Part 6

The only country tradesman who figures at all prominently is Sir William Lucas, who had "risen to the honour of Knighthood by an address to the King during his mayoralty. The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a disgust to his business.... By nature inoffensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St. James's had made him courteous." He is {115} not so diverting a creature as Martin Tinman of Crikswich in Mr. Meredith's delightful comedy _The House on the Beach_, who, when rescued from that storm-beaten home on a terrible night, was found to be wearing the Court suit in which, long before, he had presented an address to the throne! But Sir William Lucas's constant recollection of the fact that _he_ had been received by the sovereign, while his neighbours, the "small" country-gentlemen, had not, is illustrated with admirable art. In his "emporium," with his stock-in-trade around him, his portrait would never have been drawn. Mr. Weston also made money in trade, apparently "in the wholesale line," after he had retired from the militia, and of the proud and conceited Bingley sisters we are told that "they were of a respectable family in the north of England; a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories than that their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade."

Jane has many kindly things to tell her sister about, her mother's maids, especially of a faithful and industrious "Nannie." Of the maids' relations, the agricultural class, amid whose homes {116} she passed nearly all her life, she has, as I have said, left no account in her novels. Her letters do indeed contain many bits of news concerning the ploughmen and washerwomen of the parish, and they are significant as to the manner, proper to the age, in which she regarded her humble neighbours. Her references to the cottagers are commonly devoid of any indication of deeper feeling than the consciousness of a need to give them clothes. Of the people employed on her father's farm, she says--

"John Bond begins to find himself grow old, which John Bond ought not to do, and unequal to much hard work; a man is therefore hired to supply his place as to labour, and John himself is to have the care of the sheep. There are not more people engaged than before, I believe; only men instead of boys. I fancy so at least, but you know my stupidity as to such matters. Lizzie Bond is just apprenticed to Miss Small, so we may hope to see her able to spoil gowns in a few years."

About Christmas (1798) she writes--

"Of my charities to the poor since I came home you shall have a faithful account. I have given a pair of worsted stockings to Mary Hutchins, Dame Kew, Mary Steevens, and Dame Staples; {117} a shift to Hannah Staples, and a shawl to Betty Dawkins, amounting in all to about half-a-guinea. But I have no reason to suppose that the _Battys_ would accept of anything, because I have not made them the offer."

Of personal service we hear but little. There is just the old "Lady Bountiful" idea, adapted to the purse of the parson's younger daughter. Alms were what the poor chiefly wanted, and alms they received--if not in money, in warm garments. She gave them worsted stockings, and flannel to wear in the cold weather. She did not often, so far as we hear, sit and chat with Dame Staples and Dame Kew over the things that made up their life-interests, or listen to the confidences of Lizzie Bond and Hannah Staples concerning their rustic lovers.

Sometimes we do hear of talks with poor women, as when Jane writes, "I called yesterday upon Betty Londe, who inquired particularly after you, and said she seemed to miss you very much, because you used to call in upon her very often. This was an oblique reproach at me, which I am sorry to have merited, and from which I will profit." We may well believe that Jane was no {118} pioneer in "district visiting." Her services to humanity were of another kind. Almost alone among the greater novelists who have written the fiction of drawing-rooms, she was hardly less indifferent as a writer to the concerns of the governing class of her day than of the voteless class, unless, indeed, she was a hostile witness so far as her knowledge went. Among the worst-bred persons in the novels, with John Thorpe, Mr. Collins, and the ever-delightful Mrs. Bennet, are Sir Walter Elliot and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and the hero whose manners are most open to reproach is Lady Catherine's nephew, Darcy--before he has been refused by Elizabeth.

Jane Austen's views on the claims of social position, as distinct from individual character, were much the same as Anne Elliot's. Mr. Elliot and Anne, we learn--

"Did not always think alike. His value for rank and connection she perceived to be greater than hers. It was not merely complaisance, it must be a liking to the cause, which made him enter warmly into her father's and sister's solicitudes on a subject which she thought unworthy to excite them.... She was reduced to form a wish which she had never foreseen--a wish that they {119} had more pride.... Had Lady Dalrymple and her daughter even been very agreeable, she would still have been ashamed of the agitation they created; but they were nothing. There was no superiority of manner, accomplishment, or understanding."

The Dalrymples and Lady Catherine de Bourgh do not lead one to suppose that Jane's acquaintance with their class was a fortunate one. Had it been, she would probably have given some happier examples of the titular aristocracy. Lord Osborne, in _The Watsons_, is in some ways a more amiable type, but too "sketchy" to be of much account as an antidote to such unpleasing people as the aunt of Darcy and the cousins of Anne Elliot.

If persons of artificial eminence are almost unknown in the novels, there is an even more complete dearth of men or women distinguished for their individual gifts or achievements. Sir John Middleton fills his too hospitable mansion with an endless supply of guests who keep his maid-servants hard at work in preparing spare bedrooms, that were occupied the night before, for fresh arrivals in the afternoon. He hardly allows {120} time to speed the parting guests before he must turn to welcome their successors. But no statesman, or traveller, or professor, not so much as a rising politician or a poet, crosses those ever-open doors. They do not come, for one reason--and it seems a sufficient one--because they scarcely exist for the author, or if they do, the people who eat mutton and drink port and Madeira around the mahogany tables at Netherfield, or Barton, or Uppercross, know and care nothing whatever about them and their performances. "Each thinks his little set mankind" is as true of the characters in Jane Austen's books as in a sense it is true, one is sometimes inclined to think, of their author. The Morlands, and Musgroves, and Woodhouses, and Bennets have never travelled, unless an occasional visit to London may count as travel. They have been into some neighbouring county, they have been perchance to Bath. They have not so much as been to Paris. Emma had never seen the sea. Twenty years earlier it would have been different. Darcy at any rate would have known something of France had he been twenty years older. From the outbreak of the Revolution till the first exile of {121} Napoleon, France was not a likely place for any but the most adventurous of squires to choose for a pleasure-trip, nor, after the rise of Napoleon's star, were the accessible parts of the Continent very attractive for any but soldiers of fortune and spies. Thus, not only are the conversations which Jane Austen offers devoid of any such elements of interest as are introduced, for example, by the appearance of Byron in _Venetia_, or of Shelley in _Nightmare Abbey_, but the opportunities of lively talk offered by reminiscences of foreign manners and scenes are not allowed to the author. On the other hand, we do not meet with any of those egotistical travellers who, as a contemporary of Jane Austen's declared, "If you introduce the name of a river or a hill, instantly deluge you with the _Rhine_, or make you dizzy with the height of _Mont Blanc_."

In any case, however much the fact may be due to want of opportunities for enlarging her knowledge, Jane, literature apart, took very little interest in anything outside the social and family life of her own class in the country. Her published correspondence has been described as "trivial" (as her novels have been, for that is what {122} Madame de Staël meant by "_vulgaire_," and not "vulgar," as Sir James Mackintosh and others have supposed), and, in comparison with such contemporary letters as Byron's or Lamb's, her accounts of her dances and her bonnets are certainly weak tea for serious readers. They are, however, exactly such letters as she might have been expected to write. Her satire gives them an agreeable tartness which somehow suggests the syllabubs which were so common a feature of the supper-tables of her time. It is all, one may reasonably suppose, like the common talk of the drawing-room in a manor-house on an afternoon when the men are hunting or shooting--the choice of a winter frock, the prospects of a ball at some territorial magnate's, the errors of cooks and housemaids, the fatuity of this young man who is so rich, and the silliness of that young woman who is so pretty--enlivened by Jane's wit.

The dances, whether full-dress balls or merely "small and early hops" were among the favourite pleasures of Jane Austen. If you have read her letters you will feel that she is present when Fanny Price dances so prettily at Mansfield Park, or when Darcy declines to dance with Elizabeth because though she is "tolerable," she is {123} "not handsome enough" to tempt him. "I danced twice with Warren last night, and once with Mr. Charles Watkins, and to my inexpressible astonishment I entirely escaped John Lyford. I was forced to fight hard for it, however. We had a very good supper, and the greenhouse was illuminated in a very elegant manner." Such bits of news are common at all periods of Jane's correspondence. For example: "The ball on Thursday was a very small one indeed, hardly so large as an Oxford smack;" and again, "Our ball on Thursday was a very poor one, only eight couple, and but twenty-three people in the room"--just as it was when they got up the scratch dance at the Bertrams, "the thought only of the afternoon, built on the late acquisition of a violin player in the servants' hall."

On another occasion, at a public hall at the county town--

"The Portsmouths, Dorchesters, Boltons, Portals, and Clerks were there, and all the meaner and more usual etc., etcs. There was a scarcity of men in general, and a still greater scarcity of any that were good for much. I danced nine dances out of ten--five with Stephen Terry, T. Chute, and James Digweed, and four with {124} Catherine. There was commonly a couple of ladies standing up together, but not often any so amiable as ourselves."

Jane, from all we know of her, would almost as soon dance with another girl as with a man--it was the dancing she loved, and watching the behaviour of others, their flirtations, their love-making, their airs and affectations.

Emma Woodhouse, the day after a dance at Highbury, might have sent to her sister in Brunswick Square just such an account as Jane Austen to her sister at Godmersham--

"There were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome." One of the girls seemed to her: "A queer animal with a white neck. Mrs. Warren, I was constrained to think a very fine young woman, which I much regret. She danced away with great activity. Her husband is ugly enough, uglier even than his cousin John; but he does not look so _very_ old. The Miss Maitlands are both prettyish, very like Anne, with brown skins, large dark eyes, and a good deal of nose. The General has got the gout, and Mrs. Maitland the jaundice."

A ball to which Jane Austen went in 1808--her {125} thirty-fourth year--was "rather more amusing" than she expected. "The melancholy part was to see so many dozen young women standing by without partners, and each of them with two ugly naked shoulders. It was the same room in which we danced fifteen years ago. I thought it all over, and in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then. We paid an additional shilling for our tea." This letter is but one of many bits of evidence that no memory of a Captain Wentworth troubled Jane's own life. The "shame" such a woman could have felt in being "older" one can scarcely imagine, and the context shows it was not seriously felt.

The most pathetic dancing incident in the novels was the impromptu affair at Uppercross (in _Persuasion_), where Anne saw her old lover apparently losing his heart elsewhere. "The evening ended with dancing. On its being proposed, Anne offered her services, as usual; and though her eyes would sometimes fill with tears as she sat at the instrument, she was extremely glad to be employed, and desired nothing in return but to be unobserved." She did not know that Wentworth, who was making so merry with {126} the Musgrove girls, was faithful all the time to his old love--herself. We might doubt whether the author knew it until later on in the story, were it not that the idea of ending a novel without the marriage of the principal maiden to the man she liked best would have been entirely foreign to Jane Austen's method. So Frederick Wentworth danced with the Musgroves, and Anne played for their delight.

The dance most fully described was that given by the Westons at the "Crown," when Mr. Elton behaved so abominably to Harriet Smith, and Mr. Knightley showed himself a _preux chevalier_ and saved Emma's lovely _protégée_ from the humiliation of being the only "wallflower." In describing how Elizabeth at Netherfield, Catherine at Bath, Harriet at Highbury, and Fanny at Mansfield Park idly watched the dancing because no man had asked them to join it, Jane, pretty girl and excellent dancer as she was, spoke from personal experience. Once at any rate, when "in the pride of youth and beauty," she was able to write, after a dance at a neighbouring house--

"I do not think I was very much in request. People were rather apt not to ask me till they {127} could not help it; one's consequence, you know, varies so much at times without any particular reason. There was one gentleman, an officer of the Cheshire, a very good-looking young man, who, I was told, wanted very much to be introduced to me; but as he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it, we never could bring it about."

She would not, if she could help it, dance with bad partners. "One of my gayest actions," she writes after a ball, "was sitting down two dances in preference to having Lord Bolton's eldest son for my partner, who danced too ill to be endured."

It is in connection with one of the Westons' parties that Mr. Woodhouse makes his sage observations on the eternal question of ventilation. When Frank Churchill says that the fresh air difficulty will be settled by their dancing in a large room, so that the windows need not be opened, because "it is that dreadful habit of opening the windows, letting in cold air upon heated bodies, which does the mischief," Mr. Woodhouse cries--

"'Open the windows! but surely, Mr. Churchill, nobody would think of opening the windows at Randalls. Nobody could be so imprudent! I never heard of such a thing. Dancing with open windows! I am sure neither your father nor {128} Mrs. Weston (poor Miss Taylor that was) would suffer it.'

"'Ah! sir--but a thoughtless young person will sometimes step behind a window-curtain, and throw up a sash, without its being suspected. I have often known it done myself.'

"'Have you, indeed, sir? Bless me! I never could have supposed it. But I live out of the world, and am often astonished at what I hear.'"

The conversation of this valetudinarian quietist is always diverting. He suggests that Emma should leave the Coles' party before it is half over, as it is so bad to be up late. "But, my dear sir," cried Mr. Weston, "if Emma comes away early it will be breaking up the party."

"And no great harm if it does," said Mr. Woodhouse. "The sooner every party breaks up the better."

Advancing maturity did not do much to spoil Jane's love of dances. From Southampton, in 1809, she wrote: "Your silence on the subject of our ball makes me suppose your curiosity too great for words. We were very well entertained, and could have stayed longer but for the arrival of my list shoes to convey me home, and I did not like to keep them waiting in the cold."

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If Jane tells Cassandra about her own dances, she is ever ready in return for news of Cassandra's. "I shall be extremely anxious to hear the event of your ball, and shall hope to receive so long and minute an account of every particular that I shall be tired of reading it.... We were at a ball on Saturday I assure you. We dined at Goodnestone and in the evening danced two country dances and the Boulangeries." This French dance, by the way, was on the unwritten programme at Mr. Bingley's ball, in _Pride and Prejudice_. It seems to have had its birth in the Revolution, when the bakers, men and women together, kept themselves warm by joining hands and dancing up and down the streets.

After Jane Fairfax had sung herself hoarse at the Coles' party--

"The proposal of dancing--originating nobody exactly knew where--was so effectually promoted by Mr. and Mrs. Cole that everything was rapidly clearing away, to give proper space. Mrs. Weston, capital in her country dances, was seated, and beginning an irresistible waltz; and Frank Churchill, coming up with most becoming gallantry to Emma, had secured her hand, and led her up to the top, (where) she led off the dance with genuine spirit and enjoyment."

{130}

The waltz was a novelty still in those days, and seems here to be classed as a country dance. It had been imported from Germany, where Mozart had done much to forward its triumph, after Jane Austen had written her earlier novels, and I cannot remember any other reference to it in her work. It was at first considered an "improper" dance, and one need not be surprised that a generation which had danced nothing more intimate than the "boulangeries" was at first a little flustered by the new fashion. Sheridan, watching the dancers in a ball-room, repeated the following lines of his own composition, which aptly suggest the contrast between the old dancing and the new as it struck the eyes of our great-grand-aunts about the time when Emma danced at the "Crown" and Jane Austen at Goodnestone.

"With tranquil step, and timid, downcast glance, Behold the well-paired couple now advance. In such sweet posture our first parents moved, While, hand in hand, through Eden's bowers they roved, Ere yet the Devil, with promise fine and false, Turn'd their poor heads, and taught them how to waltz."

Little wonder, when a waltz was regarded as forbidden fruit, if Edmund Bertram, Fanny, and Sir Thomas were shocked at the very idea of play-acting by the family and guests at Mansfield Park. {131} Not that there were wanting plenty of quiet souls who were in nowise personally distressed at the "impropriety" of the waltz on their own account, just as, in the other matter of amateur theatricals, and the choice of a play, when Lady Bertram asked her children not to "act anything improper," it was not because she had any personal objection to offer, but because "Sir Thomas would not like it."

The Bertrams' ill-fated theatricals, and the waltz which Mrs. Weston played, serve to emphasize the place which Jane Austen fills as an historian of the transition from the formal prudery of the sceptical eighteenth century to the broader liberties of the scientific nineteenth. "What is become of all the shyness in the world?" she asks her sister in 1807; "shyness and the sweating sickness have given way to confidence and paralytic complaints." Morals change but little as compared with _moeurs_. The girls who act in private theatricals every winter and dance twenty waltzes a night half the year round are no whit less virtuous than their great-grandmothers who were shocked at the waltz, and caught cold in clothes which were so thin that, as a close observer has recorded, you could "see the gleam of their {132} garter-buckles" through the silks and kerseymeres as they danced, and altogether so suitable for a classical revival that a contemporary poet was moved to utter the quatrain--

"When dressed for the evening the girls now-a-days, Scarce an atom of dress on them leave; Nor blame them, for what is an evening dress But a dress that is suited to Eve."

Thus the mother of mankind is accused by one poet of having danced the first waltz, and held responsible by another for the airy fashions of the Récamier period.

One of the principal differences of etiquette, we may note before passing on, between the customs of the ball-room a century ago and now, was that in the days when John Lyford was eluded with so much difficulty a girl danced two successive dances with the same partner as a matter of course, so that neither an imaginary John Thorpe nor a real John Lyford could be got rid of by the promise of one dance.

The scraps from the letters, given on the last few pages, help us to realize how clearly Jane Austen's own life is at times reflected in her books.

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IV

ETHICS AND OPTIMISM

Dr. Whately on Jane Austen--"Moral lessons" of her novels--Charge of "Indelicacy"--Marriage as a profession--A "problem" novel--"The Nostalgia of the Infinite"--The "whitewashing" of Willoughby--_Lady Susan_ condemned by its author--_The Watsons_--Change in manners--No "heroes"--Woman's love--The Prince Regent--_The Quarterly Review_.

"The moral lessons of this lady's novels," wrote Archbishop Whately in his _Quarterly_ article of 1821, "though clearly and impressively conveyed, are not offensively put forward, but spring incidentally from the circumstances of the story." So inoffensively, indeed, are they offered to our notice, that Dr. Whately himself seems to have been unable to discover them at all. "On the whole," writes the Archbishop, "Miss Austin's (_sic_) works may safely be recommended, not only as among the most unexceptionable of their class, but as combining, in an eminent degree, instruction with amusement, though without the direct effort {136} at the former, of which we have complained, as sometimes defeating its object."