warmly replies: "That is an expression, Sir John, which I particularly dislike. I abhor every commonplace phrase by which wit is intended; and 'setting one's cap' at a man, or 'making a conquest,' are the most odious of all. Their tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity." The offending Sir John "did not much understand this reproof," but he "laughed as heartily as if he did." Elizabeth Bennet's use of the saying, "Keep your breath to cool your porridge," gives us a worse shock than it can have given to Darcy, so unexpected is it from the mouth of a Jane Austen heroine. When one of Cassandra's letters had diverted Jane "beyond moderation," and she added: "I could die of {80} laughter at it," she felt the banality of the phrase as keenly as Marianne would have done, and saved herself with "as they used to say at school."

Whatever the words and phrases she employed, it can never be held that she "spoke well" according to the test proposed by Catherine Morland when she said to Henry Tilney, "I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible," a remark which Mr. Tilney hailed with delight as "an excellent satire on modern language." Its origin may be found in that first volume of _The Mirror_ which Catherine's mother brought down-stairs for her edification, where we are told that "many great personages contrive to be unintelligible in order to be respected."

A peculiarity of Jane Austen's vocabulary and manner is her fondness for negatives in "un," such words as "unabsurd," "unpretty," "unrepulsable," "unfastidious," "untoward," and "unexceptionable"--a pet fancy of hers, which occurs, I am told, at least eight times in _Emma_ alone--being as common in her novels as "halidome" and "minion" in the older romances of Wardour Street. Some day, perhaps, a lost novel of hers, written during the apparently idle years {81} of her residence at Bath, will be identified by the prevalence of "uns" in its text.

In clarity of meaning her style is usually of the purest, and there is reason to think that her few obscurities are as often due to carelessness as to defective art. Not that she was exempt from all the weaknesses that she discovers for our amusement in the generality of her sex. Henry Tilney's appreciation of women as letter-writers can hardly have been imagined without at least a moment's reflection by the author over her own achievements--

"'I have sometimes thought,' says Catherine, doubtfully, 'whether ladies _do_ write so much better letters than gentlemen. That is, I should not think the superiority was always on our side.'

"'As far as I have had opportunity of judging,' replies Tilney, 'it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars.'

"'And what are they?'

"'A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.'

"'Upon my word, I need not have been afraid of disclaiming the compliment! You do not think too highly of us in that way.'

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"'I should no more lay it down as a general rule that women write better letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw better landscapes. In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.'"

Deficiency of subject has not been charged against Jane's published letters, but they have often been charged with deficiency of serious interest. Her works certainly do exhibit an occasional looseness of grammar, mostly due to bad punctuation. The faulty construction of Lucy's letters (_Sense and Sensibility_) is noted by the author, but while Jane would not have been likely to regard "Sincerely wish you happy in your choice" as a proper way of beginning a sentence, her own delinquencies with respect to commas are sometimes no less grave than those of Mrs. Robert Ferrars. She would have felt no serious sympathy with Cyrano's declaration concerning his literary compositions--

"... Mon sang se coagule En pensant qu'on y peut changer une virgule."

Her blood was too cool to be frozen by the printer's fancies in punctuation.

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In an old number of the _Cambridge Observer_ the curious student may find some suggested emendations of Jane Austen's text by Mr. A. W. Verrall, many of them being concerned with what are probably printers' errors. Those which deal with punctuation need not reflect on the printer as prime offender. The author was a woman. Mr. Verrall's ingenious suggestion that when Jane Austen is made to say that William Price's "direct holidays" might justly be given to his friends at Mansfield Park (his own family seeing him frequently at Portsmouth, where his ship was lying), she really wrote "derelict holidays," has little to commend it, "direct" so evidently, I think, being used to differentiate his actual leave from his ordinary leisure hours when on service. But there are two emendations, typical of many which might be suggested (Mr. Verrall has probably noted them for the edition which he ought to undertake in time for the centenary), which are entirely acceptable. Fanny Price is made to say to Mr. Rushworth, on the occasion when Maria Bertram and Crawford gave that unfortunate person the slip in his own garden, "They desired me to stay; my {84} cousin Maria charged me to say that you would find them at that knoll, or thereabouts." Mr. Verrall justly observes that no one had desired Fanny to stay, and she would be the last girl to utter "an irrelevant falsehood." He holds that "she really did on this occasion, for kindness' sake, say something 'not quite true,'" and it was: "They desired me to say--my cousin Maria charged me to say, that you would find them at that knoll, or thereabouts."

Again, when in describing the discussion over Mrs. Weston's proposed dance, Jane Austen is made to say (in _Emma_), "The want of proper families in the place, and the conviction that none beyond the place and its immediate environs could be attempted to attend, were mentioned," the author's words were, in Mr. Verrall's opinion, "tempted to attend." Like Shakespeare's, the MSS. of Jane Austen's masterpieces are to seek, so that what she wrote we cannot prove. The probability that in these two cases, as in others, the author omitted to notice in proof the errors of the printer is more likely, on the whole, than that her pen had slipped badly, and that her "copy" had never been carefully read over. She {85} cared little for such slips, however, as we know from a letter written after _Pride and Prejudice_ was published, wherein she says: "There are a few typical errors, and a 'said he' or 'said she' would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear, but 'I do not write for such dull elves,' as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves." "Typical," of course, is here used in its obsolete sense of "typographical."

The negative bond of union referred to above between Jane Austen and the only English writer whom some of her eminent admirers have allowed to take precedence of her--that the MSS. of both have disappeared--suggests the passing reflection that in these days when Shakespeare is not allowed to hold the title to his plays without challenge, when Anne and Emily Brontë are accused of being (so far as the public is concerned) mere pseudonyms of their sister Charlotte, when George Henry Lewes has been given the credit for George Eliot's novels, and the speeches of eminent statesmen are said to be written by their wives, it is rather surprising that no one in search of a striking subject for a magazine article has attacked the claims of Jane Austen to a place among English {86} authors. There is no evidence in the memoirs of her time that any distinguished person ever found himself in her company, her name did not appear on the title-pages of any books, she was almost unknown outside a small provincial circle, and in that circle no one seems to have had any idea that there was anything specially remarkable about her. Is it likely that such an obscure little body should have written such admirable books? Is it not much more likely that they were the work of Madame d'Arblay, or that in these peaceful compositions Mrs. Radcliffe found rest and recreation after the fearful strain on her delicate nervous system involved in the production of her "_èpouvantable_" melodramas? Jane Austen lays claim to some of the novels in her letters, it is true, but, since Ben Jonson's references to Shakespeare, and all other contemporary evidence in favour of the Stratford actor's authorship of the plays have been explained away to the complete satisfaction of those who dispute his claims, it would be no very difficult task to persuade a number of earnest souls that Jane Austen's letters are not really evidence of her authorship of the novels. As for her nearest relations, they were {87} not in the real secret. The secret they are supposed to have kept during her life was that she wrote the novels, but if so, where are the MSS.? Why did not her admiring brothers treasure those most precious relics? Two of her MSS. (in addition to the opening chapters of her final effort in fiction) her family did, as a fact, preserve, those of _Lady Susan_ and _The Watsons_, and these (here italic type becomes necessary) _are so inferior to the six novels acknowledged, soon after her death, as hers_, that it is easy (if we like) to find it _difficult to believe that they are from the same pen_! The real secret was that she did not write those six novels. This fascinating theory is freely offered to whomsoever it may please to follow it up.

We gain many vivid glimpses of Jane Austen's views of life in her novels, and _Northanger Abbey_ holds a place apart from the others, not only for its many pages of burlesque, but as the vehicle by which so many of the author's reflections are conveyed, in a bright wrapping, to her appreciative readers. Let me give one or two examples--

"The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen {88} of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though, to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable, and too well-informed themselves, to desire anything more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her own advantages--did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward."

The sister author is Fanny Burney. The opinion of men, the "trifling" or the "reasonable," is Jane Austen's. In Henry Tilney's remarks upon Catherine's extraordinary fears concerning his father's conduct to Mrs. Tilney we may discover something of Jane's view of the general condition of society in her time.

"Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of {89} what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies; and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"

Of Jane Austen as humourist there is no need to write specifically at any length. Almost every extract given from her novels, whatever the point to be illustrated, shows her in that capacity. It is impossible for long to separate her humour from the rest of her qualities. Yet there are people who see no humour in her, and actually like her novels in spite of their "seriousness "!

An American author, Mr. Oscar Adams, wrote a book about her some years ago in order "to place her before the world as the winsome, delightful woman that she really was, and thus to dispel the unattractive, not to say forbidding, mental picture that so many have formed of her." Who were these "many" people? Evidently they existed (either without or within the author's own circle) or there would have been no reason {90} to write a book for their conversion. They were probably those worthy persons--we have all met a few of them ourselves--who read _Emma_, and _Pride and Prejudice_, and the rest, without noticing that a malicious little sprite is for ever peeping between the lines. Imagine a reader who regards all Mr. Bennet's remarks as sober statements of considered opinion, and you will understand how Jane Austen might seem formidable. Though she is never so ruthless to her characters as Mr. Bennet is to his wife, Jane is herself a member of his family. Perhaps "ruthless" is the wrong word. You might apply it to a boy who throws pebbles at a donkey, but if the object of his attack was a rhinoceros, the boy would suffer more than the pachyderm. To the slings and arrows of her husband's outrageous humour Mrs. Bennet was less sensible than was Gulliver to the darts of the Lilliputians. Gulliver did feel a pricking sensation, whereas Mrs. Bennet was merely annoyed that Mr. Bennet did not always agree with her mood of the moment. In his critical introduction to _Pride and Prejudice_ Professor Saintsbury forcibly says, in reply to those who resent the presence of such a husband as Mr. Bennet, that {91} Mrs. Bennet was "a quite irreclaimable fool; and unless he had shot her or himself there was no way out of it for a man of sense and spirit but the ironic." The most unpleasant aspect of Mr. Bennet's sarcasms is not that they hurt his wife, which they could not, but that they were heard by his five daughters, three of whom at least were more or less able to understand them.

Jane Austen the novelist, then, may truly be "forbidding" to readers who take her _au pied de la lettre_. Such readers are in the position of Catherine Morland listening to Henry Tilney's imaginary account of the antiquities and mysteries of Northanger Abbey. She went there and painfully discovered the truth, while they can no more hope to discover it than a man with one eye can hope to see things as they appear to his fellows who have two. Still, he is a king among the blind, and the readers who find pleasure in Jane Austen as an entirely serious author are to be counted happy as compared with those who cannot read her at all.