Part 5

It has been said by Mr. Goldwin Smith that there is no philosophy beneath the surface of Jane Austen's novels "for profound scrutiny to bring {92} to light," her characters typifying nothing, because "their doings and sayings are familiar and commonplace. Her genius is shown in making the familiar and commonplace intensely interesting and amusing." Such justification as may be discovered for the charge that the subjects of the novels are commonplace is chiefly negative in kind. It is not that we may find in real life innumerable people as distinctive and entertaining as the principal characters of these stories, but that Jane does not introduce us to dramatically unusual scenes or persons. There are no houses like Dotheboys Hall or Ravenswood Tower, no incidents like the flight of Jos Sedley from Brussels or the arrest of Vautrin, no strange creatures like Mr. Rochester or Jonas Chuzzlewit, no scenes like those in Fagin's kitchen or Shirley's mill. She was immediately followed by a humourist whose scenes and characters are as unusual as hers were familiar. He is almost unknown to the great fiction-devouring public, and little read in comparison even with Jane Austen, with whom he has some strong affinities as well as antipathies. Thomas Love Peacock was never, so happily inspired--or so happy perhaps--as when he was "ironing" the {93} insincerity or the unreasonable prejudice of the "well-to-do" class. There is, among the parsons of Jane Austen's creating, none who is more gloriously diverting than Dr. Ffolliot in _Crotchet Castle_, and it is pleasant to imagine Mr. Collins as curate to that militant theologian. The talk of the young women in Peacock's modern novels is better "informed" and much less natural than that of Elizabeth Bennet, or Emma, or Anne, and as for the men, while Mr. Tilney or Mr. Darcy might not have found it difficult to hold their own with most of the lovers in Peacock's novels, his intellectuals--Milestone, McQueedy, and the rest--would have found no one to refute their arguments among the company at Netherfield or at Mansfield Park. Peacock allows his satirical hobby-horse to run wild over the bramble-covered desert of British prejudice, while Jane Austen never leaves go of the rein. The result is that while he frequently makes us laugh at the absurdities of his Scythrops and Chainmails, whose performances we know to be burlesque, she makes us chuckle by her silver-shod satire of the class which she had studied from childhood. There are some who read Jane Austen and cannot read {94} Peacock, and the reverse is also true. Those who can read both are never likely to be in want of pleasure on winter evenings so long as mind and eyes are left.

It is certain that no one familiar with either author could mistake a page written by one of them for a page by the other. Jane Austen's people, in spite of the humour with which the atmosphere is charged, are always possible--except, some of her most intimate admirers say, for Mr. Collins--while Peacock was never to be deterred from breaking through the fence which borders the pathway of probability. Only such readers as the prelate who declined to believe some of the incidents in _Gulliver's Travels_ could be expected to regard _Melincourt_ or _Nightmare Abbey_ as veracious narratives. For all that Peacock, whose first novel, _Headlong Hall_, appeared in the year (1816) in which Jane Austen's last (published) work was done, was her immediate successor as a satirist of the follies and foibles of English men and women, and he was succeeded in turn by the splendid Thackeray, whose most obvious difference from Jane Austen lies in his frequent indulgence in sentimental reflections.

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Jane was amused by the suggestions for improving her work, or for the plots of fresh novels, given to her from time to time, and among the papers found after her death was one endorsed "Plan of a novel according to hints from various quarters," the names of some of these human "quarters" being given in the margin. There were to be a "faultless" heroine and her "faultless" father driven from place to place over Europe by the vile arts of a "totally unprincipled and heartless young man, desperately in love with the heroine, and pursuing her with unrelenting passion." Wherever she went somebody fell in love with her, and she received frequent offers of marriage, which she referred to her father, who was "exceedingly angry that he should not be the first applied to." The "anti-hero" again and again carried her off, and she was "now and then starved to death," but was always rescued either by her father or the hero! For even the mildest varieties of the plots thus burlesqued Jane had no use, unless to laugh at them.

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III

CONTACT WITH LIFE

Origins of characters--Matchmaking--Second marriages--Negative qualities of the novels--Close knowledge of one class--Dislike of "lionizing"--Madame de Staël--The "lower orders"--Tradesmen--Social position--Quality of Jane's letters--Balls and parties.

In her letters, as in her books, the satiric touch was on almost everything that Jane Austen wrote. Her habit of making pithy little notes on the doings of her acquaintances was, in writing to her sister, irrepressible. The pith was not bitter. It was just the comment of a highly intelligent woman to whom the gods had given the gift of humour, and who, at an age when most girls of her day were as ingenuous as Evelina or as Catherine Morland, had learnt how much insincerity and affectation coloured the conduct even of kind and well-meaning people.

In her references to the foibles of real men and women we gain many glimpses of the origins--if not the originals--of some of her character studies. {100} At an Ashford ball in 1798 one of the Royal Dukes was present, and among those who supped in his company were Cassandra and a Mrs. Cage, with whom the Austens were well acquainted. This lady was uneasy in the presence of Royalty, and her mistakes were described in a letter from Cassandra. Jane's mention of the incident in her reply is a fair sample of the way in which, in her more serious mood, this young woman of twenty-three regarded the weakness of her less cool and reasonable friends: "I can perfectly comprehend Mrs. Cage's distress and perplexity. She has all those kind of foolish and incomprehensible feelings which would make her fancy herself uncomfortable in such a party. I love her, however, in spite of all her nonsense."

One can see a hint of Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Bennet in the silly woman who flustered herself and fidgeted her companions in her attempts to assume what she supposed to be the right behaviour on such an occasion. Jane, who had never seen a prince, so far as we know, would have had no "distress and perplexity." She would have curtsied in the prettiest way, the Duke would have been charmed by her graceful figure, her {101} clear complexion, and her soft brown eyes, and she would next day have written to her sister "all the minute particulars, which only woman's language can make interesting."

Her reflections on the gossip of the hour are not always quite so kindly. When Charles Powlett (of whose rejected offer of a kiss we have already heard) brings home a wife, Jane tells her sister that this bride "is discovered to be everything that the neighbourhood could wish her, silly and cross as well as extravagant." Once, when a story has reached her in the way that "Russian Scandal" is played, by the muddling up of half-understood particulars in the process of transmission from mouth to ear, she has to correct a previous statement about some of the Austen circle--

"On inquiring of Mrs. Clerk, I find that Mrs. Heathcote made a great blunder in her news of the Crooks and Morleys. It is young Mr. Crook who is to marry the second Miss Morley, and it is the Miss Morleys instead of the second Miss Crook who were the beauties at the music meeting. This seems a more likely tale, a better devised imposture."

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The sting is where stings usually are.

Scandal was as distasteful to her as it can have been to Madame du Châtelet, of whom Voltaire said that "_tout ce qui occupe la société était de son ressort, hors la médisance._" Jane gave Cassandra many little bits of news about their friends which the principals might have resented, but between sister and sister such things are not scandalous, and as for those who read them now, they may talk about the incidents referred to as freely as they like without harm to any one. Many of the "scandals" Jane mentions are "serious" only in her innocent fun. We hear, for instance, that in 1809, "Martha and Dr. Mant are as bad as ever, he runs after her in the street to apologize for having spoken to a gentleman while she was near him the day before. Poor Mrs. Mant can stand it no longer; she is retired to one of her married daughters." Jane amused herself and her sister and teased poor Martha by her jokes on this affair. "As Dr. M. is a clergyman," she writes, "this attachment, however immoral, has a decorous air." Mrs. Jennings, Sir John Middleton's mother-in-law, would have told the story quite seriously, and with immense gusto, at the Barton {103} breakfast-table, but Dr. Mant and Martha were not transferred to a novel to the discomfort of themselves and their families and the delight of the _roman à clef_ hunters of Southampton.

The letters do seem occasionally to bring us into the company of people whom we know quite well in the novels. Jane, replying to Cassandra at Christmas 1798, says: "I am glad to hear such a good account of Harriet Bridges; she goes on now as young ladies of seventeen ought to do, admired and admiring.... I dare say she fancies Major Elkington as agreeable as Warren, and if she can think so, it is very well." Alter the surnames, and this passage might apply as well to Harriet Smith as to Harriet Bridges. "I dare say she fancies Mr. Martin as agreeable as Mr. Churchill, and if she can think so, it is very well," might have been written by Emma to dear Anne Weston about the "little friend" from the boarding-school. Jane, as in this case of Harriet Bridges, took so much interest in the love affairs of her friends that we often think of Emma Woodhouse and her match-making propensities, about which Mr. Knightley spoke so harshly. By Emma's advice Harriet Smith, having refused {104} Robert Martin, the young farmer, had regarded Mr. Elton as a prospective husband, and when he went elsewhere Emma had selected Frank Churchill for the vacant post. Then, through a serious mistake, Mr. Knightley was the man, until at last the "inconsiderate, irrational, unfeeling" nature of her conduct became clear to her mind, and Harriet was allowed to marry the constant Martin.

Mrs. Mitford declared that Jane Austen was husband-hunting at twelve years of age, but the old lady's memory was evidently quite untrustworthy about people and dates when she talked such nonsense. Jane was, however, on her own showing, fond of looking out for possible husbands for her pretty little nieces. Here is an instance, from a letter of 1814--"Young Wyndham accepts the invitation. He is such a nice, gentlemanlike, unaffected sort of young man, that I think he may do for Fanny." Next day she is less pleased with him--"This young Wyndham does not come after all; a very long and very civil note of excuse is arrived. It makes one moralize upon the ups and downs of this life."

That the habit was hereditary--it was a custom {105} of Jane's time, even more than it is of our own--we may see from a report she sent to Cassandra of the pleasure with which Mr. and Mrs. Austen, with one accord, lighted upon a suitable "match" for their elder daughter. He was "a beauty of my mother's." Having no _affaire_ of her own to trouble her rest, Jane took an active part as adviser for those in whose fate she was affectionately interested. Especially was this the case with this favourite niece, Fanny Knight, who, having fancied she was "in love" with one man, discovered that she preferred, or thought she preferred, another.

"Do not be in a hurry," wrote Aunt Jane, "the right man will come at last; you will in the course of the next two or three years meet with somebody more generally unexceptionable than anyone you have yet known, who will love you as warmly as possible, and who will so completely attract you that you will feel you never really loved before."

Fanny, who was "inimitable, irresistible," whose "queer little heart" and its flutterings were "the delight of my life," might have been fickle, but she did not, said her aunt, deserve such a punishment {106} as to fall in love after marriage, and with the wrong man.

Jane's views on second marriages are expressed in the case of Lady Sondes, whose haste to find consolation after the death of Lord Sondes was the subject of much chatter among the Mrs. Jenningses and Mrs. Bennets of her neighbourhood. "Had her first marriage been of affection, or had there been a grown-up single daughter, I should not have forgiven her; but I consider everybody as having a right to marry once in their lives for love, if they can, and provided she will now leave off having bad headaches, and being pathetic, I can allow her, I can _will_ her, to be happy."

In the novels no woman of consequence--excepting the callous and selfish Lady Susan Vernon--is allowed a second mate, nor is the courtship before any of the marriages much in accord with the general practice of English fiction. There is not even a description of some splendid wedding. Jane, by the way, did not regard a marriage as the proper occasion for public advertisement of the bride's qualities. "Such a parade," she writes of the conduct of a certain {107} "alarming bride," is "one of the most immodest pieces of modesty that one can imagine. To attract notice could have been her only wish."

It might seem, indeed, that the most original characteristic of her works is the absence of almost all the qualities of plot and treatment on which fiction usually depends for success with the public. If we were asked of some modern lady writer, "What are her books like?" and we replied, "In one respect they are conventional, for they all end in the choosing of wedding-rings. But scarcely anybody in these novels feels the 'grand passion,' they have no relation to current events, nobody ever has a strange adventure, only one married woman is faithless to her vows, no adventuress appears, there are no foreigners, no one is in revolt against anything, nobody is seriously troubled about the trend of society or the decadence of morals and taste, nobody starves, or commits a murder, or engineers a swindle, there are no cruel husbands, no triple _ménages_ and no mysterious occurrences or detectives, and as nobody dies, nobody makes death-bed revelations," the retort would probably imply, "What stupid stuff they must be." These novels {108} do, indeed, depend for their effect on less of "plot and passion" than almost any others of consequence yet written. There are many novels of small plot. Balzac, in _Eugénie Grandet_, George Sand, in _Tamaris_, show what even "stormy" novelists can do with a modicum of events. But the lack of both plot and passion is rare in the work that lives. It is thus that the genius of Jane Austen is strongly displayed. Only genius could give a vital, an enduring fascination to a record chiefly concerned with the ordinary experiences of a few respectable country people, almost all of one class.

She had the power, because, with the gifts of expression and of humour, she combined an almost perfect knowledge of a typical section of society, all the more clearly exhibited because of her comparative ignorance of any other section. She did not care to study the very poor, the very rich were outside her circle of common experience, and she would rarely write about people or phases of life that were not as familiar to her as the squire's daughter and the manners of the hunt ball. She had none of Disraeli's audacity. "My son," said Isaac Disraeli, when some one {109} expressed surprise at the knowledge of "exalted circles" shown in _The Young Duke_, "my son, sir, when he wrote that book, had never even _seen_ a duke." Jane Austen, "never having seen a duke," or a ducal palace, never attempted to describe either. She shrank from any kind of "lionizing," whether in village society or in the "great world," and to this healthy pride is no doubt partly due the obscurity in which she lived and died. One instance of her reserve may be adduced. Soon after the appearance of _Mansfield Park_ she was invited, "in the politest manner," to a party at the house of a nobleman who suspected her of the authorship of that book, and who, as an inducement, intimated that she would be able to converse with Madame de Staël. "Miss Austen," says her brother, "immediately declined the invitation. To her truly delicate mind such a display would have given pain instead of pleasure." The story, which has sometimes been regarded as evidence of improper pride on the part of the English novelist, is in keeping with all that is known of Jane Austen's nature.

Had the meeting of the authors of _Emma_ and {110} _Corinne_ come about, one would like to have heard their conversation. The talking would have been largely on one side. Madame, who knew the "world," and enjoyed the distinction of having been called a "wicked schemer" and a "fright" by the greatest man of her time, would have tried in vain to impress the unaffected Englishwoman who cared so little for politics and Napoleon that, in those novels which Madame regarded as "_vulgaire_," she scarcely alluded to either. Jane would have listened attentively, and now and again, when Madame paused for breath, would have made a polite remark, the covert humour of which would have been lost on her famous companion. There is no suggestion that any hint as to Madame de Staël's reputation had reached Chawton Cottage, otherwise some might suppose that it was not only the diffident modesty Jane's brother alleges which prevented her from going to the party. It is quite likely that she who described the loves of Lydia Bennet and Maria Rushworth with such an entire absence of sermonizing would yet have felt that, though she might like to converse on a more private occasion with the author of _Corinne_ and _Delphine_, she would {111} prefer not to be matched with a lady who had put to so practical a test her theories "_de l'influence des passions sur le bonheur_."

Could there be a stronger contrast, physical or moral, than between the country parson's slight and good-looking daughter, whose knowledge of men and affairs was gained in the parlours of manor-houses and the assembly-rooms of watering-places, and the financier's stout and ugly daughter, whose political activities were so persistent that she had been expelled from Paris, who had travelled, mingling in the society of the governing classes, the artists, the men of letters in Italy, Germany, and other lands, and whose literary performances, historical, political, and imaginative, were read wherever educated readers existed?

If Jane had no strong desire to be brought into contact with the great, wise, and eminent of her time, neither were her tastes at all in the direction of social equality or the advocacy of the "rights of man," and while she was indifferent to the famous and influential, she was scarcely more concerned for the obscure and lowly. Admire her work as we may, and love her as many of us {112} must, we cannot recognize that she was much in sympathy with any class but her own. It is certainly to no undue regard for social position, to no want of charitable intention, that we can attribute her general neglect of the drama, comedy and tragedy alike, of humble life. It might be said that she could, and if she would, have drawn the poor as well as she drew the "gentry." She knew her limitations, and thus such rare sketches of the "lower orders" as she gives stop short of any errors of understanding. Mrs. Reynolds, Darcy's housekeeper, whose admiration for her master and his sister is so strongly expressed, and Thomas, the servant at Barton Cottage, who comes in to describe how he has seen "Mr. and Mrs. Ferrars" in Exeter, are in no way out of drawing, though the phrase with which the author finishes off the man-servant--"Thomas and the table-cloth, now alike needless, were soon dismissed"--so aptly suggests the position accorded to the working classes in her own works that it almost seems to have a double meaning. Let any one familiar with the novels try to recall occasions when a servant is introduced even in such common cases as the answering of a bell or waiting {113} at table, and he will find it hard to add to the examples already given any with a better part than the overworked Nanny at the Watsons', who, when Lord Osborne is paying his untimely visit, puts her head in at the door and says, "Please, ma'am, master wants to know why he be'nt to have his dinner." As for the class from which most of these servants came, it has no place at all. Emma takes Harriet to a cottage where there is a convalescent child who requires jellies or beef tea, but the incident is of no account except as leading up to the visit to Mr. Elton; and she goes to see an old servant while Harriet pays her formal call at the Abbey Mill Farm. Robert Martin is a farmer, and a letter from him is introduced, but he has no share of any consequence in the dialogue. When we remember Jane Austen's avowed partiality for Emma, and Emma's disgust at the idea of Harriet marrying a mere farmer, no matter how much her admirer Knightley might support the man's claims, we may not unreasonably suppose that Jane to some extent shared Emma's prejudice. There was, however, a notable exception to Jane's remoteness from the farming class. The joint tenant of the Manor {114} farm at Steventon, the happily named James Digweed--who seems to have been ordained later on--was admitted to so much favour that she could not only dance and dine, and gossip with him, but could chaff her sister about his evident desire to gain Cassandra's affection.

Two or three apothecaries are admitted into the novels. One attends Jane Bennet at Netherfield, and another attends Marianne Dashwood at Cleveland. Apothecary was almost a term of contempt in those days, and one of Jane's hits at the neighbourhood of Hans Place was that there seemed to be only one person there who was "not an apothecary." She even, as we have seen, corrects her niece for supposing that a country doctor--not a mere "apothecary"--would ever be "introduced" to a peer!